by Ransom Riggs
A sign above the flap read: PERFORMERS ONLY.
We slipped inside and were immediately stopped. A plain-looking boy sat on a tufted stool near the entrance, apparently in some official capacity. “You performers?” he said. “Can’t come in ’less you’re performers.”
Feigning offense, Emma said, “Of course we’re performers,” and to demonstrate, she made a tiny flame on the tip of her finger and stubbed it out in her eye.
The boy shrugged, unimpressed. “Go on, then.”
We shuffled past him, blinking, our eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. The sideshow was a low-ceilinged maze of canvas—a single, dramatically torchlit aisle that took sharp turns every twenty or thirty feet, so that around each corner we were confronted by a new “abomination of nature.” A trickle of spectators, some laughing, others pale and shaking, stumbled past us in the opposite direction.
The first few freaks were standard-issue sideshow fare, and not especially peculiar: an “illustrated” man covered in tattoos; a bearded lady stroking her long chin-whiskers and cackling; a human pincushion who pierced his face with needles and drove nails into his nostrils with a hammer. While I thought this was pretty impressive, my friends, some of whom had traveled Europe in a sideshow with Miss Peregrine, could hardly stifle their yawns.
Under a banner that read THE AMAZING MATCHSTICK MEN, a gentleman with hundreds of matchbooks glued to his suit body-slammed a man similarly clothed in matchsticks, causing flames to erupt across the matchstick man’s chest as he flailed in fake terror.
“Amateurs,” Emma muttered as she pulled us on to the next attraction.
The oddities got progressively odder. There was a girl in a long, fringed dress who wore a giant python around her body, which wriggled and danced at her command. Emma allowed that this was at least marginally peculiar, since the ability to enchant snakes was something only syndrigasti could do. But when Emma mentioned Miss Wren to the girl, she gave us a hard stare and her snake hissed and showed its fangs, and we moved on.
“This is a waste of time,” said Enoch. “Miss Peregrine’s clock is running out and we’re touring a carnival! Why not get some sweets and make a day of it?”
There was only one more freak to see, though, so we continued on. The final stage was empty but for a plain backdrop, a small table with flowers on it, and an easel-propped sign that read: THE WORLD-FAMOUS FOLDING MAN.
A stagehand walked onto the stage lugging a suitcase. He set the case down and left.
A crowd gathered. The suitcase sat there, center stage. People began to shout, “On with the show!” and “Bring out the freak!”
The suitcase jiggled. Then it began to shake, wobbling back and forth until it toppled onto its side. The crowd pressed toward the stage, fixated on the case.
Its latches popped, and very slowly, the case began to open. A pair of white eyes peeped out at the crowd, and then the case opened a little more to reveal a face—that of an adult man, with a neatly trimmed mustache and little round glasses, who had somehow folded himself into a suitcase no larger than my torso.
The crowd burst into applause, which increased as the freak proceeded to unfold himself, limb by limb, and step out of the impossibly small case. He was very tall and as skinny as a beanpole—so alarmingly thin, in fact, that it looked as if his bones were about to break through his skin. He was a human exclamation point, but carried himself with such dignity that I couldn’t laugh at him. He studied the hooting crowd dourly before taking a deep bow.
He then took a minute to demonstrate how his limbs could bend in all sorts of exotic ways—his knee twisting so that the top of his foot touched his hip, then his hips folding so that the knee touched his chest—and after more applause and more bows, the show was over.
We lingered as the crowd filtered away. The folding man was leaving the stage when Emma said to him, “You’re peculiar, aren’t you?”
The man stopped. He turned slowly to look at her with an air of imperious annoyance. “Excuse me?” he said in a thick Russian accent.
“Sorry to corner you this way, but we need to find Miss Wren,” Emma said. “We know she’s here someplace.”
“Peh!” said the man, dismissing her with a noise halfway between laughing and hawking spit.
“It’s an emergency!” Bronwyn pleaded.
The folding man crossed his arms in a bony X and said, “I dunno anything what you say,” then walked off the stage.
“Now what?” asked Bronwyn.
“We keep looking,” said Emma.
“And if we don’t find Miss Wren?” said Enoch.
“We keep looking,” Emma said through her teeth. “Everyone understand?”
Everyone understood perfectly well. We were out of options. If this didn’t work—if Miss Wren wasn’t here or we couldn’t find her soon—then all our efforts would have been for nothing, and Miss Peregrine would be lost just the same as if we’d never come to London at all.
We walked out of the sideshow the way we’d come, dejected, past the now-empty stages, past the plain-looking boy, out of the tent and into the daylight. We were standing outside the exit, unsure what to do next, when the plain-looking boy leaned out through the flap. “Wotsa trouble?” he said. “Show weren’t to your liking?”
“It was … fine,” I said, waving him off.
“Not peculiar enough for you?” he asked.
That got our attention. “What’d you say?” said Emma.
“Wakeling and Rookery,” he said, pointing past us toward the far side of the square. “That’s where the real show is.” And then he winked at us and ducked back inside the tent.
“That was mysterious,” said Hugh.
“Did he say peculiar?” said Bronwyn.
“What’s Wakeling and Rookery?” I said.
“A place,” said Horace. “Someplace in this loop, maybe.”
“Could be the intersection of two streets,” said Emma, and she pulled back the tent flap to ask the boy if this was what he meant—but he was already gone.
So we set off through the crowd, toward the far end of the square where he’d pointed, our one last, thin hope pinned to a couple of oddly named streets we weren’t even sure existed.
* * *
There was a point, a few blocks beyond the square, where the noise of the crowd faded and was replaced by an industrial clank and clamor, and the rich funk of roasting meat and animal waste was replaced by a stench far worse and unnameable. Crossing a walled river of Stygian sludge, we entered a district of factories and workhouses, of smokestacks belching black stuff into the sky, and this is where we found Wakeling Street. We walked one way down Wakeling looking for Rookery until it dead-ended at a large open sewer which Enoch said was the River Fleet, then turned and came back the other way. When we’d passed the point along Wakeling where we’d started, the street began to curve and twist, the factories and workhouses shrinking down into squat offices and unassuming buildings with blank faces and no signs, like a neighborhood purpose-built to be anonymous.
The bad feeling I’d been nursing got worse. What if we’d been set up—sent to this deserted part of the city to be ambushed out of view?
The street twisted and straightened again, and then I crashed into Emma, who’d been walking in front of me but had come to a sudden stop.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
In lieu of an answer, she just pointed. Up ahead, at a T-shaped intersection, there was a crowd. Though it had been sticky-hot back at the carnival, many of them were bundled in coats and scarves. They were assembled around a particular building, and stood gazing up at it in dumbfounded wonder—just as we were, now. The building itself was nothing special—four stories, the top three just rows of narrow, rounded windows, like an old office building. It was, in fact, nearly identical to all the buildings around it, with one exception: it was totally encased in ice. Ice coated its windows and doors. Icicles hung like fangs from every sill and ledge. Snow spilled from its doorways, collectin
g in giant heaps on the sidewalk. It looked like a blizzard had struck the building—from the inside.
I peered at a snow-blasted street sign: R—KERY STRE—.
“I know this place,” said Melina. “It’s the peculiar archives, where all our official records are kept.”
“How do you know that?” said Emma.
“Miss Thrush was grooming me to be second assistant to the ombudswoman there. The examination’s very difficult. I’ve been studying for twenty-one years.”
“Is it supposed to be covered in ice like that?” asked Bronwyn.
“Not that I’m aware,” said Melina.
“It’s also where the Council of Ymbrynes convene for the annual Nitpicking of the Bylaws,” said Millard.
“The Council of Ymbrynes meets here?” said Horace. “It’s awfully humble. I expected a castle or somesuch.”
“It’s not meant to stand out,” said Melina. “You aren’t supposed to notice it at all.”
“They’re doing a poor job of keeping it hidden, then,” said Enoch.
“As I said, it’s not usually covered in ice.”
“What do you think happened here?” I asked.
“Nothing good,” said Millard. “Nothing good at all.”
There was no question we’d have to get closer and explore, but that didn’t mean we had to rush in like fools. We hung back and watched from a distance. People came and went. Someone tried the door but it was frozen shut. The crowd thinned a bit.
“Tick, tick, tick,” said Enoch. “We’re wasting time.”
We cut through what was left of the crowd and stepped onto the icy sidewalk. The building emanated cold, and we shivered and jammed our hands into our pockets against it. Bronwyn used her strength to pull open the door, and it came straight off, hinges flying—but the hallway it let onto was completely obstructed by ice. It stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and into the building in a blue and cloudy blur. The same was true of the windows: I wiped the frost from one pane and then another, and through both I could see only ice. It was as if a glacier was being born somewhere in the heart of the place, and its frozen tongues were squeezing out wherever there was an opening.
We tried every way we could think of to get inside. We rounded the building looking for a door or window that wasn’t blocked, but every potential entrance was filled with ice. We picked up stones and loose bricks and tried hacking at the ice, but it was almost super-naturally hard—even Bronwyn could dig no more than a few inches into it. Millard scanned the Tales for any mention of the building, but there was nothing, no secrets to be found.
Finally, we decided to take a calculated risk. We formed a semicircle around Emma to block her from view, and she heated her hands and placed them against the ice wall that filled the hallway. After a minute they began to sink into the ice, meltwater trickling down to puddle around our feet. But the progress was painfully slow, and after five minutes she’d only gotten up to her elbows.
“At this rate, it’ll take the rest of the week just to get down the hall,” she said, pulling her arms from the ice.
“Do you think Miss Wren could really be inside?” said Bronwyn.
“She has to be,” Emma said firmly.
“I find this contagion of optimism positively flabbergasting,” said Enoch. “If Miss Wren is in there, then she’s frozen solid.”
Emma erupted at him. “Doom and gloom! Ruin and ruination! I think you’d be happy if the world came to an end tomorrow, just so you could say I told you so!”
Enoch blinked at her, surprised, then said very calmly, “You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.”
“If you ever offered more than simple criticism,” Emma said, “if you ever gave a single useful suggestion during a crisis, rather than just shrugging your shoulders at the prospect of failure and death, I might be able to tolerate your unrelenting black moods! But as it stands—”
“We’ve tried everything!” Enoch interjected. “What could I possibly suggest?”
“There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Olive said, piping up from the edge of our group.
“And what’s that?” asked Emma.
Olive decided to show rather than tell us. Leaving the sidewalk, she went into the crowd, turned to face the building, and called at the top of her lungs, “Hello, Miss Wren! If you’re in there, please come out! We need your—”
Before she could finish, Bronwyn had tackled her, and the rest of Olive’s sentence was delivered into the big girl’s armpit. “Are you insane?” Bronwyn said, bringing Olive back to us under her arm.
“You’re going to get us all found out!”
She set Olive on the sidewalk and was about to chastise her further when tears began streaming down the little girl’s face. “What does it matter if we’re found out?” Olive said. “If we can’t find Miss Wren and we can’t save Miss Peregrine, what does it matter if the whole wight army descends on us right now?”
A lady stepped out of the crowd and approached us. She was older, back bent with age, her face partly obscured by the hood of a cloak. “Is she all right?” the lady asked.
“She’s fine, thank you,” Emma said dismissively.
“I’m not!” said Olive. “Nothing is right! All we ever wanted was to live in peace on our island, and then bad things came and hurt our headmistress. Now all we want to do is help her—and we can’t even do that!”
Olive hung her head and began to weep pitifully.
“Well then,” said the woman, “it’s an awfully good thing you came to see me.”
Olive looked up, sniffled, and said, “Why is that?”
And then the woman vanished.
Just like that.
She disappeared right out of her clothes, and her cloak, suddenly empty, collapsed onto the pavement with an airy whump. We were all too stunned to speak—until a small bird came hopping out from beneath the folds of the cloak.
I froze, not sure if I should try to catch it.
“Does anyone know what sort of bird that is?” asked Horace.
“I believe that’s a wren,” said Millard.
The bird flapped its wings, leapt into the air, and flew away, disappearing around the side of the building.
“Don’t lose her!” Emma shouted, and we all took off running after it, slipping and sliding on the ice, rounding the corner into the snow-choked alley that ran between the glaciated building and the one next to it.
The bird was gone.
“Drat!” Emma said. “Where’d she go?”
Then a series of odd sounds came up from the ground beneath our feet: metallic clanks, voices, and a noise like water flushing. We kicked the snow away to find a pair of wooden doors set into the bricks, like the entrance to a coal cellar.
The doors were unlatched. We pulled them open. Inside were steps that led down into the dark, covered in quick-melting ice, the meltwater draining loudly into an unseen gutter.
Emma crouched and called into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“If you’re coming,” returned a distant voice, “come quickly!”
Emma stood up, surprised. Then shouted: “Who are you?”
We waited for an answer. None came.
“What are we waiting for?” said Olive. “It’s Miss Wren!”
“We don’t know that,” said Millard. “We don’t know what happened here.”
“Well, I’m going to find out,” Olive said, and before anyone could stop her she’d gone to the cellar doors and leapt through them, floating gently to the bottom. “I’m still alive!” her voice taunted us from the dark.
And so we were shamed into following her, and climbed down the steps to find a passage tunneled through thick ice. Freezing water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls in a steady stream. And it wasn’t completely dark, after all—gauzy light glowed from around a turn in the passage ahead.
We heard footsteps approaching. A shadow climbed the wall in fr
ont of us. Then a cloaked figure appeared at the turn in the passage, silhouetted in the light.
“Hello, children,” the figure said. “I am Balenciaga Wren, and I’m so pleased you’re here.”
I am Balenciaga Wren.
Hearing those words was like uncorking a bottle under pressure. First came the initial release—gasps, giddy laughter—and then an outpouring of joy: Emma and I jumped and hugged each other; Horace fell to his knees and tossed up his arms in a wordless hallelujah! Olive was so excited that she lifted into the air even with her weighted shoes on, stuttering, “We-we-we—we thought we might never—never see another ymbryne ever-ever again!”
This, finally, was Miss Wren. Days ago she’d been nothing more to us than the obscure ymbryne of a little-known loop, but since then she’d achieved mythic stature: she was, as far as we knew, the last free and whole-bodied ymbryne, a living symbol of hope, something we’d all been starving for. And here she was, right in front of us, so human and frail. I recognized her from Addison’s photo, only now there was no trace of black left in her silver hair. Deep-set worry lines stacked her brow and held her mouth in parentheses, and her shoulders were hunched as if she were not merely old, but straining under some monumental burden; the weight of all our desperate hope piling down on her.
The ymbryne pulled back the hood of her cloak and said, “I am very glad to meet you, too, dears, but you must come inside at once; it isn’t safe out here.”
She turned and hobbled away into the passage. We fell into line, waddling behind her through the tunneled ice like a train of ducklings after their mother, feet shuffling and arms held out in awkward balance poses to keep from slipping. Such was the power of an ymbryne over peculiar children: the very presence of one—even one we’d only just met—had an immediate pacifying effect on us.
The floor ramped upward, leading us past silent furnaces bearded with frost, into a large room clogged floor to ceiling and wall to wall with ice except for the tunnel we were in, which had been carved straight through the middle. The ice was thick but clear, and in some places I could see twenty or thirty feet into it with only a slight waver of distortion. The room appeared to be a reception area, with rows of straight-backed chairs facing a massive desk and some filing cabinets, all trapped inside tons of ice. Blue-filtered daylight shone from a row of unreachable windows, beyond which was the street, a smear of indistinct gray.