by Ransom Riggs
No one had ever tried to kill me with bare hands before. That was something new, much different than being hunted by hollows, which ran on instinct. Different, too, than being shot at: bullets were a quick, impersonal way to kill. Using your hands, though—that took work. It required hate. It was a strange and sour thing to know that such hatred had been directed at me. That peculiars who didn’t even know my name had, in a moment of collective madness, hated me enough to try to beat out my life with their fists. I felt shamed by it, dehumanized somehow, though I couldn’t exactly understand why. It was something I’d have to reckon with, if one day I ever had the luxury of time to reckon with such things.
I turned on the tap to wash my face. The pipes shuddered and groaned, but after a big orchestral flourish, they produced only a hiccup of brown water. This Bentham fellow might’ve been rich, but no amount of luxury could cocoon him from the reality of the hellish place where he lived.
How had he ended up here?
More intriguing still: how did the man know, or know about, my grandfather? Surely that’s who Sharon had been referring to when he said Bentham was looking for an old man who could speak to hollows. Perhaps my grandfather had met Bentham during his war years, after he’d left Miss Peregrine’s house but before he’d come to America. It was a defining period of his life which he’d spoken about only rarely, and never in detail. Despite all I’d learned about my grandfather in the past few months, in many respects he remained a mystery to me. Now that he was gone, I thought sadly, perhaps it would always be so.
I put on the clothes Bentham had given me, a preppy-looking blue shirt and gray wool sweater combo with simple black pants. It all fit perfectly, as if they’d known I was coming. As I was slipping into a pair of brown leather oxford shoes, Emma knocked on the door.
“How’re you faring in there?”
I opened the door to a blast of yellow. Emma looked miserable in an enormous canary-colored dress with poufy sleeves and a hem that swam around her feet.
She sighed. “It was the lesser of many sartorial evils, I assure you.”
“You look like Big Bird,” I said, following her out of the bathroom, “and I look like Mr. Rogers. This Bentham is a cruel man.”
Both references were lost on her. Ignoring me, she crossed to the window and looked out.
“Yes. Good.”
“What’s good?” I said.
“This ledge. It’s the size of Cornwall, and there are handholds everywhere. Safer than a jungle gym.”
“And why would we care about the safety of the ledge?” I asked, joining her at the window.
“Because Sharon’s watching the hall, so obviously we can’t go out that way.”
Sometimes it seemed like Emma had whole conversations with me inside her head—ones I wasn’t privy to—and then she’d get frustrated that I was confused when she finally let me in on them. Her brain worked so quickly that once in a while it got ahead of itself.
“We can’t go anywhere,” I said. “We’ve got to meet Bentham.”
“And we will, but I’ll be hanged if I’m spending the next hour twiddling my thumbs in this room. Saintly Mr. Bentham is an exile living in Devil’s Acre, which means he’s likely a dangerous lowlife with a sordid past. I want to have a look ’round his house and see what we can find out. We’ll be back before anyone notices we’re gone. Word of honor.”
“Ah, good, a stealth operation. We’re dressed perfectly, then.”
“Very funny.”
I was in hard-soled shoes that made every footstep sound like a hammer blow, she was in a dress yellower than a hazard sign, and I’d only recently found the energy to stand on my own two feet—and yet I agreed. She was often right about these things, and I had come to depend on her instincts.
“If someone spots us, so be it,” she said. “The man’s waited eons to meet you, apparently. He’s not going to kick us out now for giving ourselves a little tour.”
She opened the window and climbed onto the ledge. I stuck my head out cautiously. We were two stories above an empty street in the “good” section of Devil’s Acre. I recognized a stack of firewood: it was where we’d been hiding when Sharon exited the abandoned-looking storefront. Directly below us was the law office of Munday, Dyson, and Strype. There was no such firm, of course. It was a front, a secret entrance to Bentham’s house.
Emma offered her hand to me. “I know you’re not a great fan of heights, but I won’t let you fall.”
After being dangled above a boiling river by a hollow, this little drop didn’t seem so frightening. And Emma was right—the ledge was wide, and decorative knobs and gargoyle faces protruded everywhere from the masonry, making natural handholds. I climbed out, grabbed on, and shimmied along after her.
When the ledge turned a corner, and we felt fairly certain that we were paralleling a hallway out of Sharon’s view, we tried opening a window.
It was locked. We shimmied on and tried the next one, but it, too, was locked—as were the third, fourth, and fifth windows.
“We’re running out of building,” I said. “What if none of them open?”
“This next one will,” Emma said.
“How do you know?”
“I’m clairvoyant.” And with that she kicked it, sending shattered glass into the room and tinkling down the front of the building.
“No, you’re a hoodlum,” I said.
Emma grinned at me and then knocked the last few shards from the frame with the flat of her hand.
She stepped through the opening. I followed, somewhat reluctantly, into a dark and cavernous room. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust. The only light came from the window shade we’d just broken, its puny glow revealing the edge of a packrat’s paradise. Wooden crates and boxes climbed to the ceiling in teetering stacks, leaving only a small aisle between them.
“I get the feeling Bentham doesn’t like to throw things away,” Emma said.
In reply, I released a rapid-fire triple sneeze. The air was swimming with dust. Emma blessed me and lit a flame in her hand, which she held up to the nearest crate. It was labeled Rm. AM-157.
“What do you think is in them?” I said.
“We’d need a crowbar to find out,” said Emma. “These are sturdy.”
“I thought you were clairvoyant.”
She made a face at me.
Lacking a crowbar, we ventured farther into the room, Emma enlarging her flame as we left the petering window light behind. The narrow path between the boxes led through an arched door and into another room, which was equally dark and nearly as cluttered. Instead of crates, it was crammed with bulky objects hidden beneath white dust covers. Emma was about to pull one away, but before she could I caught her arm.
“What’s wrong?” she said, annoyed.
“There might be something awful under there.”
“Yes, exactly,” she said, and tore away the cover, which scared up a cyclone of dust.
When the air cleared, we saw ourselves reflected dimly in a glass-topped case of the sort you find in museums, waist high and about four feet square. Inside, neatly arranged and labeled, were a carved coconut husk, a whale vertebra fashioned into a comb, a small stone axe, and a few other items, the usefulness of which wasn’t immediately obvious. A placard on the glass read Housewares Used by Peculiars on the Island of Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, South Pacific Region, circa 1750.
“Huh,” Emma said.
“Weird,” I replied.
She replaced the dust cover, even though there was little use in covering our tracks—it wasn’t as if we could unbreak the window—and we moved slowly through the room, uncovering other objects at random. All were museum displays of one type or another. The contents bore little relation to one another save that they had once been owned or used by peculiars. One contained a selection of brightly colored silks worn by peculiars in the Far East, circa 1800. Another displayed what appeared at first glance to be a wide cross-section of tree trunk but upon closer ins
pection was in fact a door with iron hinges and a knob made from a tree knot. Its placard read Entrance to a Peculiar Home in the Great Hibernian Wilderness, circa 1530.
“Wow,” Emma said, leaning in for a closer look. “I never knew there were so many of us in the world.”
“Or used to be,” I said. “I wonder if they’re still out there.”
The last display we looked at was labeled Weaponry of the Hittite Peculiars, Kaymakli Underground City, no date. Bafflingly, all we could see inside were dead beetles and butterflies.
Emma swung her flame around to look at me. “I think we’ve established that Bentham’s a history buff. Ready to move on?”
We hurried through two more rooms filled with dust-covered display cases, then arrived at a utilitarian staircase, which we climbed to the next floor. The landing door opened onto a long and lushly carpeted hallway. It seemed to go on forever, its regularly spaced doors and repeating wallpaper creating a dizzying impression of endlessness.
We walked along peeking into rooms. They were furnished identically, laid out identically, wallpapered identically: each had a bed, a night table, and a wardrobe, just like the room I’d recuperated in. A pattern of red poppy vines curled across the wallpaper and continued through the carpeting in hypnotic waves, making the whole place seem like it was being slowly reclaimed by nature. In fact, the rooms would’ve been entirely indistinguishable had it not been for the small brass plaques nailed to the doors, which gave each a unique name. All were exotic sounding: The Alps Room, The Gobi Room, The Amazon Room.
Perhaps fifty rooms lined the hallway, and we were halfway down its length—hurrying now, certain there was nothing of use to be discovered here—when a blast of air rolled over us that was so cold it prickled my skin.
“Whoo!” I said, hugging myself. “Where’d that come from?”
“Could be someone left a window open?” Emma said.
“But it’s not cold outside,” I said, and she shrugged.
We continued down the hall, the air chilling more the farther we went. Finally, we turned a corner and came to a section of hall where icicles had formed on the ceiling and frost glistened on the carpet. The cold seemed to be emanating from one room in particular, and we stood before it watching flakes of snow waft, one by one, from the crack beneath its door.
“That is very strange,” I said, shivering.
“Definitely unusual,” Emma agreed, “even by my standards.”
I stepped forward, my feet crunching on the snowy carpet, to examine the plaque on the door. It read: The Siberia Room.
I looked at Emma. She looked at me.
“It’s probably just a hyperactive air conditioner,” she said.
“Let’s open it and find out,” I said. I reached for the knob and tried it, but it wouldn’t turn. “It’s locked.”
Emma put her hand on the knob and kept it there for several seconds. It began to drip water as ice melted from inside it.
“Not locked,” she said. “Frozen.”
She twisted the knob and pushed the door, but it opened only an inch; snow was piled up on the other side. We put our shoulders to its surface and, on the count of three, shoved. The door flung open and a gust of arctic air slapped us. Snow flurried everywhere, into our eyes, into the hall behind us.
Shielding our faces, we peered inside. It was furnished like the other rooms—bed, wardrobe, night table—but here were indistinct humps of white buried under deep-piled snow.
“What is this?” I said, shouting to be heard above the wind’s howl. “Another loop?”
“It can’t be!” Emma shouted back. “We’re already in one!”
Leaning into the wind, we stepped inside for a closer look. I’d thought that the snow and ice were coming through an open window, but then the flurry abated and I saw there was no window at all, not even a wall at the far end of the room. Ice-coated walls stood on either side of us, a ceiling above us, and probably a carpet was somewhere below our feet, but where a fourth wall should’ve been the room gave way to an ice cave, and beyond that to open air, open ground, and an endless vista of white snow and black rocks.
This was, as near as I could tell, Siberia.
A single track of shoveled snow led through the room and into the whiteness beyond. We shuffled down the path, out of the room and into the cave, marveling at everything around us. Giant spikes of ice rose from the floor and hung from the ceiling like a forest of white trees.
Emma was hard to impress—she was nearly a hundred years old and had seen a lifetime’s worth of peculiar things—but this place seemed to fill her with genuine wonder.
“This is astonishing!” she said, bending to scoop up a handful of snow. She tossed it at me, laughing. “Isn’t it astonishing?”
“It is,” I said through chattering teeth, “but what’s it doing here?”
We threaded between the giant icicles and emerged into the open. Looking back, I could no longer see the room at all; it was perfectly camouflaged inside the cave.
Emma hurried ahead, then turned back and said, “Over here!” in an urgent voice.
I shuffled through deepening snow to her side. The landscape was bizarre. Before us was a white, flat field, past which the ground fell away in deep, undulating folds, like crevasses.
“We’re not alone,” said Emma, and pointed to a detail I’d missed. A man was standing at the edge of a crevasse, peering down into it.
“What’s he doing?” I said, more or less rhetorically.
“Looking for something, it would seem.”
We watched him walk slowly along the crevasse, always staring down. After about a minute, I realized I was so cold that I could no longer feel my face. A gust of snowy wind blew up and blanked the scene.
When it died down a moment later, the man was staring right at us.
Emma stiffened. “Uh-oh.”
“Do you think he sees us?”
Emma looked down at her bright yellow dress. “Yes.”
We stood there for a moment, our eyes locked on the man as he stared at us across the white wasteland—and then he took off running in our direction. He was hundreds of yards away through deep snow and a landscape of undulating fissures. It was unclear whether he meant us harm, but we were in a place we weren’t supposed to be and it seemed like the best thing to do was leave—a decision that was soundly reinforced by a howl, the likes of which I’d heard only once before, in the Gypsies’ camp.
A bear.
A quick look over our shoulders confirmed it: a giant black bear had clawed its way up from one of the crevasses to join the man on the snow, and they were both coming after us, the bear clearing ground much more quickly than the man.
“BEAR!” I shouted, redundantly.
I tried to run but my frozen feet refused to cooperate. Seemingly impervious to the cold, Emma grabbed my arm and swept me along. We lurched back into the cave, stumbled through the room, and tripped out the door, around which a penumbra of blowing snow was filling the hallway. I pulled the door shut behind us—as if that would stop a bear—and we retraced our steps down the long hall, down the stairs, and back into Bentham’s dead museum to hide ourselves among his white-draped phantoms.
* * *
We hid between a wall and a hulking dust-sheeted monolith in the farthest corner we could find, straitjacketing ourselves into a space so narrow that we could not turn to face each other, the cold we’d run from settling firmly into our bones. We stood silent and shivering, stiff as mannequins, the snow on our clothes melting into puddles at our feet. Emma’s left hand took my right—it was all the warmth and meaning we could trade. We were developing a language that was entirely untranslatable into words, a special vocabulary of gestures and glances and touches and increasingly deep kisses that was growing richer, more intense, more complex by the hour. It was fascinating and essential and in moments like this, made me just a little less cold and a little less scared than I might’ve been otherwise.
When, after a
few minutes, no bears showed up to eat us, we dared to exchange whispers.
“Was that a loop we were in?” I asked. “A loop within a loop?”
“I don’t know what that was,” Emma replied.
“Siberia. That’s what the door said.”
“If that was Siberia, then the room it was in was some kind of portal, not a loop. And portals don’t exist, of course.”
“Of course,” I replied, though it wouldn’t have been so strange to believe, in a world where time loops existed, that portals did, too.
“What if it was just a really old loop?” I suggested. “Like ice-age old, ten or fifteen thousand years? Devil’s Acre might’ve looked like that back then.”
“I don’t think there are any loops that ancient,” Emma said.
My teeth chattered. “I can’t stop shaking.” I said.
Emma pressed her side to mine and rubbed my back with her warm hand.
“If I could make a portal to anywhere,” I said, “Siberia would not be high on my list of choices.”
“Where would you go, then?”
“Hm. Hawaii, maybe? Though I guess that’s boring. Everyone would say Hawaii.”
“Not me.”
“Where would you go?”
“The place you’re from,” Emma said. “In Florida.”
“Why on earth would you want to go there?”
“I think it’d be interesting to see where you grew up.”
“That’s sweet,” I said. “There’s not much to it, though. It’s really quiet.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder and exhaled a warm breath down my arm. “Sounds like heaven.”
“You’ve got snow in your hair,” I said, but it melted when I tried to brush it out. I shook the cold water from my hand onto the floor—and that’s when I noticed our footprints. We’d left a trail of melting snow that probably led right to our hiding spot.
“What dimwits we are,” I said, pointing out the tracks. “We should’ve left our shoes behind!”
“It’s okay,” said Emma. “If they haven’t tracked us by now, they probably—”