by Ransom Riggs
“Well, thanks,” Noor said.
“Your timing could have been better,” said Enoch, edging in.
“And it could’ve been worse,” Emma added.
“At least his aim was true,” Sebbie said, massaging her throat in the approximate spot where Horatio had shot the wight.
Now everyone had joined our conversation.
“One question,” Millard said. “If you knew so much about the prophecy, why didn’t you tell us V’s heart was on the list of elements needed to resurrect Caul?”
“Master King did not know, because Mistress Velya never told him,” he answered plainly.
“If she had, H never would have sent us to find her,” I said.
“It would’ve meant admitting she was an ymbryne,” Emma said. “Which she probably didn’t want to do.”
“That’s a very boring mystery,” said Enoch, flapping his hand impatiently. “I want to know how you infiltrated the wights. Didn’t they know who you were?”
“They did not,” Horatio said, “because I disguised myself. This was not the face I emerged with, but a sewn-on one.”
Emma’s lips twisted in disgust and Noor mouthed, Whaaat?
“When my transition was complete, I found a wight and killed him, then removed his face and took it to Ellsworth Ellsworth, the Untouchables’ celebrated skin tailor. And this was the result.” He turned his cheek and raked the back of his hand across it like a model in a skincare ad. You could just make out a fine line of stitches that disappeared beneath his blond hairline.
“I stole his identity,” Horatio continued. “Mimicked his mode of speech and joined a band of wights operating in New York, among the last in America. At that point it was too late to stop the wights’ plot to break Percival Murnau and his comrades out of your Devil’s Acre prison, and too late again to prevent them from resurrecting Caul. But I learned that they intercepted one of your phone calls”—he gestured to Sophie, who hid her face in shame—“and I learned that they were planning to track Miss Pradesh in an attempt to discover the location of the meeting place.”
“So Caul knew about the seven,” Bronwyn said, newly awake and blinking groggily. “And the prophecy.”
“Of course,” Emma said. “That’s why he sent wights after Noor in the first place, when she was a little kid.”
“It was right there in the Apocryphon,” Horace said.
“Caul’s no fool,” Millard said. He turned to the light-eaters. “I don’t believe he’s losing sleep over you three—no offense intended—but he wasn’t about to go through all the pain and bother of getting himself resurrected without killing you as an insurance policy.”
“So we walked into a trap,” Noor said to Horatio. “And you came all that way to save us.”
“Yes,” Horatio replied, with no trace of either modesty or pride.
Noor clasped her hands together. “Thank you.”
“He’s going to keep trying to kill us,” said Julius. He had recovered his composure, and I noticed that his fingers and Horace’s were interlaced on the seat between them. “We slipped his trap, killed his hollows, humiliated his chief lieutenant monster. I’d be intent on murdering us if I were him. Wouldn’t you be?”
A brittle paranoia crept over me as our train slowed into St. Pancras Station. We were in the center of present-day London now, and there were too many people, too many eyes, and too many bodies, though not so many that we could disappear into the crush. We were a noticeable bunch, to put it mildly, despite each of us having spent an eternity in the train’s cramped bathroom trying to wipe battlefield mud from our faces and our clothes.
Caul and his agents could be anywhere, and we had to assume they would be looking for us. We had to assume Murnau had told Caul where we were heading. Or maybe Caul, invested now with powers beyond imagining, just knew.
We filed off the train in a protective clump. It was disorienting to be thrust into such a buzzing hive of twenty-first-century-ness. There were bright screens and signs everywhere, and nearly all the people flowing around us were staring at phones while they walked. At least they weren’t looking at us. Emma held a humiliated Addison at the end of a leash improvised from twine because there were rules about animals in public spaces, and rule-breaking could cause a scene, and we needed to disappear as well as a bunch of strange-looking kids dressed in mud-stained clothes from another era could.
“We need a phone,” I heard Millard say. He had pulled a scarf over his head and put on big dark glasses. He looked like old photos I’d seen of Jackie Kennedy.
Enoch went to snatch one from a passerby, but Millard caught his arm. “Not that sort of phone. A real one, inside a booth. I need to call the Acre.”
We left the platform area for the vast ticket hall, which looked like a sci-fi cathedral where people came to worship fast food. We were a cluster of swiveling heads, on the watch for attackers and analog phones from the previous century. As it turned out, most of the red phone booths, which are so iconically famous in London, no longer had actual phones inside them, but had been converted into charging stations and private spaces to make cell phone calls. After several minutes of fruitless searching we finally found an old phone booth with an old phone inside it, in a dingy corner near some bathrooms.
We crammed as many of us inside as would fit, which was less than half our number. My face was uncomfortably adjacent to Bronwyn’s armpit. Millard paged through a chunky phone book that dangled from a cord. “Most of the pages are torn out,” he grumbled.
My attention drifted through the glass. Outside, a crowd was gathering around a big flat-screen TV, but I couldn’t see what they were watching.
“What’s he doing?” Noor whispered in my ear.
“The ymbrynes have their numbers listed under fake names,” I explained. “He can connect to some of their loops if he whistles the right birdsong.”
She slipped her arms around my waist from behind and my hands rose instinctively to grip hers. How something so simple could feel so reassuring was both a mystery and a miracle.
“Miss you,” she whispered, and I nodded. Me too. I’d hardly left her side for days, but we’d had so little time to be alone and ourselves, she’d begun to feel distant. This thing between us was still new, still forming, and I worried that if we starved it now it would wither, never to be revived. But there was no time for dinner and a movie. Hardly even a minute to talk to each other, let alone hang out—something more important, be it planning or fleeing or fighting or catching a rare hour of sleep, was always taking precedence. Maybe one day, if this fighting ever came to an end, I could love Noor Pradesh the way she deserved to be loved.
Millard tapped the book excitedly. “Gee jolly jingo, here we are.” He squinted at the page, then plucked the phone from its cradle, pulled away his scarf, and held it to his invisible ear. After a couple of false starts he whistled a high and uncannily realistic birdcall. “It’s going through,” he said.
I heard a tinny voice on the other end say, “Ahoy.”
“Ahoy there, this is Millard Nullings. I need to speak with Alma Peregrine at once.”
She must have been waiting near the one room in Bentham’s house that contained a phone, because she came on the line almost immediately. Several of us pressed our heads together and strained to hear her.
“Millard, is that you?” The connection was tinny and crackling, but even so I could hear the breathless worry in her voice.
“Yes, it’s me, miss.”
After that, I couldn’t hear Miss Peregrine for a while, only Millard’s end of the conversation: “We’re all right. Yes, we’ve got the seven. Well, not all. Two more than we had before, so three altogether. Right. But that’s just fine . . . as it happens we didn’t need all of them. The other two are spares.” Julius scowled at this. “Yes, that’s right. We were chased out by Murnau and some hollowgast . . . Uh-huh
. . . Say, we were wondering if we should—well, there was talk of eating his soul . . . Oh? All right, let me relay that.” He pulled his head away from the receiver and covered it with his hand. “Miss P says we mustn’t under any circumstances attempt to engage Caul on our own. We should come back to the Acre right away.”
Bronwyn snatched the phone from Millard. “Miss, it’s your Bronwyn. Please, you’ve got to evacuate all the little ones from the Acre. Caul’s got a whole army of hollows on the way and they’re extremely nasty and Jacob won’t be able to control them. There must be some Panloopticon loop where the kids would be safe for a while—what’s that?” Her brow furrowed. “Oh.” Her voice deepened in shock. “Oh no.”
“Let us hear,” Enoch said, and managed to yank the receiver far enough away from Bronwyn’s ear that a few of us, crowding around, could make out Miss Peregrine’s voice.
“ . . . just after you went through to Miss Hawksbill’s loop,” she was saying, “and only moments before we shut down the Panloopticon again, one of Caul’s monstrous enhanced wights snuck into the house through one of the upper-floor loop doors. It wreaked havoc. Killed two home guards and seriously wounded Miss Plover and Miss Babax, though, thank the elders, they weren’t killed or our temporal shield would’ve disintegrated instantly. We mobilized a lot of people to fight him, and in the end he was felled—though much was damaged in the doing. I’m afraid the Panloopticon is inoperable, and far too risky to use even if it weren’t.”
“So you’re stuck there,” Emma said. “With nowhere to run.”
“We have no interest in running.”
“And there’s no way to reach you other than going through the loop entrance,” Enoch said, “which is probably surrounded by now—”
“Perhaps you should surrender?” said Addison. “Preserve lives in the face of what is clearly a superior and overwhelming force?”
We looked at him like he’d gone batty.
“Never!” Emma said. “I’d never surrender to Caul!”
“Even if it meant dying? And everyone you love dying?”
A flicker of hesitation crossed her face. But she maintained that death was preferable to becoming Caul’s prisoner or slave, and the rest of us agreed.
“Good,” Addison said. “I was just testing you.”
We discussed strategy with Miss Peregrine. There was talk of us “softening up” Caul’s forces from the outside while the Acre prepared a surprise attack from within. Millard suggested waiting until Caul and his forces tried to break through the shield, then assaulting from the rear while they were distracted—at which point the ymbrynes would drop the shield and attack.
“A classic pincer formation,” said Millard.
“Or we three light-eaters could find Caul and attack him,” said Julius. “I think you’re overcomplicating things.”
Miss Peregrine reiterated that we were not to fight Caul on our own. “You’re not to attempt anything. I want all of you to return only when it’s safe to do so. Until then, I want you to hide in our safe house near the Acre’s loop entrance and wait for us to come to you.”
“But, miss, the new light-eaters and Sophie are loop-trapped,” Bronwyn said. “They can’t stay in that safe house more than a day or they’ll age forward—”
“We won’t let that happen,” I heard Miss Peregrine say. “When the time is right, we’ll come. In the meantime, there are things we can do to harass Caul’s forces. We can make some desolations of our own.”
I’d been so focused on the call that I hadn’t noticed until then what was going on outside the booth. The crowd around the big TV had grown to several dozen, and they seemed frozen in place. I craned to see the screen through the tinted booth glass and caught a glimpse of a man with light shooting out of his eye sockets.
“Oh my God,” I said, pushing out of the booth for a closer look. I shouldered my way to the middle of the crowd, my blood going cold. The screen was showing footage of people running terrified down city streets. Then it cut to an aerial shot from a helicopter or a drone of a man and a woman who had clearly just ingested huge doses of ambrosia. They were in the middle of a bridge, beams of light from their eyes blackening the concrete as they swung their heads from side to side. The woman ripped the door off an abandoned car and flung it at a couple of people crouched behind a delivery truck. Then a man jumped out from behind the truck and raised both his hands, and the car the woman had been ripping apart slid suddenly toward the edge of the bridge, pushing her with it. She dove out of its way just before it tumbled into the river below.
We were watching a battle between peculiars unfold live on television. “They’re fighting!” Bronwyn cried, running up beside me. “And everyone can see!” My friends had left the phone hanging from its cord in the booth. They gathered around me, mouths open in disbelief.
A chyron rolled across the screen: FREAK ASSAULT ON CENTRAL LONDON.
“I recognize one of them,” Emma said. “The one throwing car parts. It’s that horrible woman . . .” I realized I did, too. She was the chain-smoking proprietor of a peculiar flesh market who we’d interrogated for information about the wights. Lorraine. She must have escaped the Acre before the ymbrynes started making arrests. She’d once been a mercenary with no loyalties. Now she’d sunk even further: She was an ambro addict fighting for Caul.
“I know the ones hiding behind the truck,” Millard said. “They’re part of the rescue team we sent to free Caul’s hostages.”
The man beside Lorraine turned toward a police cruiser that had just arrived and projectile-vomited a stream of something at it—it glinted silver in the sun, like hot liquid metal—which melted a hole in the hood of the cruiser and sent the two police officers inside running for their lives.
“This is awful, this is terrible, someone turn this off before we’re exposed!” Horace cried.
“It’s too late for that, mate,” said Enoch, and he pointed to three more screens nearby that were showing the same footage.
And yet the people around us seemed more skeptical than frightened. “This has got to be a joke,” said a man near us as he turned away.
“Promotion for a film, innit,” someone else agreed.
They just couldn’t believe it was real.
And then I heard a voice say, “Freak assault? Why, this is tame! Wait till they see what’s coming next!”
I turned and saw a man standing next to me in the crowd, a normal-sized man in a normal-enough shirt and tie connected to the ground by what appeared to be legs, and I was so shocked I froze for a moment.
It was Caul. His beaklike nose and jutting chin. His white eyes, full of laughing malice even in their blankness. He grinned, revealing sharpened canines. “Hello again, Jacob.”
And then Emma, fast to move and quick on the draw, slapped him in the face with a hand full of fire, and Caul spun around and collapsed to the floor.
There were screams of panic around us, and the crowd flooded away in a wave. Caul was writhing on the floor and howling, “The freaks—they’re here! They’re here!” He appeared to be melting into a black puddle on the floor. “I’m melting!” he screeched. “Meltiiinggg!!!”
In a moment only his empty clothes were left. The pool spread quickly, approaching our feet as we scrabbled backward away from it.
“Do something!” Sebbie shouted at Noor and Julius. “Now’s our chance.”
“To do what?” Noor said.
As if in reply, the black puddle began to pulse blue light in the rhythm of a heartbeat. Julius took the cue. “This,” he said, and spreading his arms he stepped forward. He moved to swipe the light from the puddle when an impossibly long arm shot up from it, and a clawlike hand wrapped its fingers around Julius’s throat.
A loud cackling laugh issued from the black pool. Julius fell to his knees, choking, his skin turning a deathly gray.
“Julius!�
� Sebbie screamed.
Noor broke away from me, though I tried to hold her back. She ran for the puddle, arms extended, but before she could steal the light from it the blue glow disappeared. A second arm rocketed out of the puddle at her. I tackled her to the floor and it missed her by inches.
Emma flared her hand-flames at the arm and it retreated like an angry snake. Millard screamed that no one else should touch the arm, and Bronwyn, who had been about to wrestle the one still choking Julius, stopped short. Then Sophie ran forward with Pensevus held high. The doll’s face was suddenly alive, its eyes aflame with anger and its mouth chomping hungrily. She flung Pensevus at the arm. The doll sunk a rack of razor-sharp teeth into Caul’s skin and bit straight through the bone in one bite. There was a piercing howl as the severed hand fell away from Julius’s throat. Julius slumped into Horace’s arms and Bronwyn dragged them both away.
And then something began to rise from the puddle, coalescing as it did. It was Caul, bigger now, dripping black liquid like a hollowgast, naked to the waist. He rose slowly as we gaped in horror. He was vaguely human but all wrong: his head was stretched vertically, his neck barely there, his chest concave and his back arched like someone being electrocuted. His arms were too long, thick and grasping like hollowgast tongues, and the right hand that had been severed was quickly growing back. His top half was nominally human but below that he was all trunk, a tree made not from wood but from what looked like mottled-gray flesh, the roots somewhere deep inside the puddle. He towered over us, growing taller until his head nearly bumped a rafter fifteen feet overhead. This was the horror Caul had become, his true form.
“We don’t have to fight,” he cooed softly. His voice was doubled, both high and low, like a child and a man mated to one soul. “Just kneel before me, children, and pray to your new master.”