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

After a minute the pigeon stiffened and flew toward the tracks, then reached the end of its leash and bounced back into Melina’s hand like a yo-yo.

We tiptoed around the bodies to the edge of the platform, then hopped down into the pit where the tracks ran. They disappeared into tunnels on either end of the station. I had a sinking feeling that our future lay somewhere inside one of these dark, gaping mouths.

“Oh, I hope we don’t have to go mucking about in there,” said

Olive.

“Of course we do,” Enoch said. “It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.”

The pigeon bopped rightward. We started down the tracks.

I hopscotched around an oily puddle and a legion of rats scurried away from my feet, sending Olive into Bronwyn’s arms with a shriek. The tunnel yawned before us, black and menacing. It occurred to me that this would be a very bad place to meet a hollowgast. Here there’d be no walls to climb, no houses to shelter in, no tomb lids to close behind us. It was long and straight and lit only by a few red bulbs, glinting feebly at scattered intervals.

I walked faster.

The darkness closed around us.

*   *   *

When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek with my dad. I was always the hider and he the seeker. I was really good at it, primarily because I, unlike most kids of four or five, had the then-peculiar ability to be extremely quiet for long periods of time, and also because I suffered from absolutely no trace of anything resembling claustrophobia: I could wedge myself into the smallest rear-closet crawl space and stay there for twenty or thirty minutes, not making a sound, having the time of my life.

Which is why you’d think I wouldn’t have a problem with the whole dark, enclosed spaces thing. Or why, at the very least, you’d think a tunnel meant to contain trains and tracks and nothing else would be easier for me to handle than one that was essentially an open cemetery, with all manner of Halloweenish things spilling out along it. And yet, the farther into this tunnel we walked, the more I was overcome by clammy, creeping dread—a feeling entirely apart from the one I sensed hollows with; this was simply a bad feeling. And so I hurried us through as fast as the slowest of us could go, prodding Melina until she barked at me to back off, a steady drip of adrenaline keeping my deep exhaustion at bay.

After a long walk and several Y-shaped tunnel splits, the pigeon led us to a disused section of track where the ties had warped and rotted and pools of stagnant water spanned the floor. The pressure of trains passing in far- off tunnels pushed the air around like breaths in some great creature’s gullet.

Then, way down ahead of us, a pinpoint of light winked into being, small but growing fast. Emma shouted, “Train!” and we split apart and pressed our backs to the walls. I covered my ears, expecting the deafening roar of a train engine at close range, but it never came—all I could hear was a small, high-pitched whine, which I was fairly certain was coming from inside my own head. Just as the light was filling the tunnel, its white glow