by Ransom Riggs
“Or have trouble finding Miss Hawksbill,” Miss Cuckoo added.
Noor rifled through her pack. “No weapons,” she noted.
“Guns would only arouse suspicion, if you should run into trouble with any soldiers,” Miss Cuckoo said. “If they think you’re combatants, you could end up in a military prison camp, or worse.”
With that cheerful thought to comfort us, we proceeded up a staircase to the lower Panloopticon hall. I’d rarely seen it so empty. Usually there were a dozen people coming and going, transit officials stamping passports and checking documents, Sharon stalking around to make sure everything was shipshape. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen it, when Emma and I had stumbled into this hallway by accident, before we ever met Bentham. Now it was even quieter: There were no drifts of snow spilling across the carpet, no piles of sand collecting around the jambs of desert loop doors. No echo of whistling wind or crashing surf. The doors were dead, blank. Deactivated. At least for now.
The ymbrynes escorted us nearly all the way down the hall, around a corner into an even narrower hall, to a door built into a dead-end wall. Its paint was flaking and the plaque read FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1918. Sometimes you could tell how often and how recently a particular loop door had been used by checking the frame around it, because Sharon had gotten into the habit of putting subtle notches in the wood.
There were no notches in this door. It hadn’t been used in a long time. Certainly not since the ymbrynes had occupied the Acre.
“Coats on, everyone!” Miss Peregrine said.
We shrugged on our long wool coats and antique boots that went halfway up our calves. There was even a coat for Addison, a little green number with short sleeves and faux-fur trim, which Miss Wren helped him into. Millard, who would freeze if naked but attract way too much attention if he was anything other than mummified in clothes, pulled on a muffler, earflap cap, and gloves, and hung a pair of smoked goggles around his neck that he could pull over his eyes at a moment’s notice.
“It had better be arctically frigid over there—I’m sweltering,” said Millard.
“You look dashing,” Horace said to him. “Like one of the polar expeditioneers.”
“Which? The one who got lost and had to eat his crew?” Millard loosened the muffler and fanned himself. “You’re sure Miss Hawksbill will be waiting for us?”
“I saw it in a dream. She’s in her house right now, not far from the loop entrance. We shouldn’t have much trouble finding her.”
Miss Wren announced that we’d have only thirty seconds from the time the Panloopticon restarted to get inside the loop before the door would shut behind us. Sharon was down in the machine-clogged guts of the building, standing ready for the signal.
“Are you ready?” asked Miss Peregrine.
“I’m ready,” said Noor, and down the line we all answered the same. Ready, ready, ready.
“All right, then.”
We waited. I glanced out a window, and beyond the yellow sky I could see the Quilt glowing green. I thought of old Miss Avocet, and how exhausted all the ymbrynes were. Until we succeeded none of them could sleep, or that green shield keeping our enemies at bay would shatter.
The floor began to rumble. The candle-shaped electric sconces along the wall flickered. I wondered for a moment if it was an earthquake, but then a puff of something like steam escaped from the crack under the door in front of us and from every door down the hall, and there was a faint ding! that sounded like an egg timer hitting zero.
The Panloopticon was back online.
Miss Peregrine and Miss Wren exchanged an anxious glance, and then Miss Peregrine reached out her arm and turned the knob of France, November 1918. It blew inward, the knob sucked from her hand, and slammed hard against the inner wall. She fell back, startled.
I ventured a look inside. It was the usual Panloopticon sameness: an uninviting bed that never tempted you to linger, a wardrobe and a nightstand, and the red poppy carpeting that ended at a missing fourth wall. Beyond that, a shimmering image of a snowy forest was materializing. Emma started toward the door, but Miss Peregrine held out her arm to stop her.
“Wait for it,” she said. “It’s not quite born yet.”
We watched the forest. It brightened, and the shimmer stopped, and then it looked every bit as real as the view out the window.
“Godspeed, children,” Miss Peregrine said. “May the elders watch over you.”
Seven teenagers and a dog said goodbye to the three ymbrynes and marched through the open door. Our boots clomped to the edge of the carpet, then across a blanket of fallen leaves.
“Go quickly now, my pets, we must shut the door,” Miss Wren called, shooing a clingy Horace after us. When he was fully clear of the room, the ymbrynes waved at us from the hallway and pulled the door shut. There was no time for long, tearful goodbyes. They had to shut down the Panloopticon before Caul or any of his monsters could slip through.
The three-walled room wavered in the air like a heat distortion, then dimmed away and disappeared. And we were alone in a forest in France with no obvious way back home—or to the place I had started to think of as home, anyway. A gust of wind flurried the leaves around us and made a lonely sound through the trees. Emma clapped her hands, cutting through the heavy silence that had begun to accrue. “Right!” she barked. “Job one: Find Miss Hawksbill.”
We looked around. There was no path, no trail, no signage. The forest thickened into dense brush ahead of us and climbed over a blind hill in the other, so we couldn’t see far in any direction.
Noor turned to Millard. “I saw you packing maps.”
“Reams and sheaves of them,” he replied. “But since we don’t know where we are right now, they won’t do us much good.”
“We’re in a forest,” said Bronwyn.
“Thank you, I can see that. We’ve got to find a landmark.”
From the direction of the brush came a distant rattle of gunfire.
“War’s over that way,” Horace said, pointing.
“That settles it, you’re all geniuses,” said Enoch.
Addison popped up on his hind legs. “If Miss Tern’s loop is on the other side of the front lines, why don’t we simply follow the shooting and cross over?”
“Because,” Horace said slowly, “we could get shot.” The low boom of an explosion rumbled from the direction of the front.
“Or blown up,” Enoch added.
“Well, try not to.” Addison harrumphed. “For supposedly heroic people, you worry an awful lot about things like that.”
“Heroic isn’t the same thing as stupid,” Horace said.
Addison growled at him.
“Can he be muzzled?” Enoch said to no one in particular.
Emma separated them before the situation could escalate. “You’re all being stupid. Look, we’ll find our own way across if we have to, but before we resort to that we must try and find Miss Hawksbill.”
“If only Olive were here to float above the trees and spot for her house,” said Millard.
“Or we could try this,” I said. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “MISS HAWKSBILL!”
Horace leapt at me and tried to clap his hand over my mouth—“Be quiet!”—but I shoved him off. “When has that ever been an acceptable way to find an ymbryne?”
“When no one has a better idea?” I said.
“But soldiers might come!”
“If you’re going to do it that way, you’ve got to be much louder,” said Bronwyn, and then she threw her head back and bellowed at the top of her lungs. “MISS HAWKSBILL!!!”
Horace clapped his hands over his face and muttered, “You’re dreaming again. Wake up, Horace.”
Emma shrugged. “Perhaps we should all shout?”
And so we did, Horace included. We screamed until we ran out of breath and the woods echoed Miss Hawksbi
ll’s name, and in the quiet that followed, we listened.
Even the distant guns had fallen silent, and I began to wonder whether we’d made a mistake, and a squad of soldiers was about to burst through the trees to mow us down.
Instead, from over the hill behind us we heard a small voice call, “Hello?”
We turned to see a figure in a dress and a large hat at the top of the hill. I couldn’t see her face. Whoever it was must not have liked the looks of us, because she immediately turned and darted back into the trees.
“Don’t let her get away!” Millard shouted.
We took off running, loaded down with heavy packs, feet thundering in heavy boots. I crested the hill to see more forest stretching out ahead of us. Addison barked, his body forming an arrow. The figure disappeared behind a stand of brush. We ran after her until we came to a clearing and a small thatch-roofed cottage. It was ringed by burned trees and singed shrubs, and in the front yard what had once been a flower bed was now a pair of bomb craters with a narrow gravel path threading between them to a front door—which slammed shut just as I laid eyes on it.
We could hear someone rattling around inside the cottage.
A large sign staked into the yard read KEEP OFF GRASS in three languages, though there wasn’t much grass left to keep off of.
“Miss Hawksbill!” Bronwyn shouted. “We need to talk with you!”
A small shuttered window slapped open and an old woman’s face peeped out. “Va te faire cuire un oeuf!” she shouted. “Go away, I have nothing to say to anyone!” She slammed the shutter closed, then opened it again to bark “And stay off my grass!” before pulling it shut.
“We need your help,” Emma shouted. “Please!”
“The ymbrynes sent us!” I yelled.
The shutter opened again. “What did you say?”
“The ymbrynes sent us.”
She gaped at us. “You are peculiar?”
“We’re in your loop, aren’t we?” Enoch said.
She frowned doubtfully, stared at us for a moment longer, then disappeared from the window without a word.
We looked at one another dumbfounded. What kind of ymbryne was this?
We heard a heavy lock turn and the front door swung open.
Miss Hawksbill said, “Well, you’d better come in, then. And step lively!”
We hurried in single file between the craters. One was still smoking and smelled like fresh earth; the bomb had fallen only recently. Which, since this was a loop, meant that it exploded thirty feet from Miss Hawksbill’s front door every day.
She stood propping the door open with her foot, glaring as we went inside. She might’ve been in her seventies, physically, but if I knew anything about ymbrynes she was probably twice as old, if not older. She kept her hair in a gray bun so tight it looked painful, and wore a long, blanketlike dress that was the color of dried blood. But what caught everyone’s attention was her right hand, which was wrapped in a cast and hung from a sling around her neck.
“Hurry up now and get inside, and don’t sit on my furniture, damn you,” she growled in a French accent.
Her little cottage was just a single wide room: against one wall hulked a midnight-black cooking range and a rough dining table; in the center was a lumpy sofa; and some bookshelves and a massive wood-framed bed occupied another wall. When the last of us was inside, she slammed the door shut and shouted, “Protégez vos oreilles!” and clapped her hands over her ears, and a moment later a blast rattled the house. The lanterns swung from the ceiling and dirt came flying into the room through the small window she’d left open.
“Sac à merde,” she swore, running toward the pile of steaming dirt that had landed on her floor.
Horace uncovered his head. “Was that another bomb?”
“I told you to keep off the grass! I opened my shutters because of you, and look what’s happened! Who’s going to clean up this mess?”
“We will, of course,” Bronwyn said, rushing to help.
“And your wards?” Emma said, scanning the room curiously.
“My wards”—Miss Hawksbill flung two more shutters open, and daylight poured in—“are useless.”
“Mange tes morts!” said a low, booming voice. “How dare you.” It had come from a giant, mounted moose head propped on a table by the bed.
“Oh, don’t be so sensitive, Teo,” Miss Hawksbill said.
The moose head’s lips curled. “I wasn’t the one who left the window open,” it replied tartly.
“Oh, shut up, Teo,” said a shrill voice, and then another voice concurred in French. In the bright new light I could see that the walls and much of the ceiling were covered in stuffed and mounted animal heads. They were talking to one another.
“What wicked sorcery keeps them bodiless but alive?” Horace cried.
“My God,” Addison shouted, backing away from the ymbryne, “she’s a serial murderer!”
“Don’t insult her,” Emma hissed at him.
“These are your wards?” Millard asked her.
“A menagerie of the dead!” Addison wailed.
“We aren’t dead!” roared the mounted head of a bear, which set off a chorus of arguing voices—“We are, technically!” “No we aren’t!”—and a volley of French insults (“Bête comme ses pieds!” “Con comme une valise sans poignée!”) until Miss Hawksbill raised her arms and shouted, “BE SILENT!” and the bickering ceased.
She turned to us with a sigh. “I suppose I must explain.”
“At the risk of being rude, we don’t really have time,” Emma said. “Do you know a Miss Tern?”
The ymbryne struggled to suppress a look of shock. The heads began to mutter among themselves, until Miss Hawksbill gave them a vicious shush.
“Miss Tern’s loop has been gone a very long time,” she said.
Emma nodded. “Her loop was destroyed a few years after yours was created, and—”
“Yes. Miss Tern was my sister.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Do you mean in the way that all ymbrynes are sisters?” Bronwyn asked. “Or by blood?”
Miss Hawksbill drew up her chin proudly. “In the way of having shared a mother and a womb. And when we fledged into full ymbrynes we made adjacent loops so we could be close to each other.”
We were all stunned. It was one thing for Miss Peregrine to have a pair of somewhat peculiar brothers. It was a much rarer thing for an ymbryne to be sisters with another ymbryne.
“My sister was a true prodigy and graduated from Miss Avocet’s academy two years before I did. When I eventually completed my training I came here to establish a loop near hers, as we had planned. I meant to collect a group of wards like yourselves, human peculiar children from all walks of life.” Miss Hawksbill looked away. Her face fell into shadow. “Before I had the chance, a mere week after this house was completed, a hollowgast killed my sister. When her life ended, so did her loop. The bombs she’d been holding at bay fell on the house. I took it upon myself to rescue all her animals who survived—and many that did not. A talented taxidermist was able to save many I had feared beyond saving, and preserve their lives and voices, if not the entirety of their bodies.” She gestured to the walls with a sweep of her hand. “I brought them here; they became my wards.”
So this loop was a kind of memorial to that lost one, filled with the animated remains of peculiar animals. What a strange, sad place.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Bronwyn said, “why didn’t you leave here after Miss Tern’s loop was destroyed? Take the heads elsewhere?”
“So I could visit her now and then,” she replied. “Though it’s a bit like calling on a forgetful ghost, as it’s always the same day for her and she never remembers my last visit.”
“We need to reach her,” Noor said. “And soon.”
Miss H
awksbill turned to study her. “And what’s your peculiarity, young lady?” The way she said it made it seem like she already knew.
Rather than explain herself, Noor scooped a handful of light from the air, tucked it into her cheek, and swallowed. Miss Hawksbill gazed at the churning black spot between them for a moment, then broke into a smile. “You came,” she said. “Finally.”
Noor’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, finally?”
“Are you familiar with a book written by a madman named Robert LeBourge?”
Bob the Revelator. Author of the Apocryphon.
Noor sucked in her breath, then tried to cover her surprise. “You know about . . .” She lowered her voice. “The prophecy?”
“All I know is, you’re expected.”
“I told you they would come,” intoned the moose head gravely, “in due time.”
Millard tossed his arms up and cried, “We were right! We’ve done it!”
“Am I the first?” Noor asked excitedly. “Or have other people already come?”
The heads were all murmuring among themselves about Noor.
“Maybe,” replied Miss Hawksbill mysteriously. “But they didn’t come this way. There are other avenues to reach my sister’s loop, if you’re not in such a hurry.”
“But is there a way from here to there?” said Emma. “A safe one?”
“Well, naturally.” She squinted at us. “Can any of you fly?”
Emma frowned. “No.”
“Oh. Then, no. But there is a dangerous way.”
Emma’s face fell. Horace shrank back against a wall.
“That’ll have to do,” Millard said. “Will you show us?”
“But of course,” said Miss Hawksbill, plucking a furry hat from her bed and clapping it onto her head. “You’d never make it without me.”
“Au revoir, mes enfants!” she called to the heads. “Vous avez l’intelligence d’une huitre!”
“Casse-toi!” they chorused in reply.
And then she hiked up her dress and opened the front door.
* * *
