Hollow City

“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”

“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”

Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.

“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”

“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.

“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”

The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.

“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”

“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.

“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”

Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”

“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”

Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”

For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.

Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait—no—I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”

“But it is possible,” Horace insisted.

“Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”

“I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come—I show you.”

“Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.

“If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.

“Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”

“I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.

“Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”

*   *   *

The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that—a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.

“How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.

“Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”

They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.

“What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”

“No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”

“We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”

The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word—over and over again.”

I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.

Gibberish. His mind was gone.