by Ransom Riggs
Hello, future, I thought.
Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.
“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt you.”
The boys crouched like frightened animals, saying nothing, eyes spinning, seeming to look everywhere and nowhere.
“What’s wrong with them?” Olive whispered.
Bronwyn hushed her. “Don’t be rude.”
“Can you tell me your names?” Emma said, her voice coaxing and gentle.
“I am Joel and Peter,” the larger boy said.
“Which are you?” Emma said. “Joel or Peter?”
“I am Peter and Joel,” said the smaller boy.
“We don’t have time for games,” said Enoch. “Are there any birds in there with you? Have you seen any fly past?”
“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.
“In the attic,” said the smaller.
“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”
“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.
“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”
Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.
“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”
“Death and blood!” cried one boy.
“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.
“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.
“Cheerio!” said Horace, turning on his heels. “I’ll see you all back in the crypt. Hope I don’t get squashed by a bomb!”
Emma caught Horace by his sleeve. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re the only one of us who’s managed to catch any of those blasted pigeons.”
“Didn’t you hear them?” Horace said. “That loop is full of shadows that bite—which could only mean one thing. Hollows!”
“It was full of them,” I said. “But that might have been days ago.”
“When was the last time you were inside your house?” Emma asked the boys.
Their loop had been raided, they explained in their strange and broken way, but they’d managed to escape into the catacombs and hide among the bones. How long ago that was, they couldn’t say. Two days? Three? They’d lost all track of time down here in the dark.
“Oh, you poor dears!” said Bronwyn. “What terrors you must’ve endured!”
“You can’t stay here forever,” said Emma. “You’ll age forward if you don’t reach another loop soon. We can help you—but first we have to catch a pigeon.”
The boys gazed into one another’s spinning eyes and seemed to speak without uttering a word. They said in unison, “Follow us.”
They slid down from their bone pile and started down the passage.
We followed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were fascinatingly odd. They kept their arms linked at all times, and every few steps, they made loud clicking sounds with their tongues.
“What are they doing?” I whispered.
“I believe that’s how they see,” said Millard. “It’s the same way bats see in the dark. The sounds they make reflect off things and then back to them, which forms a picture in their minds.”
“We are echolocators,” Joel-and-Peter said.
They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing.
The passage forked, then forked again. At one point I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and had to wiggle them to release it. That’s when I knew we’d left 1940 and entered a loop. Finally we came to a dead-end wall with vertical steps cut into it. Joel-and-Peter stood at the base of the wall and pointed to a pinpoint of daylight overhead.
“Our house—” said the elder.
“Is up there,” said the younger.
And with that, they retreated into the shadows.
* * *
The steps were slimed with moss and difficult to climb, and I had to go slowly or risk falling. They ascended the wall to meet a circular, person-sized door in the ceiling, through which shone a single gleam of light. I wedged my fingers into the crack and pushed sideways, and the doors slid open like a camera shutter, revealing a tubular conduit of bricks that rose twenty or thirty feet to a circle of sky. I was at the false bottom of a fake well.
I pulled myself into the well and climbed. Halfway up I had to stop and rest, pushing my back against the opposite side of the shaft. When the burn in my biceps subsided, I climbed the rest of the way, scrambling over the lip of the well to land in some grass.
I was in the courtyard of a shabby-looking house. The sky was an infected shade of yellow, but there was no smoke in it and no sound of engines. We were in some older time, before the war—before cars, even. There was a chill in the air, and errant flakes of snow drifted down and melted on the ground.
Emma came up the well next, then Horace. Emma had decided that only the three of us should explore the house. We didn’t know what we would find up here, and if we needed to leave in a hurry, it was better to have a small group that could move fast. None who stayed below argued; Joel-and-Peter’s warning of blood and shadows had scared them. Only Horace was unhappy, and kept muttering to himself that he wished he’d never caught that pigeon in the square.
Bronwyn waved to us from below and then pulled closed the circular door at the bottom of the well. The top side was painted to look like the surface of water—dark, dirty water you’d never want to drop a drinking bucket into. Very clever.
The three of us huddled together and looked around. The courtyard and the house were suffering from serious neglect. The grass around the well was tamped down, but everywhere else it grew up in weedy thickets that reached higher than some of the ground-floor windows. A doghouse sat rotting and half collapsed in one corner, and near it a toppled laundry line was gradually being swallowed by brush.
We stood and waited, listening for pigeons. From beyond the house’s walls, I could hear the tap of horses’ hooves on pavement. No, this definitely wasn’t London circa 1940.
Then, in one of the upper-floor windows, I saw a curtain shift.
“Up there!” I hissed, pointing at it.
I didn’t know if a bird or a person had done it, but it was worth checking out. I started toward a door that led into the house, beckoning the others after me—then tripped over something. It was a body lying on the ground, covered head to ankle with a black tarp. A pair of worn shoes poked from one end, pointing at the sky. Tucked into one cracked sole was a white card, on which had been written in neat script:
Mr. A. F. Crumbley
Lately of the Outer Provinces
Aged forward rather than be taken alive
Kindly requests his remains be deposited in the Thames
“Unlucky bastard,” Horace whispered. “He came here from the country, probably after his own loop was raided—only to have the one he’d escaped to raided, as well.”
“But why would they leave poor Mr. Crumbley out in the open this way?” whispered Emma.
“Because they had to leave in a hurry,” I said.
Emma bent down and reached for the edge of Mr. Crumbley’s tarp. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t help myself, and I half turned away but peeked back through split fingers. I had expected a withered corpse, but Mr. Crumbley looked perfectly intact and surprisingly young, perhaps only forty or fifty years old, his black hair graying just around the temples. His eyes were closed and peaceful, as if he might’ve just been sleeping. Could he rea
lly have aged forward, like the leathery apple I took from Miss Peregrine’s loop?
“Hullo, are you dead or asleep?” Emma said. She nudged the man’s ear with her boot, and the side of his head caved and crumbled to dust.
Emma gasped and let the tarp fall back. Crumbley had become a desiccated cast of himself, so fragile that a strong wind could blow him apart.
We left poor, crumbling Mr. Crumbley behind and went to the door. I grasped the knob and turned it. The door opened and we stepped through it into a laundry room. There were fresh-looking clothes in a hamper, a washboard hung neatly above a sink. This place had not been abandoned long.
The Feeling was stronger here, but was still only residue. We opened another door and came into a sitting room. My chest tightened. Here was clear evidence of a fight: furniture scattered and overturned, pictures knocked off the mantel, stripes of wallpaper shredded to ribbons.
Then Horace muttered, “Oh, no,” and I followed his gaze upward, to a dark stain discoloring a roughly circular patch of ceiling. Something awful had happened upstairs.
Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “Just listen,” she said. “Listen for the birds and don’t think about anything else.”
We closed our eyes and listened. A minute passed. Then, finally, the fluttering coo of a pigeon. I opened my eyes to see where it had come from.
The staircase.
We mounted the stairs gently, trying not to creak them under our feet. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, in my temple. I could handle old, brittle corpses. I wasn’t sure if I could take a murder scene.
The second-floor hallway was littered with debris. A door, torn from its hinges, lay splintered. Through the broken doorway was a fallen tower of trunks and dressers; a failed blockade.
In the next room, the white carpet was soaked with blood—the stain that had leaked through the floor to the ceiling below. But whomever it had leaked from was long gone.
The last door in the hall showed no signs of forced entry. I pushed it open warily. My eyes scanned the room: there was a wardrobe, a dresser topped with carefully arranged figurines, lace curtains fluttering in a window. The carpet was clean. Everything undisturbed.
Then my eyes went to the bed, and what was in it, and I stumbled back against the doorjamb. Nestled under clean white covers were two men, seemingly asleep—and between them, two skeletons.
“Aged forward,” said Horace, his hands trembling at his throat. “Two of them considerably more than the others.”
The men who looked asleep were as dead as Mr. Crumbley downstairs, Horace said, and if we touched them, they would disintegrate in just the same way.
“They gave up,” Emma whispered. “They got tired of running and they gave up.” She looked at them with a mix of pity and disgust.
She thought they were weak and cowardly—that they’d taken the easy way out. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if these peculiars simply knew more than we did about what the wights did with their captives. Maybe we would choose death, too, if we knew.
We drifted into the hall. I felt dizzy and sick, and I wanted out of this house—but we couldn’t leave yet. There was one last staircase to climb.
At the top, we found a smoke-damaged landing. I imagined peculiars who’d withstood the initial attack on this house gathering here for a last stand. Maybe they’d tried to fight the corrupted with fire—or maybe the corrupted had tried to smoke them out. Either way, it looked like the house had come close to burning down.
Ducking through a low doorway, we entered a narrow, slope-walled attic. Everything here was burned black. Flames had made gaping holes in the roof.
Emma prodded Horace. “It’s here somewhere,” she said quietly. “Work your magic, bird-catcher.”
Horace tiptoed into the middle of the room and sing-songed, “Heeeeere, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon …”
Then, from behind us, we heard a wingbeat and a strangled chirp. We turned to see not a pigeon but a girl in a black dress, half hidden in the shadows.
“Is this what you’re after?” the girl said, raising one arm into a shaft of sunlight. The pigeon squirmed in her hand, struggling to free itself.
“Yes!” Emma said. “Thank heaven you caught it!” She moved toward the girl with her hands out to take the pigeon, but the girl shouted, “Stop right there!” and snapped her fingers. A charred throw rug flew out from beneath Emma and took her feet with it, sending her crashing to the floor.
I rushed to Emma. “Are you okay?”
“On your knees!” the girl barked at me. “Put your hands on your head!”
“I’m fine,” Emma said. “Do as she says. She’s telekinetic and clearly unstable.”
I knelt down by Emma and laced my fingers behind my head.
Emma did the same. Horace, trembling and silent, sat heavily and placed his palms on the floor.
“We don’t mean you any harm,” Emma said. “We’re only after the pigeon.”
“Oh, I know perfectly well what you’re after,” the girl said with a sneer. “Your kind never gives up, do you?”
“Our kind?” I said.
“Lay down your weapons and slide them over!” barked the girl.
“We don’t have any,” Emma said calmly, trying her best not to upset the girl any further.
“This will go easier for you if you don’t assume I’m stupid!” the girl shouted. “You’re weak and have no powers of your own, so you rely on guns and things. Now lay them on the floor!”
Emma turned her head and whispered, “She thinks we’re wights!”
I almost laughed out loud. “We aren’t wights. We’re peculiar!”
“You aren’t the first blank-eyes to come here pigeon-hunting,” she said, “nor the first to try impersonating peculiar children. And you wouldn’t be the first I’ve killed, neither! Now put your weapons on the floor before I snap this pigeon’s neck—and then yours!”
“But we aren’t wights!” I insisted. “Look at our pupils if you don’t believe us!”
“Your eyes don’t mean nothing!” the girl said. “False lenses are the oldest trick in the book—and trust me, I know ’em all.”
The girl took a step toward us, into the light. Hate smoldered in her eyes. She was tomboyish, except for the dress, with short hair and a muscular jaw. She had the glassy look of someone who hadn’t slept in days; who was running now on instinct and adrenaline. Someone in that condition wouldn’t be kind to us, nor patient.
“We are peculiar, I swear!” Emma said. “Watch—I’ll show you!” She lifted one hand from her head and was about to make a flame when a sudden intuition made me grab her wrist.
“If there are hollows close by, they’ll sense it,” I said. “I think they can feel us kind of like I feel them—but it’s much easier for them when we use our powers. It’s like setting off an alarm.”
“But you’re using your power,” she said, irritated. “And she’s using hers!”
“Mine is passive,” I said. “I can’t turn it off, so it doesn’t leave much of a trail. As for her—maybe they already know she’s here. Maybe it’s not her they want.”
“How convenient!” the girl said to me. “And that’s supposed to be your power? Sensing shadow creatures?”
“He can see them, too,” said Emma. “And kill them.”
“You need to invent better lies,” the girl said. “No one with half a brain would buy that.”
Just as we were talking about it, a new Feeling blossomed painfully inside me. I was no longer sensing the left-behind residue of a hollow, but the active presence of one.
“There’s one nearby,” I said to Emma. “We need to get out of here.”
“Not without the bird,” she muttered.
The girl started across the room toward us. “Time to get on with it,” she said. “I’ve given you more than enough chances to prove yourselves. Anyway, I’m beginning to enjoy killing you things. After what you did to my friends, I just can’t seem to get enough of it!”
&
nbsp; She stopped a few feet from us and raised her free hand—about to bring what was left of the roof down on our heads, maybe. If we were going to make a move, it had to be now.
I sprang from my crouched position, threw my arms in front of me, and collided with the girl, knocking her to the floor. She cried out in angry surprise. I rammed my fist into the palm of her free hand so she couldn’t snap her fingers again. She let the bird go, and Emma grabbed it.
Then Emma and I were up, rushing toward the open door. Horace was still on the floor in a daze. “Get up and run!” Emma shouted at him.
I was pulling Horace up by his arms when the door slammed in my face and a burned dresser lifted out of the corner and flew across the room. The edge of it connected with my head and I went sprawling, taking Emma down with me.
The girl was in a rage, screaming. I was certain we had only seconds to live. Then Horace stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs:
“Melina Manon!”
The girl froze. “What did you say?”
“Your name is Melina Manon,” he said. “You were born in Luxembourg in 1899. You came to live with Miss Thrush when you were sixteen years old, and have been here ever since.”
Horace had caught her off guard. She frowned, then made an arcing motion with her hand. The dresser that had nearly knocked me unconscious sailed through the air and then stopped, hovering, directly above Horace. If she let it drop, it would crush him. “You’ve done your homework,” said the girl, “but any wight could know my name and birthplace. Unfortunately for you, I no longer find your deceptions interesting.”
And yet, she didn’t quite seem ready to kill him.
“Your father was a bank clerk,” Horace said, speaking quickly.
“Your mother was very beautiful but smelled strongly of onions, a lifelong condition she could do nothing to cure.”
The dresser wobbled above Horace. The girl stared at him, her brows knit together, hand in the air.