by Ransom Riggs
A piece of classical music began to play—I think it was music, anyway—except the violins sounded like they were being tortured in hell, which finally motivated me to scootch all the way to the edge of the bed, stretch my arm out from under the womblike covers, and switch it off. And then I noticed a small picture leaned against the wall behind the radio—a framed photo of Amos Dextaire signed to Horace by the man himself. He seemed to be winking at the camera from behind dark glasses while managing an ice cream cone and a cigarette in the same hand.
I fell asleep dreaming about an orchestra of tuxedoed musicians burning alive while they played, and woke up sometime later to a vibrating bed.
Enoch had plopped down next to me. “I know you need your beauty rest, Portman, but there’s a hollowgast at the door who seems really keen to chat.”
“What?” I shot upright, covers flying off me.
“Just kidding, but it’s getting boring down there without you. Goodness, you’re high-strung.”
I punched him on the arm. “Don’t do that!”
He shoved me and I nearly fell off the bed. “Can’t you tell when I’m joking?”
“Next time it’ll be true and I won’t believe you. You’ll get eaten and deserve it.”
I heard feet on the stairs, and a few seconds later Emma burst in. “Ulysses Critchley from Temporal Affairs just came to fetch us. They’ve called a meeting.”
I slid my feet out of bed. “The ymbrynes?”
“Yes. But it’s not just for us; the whole Acre’s supposed to come.”
“They’re going to tell everyone now?”
“I suppose they want to beat Caul to the punch.” Her fingers drummed the wall. “Get your shoes on!”
A mandatory all-Acre assembly had never been called before. Instructions rang out from loudspeakers for everyone to drop what they were doing and attend, and peculiars were streaming into the streets from every building we passed. A great swarm converged on the lecture hall where it was to be held. The line to enter was long, and as we jostled into the queue and shuffled closer, Millard noted that it wasn’t just the size of the crowd that was causing the slowdown, but that a pair of home guards were searching every single person before they were admitted inside.
“What are they looking for?” asked Noor. “Weapons?”
“We are weapons,” Hugh replied.
“Some of us more than others,” said Emma.
One of the guards started patting down Enoch’s thighs. “Aww, no kiss first?” he said.
“What’s this?” the guard said, peering into a cloudy glass jar he’d pulled from Enoch’s jacket.
“A murderer’s heart pickled in Himalayan salt brine.”
The guard bobbled the jar, nearly dropping it.
“Careful, you clod, that was a gift!” He snatched it from the guard’s hands. “Let us through already, don’t you know who we are?”
The guard reared back. “I don’t care if you’re an ymbryne’s grandmother, every single person is to be—”
The other guard leaned to him and whispered something in his ear, and the first guard gritted his teeth, unhappily swallowed his pride, and waved us through. “Go on.” He gave me a forced smile and said, “Apologies, Mr. Portman, I didn’t see you there.”
Emma patted Enoch’s shoulder. “Sorry, E. Guess you’re just part of the entourage.”
Enoch laughed and shook his head.
As a final precaution, we were made to stand in front of a strange young man with misaligned eyes and let him stare at us. (“Sorry, even you,” the second guard had said to me.)
So I let the young man stare, his eyes roving up and down my body before coming to rest on my face.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Scanning your intentions,” Millard said. “Be they good or ill.”
I felt a mild heat building in my forehead, where the young man’s eyes were focused. I was about to complain when he looked at the guards and nodded.
We were allowed inside, then ushered down a stone hallway flickering with gaslights and echoing with the murmurs of a crowd.
Noor walked beside me. “That was extremely thorough,” she said suspiciously.
“They must be worried about crazies,” I said.
“I don’t blame them,” replied Horace. “Imagine if someone set off a bomb in this place. That’d be ninety percent of the ymbrynes in Great Britain, not to mention several from around the world, wiped out in a blink.”
“Thanks for that comforting thought,” Noor replied. “I’m feeling much calmer now.”
Enoch teased me the rest of the way down the hall, bowing and scraping, until I turned red from embarrassment. “Apologies, Mr. Portman, right this way, Mr. Portman! There’s a spot of mud on your boots, Mr. Portman, might I lick it clean for you?”
“Don’t be an ass,” Noor said. “He never asked anyone to treat him like that.”
Enoch bowed lower. “I’m so sorry if I ever offended you, madam.”
She gave him a playful shove and he pretended to stumble into the wall, which he apologized and bowed to, and then we were all laughing. It was good to laugh, and to see Noor laugh, if only for a moment.
The passageway ended and we came into the top level of a large lecture hall, which wasn’t really a lecture hall at all, Horace informed me. It was an old operating theater, designed so that an audience could observe surgeons at their grisly work. The seating was level upon level of rough wooden benches, arranged concentrically and looking down on a circular floor below, at the center of which was a body-sized platform. Gaslights shone everywhere, in giant chandeliers hung from the ceiling and from iron sconces that ringed the walls.
We descended to the second level and sat on a long, curving bench that had been reserved for us. The rest of the theater was filling up fast.
“This room was built as part of a medical school,” Horace said, “but the wights used it to do horrible experiments on peculiars. Grafting animal parts onto human bodies. Trying to create hybrid hollowgast. Switching people’s brains just to see what would happen. See the metal grate below the platform there? That was to catch all the—”
“I get it,” I said, holding up a hand.
“Sorry. Sometimes the only way to get bad pictures out of my head is to share them with other people. Which I know is selfish.”
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling a little guilty now. “You can tell me.”
“No, no, I don’t have to. I know it’s disgusting.”
He was quiet for a few seconds. His knee jiggled. He looked like he might burst.
I looked at him. “Go ahead.”
“It was to catch all the entrails and blood,” he said quickly. “That’s what the grate was for. And the smell was supposedly indescribable.” He let out a sigh.
“Feel better?”
He gave me a sheepish grin. “Profoundly.”
The hall was almost half full. There were over a hundred peculiars staying in the Acre now, and nearly all of them were in attendance. Everyone was freaked out by the desolations, and they weren’t about to miss what they hoped would finally be an explanation.
To my surprise, I recognized a lot of people in the crowd. Ulysses Critchley had gone to sit beside his black-suited cohort from Temporal Affairs, who were noisily shushing the people around them. Sitting across from us was Miss Grackle’s theater troupe, who had just come from practice and were still dressed from the neck down in outlandish animal costumes. In the row below them were Sharon and his burly cousins, all in matching black robes, though only Sharon wore his hood raised; the four cousins never did. They had fine silver hair but their faces looked young, and their strong jaws and high cheekbones were attracting long looks—though the cousins, whispering among themselves, hardly seemed to notice. Beside them squirmed a klatch of half-fish Ditch dwellers: Itch,
his wife, and their two scaly kids. They sat grumbling in ill-fitting clothes and a spreading puddle of water that had made a little stream down the steps, occasionally spritzing themselves from a muddy seltzer bottle and looking like they were counting the seconds until they could strip off their clothes and return to the Ditch.
At the top level of the room stood a half dozen home guards and the young man who had scanned us with his eyes. They were watching the crowd intently.
I was surprised, too, to notice some Americans: Antoine LaMothe, too proud to sit, wearing a raccoon coat that was stirring on its own; a lanky bodyguard in Western-style chaps and a fringed leather jacket; a few more from his Northerner clan whom I recognized from Marrowbone but whose names I didn’t know. I was even more surprised to spot a few of the diviner kids: Paul, Fern, and Alene, all of them in their Sunday best, Paul looking nervous and the girls surveying the scene coolly in wide-brimmed hats. I made a mental note to find them after the assembly and welcome them, and ask how they’d reached the Acre. It was no small journey getting here from their loop in Portal, Georgia; it would have meant either a plane ride or that same long road trip to New York that my friends and I had made to reach the Acre’s connector loop there.
A few rows away were even more Americans I hadn’t seen in a while, including several of Dogface’s so-called Untouchables: the boy with the pulsating and possibly sentient neck-boil; the half woman, Hattie the Halfsie, who sat propped in the lap of the tusk-cheeked warthog girl; and two others who I’d only met briefly and in the dark. They sat whispering to one another, pointing at this peculiar or that. I got the feeling they were sizing us up, and I couldn’t help but wonder what they thought.
Emma saw me looking at them. “I don’t know why the ymbrynes let them into the Acre,” she said. “They may have helped us a little when things got really dicey, but they’re still just a bunch of mercenaries, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I trust them about as far as I can throw them,” said Enoch.
“Me too,” agreed Bronwyn.
Enoch rolled his eyes. “You could throw them a long way.”
“It’s true,” she said. “I have a trusting nature.”
I was wondering whether Dogface himself was here when I heard someone bark my name, and I turned to see him coming down the row above us, mouth curled in a furry grin. “Well, if it isn’t the celebrated Jacob Portman and his sycophantic friends. You’ve always got everyone in a tizzy, don’t you? ‘Where is he, where’s he disappeared to now?’ Especially your many female admirers.” He winked at Emma, and my jaw clenched while her color deepened.
“What do you want?” she snapped at him.
“What kind of greeting is that?” he said. “Didn’t I save your life the last time I saw you?”
“The last time we saw you, you extorted us for an exorbitant sum of money just to do what any decent peculiar would’ve done out of kindness,” said Emma.
“I never claimed to be decent. And by the by, the interest on that half-paid debt of yours is fast accruing. But I ain’t here to collect. We just came to pay our respects before the show begins.”
Coming up behind Dogface were Angelica, pursued as usual by a small dark cloud and an air of grumpy affliction, and by Wreck Donovan, lanky in a suave brown suit and red tie, his hair a pomaded wave. Watching them, I realized I had no idea who else was in Angelica’s gang of peculiars, nor what Wreck’s peculiar ability was, other than extreme overconfidence.
“I thought you all hated one another,” Emma said.
Angelica looked down her nose. “We can put aside our differences when the situation demands it.”
“And what’s the situation?” I asked.
“That you’ve come to live with us in the Acre?” asked Olive, smiling. Olive was automatically nice to everyone, and clearly had no idea that these Americans had, at one point, tried to buy us.
Wreck broke out laughing. “Live here? With you?” His glancing Irish accent turned “with you?” into “witchou?”
Angelica shot him a black look, as if they were supposed to be on their best behavior, and Wreck stifled his laugh. “Leo Burnham couldn’t be here,” she said, “so he ordered us to come on his behalf. He’s asked us to study how your ymbrynes run things. Observe your, er”—she cast a glance around her and couldn’t hide her repulsion—“way of life.”
“To see whether you’ve made any innovations, politically or organizationally, we might want to adopt for ourselves,” Wreck said.
“Whether they can take us down, more like,” Enoch whispered in my ear.
“Come to see how the other half lives, eh?” said Hugh.
“Squalidly, from the looks of it,” Dogface countered.
Hugh spat a bee at him. Dogface ducked as it zinged past his ear, curved around his head, and boomeranged back into Hugh’s mouth. “It’s a lot more civilized than the way you barbarians do things, I can tell you that,” Hugh said, chuckling as Dogface growled at him.
Across the big room, one of the Ditch dwellers belched loudly enough for everyone to hear, and a fountain of dirty water sprayed from his mouth onto Sharon’s cousins, who turned around and threatened to spit-roast every last one of them.
“It’s the most singularly hideous loop I’ve ever set cloud in!” Angelica burst out, then looked relieved—as if holding that in another moment might have killed her.
“You can’t judge our way of life by this place,” Emma said irritably. “So many of our loops were destroyed when the wights raided them a few months ago, and we’ve all been shoved together here like survivors on a lifeboat. We’ve hardly begun rebuilding.”
“Sure, sure,” Wreck said. “And when that’s done, what?”
“We go back to the way things were,” said Claire. There was such hope in her voice that none of us had the heart to crush it, but it was utter fantasy in light of what the ymbrynes were about to announce.
Dogface knelt down to Claire’s level. “And you liked the way things were?” he said in a childish voice. “With the ymbrynes treating you like schoolchildren?”
“They don’t!” Claire protested.
“Don’t they?” Angelica said.
“We’d have more say in things than we used to,” Bronwyn said defensively.
Wreck’s substantial brow shot up.
“The ymbrynes promised,” said Claire.
Dogface stifled another laugh. I was getting impatient for the ymbrynes’ presentation to begin.
Emma stood up from her seat and squared her shoulders to confront Dogface. “And do you think it’s so much better in America? With a few strongmen acting like gang lords, controlling everyone with threats and intimidation? Forced to steal to earn your living? Warring and fighting with one another all the time? Afraid to cross into rival territory for fear of being taken prisoner? How could anyone live like that?”
Angelica tossed her head proudly. “Spoken like someone who would never make it a week in peculiar New York.”
Wreck was more tactful. “I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. That’s why we’ve come. But at least we call the shots inside our own loops.”
“You’re trapped in a vicious cycle of vice and crime,” Millard said. “Your freedom is an illusion.”
Dogface chuckled. “At least we get to choose our own bedtime, you coddled, infantile—”
“We didn’t come to fight with you,” Wreck interrupted.
Dogface sulked. “I did.”
“Can’t you just be decent?” Claire said to him. “You’d have an easier time in life, don’t you think?”
Dogface’s perpetual grin vanished. “When you look like my Untouchables and I do, there is no easy time. Maybe pretty little girls like you can afford to be decent”—he said it with utter disdain—“but I cannot. So I’m a businessman, a survivor. They call me a stain on the world, a cockro
ach with fur. That’s all right. I’ll be the cockroach still standing when this world crumbles to dust.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh, and I take issue with the notion that we’re forced to steal. For me, it’s a passion.” He opened his hand and dangled from it a small locket on a silver chain.
“Hey!” Olive shouted. “That’s mine!”
He grinned, dropped it into her lap, and left, taking the other two Americans with him.
“Most unpleasant,” said Horace, waving his hand in the air as if to dispel a stench.
“They’ve got some nerve,” Emma said. “If it weren’t for the ymbrynes, they’d all be at war right now, killing one another over some dusty old argument.”
“Eh, forget them,” Enoch said. “Looks like we’re about to start.”
On the operating stage below, a door had opened, and one by one, the whole Ymbryne Council filed out.
The crowd fell quiet as nine ymbrynes filed somberly onto the stage: Miss Peregrine was first, looking even more serious than usual. Then came Miss Cuckoo, whose gold pantsuit and metallic silver hair reminded me of David Bowie. Miss Babax followed her in a white dress and white gloves, a bold choice for this filthy loop. Then came Miss Blackbird with her third eye open, scanning the room for danger. Miss Loon and Miss Bobolink, who I knew little about, stuck close to her heels, and were trailed by Miss Gannett, from Ireland. Addison stood on his hind legs and raised a paw in salute as Miss Wren entered, and lastly came Miss Avocet, wheeled onto the stage by Francesca and Bettina, her two favorite ymbrynes-in-training.