by Ransom Riggs
Emma and I were panting from running.
“Bronwyn says . . . you found something,” Emma said.
“I wanted to test a theory,” said Millard. “So while you two were dallying in the woods, I asked Olive to take a walk around the house.”
Olive took a couple of steps, her lead shoes making a heavy thud with each footfall.
“Imagine my surprise when I had her walk through this room. Olive, would you demonstrate?”
Olive started at the wall and stomped across the room. When she reached the very center of the floor, the sound her lead shoes made changed from a solid thwump to something more hollow—and slightly metallic.
“There’s something under there,” I said.
“A void. A concavity,” said Millard.
I heard Millard’s knee connect with the floor, and then a letter opener floated over the floor, point down. It was thrust between two boards, and with a grunt Millard pried up a section of floor about three feet square. It swung back on a hinge, revealing a metal door that looked just large enough for a grown man to fit through.
“Holy shit.”
Olive looked aghast. I rarely swore in front of them, but this was just . . . well, holy shit.
“It’s a door,” I said.
“More of a hatch, really,” said Bronwyn.
“I hate to say I told you so,” said Millard. “But—I told you so.”
The metal door was made of dull gray steel. It had a recessed handle and a number pad. I knelt down and rapped the metal with my knuckle. It sounded thick and strong. Then I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“It’s locked,” said Olive. “We already tried to open it.”
“What’s the combination?” Bronwyn asked me.
“How should I know?”
“Told you he wouldn’t,” said Enoch. “You don’t know much, do you?”
I sighed. “Let me think for a second.”
“Could the code be someone’s birthday?” asked Olive.
I tried a few—mine, Abe’s, my dad’s, my grandmother’s, even Emma’s—but none worked.
“It’s not a birthday,” said Millard. “Abe would never have made the combination something so obvious.”
“We don’t even know how many numbers are in the combination,” said Emma.
Bronwyn squeezed my shoulder. “Come on, Jacob. Think.”
I tried to focus, but I was letting hurt feelings distract me. I had always thought of myself as closer to Abe than anybody. So how was it that he never mentioned the secret door in the floor of his study? He lived more than half his life in the shadows, and never made a real attempt to share it with me. Sure, he told me stories that sounded like fairy tales and shared a few old photos, but he never showed me anything. I never would have doubted his stories if he’d made more of an effort to prove them—like showing me the secret door to his secret room.
Unlike my father, I wanted to believe.
Had he really been so injured by my skepticism that it made him abandon some plan to tell me everything? I couldn’t believe that anymore. If he had told me the truth plainly, I would’ve guarded his secrets with my life. I think, in the end, he just didn’t want me to know because he didn’t trust me. And now here I was trying to guess the combination to a door he had never told me about, behind which were secrets he had never meant for me to uncover.
So why was I bothering?
“I’m out of ideas,” I said, and stood up.
“You’re giving up?” said Emma.
“Who knows,” I said. “Maybe it’s just a root cellar.”
“You know it’s not.”
I shrugged. “My grandmother took fruit preservation very seriously.”
Enoch let out a frustrated sigh. “Maybe you’re holding out on us.”
“What?” I said, turning toward him.
“I think you know the code but you want to keep Abe’s secrets for yourself. Even though we found the door.”
I took an angry step toward him. Bronwyn put herself between us.
“Jacob, settle down! Enoch, shut up. You’re not helping.”
I gave him the finger.
“Ahh, who cares what’s in Abe’s dusty old hole in the ground,” said Enoch, and then he laughed. “It’s probably just a thousand old love letters from Emma.”
Now Emma gave him the finger, too.
“Or maybe a shrine with a big photo of her and candles all around . . .” He clapped his hands gleefully. “Oh, that would be so awkward for you two!”
“Come here so I can burn your eyebrows off,” said Emma.
“Ignore him,” I said.
She and I retreated to the doorway with our hands in our pockets. He’d gotten to both of us.
“I’m not hiding anything,” I said quietly. “I really don’t know what the code is.”
“I know,” she said, and touched my arm. “I was thinking. Maybe it’s not a number.”
“But it’s a number pad.”
“Maybe it’s a word. Look, the keys have letters and numbers.”
I went over to the door and looked. She was right: Every number key had three letters below it, like the buttons on a telephone.
“Was there a word that would have meant something to the both of you?” she said.
“E-m-m-a?” Enoch said.
I turned toward him. “I swear to God, Enoch . . .”
Bronwyn picked him up and threw him over her shoulder.
“Hey! Put me down!”
“You’re getting a time-out,” said Bronwyn, and she walked him out of the room while he wriggled and complained.
“As I was saying,” said Emma. “Some secret you had between the two of you. Something only you would know.”
I considered it for a moment, then knelt down by the hatch. First, I tried names—mine, Abe’s, Emma’s—but no dice. Then, just for the hell of it, I keyed in the word p-e-c-u-l-i-a-r.
Nope. Way too obvious.
“You know, it might not even be in English,” said Millard. “Abe spoke Polish, too.”
“Maybe you should take the night to think it over,” Emma said.
But now my mind was whirring. Polish. Yes, he spoke it now and then, mostly to himself. He’d never taught me any, except for one word. Tygrysku—a pet name he’d given me. It meant “little tiger.”
I punched it in.
The tumblers inside the lock opened with a clunk.
Holy shit.
* * *
• • •
The door opened to reveal a ladder descending into darkness. I swung my foot onto the first rung.
“Wish me luck,” I said.
“Let me go first,” Emma said. She held out her palm and made a flame.
“It should be me,” I said. “If there’s anything nasty waiting down there, I want to get eaten first.”
“How very chivalrous,” said Millard.
I climbed down ten steps onto a concrete floor. It was cooler than the house above by ten or fifteen degrees. Before me was total darkness. I took out my phone and shone its light around, which was only bright enough to show me the walls—curved, gray concrete. It was a tunnel: claustrophobically tight, so low I had to hunch. My phone light was too puny to see what lay ahead, or how far the tunnel went.
“Well?” Emma called down.
“No monsters!” I shouted. “But I could use more light.”
So much for chivalry.
“Be right there!” said Emma.
“Us too!” I heard Olive say.
It was only then, as I was waiting for my friends to climb down, that it hit me—my grandfather had meant for me to find this place.
Tygrysku. It was a bread crumb in the forest. Just like the postcard from Miss Peregrine that he’d tucked into tha
t volume of Emerson.
Emma reached the bottom and lit a flame in her hand. “Well,” she said, looking at the tunnel ahead. “It’s definitely not a root cellar.”
She winked at me and I grinned back. She seemed cool and collected, but I’m pretty sure it was an act; every nerve in me was jangling.
“May I come down?” Enoch called down from the room above. “Or am I to be punished for having a sense of humor?”
Bronwyn had just reached the bottom of the ladder. “You stay where you are,” she said. “In case anyone comes, we don’t want to be caught down here unawares.”
“In case who comes?” he said.
“Whoever,” said Bronwyn.
We gathered in a cluster with Emma at the front, her flame held out to make a light.
“Move slowly, listen out for anything strange, and keep your wits about you,” she said. “We don’t know what’s down here, and it’s possible Abe could have booby-trapped the place.”
We began to move forward, hunched and shuffling. I tried to imagine where we were in relation to the house above us, based on the direction the tunnel was facing. After twenty or thirty feet, we were most likely beneath the living room. After forty, we were leaving the house altogether, and after fifty, I was fairly certain we were under the front yard.
Finally, the tunnel ended at a door. It was heavy-looking, like the hatch behind us, but it was hanging slightly ajar.
“Hello?” I called. At the sound of my voice Bronwyn startled badly.
“Sorry,” I said to her.
“Are you expecting someone?” Millard asked.
“No. But you never know.”
Though I tried not to show it, I was so nervous I was vibrating.
Emma stepped through the door, then stood shining her flame around for a moment. “Looks safe enough,” she said. “But this might be useful . . .”
She reached for the wall, flicked a switch, and a bank of fluorescent lights clinked on inside the room.
“Hey now!” Olive said. “That’s more like it.”
Emma closed her hand to extinguish her flame, and we piled in after her. And then I turned a slow circle, taking everything in. The room was small, maybe twenty feet by fifteen, but I could finally stand up to full height. In the way of my grandfather, it was meticulously organized. Along one wall were four metal beds arranged bunk-style in two stacks, a tight roll of sheets and blankets sealed in plastic at the foot of each. There was a big locker bolted to the wall, which Emma opened to find all kinds of supplies: flashlights, batteries, basic tools, and enough canned and dried food to last several weeks. Beside that was a big blue drum filled with drinking water, and next to that, a strange-looking plastic box, which I recognized from the survivalist magazines I sometimes found in Abe’s garage as a chemical toilet.
“Wow, look at this!” said Bronwyn. She was standing in a corner, her eye pressed against a metal cylinder that protruded down from the ceiling. “I can see outside!”
The cylinder had handles attached at the base and a viewing lens. Bronwyn stepped aside so I could look through it, and I saw a slightly blurred image of the cul-de-sac outside. I grabbed the handles and turned it, and the view rotated until I could see the house, partly obscured by a field of high grass.
“It’s a periscope,” I said. “It must be hidden at the edge of the yard.”
“So he could see them coming,” said Emma.
“What is this place?” said Olive.
“It must be a shelter,” said Bronwyn. “In case of hollowgast attack. See the four beds? So his family could hide, too.”
“It was for more than just waiting out attacks,” said Millard. “It was a receiving station.”
His voice came from the opposite wall, next to a big wooden desk. Its surface was almost entirely taken up by an odd-looking machine made of chrome and green-plated metal—like a cross between an archaic printer and a fax machine, with a keyboard stuck awkwardly to the front.
“This must be how he communicated.”
“With who?” said Bronwyn.
“The other hollow-hunters. See, this is a pneumatic teleprinter.”
“Oh, wow,” said Emma, crossing the small room to look at it. “I remember these. Miss Peregrine used to have one. Whatever happened to it?”
“It was part of a scheme for ymbrynes to communicate with one another without having to leave the safety of their loops,” Millard explained. “It didn’t work, in the end. Too complex, and too vulnerable to interception.”
But I was in a daze, only half listening. I’d been trying to wrap my mind around the fact that all this had been so close to me—quite literally under my feet—for years, and I hadn’t known it. That I had spent afternoons playing in the grass just twenty feet above where I was standing now. It boggled the mind, and it made me wonder: How much more peculiarness had I been exposed to without realizing it? I thought about my grandfather’s friends—the old fellows who would come around to visit now and then, whiling away a few hours chatting with Abe out on the back porch, or in his study.
I knew him back in Poland, my grandfather had said about one such visitor.
A friend from the war, was how he’d described another.
But who were they, really?
“You say this thing was for communicating with other hollow-hunters,” I said. “What do you know about them?”
“About the hunters?” said Emma. “We don’t know much, but that was by design. They were extremely secretive.”
“Do you know how many there were?”
“Not more than a dozen, I suppose,” said Millard. “But that’s just an educated guess.”
“And could they all control hollows?” I asked.
Maybe there were other peculiars like me out there. Maybe I could find them.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Emma. “That’s why Abe was so special.”
“And you, Mr. Jacob,” said Bronwyn.
“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,” said Millard. “Why didn’t Abe seek shelter down here the night the hollowgast came for him?”
“Maybe he didn’t have time,” said Olive.
“No,” I said. “He knew it was coming for him. He called me in a panic, hours earlier.”
“Maybe he forgot the combination code,” said Olive.
“He wasn’t senile,” Emma said.
There was only one explanation, but I could hardly say it; even thinking it made the breath lock in my throat.
“He didn’t come down here,” I said, “because he knew I’d come to the house looking for him. Even though he begged me to stay away.”
Bronwyn looked pained and raised her hand over her mouth. “And if he was down here . . . while you were up there . . .”
“He was protecting you,” Emma said. “Trying to draw the hollow away, off into the woods.”
My body felt too heavy for my legs, and I sat down on one of the cots.
“You couldn’t have known,” Emma said, perching herself next to me.
“No.” I let out a breath. “He told me monsters were coming, but I didn’t believe him. He might still be alive today—but I didn’t believe him. Again.”
“No. Don’t do this to yourself.” She sounded angry. “He didn’t tell you enough—not nearly enough. If he had, you would’ve believed him. Right?”
“Yeah . . .”
“But Abe loved his secrets.”
“Did he ever,” said Millard.
“I think he loved them more than people sometimes,” said Emma. “And in the end, that’s what got him killed. His secrets—not you.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely.”
I knew she was right—mostly. I was angry at him for not sharing more with me, but it was hard to let go of the idea that he might have told me
everything, if only I hadn’t pushed him away. So I felt angry and guilty at the same time, but I couldn’t talk to Emma about it. So I just nodded and said, “Well . . . at least we found this place. One less secret for Abe to take with him to the grave.”
“Maybe more than one,” Millard said, and he slid open a drawer in the desk. “Something here you might be interested in, Jacob.”
I was off the cot and across the room in a second. In the drawer was a big metal-ringed binder stuffed with pages. A label on the front read OPERATIONS LOG.
“Whoa,” I said. “Is this . . . ?”
“Just what it says,” Millard said.
The others crowded around as I slid my fingers under it and lifted it out of the drawer. It was several inches thick and weighed at least five pounds.
“Go on, then,” said Bronwyn.
“Don’t rush me,” I said.
I opened to a random page in the middle—a typewritten mission report with two photos stapled to it, one of costumed child on a sofa and one of a man and woman dressed as clowns.
I read the report aloud. It was written in the terse and emotionless language of law enforcement. It outlined a mission to rescue a peculiar child from a wight and a hollowgast who were hunting him, then deliver the child to a safe loop.
I flipped a few pages in the binder, which was full of similar reports stretching all the way back to the 1950s, then closed it.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” said Millard.
“Abe did more than just find and kill hollows,” said Bronwyn.
“Right,” said Millard. “He was saving peculiar children, too.”
I looked at Emma. “Did you know?”
She looked down. “He never discussed his work.”
“But rescuing peculiar children is an ymbryne’s job,” said Olive.
“Yeah,” said Emma, “but if the wights were using the kids as bait, like in that entry, maybe they couldn’t.”
I was hung up on another detail, but for now I kept it to myself.
“HEY!” a voice shouted from the doorway, and we all jumped and turned to see Enoch standing there.
“I told you not to come down here!” said Bronwyn.
“What did you expect? You left me alone for ages.” He stepped into the room and looked around. “So, this is what all the fuss and bother was about? Looks like a prison cell.”