“We can,” said the older.
Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me—it’s Melina!”
Joel-and-Peter said:
“We thought you were—”
“Dead every last—”
“One of you.”
“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”
So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.
We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.
“They’re in!” I shouted.
I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels—not enough to lose them. Not nearly enough.
Which is why what Millard said next struck me as patently insane: “Stop! Everyone stop!”
The blind boys listened to him. We piled up behind them, tripping and skidding to a halt.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I shouted. “Run!”
“So sorry,” Millard said, “but this just occurred to me—one of us will have to pass through the loop exit before the echolocators or the girl do, or they will cross into the present and we into 1940, and we’ll be separated. For them to travel to 1940 with us, one of us has to go first and open the way.”
“You didn’t come from the present?” Melina said, confused.
“From 1940, like he said,” Emma replied. “It’s raining bombs out there, though. You might want to stay behind.”
“Nice try,” said Melina, “you ain’t getting rid of me that easy. It’s got to be worse in the present—wights everywhere! That’s why I never left Miss Thrush’s loop.”
Emma stepped forward and pulled me with her. “Fine! We’ll go first!”
I stuck out my free arm, feeling blindly in the dark. “But I can’t see a thing!”
The elder echolocator said, “It’s just twenty paces ahead there, you—”
“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.
So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.
“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.
My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.
The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.
“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”
“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.
I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.
The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.
We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.
We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.
“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.
Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.
Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.
I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.
Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long—not two of them.
They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.
Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.
We ran outside.