A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,58
along with it.
I slid across the floor on my back, through the curtains, out into the larger cold-storage room. The hollow had flung itself backward against the door to escape the fire, and it was pulling me toward its open mouth. I stuck out my hand as I slid, raking it along the shelves until I managed to hook my fingers into something. But it didn’t stop me—it was just a wooden crate, and it yanked away from the shelf with me as I slid by.
I heard Emma shouting my name. Acting purely on reflex, I grabbed the crate with my other hand and held it out in front of me. When I reached the hollow, I jammed it right between the creature’s jaws.
It let my ankle go for a moment, giving me enough time to scramble away into a corner. I’d heard it utter a few sounds now and I tried them in my own throat, summoning the strange guttural language of hollows from wherever it had been slumbering inside me.
Emma ran to where I was kneeling. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we have to get out of this room. Never fight hollows in a confined space.”
With her eyes she followed the crate in the air to the door. “It’s blocking the exit,” she said.
The hollow gave up trying to dislodge the crate using its tongues and clamped its jaws shut instead, crunching the wood to splinters like it was a mouthful of potato chips.
Move, I said, testing out a word of hollowspeak.
It took a step toward us, but it was still blocking our escape. I tried a slight modification. Move aside.
It took another step forward. Its tongues danced in the air like rattlesnakes ready to strike.
“It’s not working,” Emma said. Her flames were starting to melt everything around us, and drips of water from the ceiling were forming a puddle on the floor.
“Make it ever hotter,” I said. “I have an idea.”
Emma took a deep breath, tensed, and her flames burned a little higher.
“When I say the word,” I whispered, “you run that way and I’ll run this way.”
The hollow let out a sharp cry and ran at us. I shouted, “NOW!” and Emma jumped right and I leapt left. The hollow’s tongues shot over our heads, and I kept running to the corner. The hollow tried to spin and follow me, but it slipped in the puddle and fell, then cried out and sent its tongues after me, but one of them tangled in the rungs of a metal shelf against the wall. Trying to yank free, the hollow brought the heavy shelf, and all its crates of frozen food, down on top of itself.
I shouted, “GO!” met Emma at the door and pulled it open, and in a moment we were out in the hall and pulling the door closed behind us.
“Lock it!” Emma said. “Where’s that key?”
But this door had a different handle and no lock at all, so we turned and ran down the hall and back into the restaurant’s dining room. It was filled with morning sun and diners in crisp vintage clothes, all turning now to stare at the strangers in their midst, soggy and out of breath. Emma remembered the fire in her hand too late, then tucked it behind her back while three waiters, the only people in the room who hadn’t yet noticed us, went on harmonizing:
“Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaaaa—”
A huge crashing sound came from down the hall, and the waiters stopped mid-gal. The people who had been staring leapt up from their tables.
“Get out!” I shouted. “Everyone get out of here right now.”
Emma brought the flames out in front of her again. “That’s right! Get out, get out!”
It was the next crash that did it—the sound of the metal door flying from its hinges—and now almost everyone was on their feet, panicked and streaming toward the exits.
We spun to look behind us. The hollowgast stomped into the hallway, turned toward us, and howled, its three horrible tongues reeling down the hall like hard-cast fishing lines before snapping taut and vibrating with its scream.
The soda jerk shoved past me and ran for the nearest door. The sound alone was enough to terrify everyone. The nightmarish sight was mine alone to bear.
“Tell me you’re close,” Emma said.
“I’ve almost got him.”
The hollow started toward us down the hall. I shouted at him—