It was bees. A stream of Hugh’s bees had flown out of the crush and now they were in Caul’s eyes, stinging him as he let out a shattering howl. The ymbrynes and peculiars fell to the ground, the ball they’d formed collapsing, bodies spilling out everywhere. They hadn’t been crushed, thank God.
Miss Peregrine, screeching and flapping in bird form, pulled people to their feet and propelled them toward the corridor. Run. Run. Go!
Then she winged off for Caul. He had dealt with the bees and was again spreading his arms, ready to scoop everyone up and splatter them against a wall. Before he could, Miss Peregrine dive-bombed him with her talons and raked deep cuts across his face. He spun to take a lumbering swipe at her, smacking her so hard she flew across the room, bounced off the wall, and fell to the ground, where she lay motionless.
By the time he turned back to deal with the others, they had nearly disappeared into the corridor. Caul extended his palm toward them, closed his hand and scooped it back—but they were farther away, apparently, than his powers of telekinesis would reach. Bellowing in frustration, he ran after them, then flopped onto his belly and tried to wriggle into the corridor after them. He could just fit inside, though it was a tight squeeze.
That’s when, finally, I saw Bentham. He had rolled into the channel of water to hide, and now he was climbing out again, soaking wet but otherwise unaffected. He was bent over, his back to me, working at something—I couldn’t see what.
I felt like I was coming back to life. The pain in my chest was receding. I tried to move my arms—an experiment—and found that I could. I slid them up my body and over my chest, expecting to find a couple of holes and a lot of blood. But I was dry. Instead of holes, my hands found a piece of metal flattened like a coin. I closed my hands around it, picked it up to look.
It was a bullet. It had not pierced my body. I was not dying. The bullet had embedded itself in my scarf.
The scarf Horace had knit for me.
He had known, somehow, that this would happen and had made me this scarf from the wool of peculiar sheep. Thank God for Horace …
I saw something flash across the room and lifted my head—I could just do it—to see Bentham standing with his eyes ablaze, cones of hot white light beaming from his sockets. He dropped something and I heard a tinkle of glass.
He’d taken a vial of ambro.
I used all my strength to turn onto my side, then curled and began to sit up. Bentham hurried along the walls, looking up at the jars. He was studying each one carefully.
As if he could see them.
And then I realized what he’d done, what he’d taken. He’d been saving my grandfather’s stolen soul all these years, and now he’d consumed it.
He could see the jars. He could do what I did.
I was on my knees. Palms to the ground. Pulled one foot under me, then pushed myself up to standing. I was back, risen from the dead.
By then Caul had wriggled into the corridor and was halfway down it. I could hear my friends’ voices echoing from the other end. They hadn’t escaped yet. Perhaps they refused to leave Miss Peregrine behind (or me, possibly). They were still fighting.
Bentham was running now, as best he could. He’d spied the other large urn and was heading right for it. I took a few limping steps toward him. He reached the urn and tipped it over. Its blue liquid hissed into the channel and began circulating toward the spirit pool.
He turned and saw me.
He limped for the pool and I limped for him. The urn’s liquid reached the pool. Its water began to rage and a column of blinding light shot up toward the ceiling.
“WHO IS TAKING MY SOULS!” Caul bellowed from the corridor. He began to worm his way back into the chamber.
I tackled Bentham—or fell on him, whichever you prefer. I was weak and dizzy, and he was old and brittle, and we were just about a match for each other. We struggled briefly, and when it was clear I had him pinned, he gave up.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ve got to do this. I’m the only hope you have.”
“Shut up!” I said, grabbing at his hands, which were still flailing. “I won’t listen to your lies.”
“He’ll kill us all if you don’t let me go!”
“Are you insane? If I let you go, you’ll just help him!” I grabbed his wrists, finally. He’d been trying to get something from his pocket.
“No, I won’t!” he cried. “I’ve made so many mistakes … but I can put them right if you let me help you.”
“Help me?”
“Look in my pocket!”
Caul was backing slowly out of corridor, roaring about his souls.
“My vest pocket!” Bentham shouted. “There’s a paper in it. One I carry with me always, just in case.”
I let go of one of his hands and reached into his pocket. I found a small piece of folded paper, which I tore open.
“What is this?” I said. It was written in Old Peculiar; I couldn’t read it.
“It’s a recipe. Show it to the ymrbynes. They’ll know what to do.”
A hand reached over my shoulder and snatched the paper from me. I spun around to see Miss Peregrine, battered but human.
She read the paper. Her eyes flashed at Bentham. “You’re certain this will work?”
“It worked once,” he said. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t again. And with even more ymbrynes …”
“Let him go,” she said to me.
I was shocked. “What? But he’s going to—”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “I know.”
“He stole my grandfather’s soul! He’s taken it … it’s in him, right now!”
“I know, Jacob.” She looked down at me, her face kind but firm. “That’s all true and worse. And it was a good thing you caught him. But now you must let him go.”
So I released his hand. Stood up, with help from Miss Peregrine. And then Bentham stood, too, a sad, bent-backed old man with the starry black drippings of my grandfather’s soul running down his cheeks. For a moment I thought I could see a flash of Abe in his eyes—a little of his spirit there, sparking back at me.
Bentham turned and ran for the column of light and the spirit pool. The vapor was gathering into the shape of a giant almost as large as Caul, but with wings. If Bentham reached the pool in time, Caul would have a worthy challenger.
Caul was nearly out of the corridor now, and he was raging mad. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!” he cried. “I’LL KILL YOU!”
Miss Peregrine pushed me flat to the ground and lay beside me. “There’s no time to hide,” she said. “Play dead.”
Bentham stumbled into the pool, and immediately the vapor began funneling into him. Caul had finally wriggled out of the corridor and lurched heavily to his feet, then ran toward Bentham. We were nearly crushed as one of his enormous feet crashed down not far from our heads, but Caul arrived at the pool too late to stop Bentham from merging with whatever old, great soul had been in that urn. Miss Peregrine’s younger, weaker brother was already rocketing up to twice his original height.
Miss Peregrine and I helped each other up. Behind us, Caul and Bentham began to clash, the sound erupting like bombs. No one had to tell me to run.
We were halfway to the corridor when Emma and Bronwyn sped out of it to meet us. They caught us by the arms and whisked us toward safety faster than our weak and battered bodies could’ve managed alone. We didn’t speak—there was no time to do anything but run, no way to shout loud enough to be heard—but Emma’s face, electrified with wonder and relief at the simple fact that I was alive, said it all.
The black tunnel enveloped us. We’d made it. I looked back just once, to catch a glimpse of the riot exploding behind us. Through clouds of dust and vapor I saw two creatures, taller than houses, trying to murder each other: Caul choking Bentham with one spiky hand, gouging his eyes with the other. Bentham, insect-headed, thousands of eyes to spare, feeding on Caul’s neck with long, flexible mandibles and battering him with great leathery wings. They danced
, a tangle of limbs, slamming together into walls, the room coming down around them, the contents of countless shattered soul jars flying, a luminous rain.
With that preview of my nightmares thus cemented in my brain, I let Emma pull me into the dark.
* * *
We found our friends in the next chamber, swallowed by the dark, their only light a fading gleam from the lantern in Addison’s mouth. When Emma fired a flame and they saw us loping toward them, worse for wear but alive, they let out a great whooping cheer. I saw them in her light and winced. They were in rough shape themselves, bloodied and bruised from being slammed around by Caul, a few limping on sprained or broken legs.
There was a momentary lull in the blasting noises coming from the cavern, and Emma was finally able to hug me. “I saw him shoot you! By what miracle are you alive?”
“By the miracle of peculiar sheep’s wool and Horace’s dreams!” I said, and then I kissed Emma and broke away to find Horace in the crowd. When I did, I hugged him so hard his patent leather shoes lifted off the ground. “I hope one day I’ll be able to repay you for this,” I said, tugging on my scarf.
“I’m so glad it helped!” he said, beaming at me.
The destruction resumed, the sound immense, unbelievable. Rocky debris rolled out of the corridor at us. Even if Caul and Bentham couldn’t reach us from where they were, they could still bring the whole place crashing down on our heads. We had to get out of the library—and then out of this loop.
We ran, scraping and hobbling back the way we’d come, half of us a limping mess, the others acting as human crutches. Addison guided us with his nose, back through the maze and out the way we’d come. The sound of Caul and Bentham’s battle seemed to pursue us, growing louder even as we got farther away, as if they were growing. How big could they get, and how strong? Perhaps the souls from all the jars they’d broken were raining into the pool, feeding them, making them even more monstrous.
Would the Library of Souls bury them? Would it be their grave, their prison? Or would it crack open like an eggshell and birth these horrors into the world?
We reached the grotto exit and dashed once again into the orange daylight. The rumble behind us had become constant, a quake that reverberated through the hills.
“We must keep going!” Miss Peregrine shouted. “To the loop exit!”
We were halfway there, stumbling through a clearing, when the ground beneath us shook so violently that we were all thrown off our feet. I’d never heard a volcano erupt in person, but it couldn’t have sounded much scarier than the thunderous boom that echoed from the low hills behind us. We turned in shock to see acres of pulverized rock flying into the air—and then we heard, clear as day, the screams of Bentham and Caul.
They were free of the library now. They had torn through the cavern ceiling, and untold depths of stone, to daylight.
“We can’t wait any longer!” Miss Peregrine cried. She picked herself up and held aloft Bentham’s crumple of paper. “Sisters, it’s time to close this loop!”
That’s when I realized what it was he’d given us, and why Miss Peregrine had let him go. A recipe, he’d called it. It worked once …
It was the procedure he’d tricked Caul and his followers into enacting, all those years ago in 1908. The one that had collapsed the loop they were in, rather than resetting their internal clocks as they’d hoped. This time the collapse would be intentional. There was only one problem …
“Won’t that turn them into hollows?” asked Miss Wren.
“A hollow’s no problem,” I said, “but last time someone collapsed a loop this way, didn’t it make an explosion big enough to flatten half of Siberia?”
“The ymbrynes my brother coerced into helping him were young and inexperienced,” Miss Peregrine said. “We’ll do a better job.”
“We’d better,” said Miss Wren.
Over the hill, a giant face rose like a second sun peeking over the horizon. It was Caul, large as ten houses now. In a terrible voice that trumpeted across the hills, he bellowed, “ALMAAAAAAAAA!”
“He’s coming for you, miss!” Olive cried. “We must get to safety!”
“In a moment, dear.”
Miss Peregrine shooed all of us peculiar children (and Sharon and his cousins) a good distance away, then gathered the ymbrynes around her. They looked like some mystical secret society about to enact an ancient ritual. Which, I suppose, they were. Reading from the paper, Miss Peregrine said, “According to this, once we start the reaction, we’ll have only a minute to escape the loop.”
“Will that be that enough time?” said Miss Avocet.
“It’ll have to be,” said Miss Wren grimly.
“Perhaps we should get closer to the exit before we try,” suggested Miss Glassbill, who had just recently come to her senses.
“There isn’t time,” said Miss Peregrine. “We have to—”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a distant-but-thunderous shout from Caul, his words gibberish now, his mind likely melting from the extraordinary stress of rapid growth. His breath reached us a few seconds after his voice, a foul yellow wind that curdled the air.
Bentham hadn’t been heard from in a few minutes. I wondered if he’d been killed.
“Wish your elders luck!” Miss Peregrine shouted to us.
“Good luck!” we all cried.
“Don’t blow us up!” Enoch added.
Miss Peregrine turned to her sisters. The twelve ymbrynes formed a tight circle and joined hands. Miss Peregrine spoke in Old Peculiar. The others replied in unison, all their voices rising in an eerie, lilting song. This went on for thirty seconds or more, during which time Caul started to climb out of the cavern, rubble tumbling down the hills where his massive hands grasped for purchase.
“Well, this is fascinating,” Sharon said, “and you’re all free to stay and watch, but I think my cousins and I will be going.” He began to walk away, then saw that the path ahead split five ways, and the hard ground had captured none of our footprints. “Um,” he said, turning back, “does anyone happen to remember the way?”
“You’ll have to wait,” Addison growled. “No one leaves until the ymbrynes do.”
Finally they unclasped their hands and broke their circle.
“That’s it?” Emma said.
“That’s it!” Miss Peregrine replied, hurrying toward us. “Let’s be on our way. We don’t want to be here fifty-four seconds from now!”
Where the ymbrynes had been standing a crack was splitting open in the ground, the clay falling away into a quickly widening sinkhole from which a loud, almost mechanical buzz issued forth. The collapse had begun.
In spite of exhaustion and broken bodies and faltering steps, we ran, pushed faster by terror and awful, apocalyptic noises—and by the giant, lumbering shadow that fell across our path. We ran over ground that was splitting open, down ancient stairways that crumbled beneath our feet, back into the first house we’d exited from, choked with red dust from pulverizing walls, and finally into the passageway that led back to Caul’s tower.
Miss Peregrine herded us through, the passageway disintegrating around us, and then out the other side, into the tower. I looked back to see the passage cave in behind us, a giant fist smashing down through its roof.
Miss Peregrine, frantic: “Where’s the door gone? We must close it, or the collapse may spread beyond this loop!”
“Bronwyn kicked it in!” Enoch tattled. “It’s broken!”
She’d been the first to reach it and, for Brownyn, kicking down the door had been faster than turning its knob. “I’m sorry!” she cried. “Have I doomed us all?”
The loop’s shaking had begun to spread to the tower. It swayed, spilling us from one side of the hall to the other.
“Not if we can escape the tower,” Miss Peregrine said.
“We’re too high!” cried Miss Wren. “We’ll never make it to the bottom in time!”
“There’s an open deck just above us,” I sai
d. Though I wasn’t sure why I said it, because leaping to our deaths seemed no better than being crushed in a collapsing tower.
“Yes!” cried Olive. “We’ll jump!”
“Absolutely not!” Miss Wren said. “We ymbrynes would be just fine, but you children …”
“I can float us!” Olive said. “I’m strong enough!”
“No way!” Enoch said. “You’re tiny, and there are too many of us!”
The tower rocked sickeningly. Ceiling tiles crashed down around us and cracks spidered through the floor.
“Fine, then!” Olive said. “Stay behind!”
She started upstairs. It took the rest of us only a moment, and one more wobble of the tower, to decide that Olive was our only hope.
Our lives were now in the dainty hands of our smallest member. Bird help us.
We ran up the sloping hallway, then out into open air and what remained of the day. Below us spread a commanding view of Devil’s Acre: the compound and its pale walls, the misty chasm and its hollow-gapped bridge, the black tinders of Smoking Street and the packed tenements beyond—and then the Ditch, snaking along the loop’s edge like a ring of scum. Whatever happened next, whether we lived or died, I’d be happy at least to see the last of this place.
We bellied up to the circular railing. Emma gripped my hand. “Don’t look down, eh?”
One by one the ymbrynes turned to birds and perched on the rail, ready to help however they could. Olive took hold of the railing with both hands and slipped out of her shoes. Her feet bobbed upward until she was doing a weightless headstand on the rail, her heels aimed at the sky.
“Bronwyn, take my feet!” she said. “We’ll make a chain. Emma grabs Bronwyn’s legs, and Jacob Emma’s legs, and Horace Emma’s, and Horace Hugh’s …”
“My left leg’s hurt!” Hugh said.
“Then Horace will grab your right one!” Olive said.
“This is madness!” said Sharon. “We’ll be much too heavy!”