Uncle Bobby: Buffet?
My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.
Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?
I try to shout: I’m not dead!
I am just far away I’m sorry
But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.
The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.
We’re waiting for you, Jacob.
A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.
We’re waiting.
*
I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God—you gave us a scare!”
“I did?”
“You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”
“I was?”
Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”
I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.
I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.
“Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”
Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”
“Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex—cunning, even—in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”
“But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”
“Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”
“A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing—but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”
“But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal,” said Millard. “We don’t know a lot about hollows, having never had the chance to examine one in a controlled setting. But it’s thought that, like normals, they lack something which you and I and everyone in this train car possesses—some essential peculiarness—which is what allows us to interact with loops; to bind with and be absorbed into them.”
“Like a key,” I said.
“Something like that,” said Millard. “Some believe that, like blood or spinal fluid, our peculiarness has physical substance. Others think it’s inside us but insubstantial. A second soul.”
“Huh,” I said. I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.
“I hate all that crackpot stuff,” said Emma. “The idea that you could capture the second soul in a jar? Gives me the quivers.”
“And yet, over the years, some attempts have been made to do just this,” said Millard. “What did that wight soldier say to you, Emma? ‘I wish I could bottle what you have,’ or something to that effect?”
Emma shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”
“The theory goes that if somehow our peculiar essence could be distilled and captured—in a bottle, as he said, or more likely a petri dish—then perhaps that essence could also be transferred from one being to another. If this were possible, imagine the black market in peculiar souls that might spring up among the wealthy and unscrupulous. Peculiarities like your spark or Bronwyn’s great strength sold to the highest bidder!”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Most peculiars agree with you,” said Millard, “which is why such research was outlawed many years ago.”
“As if the wights cared about our laws,” said Emma.
“But the whole idea seems crazy,” I said. “It couldn’t really work, could it?”
“I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”
“Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature—one that can travel through time loops.”