by Ransom Riggs
Rise up.
“What are you doing?” Miss Peregrine cried. “Jacob, no—”
Bronwyn sprinted at me. The hollow’s jaw sprung wide and its tongues splayed out and caught her.
“Jacob!” she screamed, writhing against them.
“I’m sorry!” I shouted, picking up the bag again. “I love you all. That’s why I have to do this.”
I turned and ran, leaving them stunned. I hoped they would understand. I hoped one day they would forgive me. I knew it now: I would never see them again. After I helped Noor destroy Caul, I would disappear. Find the farthest, backwater loop I could and exile myself to some forgotten corner of the past. I was about to make myself into something unrecognizable. Something dangerous.
I would not saddle them with a monster.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The trail of droplets led me to the Library’s central chamber: a huge cavern shaped like a beehive, wide at the bottom and tapering to a point at the top, several stories up. But the top had caved in, and so had part of the rear wall, the work of monstrous giants that had been born here. Beyond the missing wall was a vacancy of orange air and the sound of an angry, pounding surf. A cliff’s edge.
The walls were festooned with glowing jars. Water poured from a tap shaped like a falcon’s head into a channel that ran around the edge of the room, then flowed into a wide, shallow pool pulsing dimmer and brighter in a breathlike rhythm. It was all the same way I remembered it, but for one thing: a column of undulating light that rose from the pool and beamed upward through the caved ceiling.
Into the channel, lad. Pour them all in.
I overturned my bag of jars, then emptied them into the channel one after another. The water bubbled and churned violently as it mixed with the suul. As those souls flowed into the stone-rimmed pool, its water steamed with silver-white vapor. And as that vapor joined the column of blue light, the slowly turning column pulsed brighter and turned faster.
I was moving toward the pool now, half-hypnotized by its beauty but filled with dread at what stepping into the water would mean.
The end of me. The birth of something unrecognizable.
And yet I had to. To spare the friends I loved from being hunted the rest of their days, which would be few if Caul lived out the night, I stepped toward the pool. To spare the world another murderous tyrant who believed himself a god, I stepped toward the pool. To save the life of Noor Pradesh, who was even now prepared to die to save all of ours, I moved closer still.
For Noor.
I had to.
I stepped toward the pool.
But the pool was starting to push back. The column of light was turning faster, making a wind of blue-and-silver sparks that blew back my hair, and faster still, whistling and howling and growing so strong I had to set my shoulders against it.
On a lower plane of mind I felt the hollowgast in the incubation room being overpowered. I had to let it go.
The light and the wind were strengthening in tandem. And in the periphery of my vision I could see something lowering through the hole in the roof, blocking out the disc of smoky orange sky above.
Then a voice rang down from the open roof: “Trespasser! Thief! Get out of my library!”
The wind roared in tandem with the voice, knocking me onto my hands and knees.
Hurry, lad! Bentham’s voice, in my head again. He’s found us out!
Every instinct was screaming at me to turn and run, to let the wind blow me back through the door, but I forced myself onward, dragging myself across the floor by my hands as Caul descended from above. He was enormous now; it was a tight squeeze through the hole in the broken roof. His tail of racing wind came first, tapering down to end—or rather begin—in the blue beam at the center of the spirit pool. No; it had always been here, had been here since I entered, but only now that he was lowering down from the outer world was it racing and roaring. The spirit pool was his source, the spring that fed him, and he was tied to it umbilically by this cable of wind.
A deafening crack from above. Boulders came crashing down as more of the roof gave way. Caul’s arms and fingers spidered down the walls.
I reached the edge of the pool and began to drag myself over the lip. I heard Bronwyn’s voice from across the room, shouting my name. I couldn’t stop to answer, or to think about what I was doing. I couldn’t afford to entertain even a moment of doubt.
The suul flowed all around me in veins of bright pulsing blue. I cupped my hands, let the liquid flow into them, brought them to my lips. And I drank.
No feeling came over me. No transformation. Nothing at all.
Caul was fully in the room now, his giant body filling the top half of the cavern. Bronwyn was coming, too, walking backward against the gale with the others gathered in her arms, shielded from the wind by her great frame.
I plunged my hands into pool and drank again.
Caul roared. If he’d meant to form words—Alma, what a delightful surprise! would’ve been his style—they were indecipherable. I craned my neck to see him raise his hands and spread his awful fingers. And then one of them, thick as a python, slithered around my waist. I was ripped into the air and flung away.
The world swam and tumbled and spun. I slammed into the rough floor and slid all the way to the corner. Things went black for a breath.
I shouldn’t have survived it. I was sure my bones were shattered. But after a moment I was able to pick up my head again. And there were my friends in Caul’s grip, wrapped in the tendrils of his long fingers, suspended high in the air. Emma, Bronwyn, Hugh, and Miss Peregrine—
An intense cold seized me. A terrible weight pressed on my lungs, and my vision swam and started to go black again. I leaned forward to vomit.
When I was done, I raised my head and saw Caul leaning down to grin at me. He held my friends in one giant hand. They were going limp, their lives draining slowly away. His other hand was empty, and closed, and coming at me fast.
He backhanded me out of the room. I flew through the doorway, skidded down the connecting tunnel and back into the incubation chamber.
For a moment I lay stunned. When I raised my head again, there was someone else in the room with me, and a strange pale light.
It was a girl. She was navigating by a stream of scintillating light that she’d blown out through her lips.
Noor.
Get up, I told myself, willed myself, and somehow my body, which should have been shattered, complied. I felt no pain. Only cold, and a heavy weight pressing on my lungs, and a lurching in my stomach. My legs took the weight and I rose. I rose—and kept rising. I thought for a baffling moment that I was floating like Olive, disconnected from the ground, and then I glanced down at my legs and they seemed wrong, too long, someone else’s . . .
Noor was staring at me, recoiling as her head tilted to take in my height. I tried to speak her name, but the word came out as a cry, a high keening wail.
And then I understood what I had become.
I felt no urge to kill her. No primal lizard-brain had overtaken my thoughts. In my head, at least, I was still myself.
I knelt down, my head touching the ground. An invitation.
She must have known on some level that it was me, because she let the wind push her in my direction, then climbed onto my back.
And then I opened my mouth, whipped out a long tongue, and secured it around her waist.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I ran into the chamber with Noor on my back, and when Caul saw us together he reared up in horror like an elephant who’d seen a mouse. He made the wind blow stronger, which slowed me a little, but I could feel new strength rippling through my limbs and my core. I bent my head, tightened my grip on Noor’s waist, and plowed ahead.
I tried to shout to Noor, to tell her what Bentham had told me,
but I couldn’t form human sounds, and the words came out as a screech.
But then Bentham’s voice echoed through the chamber, his real voice, not just in my head, but in the room—
“Drain his light! Drain it to the lees!”
I’d nearly reached the spirit pool when Caul brought his hand down again. I was knocked into the air, but before I could hit the ground and crush Noor under my weight, I shot out my other two tongues and whipped them around Caul’s arm. We swung upward through the air toward him, and I clung to his giant forearm.
Noor took a swipe at him. A stripe of blue light vanished from Caul’s torso. He bellowed in anger and tried to fling us away. My tongues were like elastic, and we snapped right back. Noor clawed at him again, tearing more of his light away and stuffing it into her mouth.
He dropped my friends to free up his other hand.
“You cannot kill a god!” he bellowed. “You are nothing, your prophecy means nothing!”
Yet he was wincing and howling at every swipe of Noor’s hands like he was being burned. And as she stuffed his light into her mouth, he began to both dim and shrink.
Caul raised the arm we were clinging to and swung his other hand, big as a dinner table, toward us. He was giant and lumbering and slow, and before he could smash us to jelly, I let go. We dropped fifty flailing feet to the spirit pool. I unlashed Noor from my waist to break our fall with my tongues and she rolled safely into the water.
Here in the pool was the source of Caul’s light, and Noor started vacuuming it into her mouth in great wide swaths. If Caul had had feet, he would have stomped her, but he had only his arms and his hands, and they were growing smaller by the second as Noor consumed his life-force. He was half the size he’d been when he first descended, though no less terrifying. He swung down both of his still-giant hands. With one he scooped up Noor. With the other he smacked me, hard, and I went flying, landing in a heap at the edge of the pool.
I heard her scream. I tried to intervene, but I could only raise my head. I saw Caul bringing her toward his mouth. Even as he drained her life, she was carving the light from his hand and from the column of blue around her.
“Give me back my sooouul!” he screamed, dangling Noor above his open mouth like a treat.
She had gone limp in his hand. I struggled up but couldn’t summon the strength of my tongues.
Caul was about to drop her down his throat when Miss Peregrine dove at Caul in bird form, slicing him across the cheek with her talons. He turned away to scream at her.
“You’re next, little sis—”
A thick cloud of bees flew into his mouth and down his throat. And Noor, who was not unconscious, who had been faking, reached out her hand and stole the light from Caul’s eyes.
Choking and blinded, he dropped her. She was much higher now, nearly to the broken roof, and a fall into this shallow water would probably have killed her. I raced toward the spot, flinging out my tongues to make a flying catch in the air, and we crashed down into the water together.
Caul thrashed, still trying to kill Noor by slapping blindly at the pool, and she wasted no time clawing away more and greater helpings of his light. And after a few more swaths and a few more swallows, he had shrunk down to the size of a mere sideshow giant. He couldn’t see, his throat was clogged with bees, his light was nearly gone; now it was inside Noor, shining so brightly from every pore that it was nearly impossible to look at her.
His wind had slowed to a breeze. With nothing left to support him, Caul’s torso came to rest on the stone rim of the pool, and his long arms flopped across the floor, twitching like downed power lines.
My friends surrounded the pool. Noor approached Caul, ready to deal a deathblow. He tried to speak, to beg for mercy, but his throat was clogged, and the only sound he could make was a buzzing gurgle.
There was but one speck of blue light left in the center of his forehead.
Noor stumbled. I shot out a tongue to support her.
“Can’t . . . hold it in . . .” She sucked in a pained breath.
She’d been weakened by Caul, and now she was so full of his light she was near to bursting. God only knew what it was doing to her.
“Just one more bite!” Bronwyn cried.
I helped her cross the pool to Caul. We’d nearly reached him when Noor put a hand on my tongue and pushed it off. “I’ve got to do this myself.”
I let her go. She took a wobbling step on her own, then another, until she stood before Caul.
With great effort he raised his head, as if to meet his death with some shred of dignity.
With one finger Noor scooped the light from his forehead.
“Go to hell,” she said, and then popped it into her cheek and swallowed.
Caul began to turn brittle, his skin to flake away. Holes opened in his chest, and Hugh’s bees flew out in a puff of ash.
In a croaking voice, he uttered his last words. “If I must . . . I’m taking you with me.”
He stretched out his arm toward Miss Peregrine. And with a single flap of her wings, she blew him to dust.
Caul was gone.
It seemed the cavern we were standing in would be soon, too. The ground was trembling beneath us, and more stones from the damaged ceiling were beginning to loosen and tumble down. One fell into the pool not far away, sending a wave of icy water over us.
Noor staggered into me, close to passing out. Bronwyn and I supported her arms and dragged her out of the spirit pool, and then Emma and Hugh ran with us toward the giant opening in the wall that led outside. Still in bird form, Miss Peregrine led the way.
We were running toward a cliff’s edge. We had no choice; the Library was collapsing behind us. There was nothing beyond the precipice but a steep drop to wave-tossed rocks and a black sea. Miss Peregrine flew out over the emptiness, scanning for some other escape from Abaton.
Over the deafening sound of the Library’s collapse, Noor was shouting, “Let me go! Get back!” Before I realized what was happening, she’d jerked out of our grasp and was running toward the edge of the cliff.
“NOOR!” the others screamed, but she’d stopped and fallen to her knees. With a great heave, she began to vomit a jet of silver-flaked blue into the void, so bright it knocked us back a few steps, so bright the others could only watch through split fingers.
It went on and on, racking Noor’s body until I feared she would burst apart. When it was finally over, she rocked back onto her heels, spent, the last gleams of Caul’s soul dissipating in the wind and the black ocean current.
And then she slumped to the ground.
We ran to her. I slid my arms under her, scooped her up. Her eyes were glassy but open, and she looked at me. I tried to speak but could not. I was still a hollowgast.
She said to me, “You’re glowing. It’s inside you.”
“My God,” Emma said, near tears. “Oh, Jacob, what have you done?”
“He’s saved us,” Noor said weakly.
“You have,” Hugh insisted.
“Put me down,” Noor said, and carefully, I did. She turned to face me, wobbling on unsteady legs. “Open your mouth.”
I hinged open my mouth as wide as I could, careful to keep my tongues back.
She reached her hand inside, past my rows of razor teeth, up to the elbow. When she pulled it out again, I felt the cold that had inhabited me ebb away. In her hand was a ball of glowing blue light. She put it into her mouth, closed her eyes, then turned and spat it over the cliff with the rest.
And then Miss Peregrine screamed as the cliff gave way beneath us.
For a long time there was only darkness, and the sound of distant thunder, and the hazy sensation of falling. That and the dark were all there was, for a long time, until another sound joined the thunder. Wind. Then rain, too. There was wind, and thunder, and rain, and falling.
And then, one sensation at a time, I came into being.
My eyes blinked open. Blurred shapes resolved into focus. Rough green fabric. A row of storm-blown plants tick-tocking from the rafters. A wall of insect screens shuddered and flapped.
I know this porch. I know this green floor.
How long had I been here? How many days? Time was playing tricks again.
“Jacob?”
I twisted where I lay and sat up, surprised that I could. My brain seemed to slosh from one side of my skull to the other, and the room swayed.
“Jacob!” Noor staggered into my field of view, then dropped down next to me, grasping for my arm.
I couldn’t yet form words. Wet black hair framed her face like a cowl. Her eyes were wide and searching, her lips parted slightly as if to speak, though she didn’t, her face raked with shallow cuts. I had a sudden, wild urge to kiss her.
She said: “It’s you!”
And I said: “It’s you.”
This time, words came out. English words.
Noor said, “No—I mean, God, it’s you! And you’re . . . you!” She was touching me all over, patting my chest, my face, as if to make certain I was real. “I was praying that would work, taking your light, and wouldn’t hurt you—and—wait, you’re not hurt, are you?”
A crack of thunder startled us both. And then I looked down at myself. My legs were a normal size again, though my pants were shredded. I moved my tongue inside my mouth. Just one.
I was me.
I threw my arms around her, laughing, half crazed with relief. “We’re alive! We’re okay!”
She hugged me hard, and then I kissed her, and for a long sweet moment there was nothing else in the world but the two of us, and her lips against mine, and her face in my hands. But as we drew apart, questions flooded in.
She looked outside, where a storm was blowing, and said, “Did we dream it all?”
“We couldn’t have,” I said. “Because, look—”
The wight Noor had killed was gone. There was a wide, rust-colored stain where his body had been. The porch screen had a giant hole in it, and half the aluminum ribs that anchored it to the house lay broken in the yard.