Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  That was clearly a lie, and Morrigan knew it.

  Rook said nothing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE BOOK OF GHOSTLY HOURS

  There were two notable additions to Morrigan’s timetable the next morning. The most exciting change was that all her previously blank periods had been filled in with four words: SUB-NINE ACADEMIC GROUP.

  Morrigan smiled so much at the sight of those words, it made her face hurt. She couldn’t wait to begin her proper lessons. Rook had said it was okay to tell Unit 919 about the School of Wundrous Arts, because they were bound by unit loyalty to keep her secrets, and of course Morrigan’s conductor and patron had to know about her new classes, for practical reasons.

  “But try to keep it quiet around Proudfoot House,” the Scholar Mistress had told her. “It probably won’t stay a secret forever, but the longer we can operate without everyone else nosing in, the better. So many busybodies in this place.”

  The entire afternoon train trip home that day had been taken up with telling and retelling the story over and over. Miss Cheery and the rest of Unit 919 had been satisfyingly shocked and excited to learn that there was a third school at Wunsoc they hadn’t known about. In fact, the Hometrain journey seemed to take three times longer than usual, and Morrigan suspected Miss Cheery had taken them on a circuitous route so they could hear every tiny detail a second and third time.

  “And the classrooms are all empty?” Anah asked with a little shudder. “Spooky.”

  “Do you think they’d let us come see Sub-Nine too?” asked Mahir.

  “I can’t believe Dearborn and Murgatroyd had another one of them just hanging out in there this whole time!” said Hawthorne.

  “If you’re not a whitesleeve anymore,” said Cadence, “or a graysleeve, then… what are you?”

  Morrigan hadn’t had an answer for that, but Lam pointed silently at a poster hanging on the wall of Hometrain. It had been there since the first time they’d stepped on board a year ago, but she’d not given it a thought since that day, when Miss Cheery explained its meaning to them. It was an unevenly proportioned target sign made up of three concentric circles—the large gray outer ring represented the Mundane school (or graysleeves), she’d told them. The narrower white middle ring represented the Arcane school (whitesleeves). And in the center was a much smaller black circle, which Miss Cheery had thought represented the Society as a whole, but…

  “Oh!” cried the conductor as she stared at the poster. She looked lightning-struck. “Oh, I see!”

  Morrigan saw it too. They all did. The existence of the School of Wundrous Arts had been right here, staring them in the face all this time.

  (Disappointingly, though, when she’d entered her wardrobe that morning, her white Arcane shirt had been waiting for her, pressed and starched. Morrigan supposed it wouldn’t do for her to start wearing a black shirt around Proudfoot House when she was supposed to be keeping the School of Wundrous Arts under wraps, but even so, she couldn’t help feeling a bit let down. She’d liked the idea of being a blacksleeve.)

  Jupiter had also listened with rapt attention when she’d burst into his study after he arrived home the night before to declare that, for once, she knew something he didn’t. (It really was so satisfying to know something he didn’t. She hoped it would happen again someday.)

  Morrigan was staring at her new timetable for the hundredth time, so delighted by seeing the words SUB-NINE ACADEMIC GROUP that she didn’t notice the second addition.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Hawthorne.

  Morrigan’s brow furrowed as she cautiously sniffed the air.

  “It’s Thaddea’s sweaty wrestling kit,” said Anah, wrinkling her nose. “Is that still sitting there from yesterday? Honestly.”

  “Well, I’ve got wrestling again this morning, haven’t I?” Thaddea fired back at her as she stuffed the kit into her satchel. “No sense washing it twice, is there?”

  Anah looked exasperated. “There’s an awful lot of sense in doing that, Thaddea.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Thaddea’s stinky socks.” Hawthorne held up his timetable, pointing to a class on Thursday morning. “Look. What’s That Smell? A Master Class in Minor Distractions. Anyone else got that?”

  “You’ve all got it,” Miss Cheery called out from her driver’s seat at the front of the carriage. “Everyone does What’s That Smell? once they’ve been invited into the Gathering Place. Think of it as an introduction to small-scale mayhem. Clever ways to get out of sticky situations, help others, and maybe even save lives by distracting and confusing the people around you. Throwing your voice, crying on cue, that sort of thing. Useful stuff—it will really help you on Golders Night, and you’ve only got a few weeks to prepare for that. I still use some of the tricks I learned in—OH MY DAYS, NOBODY PANIC.” Miss Cheery leapt up from her seat, eyes wide as teacups, and everyone immediately panicked.

  “What? What? What? WHAT?” said Anah, jumping up from her cushion.

  “STAY STILL, FRANCIS, DO NOT MOVE. THERE IS A SPIDER ON YOUR SHOULDER. I SAID DO NOT MOVE.”

  “WHERE?” Francis yelped, frantically craning his neck to see his shoulders. He ran his hands repeatedly over his close-cropped hair and shook out his cloak. “WHERE IS IT? GET IT OFF ME!”

  “Calm down, Francis,” said Arch, looking terrified but determined. “I’ll help you, just stay still and stop shou—”

  “GET IT OOOOFFFFFF!”

  Screams, flailing, and spider-searching ensued, and it took a good fifteen seconds for Unit 919 to realize they’d been had. They turned as one to glare at Miss Cheery, who was already back in the driver’s seat, grinning at them.

  “My mistake,” she said, shrugging as she polished off the last chocolate biscuit.

  Morrigan didn’t have to wait long to begin learning the Wundrous Arts; it was her first class of the day. Mrs. Murgatroyd met her on the ground floor of Proudfoot House, kicked a group of senior scholars out of their brass railpod, and waved a slightly embarrassed Morrigan inside.

  “Watch carefully and memorize,” said Murgatroyd as she pushed and pulled the complex sequence of buttons and levers. “I won’t always be here.”

  Murgatroyd made her transformation during the journey, while Morrigan winced and averted her eyes, trying to ignore it. She would never get used to the horrible sound of the Scholar Mistress’s spine cracking and popping like tiny fireworks.

  When they arrived on Sub-Nine, Rook led her once again down the deserted hallway of the School of Wundrous Arts, but left her with Conall and Sofia before making a hasty retreat.

  They carried on down the darkened hall, Conall leading the way. “Have you learned about ghostly hours yet, Wundersmith?” His cane clicked sharply on the marble floor.

  “No. I mean, I’ve only heard the phrase.” Her old teacher, Henry Mildmay, had briefly mentioned ghostly hours once during Unit 919’s Decoding Nevermoor class, but they’d not had the chance to study them. Mildmay had betrayed her—had betrayed the entire Wundrous Society, in fact, by conspiring with the Ghastly Market to kidnap Society members and auction them off for their knacks—and she’d tried to banish him from her mind, just as he’d been banished from Wunsoc. She preferred not to dwell. “Aren’t they some sort of… what do you call it? A geographical oddity? Like Tricksy Lanes? Are there actual ghosts involved, or—”

  “Bah. The name is a stupidity,” Conall grumbled. “They’re only called ghostly hours because some idiot once got the false impression that they were a phenomenon somehow created by the dead. Now we’re stuck calling them that.”

  “It is misleading,” Sofia agreed. “But usefully misleading. Ask most people in Nevermoor what a ghostly hour is and they’ll say it’s a thing that doesn’t really exist, or otherwise they know they exist and they’re afraid of them. Everyone’s heard an urban myth, some friend of a friend of a friend who stumbled into a moment from the distant past and witnessed it as if they were there. But mostly they’re hard to find unless
you know what to look for, and that protects them from scrutiny.”

  They stopped outside a chamber with the name Corcoran carved across the arch. The room itself was vast—easily the size of the Deucalion’s largest ballroom—and, like all the others, it was cold, bare, windowless, and dark. Morrigan shivered as they stepped inside, even though she was wearing a second sweater.

  “Even here in the Wundrous Society, it’s only the oddballs from the Geographical Oddities Squadron who’ve given them more than a passing thought. Good for us. Shame for everyone else. They don’t know what they’re missing.” Conall took a few steps in one direction, then another, gazing around the room, apparently looking for something. He frowned, checking his pocket watch. “Eight sixteen, wasn’t it, Sofia?”

  “Eight seventeen,” she told him. “We still have time.”

  “Ah.” Conall glanced from his pocket watch to the center of the room and back again. “Three… two… one.”

  Morrigan flinched as a long, tiny sliver of light appeared exactly where Conall was looking. It was as if someone had taken a very sharp knife and sliced open the air, or perhaps pulled at a tiny Gossamer thread and unraveled reality, revealing something else on the inside. She could hear distant, muffled noises from within.

  Sofia went first, nudging the incision with her snout. It opened up just enough for her to slip through it… and disappear. Morrigan breathed in sharply, looking up at Conall, but he was unfazed.

  “Nothing to fear, Wundersmith. Off we go.” He opened the air like a curtain, confidently following the foxwun.

  Morrigan reached out cautiously. Her fingers met the line of light. She felt warm air and a gentle pull, like whatever was inside had arms and they were reaching out for her, welcoming her in. She stepped forward, slipped through the gap, and felt time shudder.

  It was the strangest sensation.

  Like she was made entirely of water, and she’d somehow… rippled.

  Sofia and Conall were waiting for her on the other side, watching for her reaction.

  “Isn’t that something, Wundersmith?” asked Conall. His eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled.

  It was something, all right. They were in the same room, but everything was different. It was brighter and noisier—and warmer too. From one corner of the room came occasional blinding bursts of orange light that made Morrigan blink, accompanied by the sound of roaring flames and a smattering of cheers and applause. Whatever the show was, a small group of people dressed in old-fashioned clothes were gathered around, obscuring it from view.

  “Bravo, Stanislav, bravo!” cried an elderly man. “Extraordinary improvement in such a short time, my boy. Who’s next? Amelia! Three cheers for Amelia, gang—huzzah!”

  “What is this?” Morrigan whispered.

  “It’s okay, they can’t hear us,” Sofia replied at a normal volume.

  “Can they see us?”

  “No. Come closer. Let’s see if—ah!” She weaved between their legs and disappeared into their midst. “Excellent choice, Conall. It’s annotated.”

  Nobody seemed to have noticed the presence of the three newcomers. Morrigan was reminded of Christmas night, her first year in Nevermoor. She and Jupiter had taken the Gossamer Line train—a magical, highly dangerous, and decommissioned railway line—all the way to Crow Manor, her childhood home in Jackalfax, and while she’d stood in the middle of a room full of people, the only one who’d been able to see her was her grandmother. To the rest, she didn’t exist. Her father had walked right through her.

  “Are we traveling on the Gossamer? I’ve done this before—oh!” She’d bumped right into the man who’d given three cheers for Amelia. He turned and looked right at her, and she felt her face flush with heat. “Oh—I’m so sorry—”

  But the man turned away again, as if it hadn’t happened.

  “Come on, through we go.” Conall took hold of her elbow and steered her among the group.

  “Are you sure—shouldn’t we be more careful?”

  They were actually jostling people. Occasionally someone flinched or even turned to look, but almost immediately their eyes would glaze over and look away again, as if it had never happened. Nobody looked at them directly.

  “Your turn, Jimmy!” cried the elderly man.

  One by one the group members were called on and ran eagerly to the front, where they showed off an eclectic, extraordinary range of skills. One plucked a shadow from the wall and draped himself in it like a cape of darkness. Another made a collection of three-dimensional, glowing, brightly colored shapes seemingly from nothing, and sent them dancing through the air in formation. A teenage girl performed a series of sly impersonations of everyone else in the room, imitating their walks and posture and voices and laughter—but it was more than just an impersonation; she was becoming them, her features twisting and remaking themselves into exact replicas of her fellows, to their uproarious delight.

  The most curious thing, however, was the words that appeared in the air beside them while they performed, scrawled in glowing letters as if by some invisible hand, hanging there momentarily until they began to fade and float away:

  Veil

  Weaving

  Masquerade

  Something pinged in Morrigan’s memory.

  Ezra Squall. The Museum of Stolen Moments.

  Nocturne. Weaving. Tempus. Veil.

  “Are these the Wundrous Arts?” Morrigan whispered.

  “Some of them,” said Sofia. “The person who created this ghostly hour has annotated it, so we would know what we’re looking at—the mark of a dedicated historian.”

  “All right, all right,” called the elderly man in charge, “we’ve had our bit of morning fun. Well done, everyone, now—can tell me—yesterday’s lesson, if you—and why—for ten points—but nobody ever—”

  Morrigan blinked in confusion. The man’s words were cutting in and out like a static-filled radio, and the room had begun to slowly dim.

  “Come on, Wundersmith,” said Conall, ushering her away. “That’s our cue.”

  They found the gap again, but from this side, the sliver of light was a sliver of darkness. Morrigan reached out to gently open the way back and instead of warmth, her fingers met cool air. She stepped through the strange rippling sensation again. The fabric of the world shook itself out like clean laundry.

  Conall and Sofia followed her back to the cold, familiar darkness of Sub-Nine. Morrigan watched as the cut in the air stitched itself back up and the light disappeared completely. She reached out to run her hands over the spot where it had been, and felt nothing, not even a trace of residual heat.

  “What was that? Where did those people come from?” she demanded breathlessly as they made their way out of Corcoran and down the dark hallway, and without waiting for answers, “Can we do it again?”

  “You’ll do it every day, if you wish to,” Sofia told her. “But first, we have something important to show you.”

  When they reached the cozy warmth of the study room, the foxwun leapt up onto the big wooden table, which had been cleared of yesterday’s teacups and paper piles and basement nerds. Cleared of everything, in fact, except one enormous book, right in the center. It was bound in faded blue cloth, its pages swollen and warped from use.

  Sofia touched it lightly with one paw. “This book is our most treasured possession.”

  It was incredibly old, but lovingly cared for, that much was plain. The corners had been stitched up neatly in blue thread where the fabric covering had frayed. There wasn’t a speck of dust on it.

  Morrigan ran her fingers along the black embossed title, reading aloud. “The Book of Ghostly Hours.”

  “More of a ledger, really,” said Conall. He opened it with great care, turning to one of the early pages, and beckoned Morrigan over to see.

  Each page was divided into columns and rows, each column and row filled with tiny, meticulous handwriting. Dates and places and names. Her eyes flitted across the page, trying to make sens
e of what she was reading.

  LOCATION: School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Williams

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS: Brilliance Amadeo, Rastaban Tarazed

  A conversation between Amadeo and Tarazed concerning the theory behind possible self-projected travel on the Gossamer

  DATE & TIME: Avian Age, Seventh Tuesday, Winter of Six

  13:02–13:34

  LOCATION: School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Shaw

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS: Griselda Polaris, Mathilde Lachance, Decima Kokoro

  An advanced workshop in Tempus given by Polaris to Lachance and Kokoro

  DATE & TIME: Age of the East Winds, First Friday, Autumn of Eight

  09:52–11:44

  LOCATION: School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Van Ophoven

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS: Brilliance Amadeo, Elodie Bauer, Owain Binks

  A beginner’s lesson in Weaving given by Amadeo to Bauer and Binks

  DATE & TIME: Age of Endings, Second Wednesday, Spring of Two

  13:00–15:47

  “I don’t really know what I’m looking at,” Morrigan admitted.

  “We wouldn’t expect you to,” said Sofia. “Morrigan, this is a list of every ghostly hour that has ever been created—at least the ones within Wunsoc. This book has helped us conduct most of our research on Wundersmiths and the Wundrous Arts. And it’s going to teach you everything you need to know.”

  Conall pointed to a spot at the bottom of the page. “See that? There you go.”

  Morrigan read from the last row.

  LOCATION: School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Corcoran

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS: Caw Molloy, Hani Nakamura, Melvin Hall, Amelia Allaway, Spencer Holland-Wright, Hathaway Savage, Griselda Polaris, Jimmy Bishop, Stanislav Radkov

  Morning “free-for-all”; a warm-up showcase of various Wundrous Arts, led by Molloy and involving all contemporaneous Wundersmiths, to promote team spirit and boost morale