by Ransom Riggs
“I’ll be fine.” And then she sat on the table and let V pull her into her lap. V gave a sigh of deep satisfaction, wrapped her arms around Noor’s chest, and pulled her tight against what was left of her own.
Noor looked like she might pass dead away.
“Tell me,” said Noor. And while the rest of us looked on with a mixture of wonder and horror, V rested her chin on Noor’s shoulder and began to tell a story.
“Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a girl who grew spikes on her back like a porcupine. People feared and avoided her, and her parents worried for her future. One winter a sickness swept through the countryside and killed the girl’s poor father. Her mother had been carried away by famine the winter before. And as the father’s soul left his body, he heard the girl singing, ‘Come back to me, dear Father, come back to me, as fast as fast can be!’”
The ymbrynes traded a meaningful look.
“And the man loved his daughter so much,” Noor said, reciting from memory, “that rather than depart to his great reward, his soul lodged itself inside the girl’s favorite doll.”
“That’s right, dear,” V rasped. “That’s exactly right.” She looked spent, exhausted by the effort of speaking so much. Her head drooped onto Noor’s shoulder. Enoch circled his finger. The heart in his hand was slowing.
“Now, Mama, my question . . .”
“Sorry, love, it’ll have to wait till morning. Time for nighty-night beddy-bye,” she said dreamily, then let go of Noor and slumped backward onto the table, motionless.
Miss Wren gasped.
“Oh, come on!” Enoch said, shaking the heart as if it were a stopped clock.
Noor leapt off the table, shivering. “Are you okay?” I said, pulling her into me.
Enoch threw the exhausted heart on the floor. “Is that it?” he shouted at V. “I go to all the trouble of bringing you back from the dead, and we get a bedtime story?”
“That was one of the Tales of the Peculiar,” said Miss Wren. “The beginning of it, anyhow.”
“It was my favorite story when I was little,” Noor said. She was shivering. I led her to one of the floor cushions and we sat down together. She seemed okay, shaken but engaged. But Noor had a thousand layers beneath her surface and was practiced at hiding them.
“What a waste of hearts,” Enoch said bitterly.
The door opened and our eavesdropping friends tumbled in, unable to stem their curiosity any longer. Miss Peregrine didn’t even object; she was lost in murmured consultation with Miss Wren.
Olive rushed to where Noor and I were sitting. “Was that awful? Or wonderful? Are you all right?”
Noor looked at her blankly, as if confused by the question.
“Too soon,” Olive said. “Sorry.”
Miss Peregrine and Miss Wren split apart and started giving orders.
Miss Peregrine said, “Olive, I want you to go find the unabridged edition of the Tales. It’s in section three-F on subfloor seven of the archives. Take Bronwyn to help you, as it’s quite heavy. You’ll need my badge to check it out of the building.” As Miss Peregrine dug into her pockets and pulled out an ID shaped like an iron star, Miss Wren spoke to Millard.
“Mr. Nullings, please fetch the oldest Map of Days you can lay your hands on. Ask Perplexus for one if you come up short in the cartography stacks. Enoch, wrap V in a shroud and put her on ice, and ask the mortuary department to prepare her for funeral.”
“Are we finished with her?” said Noor, confused. “Won’t you need to wake her up again?”
“It’ll take a few hours to arrange,” Enoch said. “I’ll need to collect twice as many hearts, and even better ones this time . . .”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. O’Connor,” said Miss Peregrine.
“But she hasn’t told us where the meeting place is yet!” Hugh protested.
“Actually,” the two ymbrynes said at the same time, and then Miss Peregrine finished: “I believe she just might have.”
V was reciting from ‘The Tale of Pensevus,’” Miss Wren said. “Not one of the better-known stories.”
We had gathered in the kitchen, where Olive and Bronwyn had just returned from the archives lugging a very old and very large edition of the Tales. “The archivist said it took the skins of three hundred sheep to make this book,” Bronwyn said, panting lightly as she dropped it on the daybed beside Fiona, who grimaced as it landed with a clap and sent a cloud of chicken feathers into the air.
“The book we used to have was handwritten,” said Noor, “so I always thought it was something Mama had made up, written herself. As a comfort to an orphaned kid, and to explain how I came to live with her.”
“Do you think it contains a clue about the location of the meeting place?” asked Horace.
“I suspect so,” said Miss Peregrine. “As you know, the Tales often have secrets encoded in them.”
“V told only the beginning, though,” said Miss Wren, seating herself between Fiona and the giant, leather-bound tome. “Let’s read the rest and see what else it may reveal.”
With Bronwyn’s help she hefted open the cover, then flipped through dozens of waxy parchment pages until she found the story. Balancing a pair of cat-eye bifocals at the end of her long nose, she began to read.
“‘Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a girl who grew spikes on her back like a porcupine.’” She squinted and turned the page. “Yes, yes, we remember that bit . . . ah, here we are. ‘And her dying father so loved her that rather than go on to his great reward, his soul lodged itself inside Penny, the girl’s favorite doll. He did it so that he could watch over her all the days of her life. She loved the doll dearly, and even though she didn’t realize that the soul of her father was inside it, she felt bound to it, and took it everywhere with her, and talked to it. Sometimes, it seemed to talk back.’”
Noor closed her eyes, and her lips moved as she silently recited the story along with Miss Wren.
“‘As she got older,’” Miss Wren continued, “‘she grew careless with Penny, and one day while traveling she left it behind on a passenger ship. By the time she’d realized her mistake, the ship had departed from the port again. She saw it sailing away but was too late to catch it. She stood at the dock singing after it, Come back to me, dear Penny, come back to me, as fast as fast can be . . . ’”
Several of us traded glances. That phrase again.
“‘She looked everywhere for the doll. Listened for his voice in the wind. She didn’t hear Penny, but she began to hear different voices, voices other people rarely notice or bother to listen for. The voices of animals. They felt safe speaking to the girl, now a woman, because she was not afraid of them. She took them in whenever she met them, and cared for them as if they were her own children, and built a big house to keep them safe. Her house was near the sea, and sometimes it was battered by terrible storms. One night there was a storm like they’d never seen, and in the gale a ship wrecked on the rocky beach. When the wind stopped blowing she went out to see what had happened, and there among the wreckage was a single survivor, a little boy. The boy was soaked and shivering and in his arms he clutched the doll. He ran toward the girl and embraced her, and though she’d never seen the boy before she took him into her arms.’
“‘He swore you’d be here, said the boy.’
“‘Sea monsters had chased the ship and sunk it, he said. They’ve been after me for as long as I can remember. But Penny said you’d keep me safe. So I came, he said, fast as fast can be.’
“‘She took the boy in and kept him safe. He was an odd child who neither ate nor drank, at least not in the usual way. Under his clothes, growing out of his back and the bottoms of his feet, were roots, and when he was hungry he would go outside and lie down in the nice muddy garden for a few hours. But the woman didn’t mind. She was glad of his company, and overjoyed at
the doll’s return—though now Penny belonged to the little boy, and she didn’t have the heart to claim him again. They talked to each other all the time, the doll and the boy, the boy speaking aloud and the doll answering silently. But one morning, after the boy had been living there for several years, the woman found the boy crying by the window. When she asked him what the matter was, he replied that the doll had gone away. In that carriage, he said, and through the window she could see a horse and cart racing away down the lane. The boy sang out, Come back to me, come back to me, as fast as fast can be . . . ’
“‘The woman and the boy did not see the doll again for many years. The boy grew up and the woman grew older. A terrible war broke out, a thunderous bloody war that rent the land around them and tore it to pieces. Soldiers from another country came to the house and declared it theirs. The boy was arrested and taken away. The woman was made to sleep in the stables with the animals while the officers and soldiers moved into the house. The soldiers killed some of the animals for food, and the woman wept and wept, so miserably sad she could hardly rise from the pile of hay where she slept.’
“‘The fighting went on and on. It seemed the foreign soldiers would never leave. Then one night there was a knock at the stable door. The woman, who never slept anymore, rose and answered it. It was a wounded and frightened young soldier from her own country, who would surely have been killed if discovered. She hid him, gave him food, and tended to his wounds. When he was well enough to speak, he thanked the old woman, and told her that he’d walked for many weeks and crossed enemy lines to find her. She asked him why, and in answer he reached into his rucksack and pulled out her old doll, who was looking quite the worse for wear. And the soldier smiled and whispered, Penny said you needed help . . .’
“‘Fast as fast can be, she finished for him.’
“‘The soldier had the ability to transmute things from solid matter to gas with a certain touch of his hands, and that night he snuck into the old woman’s house and proceeded from bed to bed, transforming the enemy soldiers into harmless puffs of smoke. By the time the sun rose, they were but an angry red cloud hovering above the roof, and could do nothing to the woman anymore but hiss and swirl.’
“‘The doll came and went several times more, and it’s said that he still roams the earth to this day, helping outcast children who need a home.’” Miss Wren took off her bifocals and looked up from the book. “And that’s the end.”
“So?” Enoch said impatiently. “It’s a cute story, but—”
“‘As fast as fast can be,’” said Emma. “That’s just what the person said in those calls that were intercepted.”
“That has to mean something,” said Hugh. He looked to Miss Peregrine. She sat in deep concentration, eyes on the ceiling and fingers steepled beneath her chin.
“What else?” Miss Peregrine said.
“I had a doll named Penny,” Noor said. “He was old and broken and missing an eye, and I couldn’t stand to be apart from him.”
Everyone looked at her.
“Was it the Penny?” Bronwyn asked. “Or was your doll named after the one from the story?”
Noor shook her head. “V said Penny was the doll from the story. But I don’t know. I always imagined he could talk, but of course he didn’t really.”
“Or perhaps he did,” said Horace in a low voice, “in your mind.”
“Mama”—she caught herself—“V said he’d watch over me when she wasn’t there. And if we ever got separated, he’d help lead me back to her again. But after we were attacked by wights, just before she decided she had to give me up, Penny disappeared. I was inconsolable.”
“Maybe she hid him away,” Emma said. “So he couldn’t lead you back to her again. For your own safety.” Her voice wavered, near to breaking.
Noor’s face darkened, but she said nothing.
“What else?” Miss Peregrine asked again, searching our faces expectantly. “Think back to your loop history classes.” No one had an answer. She frowned. “I think I let you spend too many days cavorting in the sun instead of studying. Miss Wren, if you please . . .”
“I was not the only ymbryne to oversee a menagerie of peculiar animals,” Miss Wren said. Addison’s ears perked up. “There was one other before me: Miss Griselda Tern. But her loop collapsed tragically in 1918, in the closing days of the Great War. Destroyed by artillery shells.”
“Sounds a bit like the fate of our own poor loop,” Emma said.
“Prior to that,” Miss Wren continued, “there are stories about Miss Tern’s menagerie being overrun by enemy soldiers—strikingly reminiscent of the events of ‘The Tale of Pensevus.’”
“So you think . . . ,” Olive said, grasping, “you think maybe it’s the loop from the tale?”
“I think V told us that particular bedtime story for a reason,” said Miss Peregrine, “much the same way she taught you that nursery rhyme, Noor. It’s a key.”
Miss Wren nodded. “I believe Miss Tern’s loop is the meeting place.”
“Well, V was definitely an ymbryne,” Enoch said. “Always talking in riddles.”
“But that loop is gone,” Noor said doubtfully. “You said it was destroyed a long time ago.”
“It was,” said Miss Peregrine. “Which, admittedly, will make it harder to reach.”
“But makes it all the better a hiding place,” Miss Wren said with a gleam in her eye. “Very smart, squirreling it away in a place like that.”
“But how do you find a loop that isn’t there?” Noor asked.
“Leave that to us,” said Millard, and we all turned to see his robe floating in the open doorway. “Clear the way, please!”
He led two black-suited Temporal Affairs minions inside the room, and together they heaved a Map of Days that was even larger than the Tales through the door and dropped it on the kitchen table.
“Careful with that, it’s older than any of us!” Millard shooed them out the door and slammed it behind them. “Do you remember,” he said, turning to Noor, “when you asked whether it would be possible to visit very old, long-collapsed loops in places like ancient Rome or Greece, and I described a technique we call leapfrogging?”
Noor stood a little straighter. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to have to do now, in order to reach Miss Tern’s loop.”
“Is it hard?” I asked. “How long will it take?”
“That depends on what and where we have to leapfrog through,” Millard said, cracking open the atlas. “Miss Tern’s original loop was in northern France, which isn’t far from here as the crow flies. It was opened in 1916 and destroyed in 1918. Which is a fairly narrow window of time.” He started to carefully turn the pages, each one the size of a pillowcase. “It will mean finding another loop that was initiated during those few years, then traveling across the open past to reach Miss Tern’s loop before its collapse.”
“Does that mean crossing through a war zone?” asked Claire.
“We’re living in a war zone, Claire,” said Hugh, “what’s the difference?”
“It could get a bit hairy,” Millard conceded, “and complicated . . .”
“Nothing good is ever easy,” said Emma. “But if all six of the other prophesied ones are there, it’ll be worth the danger and trouble.”
“But what do I do when I find them?” Noor asked. “Are there any clues in the story about that?”
Miss Peregrine tried, I think, to seem reassuring. “Don’t worry about that yet, dear. I’m certain it will become clear eventually.”
Noor frowned and crossed her arms.
Millard was still turning pages in the temporal atlas, looking for a connecting loop, trying to figure out how much of the past we would have to cross to reach Miss Tern’s loop entrance, when someone started banging on the front door.
Hugh was closest, and ran to open
it.
A breathless young man was standing on the front steps. “Come quick! There’s a hollowgast loose in the Acre!”
“What?” Miss Peregrine spun to face him.
I ran to the door, my heart starting to race. “Is it ours?” I hoped he was talking about the one I’d tamed, that had fought by my side on Gravehill, was formerly the Panloopticon’s battery, and was now retired, recuperating—and, last I checked, imprisoned—in the former blood-sport arena.
“I don’t think so,” the boy said quickly. “This one’s different from any we’ve seen before. But in any case it’s wreaking havoc and hurting people, so if you aren’t too busy, Mr. Portman, could you please spare a moment to go and kill it?”
Miss Peregrine told everyone to shelter inside the house, then ran outside with me, Bronwyn, and Emma to see what was going on. I noted, amid the rush, that I hadn’t felt the hollow yet, which was strange, and probably bad. By now, my ability had developed such that I should’ve immediately felt any hollow that came within a mile’s radius of us, a distance that easily covered the length of the Acre.
“This one’s different how?” I called after the boy as we chased him down the steps.
He stopped at the footbridge and turned to face me. He looked frightened. “Mr. Portman, sir, even I can see this one.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
There weren’t supposed to be any untamed hollows left—and there definitely weren’t supposed to be any loose in Devil’s Acre. No one had been ready for it. The battlements we’d been prepping around the loop entrance weren’t finished. It had slipped through unscathed, and now it was raising hell a few hundred yards away, near the confluence where Fever Ditch met the smaller tributary that bisected our street. It leapt from barge to barge, terrorizing the boatmen who’d been unloading supplies, sending heavy crates crashing into the water, lashing its tongues at anyone in striking distance. It had already caught someone’s horse, and now it jumped atop a footbridge with the half-chewed creature hanging limp from its jaws and roared like King Kong.