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

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,