“How’s your ankle?” I asked her. “Does it hurt?”
She knelt and pushed down her sock to reveal a fat, red welt ringing it. “Not too bad,” she said, touching the ankle gingerly. But when she stood up again and put weight on it, I caught her wincing.
“A lot of help
“If my grandfather had run from the hollow that killed him, he might still be alive,” I said. “It’s good advice.”
I heard a thud from beyond the wall we’d just scaled, and the Feeling churned up inside me again. I went to the ledge and looked over. The hollow was alive and well at the base of the wall, and busy punching holes in the rock with its tongues.
“Bad news,” I said. “The fall didn’t kill it.”
In a moment Emma was at my side. “What’s it doing?”
I watched it twist one of its tongues into a hole it had made, then hoist itself up and begin making a second. It was creating footholds—or tongue-holds, rather.
“It’s trying to climb the wall,” I said. “Good God, it’s like the freaking Terminator.”
“The what?” said Emma.
I almost started to explain, then shook my head. It was a stupid comparison, anyway—hollowgast were scarier, and probably deadlier, than any movie monster.
“We have to stop it!” said Olive.
“Or better yet, run!” said Horace.
“No more running!” said Enoch. “Can we please just kill the damn thing?”
“Sure,” Emma said. “But how?”
“Anyone got a vat of boiling oil?” said Enoch.
“Will this do instead?” I heard Bronwyn say, and turned to see her lifting a boulder above her head.
“It might,” I said. “How’s your aim? Can you drop it where I tell you?”
“I’ll certainly try,” Bronwyn said, tottering toward the ledge with the rock balanced precariously on her hands.
We stood looking over the ledge. “Farther this way,” I said, urging her a few steps to the left. Just as I was about to give the signal for her to drop the boulder, though, the hollow leapt from one hold to the next, and now she was standing in the wrong place.
