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

And with that the boy climbed back onto his father’s horse, and we turned and walked through the gates into town.

The town was named Coal. Not Coaltown or Coalville. Just Coal. The stuff was everywhere, piled in gritty drifts by the side doors of houses, wafting up from the chimneys as oily smoke, smeared on the overalls of men walking to work. We hurried past them toward the depot in a tight pack.

“Quickly now,” Emma said. “No talking. Eyes down.”

It was a well-established rule that we were to avoid unnecessary eye contact with normals, because looks could lead to conversations, and conversations to questions, and peculiar children found questions posed by normal adults difficult to answer in a way that didn’t invite still more questions. Of course, if anything was going to invite questions, it was a group of bedraggled-looking children traveling alone during wartime—especially with a big, sharp-taloned bird of prey perched on one of the girls’ shoulders—but the townspeople hardly seemed to notice us. They haunted the laundry lines and pub doorways of Coal’s twisting lanes, drooping like wilted flowers, eyes flicking toward us and away again. They had other worries.

The train depot was so small I wondered if trains ever bothered stopping there. The only covered portion was the ticket counter, a little hut in the middle of an open-air platform. Inside the hut was a man asleep in a chair, bottle-thick bifocals slipping down his nose.

Emma rapped sharply on the window, startling the clerk awake. “Eight tickets to London!” she said. “We must be there this very afternoon.”

The clerk peered at us through the glass. Took off his bifocals and wiped them clean and put them on again, just to make sure he was seeing properly. I’m sure we were a shocking sight: our clothes were mud-splotched, our hair greasy and sticking up at odd angles. We probably stank, too.

“So sorry,” the clerk said. “The train is full.”

I looked around. Aside from a few people dozing on benches, the depot was empty.

“That’s absurd!” said Emma. “Sell us the tickets at once or I shall report you to the rail authority for child discrimination!”

I might’ve handled the clerk with a softer touch, but Emma had no patience for the self-important authority of petty bureaucrats.

“If there were any such statute,” the clerk replied, his nose rising disdainfully, “it would certainly not apply to you. There’s a war on, you know, and more important things to be hauled about her majesty’s countryside than children and animals!” He gave Miss Peregrine a hard look. “Which aren’t allowed in any case!”

A train hissed into the station and squealed to a stop. The conductor stuck his head out of one of its windows and shouted, “Eight-thirty to London! All aboard!” The bench-sleepers in the depot roused themselves and began to shuffle across the platform.