As I drew Mother Dust’s finger from my pocket, the hollow dropped me into its open jaws.
I was trapped in its mouth from knees to chest, its teeth pinning me in place, starting to cut into my flesh, its jaws quickly expanding to swallow me.
This would be my last act. My last moment. I crushed the finger in my hand and shoved it down what I hoped was the hollow’s throat. Emma was beating it, burning it—and then, just before it could close its jaws and saw me in half with its teeth, the creature began to choke. It stumbled away from Emma, burned and gagging, retreating toward the grate in the floor from which it had crawled. Bounding back to its nest, where it would have all the time it wanted to devour me.
I tried to stop it, to shout (Let me go!) but it was biting down and the pain was so blacking that I couldn’t think—and then we were there, at the grate, slipping down into it. Its mouth so full of me that it couldn’t catch hold of the rungs on the wall and it was falling, falling and choking, and I was still, somehow, alive.
When we hit bottom, it was with a great, bone-breaking crack that flattened our lungs and sent all the sedative dust I’d shoved down the hollow’s gullet blowing into the air around us. As it snowed down I could feel it working, numbing my pain and dulling my brain, and it must’ve been doing the same to the hollow because it was hardly biting me at all now, its jaws slackening.
As we lay in a stunned and tranquilized pile, racing toward sleep, I could see forming before me, through all those billowing white particles, a dank and lightless tunnel heaped with bones. The last thing I saw before the dust took me was a throng of hollows, hunched and curious, shuffling forward.
I woke up. That in itself is worthy of note, I think, given the circumstances.
I was in the hollows’ burrow, and piled around me were the bodies of many hollowgast. They might’ve been dead, but it was likelier they’d breathed what remained of Mother Dust’s pinky finger, and the result was tangled in a spaghetti of stinking, snoring, mostly unconscious hollowflesh.
I gave a silent prayer of thanks for Mother Dust and then wondered, with rising alarm, how long I’d been down here. An hour? A day? What had happened to everyone above?
I had to go. A few of the hollows were beginning to stir from sleep, like me, but they were still woozy. With great effort, I stood. Apparently my wounds were not so grave, my bones not so broken. I swayed, dizzy, then caught my balance and began to move through the enmeshed hollows.
I kicked one in the head by accident. With a grunt it came awake and opened its eyes. I froze, thinking that if I ran it would only chase me down. It seemed to register me—but as neither a threat nor a potential meal—then closed its eyes again.
I continued on, placing each foot with care until I had passed the carpet of hollows and reached a wall. Here the tunnel ended. The way out was above me: a chute leading upward a hundred feet or so to an open grate and that cluttered room. There were holds along the chute, but they were spaced too far apart, built for hollows’ acrobatic tongues, not human hands and feet. I stood peering up at a ring of dim light far overhead, hoping a friendly face might appear there, but I dared not shout for help.
In desperation I jumped, scrabbling at the hard wall and grasping for the first hold. Somehow I reached it. Pulled myself up. Suddenly I was more than ten feet off the ground. (How had I done that?) I jumped again and reached the next hold—and the next one. I was climbing the chute, my legs launching me higher and my arms reaching farther than I knew was possible—this is insane—and then I was at the top, poking my head out, pushing myself up into the room.
I wasn’t even breathing hard.
I looked around, saw Emma’s firelight, and ran toward it across the cluttered floor. I tried calling out but couldn’t seem to make the words. No matter—there she was, on the other side of the open glass door, in the office. Warren was on this side, tied to the chair Miss Glassbill had sat in, and when I came close he groaned fearfully and knocked himself over. Then their faces were at the door, suspicious and peering—Emma and Miss Peregrine and Horace, and behind them other ymbrynes and friends, too. All there, alive, beautiful. They had been freed from their cells only to be imprisoned once more in here, locked behind Caul’s bomb-proof bunker door, safe from wights (for now) but trapped.
Their expressions were fearful, and the closer I got to the glass door, the more terrified they became. It’s me, I tried to say, but the words didn’t come out right, and my friends jumped back.
It’s me, it’s Jacob!
What came out instead of English was a husky snarl and three long, fat tongues, waving in the air before me, spat from my own mouth in my attempt to speak. And then I heard one of my friends—Enoch, it was Enoch—say aloud the terrible thing that had just occurred to me:
“It’s a hollow!”
I’m not, I tried to say, I’m not—but all evidence was to the contrary. I had somehow become one of them, been bitten and turned, like a vampire, or been killed, eaten, recycled, reincarnated—oh god oh god oh god it can’t be …
I tried to reach out with my hands, to make some sign that might be recognized as human now that my mouth had failed me, but it was my tongues that reached out.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to drive this thing
Emma swiped blindly at me with her hand—and connected. Sudden, searing pain flashed through me.
And then I woke up.
Again.
Or rather, jolted by sudden pain, I woke back into my body—my hurt, human body, still lying in the dark in the slack jaws of a sleeping hollow. And yet I was still the hollow above, too, snatching my hurt tongue back into my mouth and stumbling away from the door. I was somehow dually present in both my mind and the hollow’s, and I found now that I could control both—could lift my own arm and the hollow’s, turn my own head and the hollow’s, and do it all without saying a word aloud, but merely by thinking.