Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

Thought briefly of all the pleasant, boring things I might’ve been doing with my summer, had my life gone differently. Tennis camp. Sailing lessons. Stocking shelves. And then, through some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb.

The ladder descended into a tunnel. The tunnel dead-ended to one side, and in the other direction disappeared into blackness. The air was cold and suffused with a strange odor, like clothes left to rot in a flooded basement. The rough stone walls beaded and dripped with moisture of mysterious origin.

As Emma and I waited for everyone to climb down, the cold crept into me, degree by degree. The others felt it, too. When Bronwyn reached the bottom, she opened her trunk and handed out the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters we’d been given in the menagerie. I slipped one over my head. It fit me like a sack, the sleeves falling past my fingers and the bottom sagging halfway to my knees, but at least it was warm.

Bronwyn’s trunk was empty now and she left it behind. Miss Peregrine rode inside her coat, where she’d practically made a nest for herself. Millard insisted on carrying the Tales in his arms, heavy and bulky as it was, because he might need to refer to it at any moment, he said. I think it had become his security blanket, though, and he thought of it as a book of spells which only he knew how to read.

We were an odd bunch.

I shuffled forward to feel for hollows in the dark. This time, I got a new kind of twinge in my gut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue. I didn’t mention it, though; there was no reason to alarm everyone unnecessarily.

We walked. The sound of our feet slapping the wet bricks echoed endlessly up and down the passage. There’d be no sneaking up on whatever was waiting for us.

Every so often, from up ahead, we’d hear a flap of wings or a pigeon’s warble, and we’d pick up our pace a little. I got the uneasy feeling we were being led toward some nasty surprise. Embedded in the walls were stone slabs like the ones we’d seen in the crypt, but older, the writing mostly worn away. Then we passed a coffin, grave-less, on the floor—then a whole stack of them, leaned against a wall like discarded moving boxes.

“What is this place?” Hugh whispered.

“Graveyard overflow,” said Enoch. “When they need to make room for new customers, they dig up the old ones and stick them down here.”

“What a terrible loop entrance,” I said. “Imagine walking through here every time you needed in or out!”

“It’s not so different from our cairn tunnel,” Millard said.

“Unpleasant loop entrances serve a purpose—normals tend to avoid them, so we peculiars have them all to ourselves.”

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