Hollow City

I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhythm hypnotizing me into a hazy state in which it was easy to forget that I was more than just a passive viewer, my window more than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here. Then, slowly, I remembered how I’d come to be part of this: my grandfather; the island; the children. The pretty, flint-eyed girl next to me, her hand resting atop mine.

“Am I really here?” I asked her.

“Go back to sleep,” she said.

“Do you think we’ll be all right?”

She kissed me on the tip of my nose.

“Go back to sleep.”

CHAPTER VII

More terrible dreams, all mixed up, fading in and out of one another. Snippets of horrors from recent days: the steel eye of a gun barrel staring me down from close range; a road strewn with fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward me across a chasm; that awful, grinning wight and his empty eyes.

Then this: I’m back home again, but I’m a ghost. I drift down my street, through my front door, into my house. I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest.

I’m not dead, I say, but my words don’t make sound.

I find my mother sitting on the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out the window at a pale afternoon. She’s gaunt, wrung out from crying. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but my hand passes right through it.

Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.

My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.

Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?

Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.

Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.

Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …

Uncle Bobby: Screwy.

Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.

Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.

Uncle Bobby: Yeah.

Uncle Jack: …

Uncle Les: …

Uncle Bobby: Buffet?

My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.

Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?

I try to shout: I’m not dead!

I am just far away I’m sorry

But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.

The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.

We’re waiting for you, Jacob.

A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.

We’re waiting.

*   *   *

I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God—you gave us a scare!”

“I did?”

“You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”

“I was?”

Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”

I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.

I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.

“Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”

Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”

“Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex—cunning, even—in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”

“But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”

“Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”

“A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing—but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”

“But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”