by Ransom Riggs
“If such a wonderful thing really exists, why haven’t you heard about it before now?”
“That’s it,” she said, and returned to sit next to me.
“You never heard about it—no one did—because of the unfortunate trouble with my brother.” Bentham’s expression darkened. “The machine was born with his help, but ultimately he was its downfall as well. Ultimately, the Panloopticon was never used as a tool to unite our people, as it was intended, but for quite the opposite purpose. The trouble began when we realized that the task of visiting every loop in the world so that we might re-create their entrances here was laughable at best—so far beyond our abilities that it bordered on delusional. We needed help, and a great deal of it. Luckily, my brother was such a charismatic and convincing fellow that recruiting all the help we needed proved easy. Before long we had a small army of young, idealistic peculiars willing to risk life and limb to help us achieve our dream. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my brother had a different dream than I did—a hidden agenda.”
With some effort, Bentham stood up. “There is a legend,” he said. “You might know it, Miss Bloom.” Tapping with his cane, he moved across the floor to the shelves and pulled down a small book. “It’s the tale of a lost loop. A kind of afterworld where our peculiar souls are stored after we die.”
“Abaton,” Emma said. “Sure, I’ve heard of it. But it’s just a legend.”
“Perhaps you can tell the tale,” he said, “for the benefit of our neophyte friend.”
Bentham hobbled back to the couches and handed me the book. It was slim and green and so old it crumbled around the edges. On the front was printed Tales of the Peculiar.
“I’ve read this!” I said. “Part of it, at least.”
“This edition is nearly six hundred years old,” said Bentham. “It was the last to contain the story Miss Bloom is about to recount, because it was regarded as dangerous. For a time it was a criminal act simply to tell it, and thus the book you hold is the only volume in the history of peculiardom ever to have been banned.”
I opened the book. Every page was handwritten in ornate, superhumanly neat script, and every margin was crowded with illustrations.
“It’s been a long time since I heard it,” Emma said tentatively.
“I’ll help you along,” Bentham said, lowering himself gently onto the couch. “Go on.”
“Well,” Emma began, “the legend goes that back in the old days—the really, really, thousands-of-years-ago old days—there was a special loop peculiars went to when they died.”
“Peculiar Heaven,” I said.
“Not quite. We didn’t stay there for all eternity or anything. It was more like a … library.” She seemed uncertain of her word choice, and looked to Bentham. “Right?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “It was thought that peculiar souls were a precious thing in limited supply, and it would be a waste to take them with us to the grave. Instead, at the end of our lives we were to make a pilgrimage to the library, where our souls would be deposited for future use by others. Even in spiritual matters, we peculiars have always been frugal-minded.”
“The first law of thermodynamics,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Or souls, in this case.” (Sometimes I surprise myself with the things I remember from school.)
“The principle is similar, I suppose,” said Bentham. “The ancients believed that only a certain number of peculiar souls were available to humanity, and that when a peculiar was born, he or she checked one out, as you or I might borrow a book from a library.” He gestured at the stacks around us. “But when your life—your borrowing term—was over, the soul had to be returned.”
Bentham gestured to Emma. “Please go on.”
“So,” Emma said, “there was this library. I always imagined it filled with beautiful, glowing books, each containing a peculiar soul. For thousands of years people checked out souls and returned them just before they died, and everything was rosy. Then one day someone figured out that you could break in to the library, even if you weren’t about to die. And he did break in—and then robbed the place. He stole the most powerful souls he could find and used them to wreak havoc.” Emma looked at Bentham. “Right?”
“Factually correct, if a bit artless in the telling,” Bentham said.
“Used them?” I said. “How?”
“By combining their powers with his own,” Bentham explained. “Eventually the library’s guardians killed the rogue, took back the stolen souls, and set things aright. But the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak. The knowledge that the library could be breached became a poison that spread throughout our society. Whoever controlled the library could dominate all peculiardom, and before long more souls were stolen. There dawned a dark time, in which the power-mad waged epic battles against one another for control of Abaton and the Library of Souls. Many lives were lost. The land was scorched. Famine and pestilence reigned while peculiars with power beyond imagination murdered one another with floods and lightning bolts. This is where normals got their tales of gods fighting for supremacy in the sky. Their Clash of the Titans was our battle for the Library of Souls.”
“I thought you said this story wasn’t real,” I said.
“I’m getting to that,” Bentham said, then turned to Nim, who was hovering nearby. “You can go, Nim. We don’t need any more tea.”
“Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to eavesdrop, sir, but this is my favorite part.”
“Then sit!”
Nim dropped cross-legged to the floor and propped his chin on his hands.
“As I was saying. For a short but terrible time, destruction and misery befell our people. Control of the library changed hands often, accompanied by immense bloodletting. Then one day it stopped. The self-declared king of Abaton had been killed in battle, and the one who killed him was on his way to claim the library for himself—but he never found it. Overnight, the loop had disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I said.
“There one day, gone the next,” said Emma.
“Poof,” said Nim.
“According to legend, the Library of Souls was located in the hills of the ancient city of Abaton. But when the would-be king arrived to claim his prize, the library was gone. So was the town. Gone as if they’d never been there at all, a smooth green meadow in their place.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“There’s nothing to it, though,” Emma said. “It’s just an old tale.”
“The Legend of the Lost Loop,” I said, reading the page that the book in my hands was open to.
“We may never know for certain if Abaton is a real place,” Bentham said, his lips spreading into a sphinx’s smile. “That’s what makes it a legend. But like rumors of buried treasure, the legendariness of the story has not stopped people, over the centuries, from searching for it. It is said that Perplexus Anomalous himself committed years to the hunt for the lost loop of Abaton—which is how he began to discover so many of the loops that appear on his famous maps.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Emma. “I suppose something good came of it, then.”
“And something very bad,” Bentham added. “My brother, too, believed the story. Foolishly, I forgave him this frailty—and I ignored it, realizing too late how completely it drove him. By then, my charismatic brother had convinced our small army of young recruits that it was true. Abaton was real. The Library of Souls was discoverable. Perplexus had gotten so close, he told them, and all that was left to do was to complete his work. Then the vast and dangerous power contained in the library could belong to us. To them.
“I waited too long, and this idea became a cancer. They searched and searched for the lost loop, mounting expedition after expedition, each failure only fueling their zeal. The goal of uniting peculiardom was forgotten. All along, my brother had cared only about ruling it, like the would-be peculiar gods of old. And when I tried to challenge hi
m and regain control of the machine I’d built, he smeared me as a traitor, turned the others against me, and locked me in a cell.”
Bentham had been squeezing the crook of his cane like a neck he wished he could wring, but now he looked up, his face gaunt as a death mask. “Perhaps by now you’ve guessed his name.”
My eyes snapped to Emma. Hers were wide as moons. We said it together:
“Caul.”
Bentham nodded. “His real name is Jack.”
Emma leaned forward. “Then your sister is …”
“My sister is Alma Peregrine,” he said.
* * *
We gaped at Bentham, thunderstruck. Could the man before us really be Miss Peregrine’s brother? I’d known she had two—she’d mentioned them once or twice, even shown me a picture of them as boys. She told me the story, too, of how their quest for immortality led to the disaster in 1908 that turned them and their followers into hollowgast and, later, the wights we knew and feared. But she’d never mentioned either brother by name, and her story bore little resemblance to the one Bentham had just laid out.
“If what you say is true,” I said, “then you must be a wight.”
Nim’s mouth fell open. “Mr. Bentham is not.” He was ready to stand and defend his master’s honor when Bentham waved him off.
“It’s all right, Nim. They’ve only heard Alma’s version of things. But there are gaps in her knowledge.”
“I don’t hear you denying it,” said Emma.
“I’m not a wight,” Bentham said sharply. He was also not accustomed to being questioned by the likes of us, and his pride was beginning to poke through his genteel veneer.
“Then would you mind if we checked,” I said, “just so we can be sure …”
“Not at all,” Bentham said. He pushed himself up with his cane and hobbled into the no-man’s-land between our couches. PT raised his head, idly curious, while Nim turned his back, angry that his master should have to endure such humiliations.
We met Bentham on the carpet. He bent down a little so we wouldn’t have to stand on our tiptoes—he was surprisingly tall—and waited while we searched the whites of his eyes for signs of contact lenses or other fakery. His pupils were terribly bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept in days, but otherwise unsuspicious.
We stepped back. “Okay, you’re not a wight,” I said. “But that means you can’t be Caul’s brother.”
“I’m afraid the set of assumptions you are working from is erroneous,” he said. “I was responsible for my brother and his followers becoming hollowgast, but I never became one myself.”
“You made the hollows?” Emma said. “Why?!”
Bentham turned and gazed into the fire. “It was a terrible mistake. An accident.” We waited for him to explain. It seemed to cost him real effort to drag up the story from wherever he’d hidden it away. “It was my fault for letting things go on as long as they did,” he said heavily. “I kept telling myself that my brother wasn’t as dangerous as he seemed. It was only after he imprisoned me, and it was too late to act, that I realized how wrong I’d been.”
He stepped closer to the warmth of the fire and knelt down to stroke the bear’s wide belly, letting his fingers get lost in PT’s fur. “I knew Jack had to be stopped, and not simply for my own sake—nor because there was any danger he’d ever find the Library of Souls. No, it was clear his ambitions had grown beyond that. For months he’d been molding our recruits into the foot soldiers of a dangerous political movement. He cast himself as an underdog fighting to wrest control of our society from what he called ‘the infantilizing influence of ymbrynes.’ ”
“Ymbrynes are the reason our society still exists,” Emma said bitterly.
“Yes,” Bentham said, “but you see, my brother was terribly jealous. From the time we were boys, Jack envied our sister’s power and status. Our inborn abilities were puny compared to hers. By her third birthday the elder ymbrynes who cared for us knew Alma was a great talent. People made such a fuss over her, and it drove Jack mad. When she was a baby he would pinch her just to see her cry. When she practiced turning into a bird, he would chase her and pluck her feathers.”
I saw an angry flame curl up from one of Emma’s fingers, which she extinguished in her tea.
“That ugliness only deepened over time,” Bentham said. “Jack was able to harness and exploit the same poisonous envy latent in some of our fellow peculiars. He held meetings and made speeches, rallying malcontents to his cause. Devil’s Acre was fertile ground, since many of the peculiars here were exiles, alienated from and hostile to the ymbrynic matriarchy.”
“The Claywings,” Emma said. “Before the wights became wights, that’s what they called themselves. Miss Peregrine taught us a little about them.”
“ ‘We don’t need their wings!’ Jack used to preach. ‘We’ll grow wings of our own!’ He meant this metaphorically, of course, but they used to march around wearing fake wings as a symbol of their movement.” Bentham stood up and motioned us toward the bookshelves. “Look here. I still have a photo or two from those days. A few he wasn’t able to destroy.” He pulled down an album from a shelf and turned to a picture of a large crowd listening to a man speak. “Ah, here’s Jack giving one of his hateful speeches.”
The crowd, almost exclusively male, wore big sturdy hats and were packed thirty deep, balancing on boxes and clinging to fence tops to hear what Caul had to say.
Bentham turned the page and showed us another photo, this one of two hale young men in suits and hats, one grinning earnestly, the other expressionless. “That’s me on the left, Jack on the right,” Bentham said. “Jack smiled only when he was trying to get something out of you.”
Lastly, he turned to a photo of a boy with a pair of large owlish wings that spread from behind his shoulders. He was slouched on a pedestal and regarded the camera with quiet contempt, one eye hidden behind his cocked hat. Printed across the bottom were the words We don’t need their wings.
“One of Jack’s recruiting posters,” Bentham explained.
Bentham held the second photo closer, studying his brother’s face. “There had always been a darkness in him,” he said, “but I refused to see it. Alma’s vision was sharper—she pushed Jack away early. But Jack and I were close in age and in mentality, or so I thought. We were chums, thick as thieves. But he hid his true self from me. I didn’t see him for what he was until the day I said, ‘Jack, you have stop this,’ and he had me beaten and thrown into a lightless hole to die. By then it was too late.”
Bentham looked up, his eyes reflecting the fire’s glow. “It’s quite something to realize you mean less than nothing to your own brother.” He was quiet for a moment, tangled in an awful memory.
“But you didn’t die,” said Emma. “You turned them into hollows.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I tricked them.”
“Into becoming horrible monsters?” I said.
“I never meant to turn them into monsters. I meant only to get rid of them.” He returned stiffly to the couch and lowered himself onto the cushions. “I was starving, near death when it came to me: the perfect story with which to ensnare my brother. A lie as old as humanity itself. The fountain of youth. With my finger I scratched it into the dirt of my cell floor: the steps of an obscure loop manipulation technique that could reverse, and forever eliminate, the dangers of aging forward. Or so it seemed. In reality, that was just a side effect of what the steps truly described, which was an arcane and largely forgotten procedure to collapse loops, quickly and permanently, in an emergency.”
I pictured the “autodestruct” button of sci-fi cliché. A supernova in miniature; stars winking out.
“I never expected my trick to work so well,” Bentham said. “A member of the movement whose sympathy I had earned circulated my technique as his own, and Jack believed it. He led his followers to a distant loop to enact the procedure—and there, I hoped, they would slam the door behind themselves forever
.”
“But that’s not what happened,” said Emma.
“Is that when half of Siberia got blown up?” I asked.
“The reaction was so strong, it lasted a day and a night,” said Bentham. “There are photos of it, and of the aftermath …”
He nodded at the album on the floor, then waited while we found the pictures. One, taken at night in some indistinct wilderness, was striped by a jet of vertical flame, a massive but distant release of white-hot energy that lit the night like a skyscraper-sized Roman candle. The other was a ruined village made up of rubble and cracked houses and trees raked clean of bark. Just looking at it, I could almost hear a lonely wind blowing; the palpable silence of a place robbed suddenly of life.
Bentham shook his head. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine what would crawl out of that collapsed loop,” he said. “For a brief time afterward, things were quiet. Released from confinement, I began to recover. I regained control of my machine. It seemed my brother’s dark age had drawn to a close—but it was only beginning.”
“That was the start of the Hollow Wars,” Emma said.
“Soon we began to hear stories about creatures made of shadow. They were emerging from the ruined forests to feed on peculiars—and normals, and animals, and anything that would fit between their jaws.”
“Once I saw one eat a car,” Nim said.
I said, “A car?”
“I was inside it,” he replied.
We waited for him to elaborate.
“And?” said Emma.
“I got away,” he said, shrugging. “The steering column got stuck in its throat.”
“May I continue?” said Bentham.
“Of course, sir. My apologies.”
“As I was saying, there wasn’t much that would stop these new abominations, save the odd steering column—and loop entrances. Luckily, we had plenty of those. So most of us dealt with the hollowgast problem by staying put in our loops, venturing out only when we had no choice. The hollows didn’t end our lives, but they made them vastly more difficult, isolated, and dangerous.”