by Ransom Riggs
Enoch had spent his formative years in London and claimed to still know its streets, so he led. We stuck mostly to alleys and back lanes, which made the city seem at first like a maze of gray walls and gutter pipes, its grandness revealed in glimpses as we dashed across wide boulevards and back to the safety of shadows. We made a game of it, laughing, racing one another between alleys. Horace pretended to trip over a curb, then bounced up nimbly and bowed like a dancer, tipping his hat. We laughed like mad, strangely giddy, half in disbelief that we’d made it this far—across the water, through the woods, past snarling hollows and death squads of wights, all the way to London.
We put a good long way between us and the train station and then stopped in an alley by some trash cans to catch our breath. Bronwyn set down her trunk and lifted Miss Peregrine out, and she wobbled drunkenly across the cobblestones. Horace and Millard broke out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” said Bronwyn. “It ain’t Miss P’s fault she’s dizzy.”
Horace swept his arms out grandly. “Welcome to beautiful London!” he said. “It’s ever so much grander than you described it, Enoch. And oh, did you describe it! For seventy-five years: London, London, London! The greatest city on Earth!”
Millard picked up a trash-can lid. “London! The finest refuse available anywhere!”
Horace doffed his hat. “London! Where even the rats wear top hats!”
“Oh, I didn’t go on about it that much,” Enoch said.
“You did!” said Olive. “ ‘Well, that’s not how they do things in London,’ you’d say. Or, ‘In London, the food is much finer!’ ”
“Obviously, we’re not on a grand tour of the city right now!” Enoch said defensively. “Would you rather walk through alleys or be spotted by wights?”
Horace ignored him. “London: where every day’s a holiday … for the trash man!”
He broke down laughing, and his laughter was infectious. Soon nearly all of us were giggling—even Enoch. “I suppose I did glamorize it a bit,” he admitted.
“I don’t see what’s so amusing about London,” Olive said with a frown. “It’s dirty and smelly and full of cruel, nasty people who make children cry and I hate it!” She scrunched her face into a scowl and added, “And I’m becoming quite peckish!”—which made us all laugh harder.
“Those people in the station were nasty,” said Millard. “But they got what they deserved! I’ll never forget that man’s face when Bronwyn stuffed him into the phone box.”
“Or that horrible woman when she got stung in the bum by a bee!” said Enoch. “I’d pay money to see that again.”
I glanced at Hugh, expecting him to chime in, but his back was to us, his shoulders trembling.
“Hugh?” I said. “You all right?”
He shied away. “No one gives a whit,” he said. “Don’t bother checking on old Hugh, he’s just here to save everyone’s hindquarters with no word of thanks from anybody!”
Shamed, we offered him our thanks and apologies.
“Sorry, Hugh.”
“Thanks again, Hugh.”
“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh.”
He turned to face us. “They were my friends, you know.”
“We still are!” said Olive.
“Not you—my bees! They can only sting once, and then it’s lights out, the big hive in the sky. And now I’ve only Henry left, and he can’t fly ’cause he’s missing a wing.” He put out his hand and slowly opened the fingers, and there in his palm was Henry, waving his only wing at us.
“C’mon, mate,” Hugh whispered to it. “Time to go home.” He stuck out his tongue, set the bee upon it, and closed his mouth.
Enoch patted him on the shoulder. “I’d bring them back to life for you, but I’m not sure it would work on creatures so small.”
“Thanks anyway,” Hugh said, and then he cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks roughly, as if annoyed at his tears for exposing him.
“We’ll find you more just as soon as we get Miss P fixed up,” said Bronwyn.
“Speaking of which,” Enoch said to Emma, “did you manage to get through to any ymbrynes on that phone?”
“Not a one,” Emma replied, then sat down on an overturned trash can, her shoulders slumping. “I was really hoping we might catch a bit of good luck for once. But no.”
“Then it seems the dog was correct,” said Horace. “The great loops of London have fallen to our enemies.” He bowed his head solemnly. “The worst has come to pass. All our ymbrynes have been kidnapped.”
We all bowed our heads, our giddy mood gone.
“In that case,” said Enoch, “Millard, you’d better tell us all you know about the punishment loops. If that’s where the ymbrynes are, we’re going to have to stage a rescue.”
“No,” said Millard. “No, no, no.”
“What do you mean, no?” said Emma.
Millard made a strangled noise in his throat and started breathing weirdly. “I mean … we can’t …”
He couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“What’s wrong with him?” said Bronwyn. “Mill, what’s the matter?”
“You’d better explain right now what you mean by ‘no,’ ” Emma said threateningly.
“Because we’ll die, that’s why!” Millard said, his voice breaking.
“But back at the menagerie you made it sound so easy!” I said.
“Like we could just waltz into a punishment loop …”
Millard was hyperventilating, hysterical—and it scared me. Bronwyn found a crumpled paper bag and told him to breathe into it. When he’d recovered a bit, he answered.
“Getting into one is easy enough,” he said, speaking slowly, working to control his breaths. “Getting out again is trickier. Getting out alive, I should say. Punishment loops are everything the dog said and worse. Rivers of fire … bloodthirsty Vikings … pestilence so thick you can’t breathe … and mixed into all that, like some devilish bouillabaisse, bird knows how many wights and hollowgast!”
“Well, that’s fantastic!” said Horace, tossing up his hands.
“You might’ve told us earlier, you know—like back at the menagerie, when we were planning all this!”
“Would it have made any difference, Horace?” He took a few more breaths from the bag. “If I’d made it sound more frightening, would you have chosen to simply let Miss Peregrine’s humanity expire?”
“Of course not,” said Horace. “But you should’ve told us the truth.”
Millard let the bag drop. His strength was returning, and his conviction with it. “I admit I somewhat downplayed the punishment loops’ dangers. But I never thought we’d actually have to go into them! Despite all that irritating dog’s doomsaying about the state of London, I was certain we’d find at least one unraided loop here, its ymbryne still present and accounted for. And for all we know, we may still! How can we be sure they’ve all been kidnapped? Have we seen their raided loops with our own eyes? What if the ymbrynes’ phones were simply … disconnected?”
“All of them?” Enoch scoffed.
Even Olive, eternally optimistic Olive, shook her head at that.
“Then what do you suggest, Millard?” said Emma. “That we tour London’s loops and hope to find someone still at home? And what would you say the odds are that the corrupted, who are looking for us, would leave all those loops unguarded?”
“I think we’d have a better chance of surviving the night if we spent it playing Russian roulette,” said Enoch.
“All I mean,” Millard said, “is that we have no proof …”
“What more proof do you want?” said Emma. “Pools of blood? A pile of plucked ymbryne feathers? Miss Avocet told us the corrupted assault began here weeks ago. Miss Wren clearly believed that all of London’s ymbrynes had been kidnapped—do you know better than Miss Wren, an ymbryne herself? And now we’re here, and none of the loops are answering their telephones. So please, tell me why going loop to loop would be anything other than a s
uicidally dangerous waste of time.”
“Wait a minute—that’s it!” Millard exclaimed. “What about Miss Wren?”
“What about her?” said Emma.
“Don’t you remember what the dog told us? Miss Wren came to London a few days ago, when she heard that her sister ymbrynes had been kidnapped.”
“So?”
“What if she’s still here?”
“Then she’s probably been captured by now!” said Enoch.
“And if she hasn’t?” Millard’s voice was bright with hope.
“She could help Miss Peregrine—and then we wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the punishment loops!”
“And how would you suggest we find her?” Enoch said shrilly.
“Shout her name from the rooftops? This isn’t Cairnholm; it’s a city of millions!”
“Her pigeons,” said Millard.
“Come again?”
“It was Miss Wren’s peculiar pigeons who told her where the ymbrynes had been taken. If they knew where all the other ymbrynes went, then they should know where Miss Wren is, too. They belong to her, after all.”
“Hah!” said Enoch. “The only thing commoner here than plain-looking middle-aged ladies are flocks of pigeons. And you want to search all of London for one flock in particular?”
“It does seem a bit mad,” Emma said. “Sorry, Mill, I just don’t see how that could work.”
“Then it’s a lucky thing for you I spent our train ride studying rather than making idle gossip. Someone hand me the Tales!”
Bronwyn fished the book from her trunk and gave it to him. Millard dove right in, flipping pages. “There are many answers to be found within,” he said, “if you only know what to look for.” He stopped at a certain page and stabbed the top with his finger. “Aha!” he said, turning the book to show us what he’d found.
The title of the story was “The Pigeons of St. Paul’s.”
“I’ll be blessed,” said Bronwyn. “Could those be the same pigeons we’re talking about?”
“If they’re written about in the Tales, they’re almost certainly peculiar pigeons,” said Millard, “and how many flocks of peculiar pigeons could there possibly be?”
Olive clapped her hands and cried, “Millard, you’re brilliant!”
“Thank you, yes, I was aware.”
“Wait, I’m lost,” I said. “What’s St. Paul’s?”
“Even I know that,” said Olive. “The cathedral!” And she went to the end of the alley and pointed up at a giant domed roof rising in the distance.
“It’s the largest and most magnificent cathedral in London,” said Millard, “and if my hunch is correct, it’s also the nesting place of Miss Wren’s pigeons.”
“Let’s hope they’re at home,” said Emma. “And that they’ve got some good news for us. We’ve had quite a drought of it lately.”
* * *
As we navigated a labyrinth of narrow streets toward the cathedral, a brooding quiet settled over us. For long stretches no one spoke, leaving only the tap of our shoes on pavement and the sounds of the city: airplanes, the ever-present hum of traffic, sirens that warbled and pitch-shifted around us.
The farther we got from the train station, the more evidence we saw of the bombs that had been raining down on London. Building fronts pocked by shrapnel. Shattered windows. Streets that glinted with frosts of powdered glass. The sky was speckled with puffy silver blimps tethered to the ground by long webs of cable. “Barrage balloons,” Emma said when she saw me craning my neck toward one. “The German bombers get caught up in their cables at night and crash.”
Then we came upon a scene of destruction so bizarre that I had to stop and gape at it—not out of some morbid voyeurism, but because it was impossible for my brain to process without further study. A bomb crater yawned across the whole width of the street like a monstrous mouth with broken pavement for teeth. At one edge, the blast had sheared away the front wall of a building but left what was inside mostly intact. It looked like a doll’s house, its interior rooms all exposed to the street: the dining room with its table still set for a meal; family pictures knocked crooked in a hallway but still hanging; a roll of toilet paper unspooled and caught in the breeze, waving in the air like a long, white flag.
“Did they forget to finish building it?” Olive asked.
“No, dummy,” said Enoch. “It got hit by a bomb.”
For a moment Olive looked as if she might cry, but then her face went hard and she shook her fist at the sky and yelled, “Nasty Hitler! Stop this horrible war and go right away altogether!”
Bronwyn patted her arm. “Shhh. He can’t hear you, love.”
“It isn’t fair,” Olive said. “I’m tired of airplanes and bombs and war!”
“We all are,” said Enoch. “Even me.”
Then I heard Horace scream and I spun around to see him pointing at something in the road. I ran to see what it was, and then I did see and I stopped, frozen, my brain shouting Run away! but my legs refusing to listen.
It was a pyramid of heads. They were blackened and caved, mouths agape, eyes boiled shut, melted and pooled together in the gutter like some hydra-headed horror. Then Emma came to see and gasped and turned away; Bronwyn came and started moaning; Hugh gagged and clapped his hands over his eyes; and then finally Enoch, who seemed not in the least disturbed, calmly nudged one of the heads with his shoe and pointed out that they were only mannequins made of wax, having spilled from the display window of a bombed wig shop. We all felt a little ridiculous but somehow no less horrified, because even though the heads weren’t real, they represented something that was, hidden beneath the rubble around us.
“Let’s go,” Emma said. “This place is nothing but a graveyard.”
We walked on. I tried to keep my eyes to the ground, but there was no shutting out all the ghastly things we passed. A scarred ruin belching smoke, the only fireman dispatched to extinguish it slouched in defeat, blistered and weary, his hose run dry. Yet there he stood watching anyway, as if, lacking water, his job now was to bear witness.
A baby in a stroller, left alone in the street, bawling.
Bronwyn slowed, overcome. “Can’t we help them somehow?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Millard. “These people belong to the past, and the past can’t be changed.”
Bronwyn nodded sadly. She’d known it was true but had needed to hear it said. We were barely here, ineffectual as ghosts.
A cloud of ash billowed, blotting out fireman and child. We went on, choking in an eddy of windborne wreck dust, powdered concrete blanching our clothes, our faces bone white.
* * *
We hurried past the ruined blocks as quickly as we could, then marveled as the streets returned to life around us. Just a short walk from Hell, people were going about their business, striding down sidewalks, living in buildings that still had electricity and windows and walls. Then we rounded a corner and the cathedral’s dome revealed itself, proud and imposing despite patches of fire-blackened stone and a few crumbling arches. Like the spirit of the city itself, it would take more than a few bombs to topple St. Paul’s.
Our hunt began in a square close to the cathedral, where old men on benches were feeding pigeons. At first it was mayhem: we bounded in, grabbing wildly as the pigeons took off. The old men grumbled, and we withdrew to wait for their return. They did, eventually, pigeons not being the smartest animals on the planet, at which point we all took turns wading casually into the flock and trying to catch them by surprise, reaching down to snatch at them. I thought Olive, who was small and quick, or Hugh, with his peculiar connection to another sort of winged creature, might have some luck, but both were humiliated. Millard didn’t fare any better, and they couldn’t even see him. By the time my turn came, the pigeons must’ve been sick of us bothering them, because the moment I strolled into the square they all burst into flight and took one big, simultaneous cluster-bomb crap, which sent me flailing toward a water fountai
n to wash my whole head.
In the end, it was Horace who caught one. He sat down next to the old men, dropping seeds until the birds circled him. Then, leaning slowly forward, he stretched out his arm and, calm as could be, snagged one by its feet.
“Got you!” he cried.
The bird flapped and tried to get away, but Horace held on tight.
He brought it to us. “How can we tell if it’s peculiar?” he said, flipping the bird over to inspect its bottom, as if expecting to find a label there.
“Show it to Miss Peregrine,” Emma said. “She’ll know.”
So we opened Bronwyn’s trunk, shoved the pigeon inside with Miss Peregrine, and slammed down the lid. The pigeon screeched like it was being torn apart.
I winced and shouted, “Go easy, Miss P!”
When Bronwyn opened the trunk again, a poof of pigeon feathers fluttered into the air, but the pigeon itself was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh, no—she’s ate it!” cried Bronwyn.
“No she hasn’t,” said Emma. “Look beneath her!”
Miss Peregrine lifted up and stepped aside, and there underneath her was the pigeon, alive but dazed.
“Well?” said Enoch. “Is it or isn’t it one of Miss Wren’s?”
Miss Peregrine nudged the bird with her beak and it flew away. Then she leapt out of the trunk, hobbled into the square, and with one loud squawk scattered the rest of the pigeons. Her message was clear: not only was Horace’s pigeon not peculiar, none of them were. We’d have to keep looking.
Miss Peregrine hopped toward the cathedral and flapped her wing impatiently. We caught up to her on the cathedral steps. The building loomed above us, soaring bell towers framing its giant dome. An army of soot-stained angels glared down at us from marble reliefs.
“How are we ever going to search this whole place?” I wondered aloud.
“One room at a time,” Emma said.