by Ransom Riggs
Esmerelda Avocet was the most senior and powerful ymbryne of them all, the mentor who had trained most of Great Britain’s living ymbrynes and all those before us now. But she was looking older and more feeble than ever, a skinny wisp of woman cocooned in a thick shawl. She looked almost as frail as she had the first time I’d met her, when she’d flown into Miss Peregrine’s house with shocking news of a hollowgast raid, and worse than when I’d seen her earlier in the day, as if whatever the ymbrynes had discussed in their meeting had sapped much of her remaining strength. I just hoped she could hold it together long enough to get through the assembly.
Last through the door were four more home guards, who took up positions around the stage and stood at attention. Francesca and Bettina left, closing the little door behind them, and Miss Peregrine paced to the center of the operating stage, stood at the gruesome body platform as if it were a lectern, and began to speak.
“My fellow peculiars. Some of you may have guessed why we’ve called you here today, and others will be wondering. I do not intend to keep you long in suspense. Only recently, we were celebrating our victory over the wights at the Battle of Gravehill. We fought bravely and prevailed, and I can speak for all the ymbrynes present today when I say that we are intensely proud of you: those who fought, as well as those who persevered here in Devil’s Acre despite the danger, who with tenacity and firmness of purpose kept working to rebuild our loops and our society even while menaced by such a dire threat.”
She paused. I could feel everyone in the room lean forward in their seats, on tenterhooks.
“But—I’ll tell it plainly—a terrible thing we tried mightily to prevent has come to pass.” Her voice boomed, aided by the unusual acoustics of the room. “One wight escaped our grasp at Gravehill. His name is Percival Murnau, and he was Caul’s top lieutenant. We thought we had stopped him from achieving the wights’ goal, and while we dealt him setbacks and decimated his fighting force, I’m sorry to tell you that we failed to put an end to his plans.”
Whispers rippled through the room.
“Two days ago, desolations began to plague the Acre. There’s been a great deal of speculation about what might be causing them. Now we can be certain: Two days ago, Percival Murnau resurrected Caul, my brother, the leader of the wights.”
Murmurs turned into shouts, shouts into cries of despair. The ymbrynes pleaded for quiet. Slowly, the crowd settled to a volume that allowed Miss Peregrine to continue.
“Our fiercest adversary has returned, in some form, and while all but a handful of the other wights have been killed or captured, Caul himself is more powerful than ever. How much more powerful, we don’t yet know.” The murmurs were growing louder again, and she raised her voice. “But he is still just one person, and as of now there have been no reports of attacks by Caul on any loop, any peculiar—”
“And when the attacks begin?” a familiar voice boomed. The crowd’s gaze shifted to LaMothe as he rose, imposingly, to his feet. “What will you do?”
Miss Cuckoo stepped forward to stand beside Miss Peregrine. “We’ve organized a defense for Devil’s Acre that will be impenetrable, we believe.”
“You believe?” someone called out, and I saw Miss Cuckoo wince at her own word choice.
“How could you let this happen?” another person yelled.
“We have everything under control!” Miss Blackbird shouted, jittering hands cupped around her mouth, but she could hardly be heard.
Next to me, Emma was shaking her head. The assembly was in danger of slipping into chaos. I could hear people around me shouting, not just at the ymbrynes, but at one another, arguing about who was to blame and what should be done. One thing was clear: These people needed leaders. Though the fractious and diverse peculiars of Devil’s Acre had complaints about the ymbrynes, they would be lost without them.
Then Sharon’s thundering cry cut through the noise: “QUIET!” The crowd settled again. “I, too, have questions,” he said, booming a bit more softly. “I, too, am angry, but now isn’t the time to dissect the lapses that led to this moment. There will be time for that once this crisis has passed. We may not have long to organize a defense, and if we waste time squabbling, we will live to regret it. Or die to regret it, as the case may be. Now, please.” He extended his long arm graciously toward the ymbrynes and a rat tumbled from his sleeve. “Let the good ladies speak.”
Miss Peregrine gave Sharon a nod of thanks, then gripped the edges of the body platform. “We ymbrynes don’t claim to be infallible. I wish we had predicted this. I wish we could have prevented it. But we did not. I readily acknowledge our error.”
This seemed to cool some tempers in the crowd. I glanced at Noor. She was staring at the floor, looking ill.
“Now, I won’t ask you not to worry,” Miss Peregrine went on, voice rising. “But I insist you not surrender to fear. I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you this will be easy, but no good thing ever was. We have lived under the shadow of the wights and their hollowgast for a century, and it should be no surprise that such evil cannot be shed in a few weeks, or in a few minor engagements. Our victory at Gravehill, savage as it was, was perhaps too tidy. The final trial is yet to come: a battle the magnitude of which we can’t yet know. But this I do know . . .” Miss Peregrine let go of the platform and strode to the front of the stage, hands clasped behind her like a military commander. “He will come for us. He will come here. This loop was my odious brother’s home for many years, and you can be sure he’s still furious that he and his people were driven from it. But we will not allow him to take back Devil’s Acre. We cannot, and will not, relinquish control of our only refuge, nor of the Panloopticon. We will make this loop impenetrable, and then we will find a way to drive him back into the underworld he came from. But we need your help. Stand with us. Stay and fight.” She pounded the air with her fist. “Our resolve is strong. We will not let him in. We will not—”
For some time, a low rumbling sound had been building, but I’d been so entranced by Miss Peregrine that I’d hardly registered it. Now I could feel it shaking the floor, and all at once it doubled in strength and was joined by a sudden wind that blew out all the gaslights and plunged the hall into blackness. There were screams, but they were drowned out almost immediately by an overwhelming voice:
“GET OUT!” it bellowed. “Get out of my house! Get out while you still can!”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and produced a sour stink that blew with each syllable from the center of the room. People began scrambling to escape, tripping over one another in the dark. I heard crashes and screams that sounded like people tumbling down stairs. “Stay put or we’ll be trampled!” shouted Emma, and I felt her hands pushing my shoulders down. I turned to Noor and pulled her down, too, and she pulled Fiona next to her.
“I am born agaaaaain!” the voice thundered, so loud it seemed to shake my eyes in their sockets. And then from the darkness there shone a sudden, brilliant light at the center of the room—a face, giant, blue, and glowing, that hovered in the air. It was Caul’s face, his face and nothing more, ten feet high and sneering, his thin lips and beaked nose, his mouth open and blunt round teeth shaking as he cackled at the pandemonium he had caused. Everyone was falling over one another, climbing, clambering for the steps and the door and outside, but the steps were jammed with splayed and reeling bodies and the door was blocked. The ymbrynes, directly below Caul on the stage, had scattered to the walls but had not fled. The home guards were stunned, frozen in place.
The laughing stopped. Caul grinned and said more softly, “How’s that? Have I got your attention?”
There was a sudden bang as one of the home guards fired a weapon at Caul, but the projectile passed through his ghostly face and ricocheted off a wall.
“Silly man, I’m not actually here,” Caul said. “But I will be. I am coming. I am inexorable. I am inevitable!” His voice was r
ising again. “I have harnessed the power of the ancient souls, and I will use it to crush all who stand against me!”
Just when I thought my eardrums would break, his voice fell to a childlike wheedle. “Oh, jeepers creepers, the bad man’s coming to get us! What do we do, Poppa, what do we do?”
Caul’s face turned slightly, and his voice deepened into a loony caricature of a 1950s-era American dad. “It’s simple, Johnny. We need to choose the path of righteousness!”
The demented “kid” voice again: “What’s that, Poppa?”
The dad: “Well, Caul is our god now, and it’s a real good thing he’s a merciful god. You’re a sinner, Johnny-boy, and so am I. We’ve been worshipping these half-bird charlatans instead of him all these years! Oh, it was a bad thing we did. Denying our true natures, our true power, our destiny to sit at the head of the human table rather than hiding underneath it!”
“The human what, Poppa?”
Through it all, Miss Peregrine was shouting to be heard over Caul’s insane spectacle: “He can’t hurt us! It’s only a projection! Everyone stay calm!”
“The human table! Why, we peculiars are the most evolved humans there ever were, and here we’ve been hiding in loops rather than running the show—for two thousand years! Isn’t that a shame?”
“Yes, Poppa! That must make Caul SO MAD!”
“Don’t be scared, Johnny. All you’ve got to do is ask forgiveness and pledge your undying loyalty to him, and you’ll be spared.”
“Gosh, really?”
“Well, there’s one more little thing.”
Caul’s face flickered, then appeared to melt, skin sliding off bone into a glowing puddle in the air, then swirling up again to form a new face: mine.
I went cold, certain I was hallucinating. The wheedling child’s voice disappeared, replaced by the low, rattling snarl of a demon summoned from hell:
“KILL THE BOY.”
I heard Emma gasp. Noor clasped my arm. The face changed again, the skin bubbling to mush, then forming a different face: Noor’s.
“KILL THE GIRL.”
Now it was my turn to clasp Noor’s hand. She was silent, grim-faced. The image of Noor changed quickly back to Caul, and he said, in his own mocking voice, “And for extra brownie points . . .”
His image exploded into a thousand points of blue light, then rapidly coalesced into a picture of our ymbrynes, the nine who cringed on the stage below mirrored in blue above.
“KILL THEM ALL!” Caul screamed, the voice so loud I slapped my hands over my ears, so loud I could see the glass ceiling rattling, threatening to shatter.
I heard screams from the crowd, and then the ymbrynes’ blue doubles turned into birds. Caul’s voice, his own again, cackled and said, “Crawl away, little bugs, fly away, little birds! Scurry and scatter, fly, fly, fly, get out of my kitchen!”
The spectral image of the birds flew upward toward the glass ceiling, and as they reached it they evaporated into nothing and the ceiling shattered. A hundred thousand shards of glass rained down on us, and everyone was cut to ribbons and shrieking, Emma screaming with a head full of broken glass, Noor screaming as blood ran down her arms and her neck, Horace screaming as he spun around, taking in the horrific scene.
And then the image before me flickered . . .
And the screams began to fade . . .
And the sky above the broken glass ceiling darkened—strange, I don’t remember a glass ceiling in this room—and then the gaslights around the room flared to life again, and there was no glass ceiling above us now, broken or otherwise, just a normal painted one, and we had not been cut to ribbons.
It had all been an illusion.
The gaslights brightened.
Caul was gone.
Then, other sounds: cries of relief, cries of pain from those who’d fallen on the stairs and in the doorway, who’d been caught in the crush. The sobs of the overwhelmed, the terrified. Claire was crying softly as Bronwyn cradled her. Noor had my hand in a death grip. The ymbrynes begged for calm. Miss Peregrine, now wielding a megaphone, declared that Caul’s manifestation had been merely visual, that he was only trying to scare us, and to divide us, and we could not allow him to do that. She again assured the crowd that the ymbrynes were working on a defense for the Acre that would shortly be ready, then handed the megaphone to Miss Wren, who began to direct an orderly exit from the hall, one level at a time. The sobs and cries began to subside. The ymbrynes climbed up from the pit and went to console people individually. Their assurances were easier to dismiss from a distance, as a passive member of a skeptical audience, but in person, up close and one on one, you believed it. It’s why an ymbryne’s wards never numbered more than ten or fifteen. They would never win us over as a mob. Their work would be accomplished going house to house, peculiar to peculiar, methodically undoing Caul’s terror one person at a time.
As we waited for Miss Wren to call our row, I noticed someone walking against the crowd’s flow, elbowing and shouldering his way toward us. It was the cockeyed scanner boy. He was one level below ours, and when he came even with us, he climbed up onto the lower bench and stood atop it, his head inclined toward me, wearing a blank look.
“Are you going to ask me something?” I said to him.
He reached behind him and pulled something from his waistband. I had only just registered that someone was shouting—“He’s got a knife!”—when I saw it in his hand, long and curved, and he lunged at Noor.
She dove across my body as he buried the knife in the bench where she’d just been. The boy’s hat fell off as he yanked at the knife. Someone grabbed him by the waist as he flailed. Horace slapped him in the head and Noor kicked him in the face. Soon a couple of home guards had separated him from the knife and were dragging him away by the arms. He was silent, not even struggling.
“Are you okay?” I said to Noor, and she nodded and lifted herself off me.
Then Miss Peregrine was there, asking if we were hurt; we said no. She looked relieved, but only fleetingly. As she looked past us to scan the room, I saw a new kind of fear in her eyes.
It said everything had changed.
The ymbrynes got Noor and me out of there as quickly as they could. Miss Peregrine, Miss Wren, and three home guards escorted us from the hall while our friends clamored to make sure we were all right and the crowd gawked. I tried to pull our friends along, too, but Miss Peregrine, whispering behind me as she guided my shoulders, said it would look like special treatment if all her wards were evacuated first. Only Noor and I had been called out. Marked for death.
Beyond that, we were in the dark. We didn’t know whether more would-be assassins would be waiting for us. Didn’t know whether the scanner boy’s attack was premeditated or if he’d been inspired by Caul’s bizarre rant. I knew the ymbrynes well enough by now to see that they were just as rattled as the rest of us, but since a hundred terrified peculiars trapped together in one big room was the definition of a powder keg, they were doing their best to feign, and maintain, calm.
Noor and I were hurried across the Acre to a location deemed safe: the Ymbryne Council chamber inside the asylum/peculiar ministries building. Along the way we could hear the effortlessly calming voice of Amos Dextaire through the loudspeakers: “Hey now, Acrefolk, let’s all do our best to remain calm. We’re safe. Caul is not here. If you can walk, go on back to your dormitories. If you’re injured, stay where you are and a bone-mender will come to you. Ymbrynes will be paying visits to each house and dormitory throughout the day. I repeat, we’re safe. And be sure to tune into Amos’s Hit Parade this afternoon, when you and one lucky friend could win a draft horse!” In a lightning-fast undertone he added: “Winners will split horse. Aliveness of horse not guaranteed. No returns or exchanges.”
I saw Miss Peregrine mutter something to Miss Wren and shake her head.
We arrived at the ministries bu
ilding and were brought upstairs to the council chamber, where we waited with Miss Peregrine and Miss Wren while the home guards stood watch outside the door. Other ymbrynes would be coming soon. In the meantime, we tried to make sense of what had happened. Noor and I sat at the long, polished conference table, Miss Wren stood beside a corkboard of loop maps on the wall, studying it like it might hold a clue to Caul’s plans, and Miss Peregrine treaded the floor, backlit by a triple-height window wreathed in vines.
“It was largely a visual manifestation,” she was saying, “with a few mind tricks tossed in for effect: The glass ceiling that wasn’t there, the bloodied crowd. A loud magic-lantern show, all sound and fury.”
“He’s only trying to scare us,” I said.
“Job done,” said Noor. “Everyone was freaking out.”
“He’s trying to divide us,” Miss Wren replied.
“That’s nothing new,” said Miss Peregrine. “He’s been doing that for decades.”
“But he’s never been able to project himself and his propaganda into our midst before. That is new. If he can turn some of our own wards against us, he’ll hardly need to wage much of a battle for Devil’s Acre, will he?”
“Do you really think that could happen?” Noor said. “That peculiars here would turn against you?”
“Absolutely not,” Miss Peregrine said dismissively. But I couldn’t help remembering the loop freedom protest that had broken out just recently, and the underground meetings Sharon had invited me to. It may not have been a fiery-hot resistance movement, but even our mild divisions were cracks Caul could exploit and pry into gaping fissures.
“He got to at least one person,” Noor pointed out.
“We’ll see,” said Miss Peregrine. “It’s possible the boy was just weak-minded, and Caul was able somehow to invade his thoughts.”