by Ransom Riggs
What’s more, the subject of the mission was more than just the subject now. She was Noor, and she had a name and a story and a face (a very pretty one, at that); it was hard for me to imagine delivering her into the hands of strangers. Was I really supposed to dump her into some loop I knew nothing about, wash my hands of her, and head home?
I glanced over at her now, her scuffed Vans on the plastic bench seat and knees hugged to her chest, staring at the floor with a weariness the depth of which I could hardly fathom.
“Would you miss New York, if you had to leave?” I asked her.
It took five full seconds to draw herself out of whatever thought she’d been sunk in and look at me.
“Miss New York? Why?”
“Because I think you should come home with us, instead.”
Emma looked at me sharply, but it was Millard who objected aloud.
“That’s not the mission!”
“Forget the mission,” I said. “She’ll be safer with us than in any loop in this crazy city. Or on this side of the ocean.”
“We live in London, most of the time,” Emma explained. “In Devil’s Acre.”
Noor recoiled a bit.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Millard said. “Once you get past the smell, anyway.”
“We’re nearly finished with this mission from hell,” said Enoch. “Let’s not muck it up now. Let’s just take her where she’s supposed to go and be done with it already.”
“We don’t know who’s in this loop we’re going to,” I said, “or how capable they are. Or anything.”
“Is that any of our concern?” said Enoch.
“I agree with Jacob,” said Millard. “There are almost no ymbrynes left in America, and it’s an ymbryne’s job to protect and shape uncontacted peculiars. Who’s going to teach her how to be peculiar?”
Noor raised her hand. “Is anyone going to fill me in here?”
“An ymbryne—they’re like teachers,” I said. “And protectors.”
“And government leaders,” said Millard, and then he added, under his breath, “though unelected . . .”
“And overbearing know-it-alls who are always minding other people’s business,” said Enoch.
“Essentially, the backbone of our whole society,” said Emma.
“We don’t need an ymbryne,” I said, “we just need someplace safe. Anyway, Miss Peregrine probably wants to kill us right now.”
“She’ll get over it,” Enoch said.
“So, would you come with us?” I asked Noor.
She sighed, then chuckled. “What the hell. I could use a vacation.”
“Hey, what about me?” Lilly said.
“You’d be more than welcome to come,” Millard said, a bit too eagerly. “Though normal people cannot enter loops, I’m afraid.”
“I can’t leave anyway!” Lilly said. “School just started.” Then she laughed and said, “God, listen to me. As if none of this insanity even happened. That’s how badly school has messed up my brain.”
“Well, education is important,” said Millard.
“But I have parents. Pretty good ones, actually. And they would worry about me a lot.”
“I’ll be back,” said Noor. “But getting out of town until this stuff blows over sounds like an excellent idea.”
“So you trust us now?” I said.
She shrugged. “Enough.”
“How do you feel about road trips?”
Out of nowhere, Bronwyn slumped forward in her seat and crumpled to the floor.
“Bronwyn!” Emma cried, and leapt down next to her.
If any of the other people in the subway car had seen, they pretended they hadn’t.
“Is she okay?” Enoch said.
“I don’t know,” said Emma. She slapped Bronwyn’s cheek lightly and repeated her name until her eyes blinked open again.
“Fellows, I think—Rats, I should have mentioned this earlier.” Bronwyn winced. Raised the hem of her shirt. She was bleeding from her torso.
“Bronwyn!” said Emma. “My God!”
“The man with the gun . . . I think he shot me. Don’t worry, though. Not with a bullet.” Bronwyn opened her palm to show us a small dart, tipped now with her own blood.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I said.
“We needed to get out of there quickly. And I thought I was strong enough to overcome whatever he’d shot me with. But apparently . . .”
Her head lolled to the side and she passed out.
We weren’t looking for a loop. At that moment, we wanted anything but to find a loop. All that was in our minds was getting Bronwyn to a hospital. We jumped out of the train at the next stop, hardly even looking to see where we were, and climbed the steps out of the subway station. Lilly held on to Millard’s arm, and Emma, Noor, and I helped prop up Bronwyn, who was weak but still conscious, as she shuffled heavily up the steps and along the sidewalk. We were in Manhattan now, and the buildings were taller, the sidewalks bustling.
I dug out my phone to call 911. Enoch approached people on the street shouting, “Hospital! Where’s a hospital?” This turned out to be an effective strategy. We were pointed down a particular street by a kind, concerned lady who hustled us in the right direction, asking after Bronwyn. Of course, we didn’t want to tell her anything, didn’t want her following us into the emergency room or asking our names (I was already imagining having to bring in an ymbryne to memory-wipe her . . . and the doctors and nurses), so we pretended we’d been joking about the injury and after a block she stormed off, understandably angry.
The hospital was just ahead; I could see the sign hanging from a building a block away. And then the sweetest, richest smell of cooking food hit my nose, and my steps began to slow.
“Do you smell that?” said Enoch. “That’s rosemary toast and goose liver pâté!”
“No way,” said Emma. “It’s shepherd’s pie.”
Our momentum was waning.
“I’d know that smell anywhere,” said Noor. “Dosas. Paneer masala dosas.”
“What are you guys talking about?” said Lilly. “And why are you stopping?”
“She’s right, we have to get Bronwyn to a doctor,” said Millard. “Although that might be the most aromatic coq au vin I’ve ever laid nostrils on . . .”
Our progress had been completely arrested. We were standing in front of a storefront with drawn shades that might have been a restaurant, though there was no sign for one—just a placard that read OPEN ALWAYS and ALL ARE WELCOME.
“You know, I feel okay,” Bronwyn said. “A bit peckish, though, now that you mention it.”
She didn’t seem particularly okay—her speech was slurred, and she was still leaning heavily on our arms—but the part of my brain that registered this seemed to be wrapped in cotton.
“She’s bleeding!” Emma said. “And the hospital is right there.”
Bronwyn looked down at her shirt. “Not bleeding much,” she said, though the patch of red appeared to be spreading.
There were two desires at war inside me. One was a voice shouting, Go to the hospital, dumbass! but I could barely hear it over the other voice, which sounded weirdly like my dad’s. It was insisting, in this peppy, dorky way, that it was getting near dinnertime and shouldn’t we try New York food while we’re here, and goshdarnit, why don’t we just stop in for dinner real quick?
We all seemed to agree except Lilly and Emma, but even their objections were starting to fade.
I pushed the door open and ushered everyone inside. It was indeed a restaurant: a small old place with checkered tablecloths and cane-backed chairs and a soda fountain along one wall. Behind the counter stood a waitress in an apron and a paper hat, and she was smiling like she’d been waiting for us all day. We were the only ones there.
“You kids look
hungry!” she said, bouncing on her heels.
“Oh, we are,” said Bronwyn.
The waitress didn’t seem to notice the blood on Bronwyn’s shirt. “In fact, you look like you’re downright starving.”
“Yes,” said Enoch, his voice a bit robotic. “Starving.”
“What kind of restaurant is this?” asked Noor. “I thought I smelled paneer.”
“Oh, we’ve got everything,” said Bernice with a small wave of her hand. “Everything you could ever want.”
Had she said her name? How did I know it? My brain felt like mush.
The little voice that wondered if this was a good idea had faded to a whisper. Lilly’s objections, too, had quieted. The last thing I’d heard her say was, “You guys can stay here if you want, but I’m taking your friend to the hospital!” But her efforts to drag Bronwyn out by the elbow hadn’t been very effective. (You can’t drag Bronwyn anywhere she doesn’t want to go.)
“We don’t have money,” I said, and the disappointment I felt as I realized I had left our cash in the trunk of the car was so total it felt like I was suddenly in mourning.
“It just so happens we’re having a special promotion today,” said Bernice. “Everything’s on the house.”
“Really?” said Bronwyn.
“That’s right. Your money’s no good here.”
We bellied up to the counter and sat on the fixed, plastic stools, all in a row. There was no menu. We simply told Bernice what we wanted, and she shouted the orders to an unseen line cook in the back. A remarkably short time later, a bell dinged and she began to bring out plate after plate of food. A rooster cooked in wine for Millard. Paneer masala dosas and a mango lassi for Noor. A lamb roast trimmed with mint jelly for Emma. A double cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shake for me. A lobster for Bronwyn, complete with a shell-cracker and a bib with a picture of a lobster on it. A steaming Korean bibimbap with an egg cracked over it for Lilly. It was a more eclectic array than I’d thought possible in any restaurant—much less a greasy old diner with only one person working the kitchen—but the part of my brain that was objecting to all this had gotten very quiet:
Don’t eat that.
You should leave.
This is a bad idea.
Stop now before it’s
too late.
I don’t remember eating my double cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shake. But the next thing I knew, the shake was drained, there were only greasy crumbs left on my plate, and my head was heavy, so heavy.
“Oh, honey!” Bernice trotted out from behind the counter, a hand to her chest. “You look beat!”
And I was. I really was.
“I’m so, so, so tired,” I heard Emma say, and a murmur of agreement rippled through my friends.
“Why don’t you head on upstairs and catch a little sleep?”
“We have to go,” said Noor. She was trying to get up from her counter stool, but couldn’t seem to work up the momentum.
“Do you?” said Bernice. “I don’t think you do.”
“Jacob,” Emma whispered in my ear.
She sounded drunk.
“We gotta go.”
“I know.”
We had been hypnotized somehow. I knew it. It was like what the Mermaid Fantasyland peculiars had tried to do to us—but this time we had taken the bait.
“We’ve got rooms upstairs with beds all made for you. Just through here . . .”
Now that she’d said it, I found that I could make myself stand. In fact, we were all standing. And Bernice was pushing us toward the exit—a strange tunnel of hallway painted with red and white candy stripes.
We let ourselves be pushed. The hallway seemed to elongate as we approached it. I heard a scuffle and turned to see Bernice barring Lilly’s way with her arm.
“Hey,” I said vaguely. “Be nice to her.”
Lilly was speaking. I saw her mouth moving, her throat constricting with the effort, but her voice did not (or could not) reach my ears.
“We’ll be back soon, Lil, just wait here,” Noor said.
Of course, Lilly wouldn’t have been able to join us even if she had been allowed to walk down the hall. Around the halfway point I felt the rush in my head and the drop in my stomach, and whump, the loop took us.
Lilly was no longer behind us, and up ahead the candy-striped hallway now had an endpoint: a staircase.
“It’s just upstairs!” Bernice’s voice echoed, though she was nowhere to be seen.
We dragged ourselves slowly up, one step at a time, and as we mounted the landing I felt the last of my willpower dissipate. We were at the mercy of whatever siren was luring us along, and all we could seem to do, for now, was obey.
* * *
• • •
On the landing were two young girls on their hands and knees, engaged in what seemed to be a thorough, inch-by-inch examination of the floorboards. When we came into the hall, they stopped what they were doing and looked up at us.
“Have you seen a doll?” the older girl asked. “Frankie lost one of her dolls.”
She seemed to be telling a joke, but she didn’t crack a smile.
“Sorry,” said Noor.
“We ordered a . . . sleep?” said Millard, sounding confused.
“Through there,” said the older girl, nodding to the door behind her.
We stepped past them. “Run,” I thought I heard one hiss, “run while you can.” But when I turned back to look again, they were staring at the floor, having returned to their methodical search. I felt like I was moving through a dream.
Through the door was a small, neat kitchen area. A young boy sat at a table and a man in a bow tie stood over him. There were puzzles and a little tower of stacking blocks on the table, as if the man were giving the boy some kind of examination. When he heard us come in, the man lifted his arm and pointed to the next room. “Through there.” He didn’t even look at us. His attention was locked on the boy. “Sanguis bebimus,” he said. “Corpus edimus.”
“Mater semper certa est,” the boy replied, while staring at nothing. “Mater semper certa est.”
“‘The mother is always certain,’” Millard translated.
The teacher straightened, then banged on the wall. “Keep it down in there!” he shouted—not at us. I couldn’t tell what had upset him until we were nearly out of the room and into the next one, and I heard the singing.
A woozy, tuneless voice moaned, “Happy biiiiiirthday, dear Frankieeeeeee . . . haaaaaapy biiiirthday to youuuuuuu . . .”
I couldn’t make my feet move any faster, though I would have run if they’d have let me. The singer was a man in clown makeup and a bone-white wig. He was seated on a daybed, bellied up to a small cocktail table, and was pouring himself a drink from a bottle. He seemed to be stuck: He would sip from the glass in his hand, splash a bit more from the bottle into the glass, sing a few words, then sip again. When he saw us he raised his glass and said, “Chin-chin! Happy birthday, Frankie!”
“Happy birthday,” I said involuntarily.
The clown seemed to freeze like that, with his glass raised and his mouth open, and from the back of his throat there came a sound like something unwinding, barely intelligible as words:
Let
me
sleeeeeep
“Come in here!” called a shrill voice from the next room.
We came, all in a bunch, into a bedroom crowded with dolls. Every available space was crammed with them. There were dolls on the floor, dolls on the shelves on the walls, dolls overflowing from a big armchair in the corner and from an iron-railed bed. There were so many that I didn’t notice the girl among them—on the bed, half buried in an avalanche of little porcelain faces—until she spoke a second time.
“Siddown!” she barked, and began flinging the dolls off her.
“I didn’t say you could make noise!” the girl said. She wore a cotton nightshirt and yellow corduroy pants that looked like they were from the 1970s or 80s, and when she spoke her upper lip curled into a sneer. “Well? Who are you?”
I felt my tongue unlock and started to answer. “My name is Jacob, and I come from a town in Florida—”
“Bored, bored, bored!” she shouted. She pointed to Emma. “You!”
A jolt went through Emma and she began to speak. “My name is Emma Bloom. I was born in Cornwall and came of age in a loop in Wales and—”
“BORING!” the girl screamed, and pointed at Enoch.
“I’m Enoch O’Connor,” he said, “and we have something in common.”
The girl seemed intrigued. As he spoke she stood up from the bed, where she’d been lying among her dolls, and walked over to him.
“I can make dead things move using the hearts of living things,” Enoch said. “I have to take them apart first, but—”
The girl snapped her fingers, and Enoch’s mouth clapped shut. “You’re nice-looking,” she said, tracing a finger along the line of Enoch’s jaw, “but when you talk it gets ruined.” She smooshed the tip of his nose with her finger. “Boop. More for you later.”
She turned to Bronwyn. “You.”
“My name is Bronwyn Bruntley and I’m quite strong and my brother, Victor, was also—”
“BORING!” the girl screamed. “POOP!”
Feet scurried toward us. The bow-tied teacher appeared in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“I don’t want any more dolls like these, Poop. Just look at them. Do they seem like they would be fun to play Monopoly with? DO THEY?”
“Er . . . no?”
“THAT’S RIGHT. THEY DO NOT.”
She kicked a pile of dolls and they flew everywhere.
“Well, him I like.” She pointed at Enoch. “But the rest are HORRIBLE and BORING.”
“I’m very sorry, Frankie.”