“The same thing our brother wants with young Mr. Portman,” Miss Peregrine said.
“I won’t even honor that accusation with a denial. I only wish this haze of bias would clear so that you could see the truth: I’m on your side, Alma, and I’ve always been.”
“You’re on whatever side fits your interests at the moment.”
Bentham sighed and aimed a hangdog look at Emma and me. “Goodbye, children. It’s been a distinct pleasure knowing you. I’ll go back home now; saving all your lives has taken quite a toll on this old man’s body. But I hope one day, when your headmistress comes to her senses, we’ll meet again.”
He tipped his hat, and he and his bear began to walk away through the crowd, back through the compound toward the tower.
“What a drama queen,” I muttered, though I did feel a little bad for him.
“Ymbrynes!” Miss Peregrine called. “Watch him!”
“Did he really steal Abe’s soul?” Emma asked.
“Without proof we can’t be certain,” replied Miss Peregrine. “But the rest of his crimes taken together would earn him more than a lifetime’s banishment.” Watching him go, her hard expression gradually melted away. “My brothers taught me a hard lesson. No one can hurt you as badly as the people you love.”
* * *
The wind shifted, sending the ash cloud that had aided the wights’ escape in our direction. It came faster than we could react, the air around us howling and stinging, the daylight dimming away. There was a sharp flutter of wings as the ymbrynes changed form and flew up above the storm. My hollow sank to its knees, bowed its head, and shielded its face with its two free tongues. It was accustomed to ash storms, but our friends were not. I could hear them panicking in the dark.
“Stay where you are!” I shouted. “It’ll pass!”
“Everyone breathe through your shirts!” said Emma.
When the storm began to subside a little, I heard something from across the bridge that made the hairs on my neck stand up. It was three baritone voices united in a song, the lines of which were punctuated by thuds and groans.
“Hark to the clinking of hammers …”
Thwack!
“Hark to the driving of nails!”
“Gahh, my legs!”
“What fun to build a gallows …”
“Let me go, let me go!”
“… the cure for all that ails!”
“Please, no more! I give up!”
And then, as the ash began to clear, Sharon and his three burly cousins appeared, each of them dragging a subdued wight. “Morning, all!” Sharon called. “Did you lose something?”
Wiping ash from their eyes, our friends saw what they’d done and began to cheer.
“Sharon, you brilliant man!” shouted Emma.
All around us the ymbrynes were landing and resuming human form. As they slipped quickly into the clothes they’d dropped, we respectfully kept our eyes on the wights.
Suddenly, one of them broke away from his captor and ran. Rather than chasing him, the rigger calmly selected a small hammer from his tool belt, planted his feet, and threw it. It tumbled end over end straight toward the wight’s head, but what would’ve been a perfect takedown was spoiled when the wight ducked. He darted toward the chaos of scrap at the road’s edge. Just as the wight was about to disappear between two shanty houses, a crack in the road erupted and the wight was engulfed in a belch of yellow flame.
Though it was a grisly sight, everyone whooped and cheered.
“You see!” said Sharon. “The Acre itself wants to be rid of them.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, “but what about Caul?”
“I agree,” said Emma. “None of these victories will matter if we can’t catch him. Right, Miss P?”
I glanced around but didn’t see her. Emma looked, too, her eyes scanning the crowd.
“Miss Peregrine?” she said, panic creeping into her voice.
I made my hollow stand tall so I could get a better view. “Does anyone see Miss Peregrine?” I shouted. Now everyone was looking, checking the sky in case she was still airborne, the ground in case she’d landed but not yet turned human.
Then from behind us, a high, gleeful shout cut through our chatter.
“Look no further, children!” For a moment I couldn’t pinpoint the voice. It came again: “Do as I say and no harm will come to her!”
Then I saw emerge, from beneath the branches of a small, ash-blackened tree just inside the wights’ gate, a familiar figure.
Caul. A twig of a man with no weapons in his hand nor guards by his side. His face pale and contorted into an unnatural grin, his eyes capped by bulging sunglasses, insectine. He was dandied up in a cloak, a cape, loops of gold jewelry, and a bouffant silk tie. He looked flamboyantly insane, like some mad doctor from gothic fiction who’d performed too many experiments on himself. And it was his evident madness, I think—and that we all knew him to be capable of true evil—that stopped us from rushing to tear him apart. A man like Caul was never as defenseless as he seemed.
“Where’s Miss Peregrine?” I shouted, inspiring a chorus of similar demands from the ymbrynes and peculiars behind me.
“Right where she belongs,” Caul said. “With her family.”
The last of the ash cloud gusted out of the compound behind him, revealing Bentham and Miss Peregrine, the latter in human form, held captive in the arms of Bentham’s bear. Though her eyes flashed with rage, she knew better than to struggle against a sharp-clawed, short-tempered grimbear.
It seemed a recurring nightmare we were doomed to dream again and again: Miss Peregrine kidnapped, this time by Bentham. He stood slightly behind the bear with eyes downcast, as if ashamed to meet our looks.
Cries of shock and anger rippled through the peculiars and ymbrynes.
“Bentham!” I shouted. “Let her go!”
“You traitorous bastard!” cried Emma.
Bentham raised his head to look at us. “As recently as ten minutes ago,” he said in a high and imperious tone, “you had my loyalty. I could have betrayed you to my brother days ago, but I didn’t.” He narrowed his eyes at Miss Peregrine. “I chose you, Alma, because I believed—naively, it seems—that if I helped you and your wards, you might see how unfairly you’d judged me, might finally rise above past differences and let bygones be bygones.”
“You’ll be sent to the Pitiless Waste for this!” Miss Peregrine shouted.
“I’m not frightened of your little council anymore!” Bentham said. “You won’t keep me down any longer!” He stamped his cane. “PT, muzzle!”
The bear clamped its paw over Miss Peregrine’s face.
Caul strode toward his brother and sister, his arms and smile spreading. “Benny’s made a choice to stand up for himself, and I, for one, congratulate him! There’s nothing like a family reunion!”
Suddenly, Bentham was pulled backward by an unseen force. A knife flashed at his throat. “Make the bear release Miss Peregrine or else!” a familiar voice shouted.
“Millard!” someone gasped, one of many that rippled through our crowd.
It was Millard, disrobed and invisible. Bentham looked terrified, but Caul seemed merely annoyed. He drew an antique pepperbox pistol from one of the deep pockets in his cloak and pointed it at Bentham’s head. “Let her go and I’ll kill you, brother.”
“We made a pact!” Bentham protested.
“And you caving to the demands of a nude boy with a dull knife would be breaking that pact.” Caul cocked the gun, walked it forward until it was pressed against Bentham’s temple, and addressed Millard. “If you make me kill my only brother, consider your ymbryne dead, too.”
Millard hesitated for a moment, then dropped the knife and ran. Caul made a grab for him but missed, and Millard’s footsteps curved away in a trail of divots.
Bentham composed himself and straightened his mussed shirt. Caul, his good humor gone, turned the gun on Miss Peregrine.
“Now listen to
me!” he barked. “You there, across the bridge! Let those guards go!”
They had little choice but to do as he asked. Sharon and his cousins released their collared wights and backed away, and the wight who’d been standing on our side of the bridge lowered his hands and picked his gun up off the ground. Within seconds the balance of power had been reversed completely, and there were four guns aimed at the crowd and one at Miss Peregrine. Caul could do what he wanted.
“Boy!” he said, pointing at me. “Pitch that hollow into the chasm!” His shrill voice a needle in my eardrum.
I walked my hollow to the edge of the chasm.
“Now make him leap!”
It seemed I didn’t have a choice. It was an awful waste, but perhaps just as well: the hollow was suffering badly now, its wounds leaking black blood that flowed around its feet. It wouldn’t have survived.
I unwrapped its tongue from my waist, unsaddled myself, and stepped down. My strength had returned enough for me to stand on my own, but the hollow’s was going fast. As soon as I was off its back it bellowed softly, sucked its tongues back into its mouth, and sank to its knees, a willing sacrifice.
“Thank you, whoever you were,” I said. “I’m sure that if you’d ever become a wight, you wouldn’t have been a completely evil one.”
I put my foot on its back and pushed. The hollow tumbled forward and dropped silently into the misty void. After a few seconds, I felt its consciousness disappear from my mind.
The wights across the bridge rode over to our side on the hollow’s tongues, Miss Peregrine’s life threatened again if I interfered. Olive was yanked out of the sky. The guards set about herding us into a tight and easily controllable cluster. Then Caul shouted for me, and one of the guards reached into the crowd and dragged me out.
“He’s the only one we really need alive,” Caul said to his guards. “If you must shoot him, shoot him in the knees. As for the rest of them …” Caul swung his gun toward the tightly packed crowd and fired. There were screams as the crowd surged. “Shoot them anywhere you please!”
He laughed and twirled with his arms poised like a squat ballerina. I was about to run at him, ready to dig out his eyes with my bare hands and damn the consequences, when a long-barreled revolver appeared front and center in my field of view.
“Don’t,” grunted my monosyllabic guard, a wight with broad shoulders and a shiny bald head.
Caul fired his own gun into the air and shouted for quiet, and every voice fell away but the whimpers of whomever he’d shot.
“Don’t cry, I have a treat for you people!” he said, addressing the crowd. “This is a historic day. My brother and I are about to culminate a lifetime’s worth of innovation and struggle by crowning ourselves the twin kings of peculiardom. And what would a coronation be without witnesses? So we’re bringing you along. Provided you behave yourselves, you’ll see something no one has witnessed for a thousand years: the domination and expropriation of the Library of Souls!”
“You have to promise one thing, or I won’t help you,” I said to Caul. I didn’t have much negotiating power, but he believed he needed me, and that was something. “Once you get what you want, let Miss Peregrine go.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Caul said, “but I’ll let her live. Peculiardom will be more fun to rule with my sister in it. Once I clip your wings I’ll keep you as my personal slave, Alma, how would you like that?”
She tried to respond, but her words were lost beneath the bear’s meaty paw.
Caul cupped a hand behind his ear and laughed. “What’s that? I can’t hear you!” Then he turned and began walking toward the tower.
“Let’s go!” the guards shouted, and soon we were all stumbling after him.
We were herded toward the pale tower at a brutal pace, the wights encouraging stragglers with shoves and kicks. Without my hollow I was a limping, hobbling mess: I had nasty bite wounds across my torso and the dust that had kept me from feeling them was beginning to wear off. I forced myself forward anyway, my mind spinning out ways we might save ourselves, each more implausible than the last. Without my hollows, all our peculiar powers were outmatched by the wights and their guns.
We stumbled past the wrecked building where my hollows had died, over bricks misted with the blood of parrots and wights. Marched through the walled courtyard, into the tower door and then up and up its winding hallway past a blur of identical black doors. Caul paraded before us like a deranged bandleader, high-stepping and swinging his arms one moment and turning to hurl profane insults at us the next. Behind him, the bear waddled along with Bentham riding in the crook of one arm and Miss Peregrine slung over its shoulder.
She pled with her brothers to reconsider their course of action.
“Remember the old stories of Abaton, and the ignominious end that came to every peculiar who stole the library’s souls! Its power is cursed!”
“I’m not a child anymore, Alma, and I’m no longer frightened by old ymbrynes’ tales,” Caul scoffed. “Now hold your tongue. That is, if you want to keep it!”
She soon gave up trying to convince them and stared silently at us over the bear’s shoulder, her face projecting strength. Don’t be afraid, she seemed to telegraph. We’ll survive this, too.
I worried not all of us would survive even the trip to the top of the tower. Turning around, I tried to see who it was that had been shot. Amidst the tight-packed group behind me, Bronwyn was carrying someone limp in her arms—Miss Avocet, I think—and then a meaty hand smacked me in the head.
“Face forward or lose a kneecap,” growled my guard.
Finally we came to the top of the tower and its very last door. In the hallway beyond, pale daylight shone on the curving wall. There was an open deck above us, a fact I filed away for future reference.
Caul stood beaming before the door. “Perplexus!” he called. “Signor Anomalous—yes, there in the back! Since I owe this discovery in part to your expeditions and hard work—credit where credit is due!—I think you should do the honors and open the door.”
“Come now, we’ve no time for ceremony,” said Bentham. “We’ve left your compound unguarded …”
“Don’t be such a ninny-willow,” Caul said. “This won’t take but a moment.”
One of the guards dragged Perplexus out of the crowd and up to the door. Since I’d last seen him, his hair and beard had turned alabaster white, his spine had curved, and deep wrinkles grooved his face. He’d spent too long away from his loop, and now his true age was beginning to catch up to him. Perplexus seemed about to open the door when he was struck by a fit of coughing. Once he’d regained his breath, he faced Caul, drew in a snorting lungful of air, and spat a glistening wad of phlegm onto his cloak.
“You are an ignorant pig!” Perplexus cried.
Caul raised his pistol to Perplexus’s head and pulled the trigger. There were screams—“Jack, don’t!” Bentham shouted—and Perplexus threw up his hands and spun away, but the only sound the gun made was a dry click.
Caul opened the gun and peered into its chamber, then shrugged. “It’s an antique, like yourself,” he said to Perplexus, then used its barrel to flick the spittle from his jacket. “I suppose fate has intervened on your behalf. Just as well—I’d rather watch you turn to dust than bleed to death.”
He motioned for the guards to take him away. Perplexus, muttering oaths at Caul in Italian, was dragged back to the group.
Caul turned to the door. “Oh, to hell with it,” he muttered, and opened it. “Get in there, all of you!”
Inside was the same familiar gray-walled room, only this time its missing fourth wall extended into a long, dark corridor. With a few shoves from the guards, we were hurrying along it. The smooth walls became rough and uneven, then widened into a primitive, day-lit room. The room was made from rock and clay, and I might’ve called it a cave but for its approximately rectangular door and two windows. Someone had carved them, and this room, using tools to dig it out of soft rock.
>
We were herded outside into a hot, dry day. The view opened dizzyingly. We were high in a landscape that could’ve been an alien world: everywhere around us, towering on one side and rolling away into valleys on the other, were humps and spires of strange, reddish rock, all honeycombed with crude doors and windows. A constant wind blew through them, producing a human-sounding moan that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Though the sun was nowhere near setting, the sky glowed orange, as if the end of the world were brewing just beyond the horizon. And despite evidence here of a civilization, other than ourselves there was no one in sight. I had a heavy, watched feeling, like we were trespassing someplace we were not meant to be.
Bentham climbed down from his bear and removed his hat in awe. “So this is the place,” he said, gazing across the hills.
Caul threw a big-brotherly arm across his shoulders. “I told you this day would come. We certainly put each other through hell getting here, didn’t we?”
“We did,” Bentham agreed.
“But I say all’s well that ends well, because now I get to do this.” Caul turned to face us. “Friends! Ymbrynes! Peculiar children!” He let his voice echo away into the strange, moaning canyons. “Today will go down in history. Welcome to Abaton!”
He paused, waiting for applause that didn’t come.
“You’re standing now in the ancient city that once protected the Library of Souls. Until recently, it hadn’t been seen in over four hundred years, nor conquered in a thousand—until I rediscovered it! Now, with you as my witnesses …”
He stopped, looked down for a moment, then laughed. “Why am I wasting my breath? You philistines will never appreciate the gravity of my achievement. Look at you—like donkeys contemplating the Sistine Chapel!” He patted Bentham on the arm. “Come on, brother. Let’s go and take what’s ours.”
“And ours as well!” said a voice behind me. One of the guards. “You won’t forget us, will you, sir?”
“Of course I won’t,” Caul said, attempting a smile and failing. He couldn’t disguise his irritation at having been challenged in front of everyone. “Your loyalty will be repaid tenfold.”