Hollow City

So rational. So wise. All I could think was, There are dead people everywhere and they’re all rotted and bony and dead and, oh God …

“Uh-oh,” Emma said, and she stopped suddenly, causing me to run into her and everyone else to pile up behind me.

She held her flame to one side, revealing a curved door in the wall. It hung open slightly, but only darkness showed through the crack.

We listened. For a long moment there was no sound but our breath and the distant drip of water. Then we heard a noise, but not the kind we were expecting—not a wing-flap or the scratch of a bird’s feet—but something human.

Very softly, someone was crying.

“Hello?” called Emma. “Who’s in there?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” came an echoing voice.

Or was it a pair of voices?

Emma brightened her flame. Bronwyn crept forward and nudged the door with her foot. It swung open to expose a small chamber filled with bones. Femurs, shinbones, skulls—the dismembered fossils of many hundreds of people, heaped up in no apparent order.

I stumbled backward, dizzy with shock.

“Hello?” Emma said. “Who said that? Show yourself!”

At first I couldn’t see anything in there but bones, but then I heard a sniffle and followed the sound to the top of the pile, where two pairs of eyes blinked at us from the murky shadows at the rear of the chamber.

“There’s no one here,” said a small voice.

“Go away,” came a second voice. “We’re dead.”

“No you’re not,” said Enoch, “and I would know!”

“Come out of there,” Emma said gently. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Both voices said at once: “Promise?”

“We promise,” said Emma.

The bones began to shift. A skull dislodged from the pile and clattered to the floor, where it rolled to a stop at my feet and stared up at me.

Hello, future, I thought.

Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.

“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt you.”

The boys crouched like frightened animals, saying nothing, eyes spinning, seeming to look everywhere and nowhere.

“What’s wrong with them?” Olive whispered.

Bronwyn hushed her. “Don’t be rude.”

“Can you tell me your names?” Emma said, her voice coaxing and gentle.

“I am Joel and Peter,” the larger boy said.

“Which are you?” Emma said. “Joel or Peter?”

“I am Peter and Joel,” said the smaller boy.

“We don’t have time for games,” said Enoch. “Are there any birds in there with you? Have you seen any fly past?”

“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.

“In the attic,” said the smaller.

“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”

“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.

“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”

Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Death and blood!” cried one boy.

“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.

“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.

“Cheerio!” said Horace, turning on his heels. “I’ll see you all back in the crypt. Hope I don’t get squashed by a bomb!”

Emma caught Horace by his sleeve. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re the only one of us who’s managed to catch any of those blasted pigeons.”

“Didn’t you hear them?” Horace said. “That loop is full of shadows that bite—which could only mean one thing. Hollows!”

“It was full of them,” I said. “But that might have been days ago.”

“When was the last time you were inside your house?” Emma asked the boys.

Their loop had been raided, they explained in their strange and broken way, but they’d managed to escape into the catacombs and hide among the bones. How long ago that was, they couldn’t say. Two days? Three? They’d lost all track of time down here in the dark.

“Oh, you poor dears!” said Bronwyn. “What terrors you must’ve endured!”

“You can’t stay here forever,” said Emma. “You’ll age forward if you don’t reach another loop soon. We can help you—but first we have to catch a pigeon.”

The boys gazed into one another’s spinning eyes and seemed to speak without uttering a word. They said in unison, “Follow us.”

They slid down from their bone pile and started down the passage.

We followed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were fascinatingly odd. They kept their arms linked at all times, and every few steps, they made loud clicking sounds with their tongues.

“What are they doing?” I whispered.