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“We have permission,” I said, improvising a lie. “I’m a wight, and I’m delivering these two captured peculiars to Caul.”
“No one told us,” the head on the left said irritably.
“Do they look captured to you, Richard?” said the one on the right.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said the left. “Ravens pecked out my eyes weeks ago.”
“Yours, too?” said the right. “Pity.”
“He don’t sound like any wight I know,” said the left. “What’s your name, sirrah?”
“Smith,” I said.
“Ha! We don’t have a Smith!” said the right.
“I just joined up.”
“Nice try. No, I don’t think we’ll let you through.”
“And who’s going to stop us?” I said.
“Obviously not us,” said the left. “We’re just here to forebode.”
“And to inform,” said the right. “Did you know I took a degree in museum studies? I never wanted to be a bridge head …”
“No one wants to be a bridge head,” snapped the left. “No child grows up dreaming of becoming a bloody bridge head, foreboding at people all day and having your eyes pecked out by ravens. But life doesn’t always scatter roses at your feet, does it?”
“Let’s go,” muttered Emma. “All they can do is natter at us.”
We ignored them and continued up the bridge, each head warning us in turn as we passed.
“Step no further!” shouted the fourth.
“Continue at your peril!” wailed the fifth.
“I don’t think they’re listening,” said the sixth.
“Oh, well,” said the seventh airily. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
The eighth only stuck out his fat green tongue at us. Then we were beyond them and cresting the bridge, and there it came to a sudden end—a yawning, twenty-foot gap in the place where stone should’ve been, and I nearly stepped into it. Emma caught me as I reeled backward, arms pinwheeling.
“They didn’t finish the damned bridge!” I said, my cheeks flushing with adrenaline and embarrassment. I could hear the heads laughing at me, and behind them, the road squatters.
If we’d been going at a run, we wouldn’t have stopped in time and would’ve pitched right over the edge.
“Are you all right?” Emma asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but we’re not. How are we supposed to get Addison across now?”
“This is vexing,” said Addison, pacing along the edge. “I don’t suppose we could jump?”
“No chance,” I said. “It’d be way too far, even at a full run. Even with a pole vault.”
“Huh,” said Emma. She looked behind us. “You just gave me an idea. I’ll be right back.”
Addison and I watched as she marched down the bridge. At the first head she came to, she stopped, wrapped her hands around the pike it was impaled on, and pulled.
The pike came out with ease. As the head protested loudly, she laid it on the ground, planted her foot on its face, and gave a mighty yank. The pike slid free of the head, which went rolling off down the bridge, howling with rage. Emma returned triumphant, stood the pike at the edge of the gap, and let it fall across with a loud metallic clang.
Emma looked at it and frowned. “Well, it isn’t London Bridge.” Twenty feet long by one inch wide and slightly bowed in the middle, it looked like something a circus acrobat might balance on.
“Let’s get a few more,” I suggested.
We ran back and forth, prying up pikes and laying them across the gap. The heads spat and swore and issued empty threats. When the last of them had been pried off and rolled away, we’d made a small metal bridge, roughly a foot wide, slippery with head goo and rattling in the ashy breeze.
“For England!” Addison said, and he shimmied haltingly onto the pikes.
“For Miss Peregrine,” I said, following him.
“For the love of birds, just go,” said Emma, and she stepped on behind me.
Addison slowed us down badly. His little legs kept slipping between the pikes, which made the pikes roll like axles and gave me awful stomach flutters. I tried focusing on where to place my feet without seeing past them into the chasm, but it was impossible; the boiling river attracted my eyes like a magnet, and I found myself wondering whether we were high enough for the fall alone to kill me or whether I’d survive long enough to feel myself cooking to death. Addison, meanwhile, had given up trying to walk altogether and instead laid down, whereupon he began to push himself along the pikes like a slug. In this way we proceeded, inch by undignified inch, to just beyond the halfway point—and then my flutters sharpened and gave way to something else: a knot in my stomach that I’d come to know all too well.
Hollow. I tried to say it aloud but my mouth had gone dry; by the time I’d swallowed and got the word out, the feeling had multiplied tenfold.
“What dreadful luck,” Addison said. “Is it ahead of us or behind?”
I couldn’t tell right away and had to poke around the feeling for a moment before I could pin it down.
“Jacob! Ahead or behind?” Emma shouted in my ear.
Ahead. My gut-compass was certain, but it made no sense: the downward slope of the bridge was now visible all the way to the gate, and the whole length was deserted. There was nothing there.
“I don’t know!” I said.
“Then keep going!” Emma replied.
We were closer to the far side of the gap than the near; we’d be off the pikes faster if we continued forward. I shoved down my fear, bent and scooped up Addison, and started to run, slipping and wobbling on the unsteady pikes. The hollow felt close enough to touch, and I could hear it now, grunting toward us from some unseen place ahead. My eyes followed the sound to a spot in front of us but below our feet—on the cut-away face of the bridge, where several tall, narrow apertures had been carved into the stone.
There. The bridge was hollow, and a hollow was inside the bridge. Though its body would never fit through the openings in the stone, its tongues easily could.
I’d made it across the pikes and onto solid bridge when I heard Emma cry out. I dropped Addison and spun to see her behind me, one of the hollow’s tongues wrapped around her waist and whisking her into the air.
She screamed my name and I screamed hers. The tongue flipped her upside down and shook her. She screamed again. There was no worse sound.
Another of its tongues slapped the underside of the pikes and our makeshift bridge went flying, clattering apart and plunging like matchsticks into the chasm below. Then the second tongue went for Addison, and the third punched me in the chest.
I fell to the ground, the
wind knocked out of me. While I struggled for a breath, the tongue slithered around my waist and scooped me into the air. The other had Addison by his hind legs. In a moment, all three of us were dangling upside down.
Blood rushed to my head, darkening my vision. I could hear Addison barking and nipping at the tongue.
“Don’t, it’ll drop you!” I shouted, but he kept on.
Emma was helpless, too; if she burned the tongue around her waist, the hollow would drop her.
“Talk to it, Jacob!” she shouted. “Make it stop!”
I twisted to see the narrow openings through which its tongues had squeezed. Its teeth gnawed at the stone slats. Its black eyes bulged hungrily. We hung like fruit on thick black vines, the chasm yawning below.
I tried to speak its language. “SET US DOWN!” I shouted—but what came out was English.
“Again!” Addison said.
I shut my eyes and imagined the hollow doing as I asked, then tried again.
“Put us down on the bridge!”
More English. This wasn’t the hollow I’d come to know, the one I’d communed with for hours while it was frozen in ice. This was a new one, a stranger, and my connection with it was thin and weak. It seemed to sense that I was fumbling for a key to its brain, and it hauled us suddenly upward, as if winding up to fling us into the chasm. I had to connect, somehow, now—
“STOP!” I screamed, my throat raw—and this time, out came the guttural scratch of hollowspeak.
We jolted to a stop in midair. For a moment we just hung there, swinging like laundry in a breeze. My words had done something but not enough. I’d merely confused it.
“Can’t breathe,” Emma croaked. The tongue around her was squeezing too hard, and her face was turning purple.
“Put us down on the bridge,” I said—in Hollow again!—the words clawing at my throat as they came. Every burst of hollowspeak felt like I was coughing up staples.
The hollow made an uncertain rattle. For an optimistic moment I thought it might actually do as I’d asked. Then it snapped me up and down as fast and hard as you’d shake out a towel.
