by Ransom Riggs
Loud, clonking footsteps echoed from across the room, accompanied by the sound of a large animal breathing.
“Back to the window, quick as you can,” Emma hissed, and we wormed out of our hiding spot.
I tried to run but slipped in a puddle. I grabbed the closest thing at hand, which happened to be the sheet covering the large object we’d been hiding behind. The sheet came ripping away, uncovering another display case with a resounding zzzzzzwit! and landing me on the floor in a pile of rumpled canvas.
When I looked up, the first thing I saw was a girl—not Emma, who was standing above me, but past her, inside the case, behind the glass. She had a perfectly angelic face and a ruffled dress and a bow in her hair, and she stared glassily at nothing in what seemed the permanent rictus of a taxidermied human being.
I freaked. Emma turned to see what I was freaking out about, and then she freaked.
She dragged me to my feet and we ran.
* * *
I’d forgotten all about the guy chasing us, the bear, Siberia. I just wanted to get out of that room, away from the stuffed girl, and far away from any possibility that Emma and I might end up like her, dead and encased behind glass. Now I knew all I needed to know about this Bentham guy—he was some kind of twisted collector, and I was sure that if we looked under more dust covers, we’d find more specimens like the girl.
We sped around a corner only to find, towering before us, a terrifying ten-foot mountain of fur and claws. We screamed, tried too late to stop running, and slid into a pile at the bear’s feet. There we cowered, waiting to die. Hot, stinking breath rolled over us. Something wet and rough mopped the side of my face.
I’d been licked by a bear. I’d been licked by a bear, and someone was laughing.
“Calm yourself, he won’t bite!” the someone said, and I uncovered my face to see a long furry nose and big brown eyes staring down at me.
Had the bear spoken? Do bears talk about themselves in the third person?
“His name’s PT,” the someone continued, “and he’s my bodyguard. He’s quite friendly, provided you stay on my good side. PT, sit!”
PT sat, then began licking his paw instead of my face. I flipped myself right side up, wiped the slobber from my cheek, and finally saw the owner of the voice. He was an older man—a gentleman—and he wore a subtle smirk that complemented his killer outfit: top hat, cane, gloves, and a high white collar that rose from the top of his dark jacket.
He bowed slightly and tipped his hat. “Myron Bentham, at your service.”
“Back away slowly,” Emma whispered in my ear, and we stood up together and side-stepped out of the bear’s reach. “We don’t want any trouble, mister. Just let us go and no one gets hurt.”
Bentham spread his arms and smiled. “You’re free to leave anytime you like. But that would be such a disappointment. You’ve only just arrived, and we have so much to talk about.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Maybe you can start by explaining that girl in the case over there!”
“And the Siberia Room!” said Emma.
“You’re upset, you’re cold, and you’re wet. Wouldn’t you rather discuss all this over a pot of hot tea?”
Yes, but I wasn’t going to say so.
“We’re not going anywhere with you until we know what’s happening here,” said Emma.
“Very well,” Bentham replied, not losing an ounce of his good humor. “That was my assistant you surprised in the Siberia Room—which, as you likely gathered, leads to a time loop in Siberia.”
“But that’s impossible,” said Emma. “Siberia is thousands of miles away.”
“Three thousand four hundred and eighty-nine,” he replied. “But making interloop travel possible has been my life’s work.” He turned to me. “As for the case you uncovered, that’s Sophronia Winstead. She was the first peculiar child born to the royal family of England. Fascinating life she led, if a bit tragic in the end. I have all sorts of notable peculiars here in my peculiarium—well known and unknown, famous and infamous—any or all of which I’m happy to show you. I have nothing to hide.”
“He’s a psycho,” I muttered to Emma. “He just wants to stuff us and add us to his collection!”
Bentham laughed. (His hearing, apparently, was very sharp.) “They’re only wax models, my boy. I am a collector and a preservationist, yes—but not of humans. Do you really think I waited so long to meet you, only to pull out your insides and lock you in a cabinet?”
“I’ve heard of stranger hobbies,” I said, thinking of Enoch and his army of homunculi. “What is it you want with us?”
“All in good time,” he said. “Let’s get you warm and dry first. Then, tea. Then—”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Emma cut in, “but we’ve spent too much time here already. Our friends—”
“Are all right, for the moment,” Bentham said. “I’ve looked into the matter, and it isn’t as close to midnight for them as you might imagine.”
“How do you know?” Emma said quickly. “What do you mean, it isn’t close—”
“What do you mean, looked into it?” I said, talking over her.
“All in good time,” Bentham repeated. “I know it’s difficult, but you must be patient. There’s too much to tell all at once, and in such a sorry state.” He stretched out an arm toward us. “Look. You’re shivering.”
“Fine, then,” I said. “Let’s have tea.”
“Excellent!” said Bentham. He rapped his cane twice on the floor. “PT, come!”
The bear grunted in an agreeable sort of way, stood on its hind legs, and walked—waddling like a stubby-legged fat person—to where Bentham stood. Upon reaching him, the animal bent down and scooped him into the air, carrying him like a baby, one paw supporting his back and the other his legs.
“I know it’s an unconventional way to travel,” Bentham said over PT’s bushy shoulder, “but I tire easily.” He pointed ahead of them with his cane and said, “PT, library!”
Emma and I watched in amazement as PT began to walk away with Mr. Bentham.
You don’t see that every day, I thought. Which was true of nearly everything I’d seen that day.
“PT, stop!” Bentham commanded.
The bear stopped. Bentham waved to us.
“Are you coming?”
We’d been staring.
“Sorry,” Emma said, and we ran to catch up.
* * *
We wended our way through the maze after Bentham and his bear.
“Is your bear peculiar?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s a grimbear,” said Bentham, rubbing PT’s shoulder affectionately. “They are the preferred companion of ymbrynes in Russia and Finland, and grimbear-taming is an old and respected art among peculiars there. They’re strong enough to fight off a hollowgast yet gentle enough to care for a child, they’re warmer than electric blankets on winter nights, and they make fearsome protectors, as you’ll see here … PT, left!”
As Bentham extolled the virtues of grimbears, we came into a small anteroom. Under a glass canopy in the middle of the room were three ladies and, towering over them, a giant, vicious-looking bear. My breath caught for a moment before I realized they were motionless, another of Bentham’s displays.
“That’s Miss Waxwing, Miss Troupial, and Miss Grebe,” Bentham said, “and their grim, Alexi.”
The grimbear, on second look, appeared to be protecting the wax ymbrynes. The ladies were posed calmly around it while the bear was raised on its hind legs, frozen in midroar while swiping its paw at an enemy. Its other paw rested almost sweetly on one of the ymbrynes’ shoulders, and her fingers were hooked around one of its long nails, as if to demonstrate her casual mastery over such a fearsome creature.
“Alexi was PT’s great-uncle,” Bentham said. “Say hello to your uncle, PT!”
PT grunted.
“If only you could do that with hollows,” Emma whispered to me.
“How long does it take to train a grimbear?�
�� I asked Bentham.
“Years,” he replied. “Grims are naturally very independent.”
“Years,” I whispered to Emma.
Emma rolled her eyes. “And is Alexi made of wax, too?” she said to Bentham.
“Oh no, he’s taxidermy.”
Apparently Bentham’s aversion to stuffing peculiar folk did not extend to peculiar animals. If Addison were here, I thought, there’d be fireworks.
I shivered. Emma ran a warm hand up my back. Bentham noticed, too, and said, “Forgive me! I so seldom have visitors that I can’t help showing off my collection when they come. Now, I keep promising tea, and tea there shall be!”
Bentham pointed his cane and PT resumed walking. We followed them out of the dust-sheeted artifact storerooms through other parts of the house. It was in many ways the home of an average rich man—there was a marble-columned entry hall, a formal dining room with tapestried walls and seating for dozens, wings whose sole purpose seemed to be the display of tastefully arranged furnishings. But in each room, alongside everything else, were always a few objects from Bentham’s peculiar collection.
“Fifteenth-century Spain,” he said, indicating a gleaming suit of armor standing in a hall. “Had it made new. Fits me like a glove!”
At last we came to the library—the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Bentham told PT to set him down, brushed fur from his jacket, and showed us in. The room was three stories high at least, with shelves rising to dizzying heights above us. An array of staircases, catwalks, and rolling ladders had been constructed to reach them.
“I confess I haven’t read them all,” Bentham said, “but I’m working on it.”
He ushered us toward a battalion of couches surrounding a flaming hearth whose warmth filled the room. Waiting by the fire were Sharon and Nim. “Call me an untrustworthy lout!” Sharon hissed, but before he berated me further Bentham shooed him away to fetch us blankets. We were under the protection of the master’s good graces, and Sharon’s tongue-lashing would have to wait.
Within a minute we were seated on a couch and wrapped in blankets. Nim fluttered around preparing tea on gilded trays, and PT, curled before the flames, was fast settling into a state of hibernation. I tried to resist the feeling of cozy contentedness that was beginning to settle over me and focus on our unfinished business—the big questions and seemingly intractable problems. Our friends and ymbrynes. The absurd and hopeless task we had assigned ourselves. It was enough to crush me if I thought about it all at once. So I asked Nim for three lumps of sugar and enough cream to turn the tea white, then downed it in three gulps and asked for more.
Sharon had retreated to a corner, where he could sulk but still overhear our conversation.
Emma was eager to dispense with the formalities. “So,” she said. “Can we talk now?”
Bentham ignored her. He was sitting across from us but staring at me, the oddest little grin on his face.
“What?” I said, wiping a dribble of tea from my chin.
“It’s uncanny,” he replied. “You’re the spitting image.”
“Of who?”
“Of your grandfather, of course.”
I lowered my teacup. “You knew him?”
“I did. He was a friend to me, long ago, when I badly needed one.”
I glanced at Emma. She’d gone a bit pale and was clenching her teacup.
“He died a few months ago,” I said.
“Yes. I was very sorry to hear it,” Bentham said. “And surprised, to be honest, that he held out as long as he did. I assumed he’d been killed years ago. He had so many enemies—but he was exceedingly talented, your grandfather.”
“What was the nature of your friendship, exactly?” said Emma, her tone like a police interrogator’s.
“And you must be Emma Bloom,” Bentham said, finally looking at her. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
She seemed surprised. “You have?”
“Oh, yes. Abraham was very fond of you.”
“That’s news to me,” she said, blushing.
“You’re even prettier than he said you were.”
She clenched her jaw. “Thank you,” she said flatly. “How did you know him?”
Bentham’s smile wilted. “Down to business, then.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said, though his demeanor had cooled by a few degrees. “Now, you asked me before about the Siberia Room, and I know, Miss Bloom, that you were unsatisfied with the answer I gave.”
“Yes, but I’m—we are—more interested in Jacob’s grandfather, and why you brought us here.”
“They are related, I promise. That room, and this house generally, is the place to begin.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell us about the house.”
Bentham took a breath and steepled his fingers against his lips for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “This house is filled with priceless artifacts I’ve brought back over a lifetime of expeditions, but none are more valuable than the house itself. It is a machine, a device of my own invention. I call it the Panloopticon.”
“Mr. Bentham’s a genius,” Nim said, laying a plate of sandwiches before us. “Sandwich, Mr. Bentham?”
Bentham waved him away. “But even that is not quite bedrock,” he continued. “My story begins long before this house was built, when I was a lad about your age, Jacob. My brother and I fancied ourselves explorers. We pored over the maps of Perplexus Anomalous and dreamed of visiting all the loops he’d discovered. Of finding new ones, and visiting them not just once, but again and again. In this way we hoped to make peculiardom great again.” He leaned forward. “Do you understand what I mean?”
I frowned. “Make it great … with maps?”
“No, not just with maps. Ask yourself: what makes us weak, as a people?”
“Wights?” Emma guessed.
“Hollows?” I said.
“Before either of them existed,” Bentham prodded.
Emma said, “Persecution by normals?”
“No. That is just a symptom of our weakness. What makes us weak is geography. There are, by my rough estimate, some ten thousand peculiars in the world today. We know there must be, just as we know there must be other planets in the universe that harbor intelligent life. It is mathematically mandatory.” He smiled and sipped his tea. “Now just imagine ten thousand peculiars, all with astounding talents, all in one place and united by a common cause. They’d be a power to be reckoned with, no?”
“I suppose so,” Emma said.
“Most definitely so,” Bentham said. “But we are splintered by geography into hundreds of weak subunits—ten peculiars here, twelve there—because it is extraordinarily difficult to travel from a loop in the Australian outback, for example, to a loop in the horn of Africa. There are not only the inherent dangers of normals and the natural world to consider, but the dangers of aging forward during a long journey. The tyranny of geography precludes all but the most cursory visits between distant loops, even in this modern era of air travel.”
He paused for a moment before continuing, his eyes scanning the room.
“Now then. Imagine there was a link between that loop in Australia and the one in Africa. Suddenly those two populations could develop a relationship. Trade with each other. Learn from each other. Band together to defend each other in times of crisis. All sorts of exciting possibilities arise which were previously impossible. And gradually, as more and more such connections are made, the peculiar world is transformed from a collection of far-flung tribes hiding in isolated loops to a mighty nation, united and strong!”
Bentham had grown increasingly animated as he spoke, and at this last bit he’d raised his hands and spread his fingers like he was grasping for an invisible pull-up bar.
“Hence the machine?” I ventured.
“Hence the machine,” he said, lowering his hands. “We’d been searching, my brother and I, for an easier way to explore the peculiar world, and instead we hit upon a
way to unite it. The Panloopticon was to be the savior of our people, an invention that would change the nature of peculiar society forever. It works like this: you begin here, in the house, with a small piece of the machine called a shuttle. It fits in your hand,” he said, opening his palm. “You take it with you, out of the house, out of the loop, and then across the present to another loop, which could be on the other side of the world or the next village over. And when you return here, the shuttle will have collected and brought back the DNA-like signature of that other loop, which can be used to grow a second entrance to it—here, inside this house.”
“In that hallway upstairs,” Emma guessed. “With all the doors and little plaques.”
“Exactly,” said Bentham. “Every one of those rooms is a loop entrance that my brother and I, over the course of many years, harvested and brought back. With the Panloopticon, the initial, arduous trek of first contact has to be made only once, and every return trip thereafter is instantaneous.”
“Like laying telegraph lines,” Emma said.
“Just so,” said Bentham. “And in that way, theoretically, the house becomes a central repository for all loops everywhere.”
I thought about that. About how hard it had been to reach Miss Peregrine’s loop the first time. What if instead of having to go all the way to a little island off the coast of Wales, I could’ve entered Miss Peregrine’s loop from my closet in Englewood? I could have lived both lives—at home with my parents, and here, with my friends and Emma.
Except. If that had existed, Grandpa Portman and Emma never would’ve had to break up. Which was a sentence so strange it gave me the tailbone-tingling willies.
Bentham stopped and sipped his tea. “Cold,” he said, and set it down.
Emma peeled off her blanket, got up, crossed the floor to Bentham’s couch, and dipped the tip of her index finger in his tea. In a moment it was boiling again.
He grinned at her. “Fantastic,” he said.
She removed her finger. “One question.”
“I’ll bet I know what it is,” Bentham said.
“Okay. What is it?”