Library of Souls

by Ransom Riggs

  “What about the wights?” I asked.

  “I imagine he’s coming to that,” said Emma.

  “I am,” said Bentham. “Five years after encountering my first hollowgast, I met my first wight. There was a knock at my door after midnight. I was in my house, safe inside my loop—or so I thought. But when I opened the door, there stood my brother Jack, a bit worse for wear but looking like his old self—save his dead eyes, which were blank as unmarked paper.”

  Emma and I had folded ourselves into cross-legged positions and were now leaning toward Bentham, hanging on his every word. Bentham stared over our heads with haunted eyes.

  “He’d consumed enough peculiars to fill his hollow soul and turn himself into something that resembled my brother—but wasn’t, quite. What little humanity he’d clung to through the years was gone completely, leaked away with the color in his eyes. A wight is to the peculiar he once was as a thing copied many times is to its original. Detail is lost, and color …”

  “What about memory?” I asked.

  “Jack retained his. A pity: otherwise he might’ve forgotten all about Abaton and the Library of Souls. And what I’d done to him.”

  “How did he find out it was you?” Emma asked.

  “Chalk it up to brotherly intuition. And then one day, when he had nothing better to do, he tortured me until I confessed to it.” Bentham nodded at his legs. “Never quite healed properly, as you can see.”

  “But he didn’t kill you,” I said.

  “Wights are pragmatic creatures, and revenge is not a great motivator,” Bentham said. “Jack was more obsessed than ever with finding Abaton, but to do it he needed my machine—and me to operate it. I became his prisoner and his slave, and Devil’s Acre the secret headquarters for a small but influential contingent of wights bent on finding and cracking open the Library of Souls. Which is, you’ll have guessed by now, their ultimate goal.”

  “I thought they wanted to re-create the reaction that turned them into hollows,” I said, “only bigger and better. ‘Do it right this time,’ ” I said, making air quotes.

  Bentham frowned. “Where did you hear that?”

  “A wight told us just before he died,” Emma said. “He said that’s why they needed all the ymbrynes. To make the reaction more powerful.”

  “Utter nonsense,” Bentham said. “Probably just a cover story to throw you off the scent. Though it’s possible the wight who told you this lie believed it. Only Jack’s innermost circle knew about the search for Abaton.”

  “But if they didn’t need the ymbrynes for their reaction,” I said, “then why’d they go to all the trouble of kidnapping them?”

  “Because the lost loop of Abaton isn’t just lost,” said Bentham. “According to legend, before it was lost it was also locked—and it was ymbrynes who locked it. Twelve of them, to be exact, who came together from twelve far-flung corners of peculiardom. To open Abaton again, if you can manage to find it, would require those same twelve ymbrynes, or their successors. So it’s no surprise that my brother has kidnapped precisely twelve ymbrynes, whom he spent many years hunting and tracking.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “It had to be something more than just re-creating the reaction that turned them into hollows.”

  “Then he’s found it,” Emma said. “Caul wouldn’t have pulled the trigger and kidnapped the ymbrynes if he didn’t know where Abaton was.”

  “I thought you said it was legendary,” I said. “Now you’re talking like it’s a real. Which is it?”

  “The official position of the Council of Ymbrynes is that the Library of Souls is nothing but a story,” Bentham said.

  “I don’t care what the council says,” said Emma. “What do you say?”

  “My opinions are my own,” he said evasively. “But if the library is real, and Jack manages to find and open it, he still won’t be able to steal its souls. He doesn’t know it, but there’s a third element he needs, a third key.”

  “And what’s that?” I said.

  “No one can take the soul jars. To most everyone they would be invisible and intangible. Even ymbrynes can’t touch them. In the stories, only special adepts called librarians can see and handle them—and a librarian hasn’t been born for a thousand years. If the library exists, all Jack would find there are empty shelves.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said.

  “Yes and no,” said Emma. “What’s he going to do when he figures out the ymbrynes he spent so long hunting are useless to him? He’ll go mad!”

  “That’s what I worry about most,” Bentham said. “Jack has a bad temper, and when the dream he’s nurtured for so long dies …”

  I tried to imagine what that could mean—all the tortures a man like Caul might be capable of—but my mind recoiled from the idea. It seemed the same horrors had broadcast themselves to Emma, because what she said next was sharp and charged with anger.

  “We’re going to get them back.”

  “We share a common goal,” Bentham said. “To destroy my brother and his kind, and to save my sister and hers. Together, I believe we can do both.”

  He looked so small in that moment, sunk into the massive couch, cane leaning against his rickety legs, that I nearly laughed.

  “How?” I said. “We’d need an army.”

  “Incorrect,” he replied. “The wights could easily repel an army. Luckily, we have something even better.” He looked at Emma and me, his lips curling into a smile. “We have the both of you. And luckily for you, you have me.” Bentham leaned on his cane and rose slowly to his feet. “We have to get you inside their fortress.”

  “It seems pretty impenetrable,” I said.

  “That’s because it is, conventionally speaking,” Bentham replied. “In the years when Devil’s Acre was a prison loop, it was designed to hold the worst of the worst. After the wights returned here, they adopted it as their home—and what had been an inescapable prison became their impenetrable fortress.”

  “But you have a way in,” Emma guessed.

  “I might, if you can help me,” Bentham said. “When Jack and his wights came, they stole the heart of my Panloopticon. They forced me to break my own machine, to copy its loops and re-create them inside their fortress so that they could continue their work in a more protected location.”

  “So there’s … another one?” I said.

  Bentham nodded. “Mine is the original and theirs is the copy,” he said. “The two are linked, and there are doorways in each that lead to the other.”

  Emma sat up straight. “You mean, we can use your machine to get inside theirs?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then why haven’t you?” I said. “Why didn’t you do it years ago?”

  “Jack broke my machine so irrevocably that I thought it could never be fixed,” Bentham said. “For years, only one room has remained functional: the one that leads to Siberia. But though we’ve searched and searched, we haven’t found a way through it into Jack’s machine.”

  I remembered the man we’d seen peering into the crevasse—looking for a door, it seemed, deep in the snow.

  “We need to open other doors, other rooms,” Bentham said, “but to do that I need an adequate replacement for the part Jack stole—the dynamo at the heart of my Panloopticon. I’ve long suspected there’s something that might work—a very powerful, very dangerous item—but though it exists right here in Devil’s Acre, getting one has never been possible for me. Until now.”

  He turned to me.

  “My boy, I need you to bring me a hollowgast.”

  * * *

  I agreed to, of course. I would’ve said yes to almost anything then if I thought it might help free our friends. It occurred to me only after I’d said it, though, and Bentham had clapped his hands around mine and shook them, that I had no idea where to get a hollowgast. I was sure there were plenty inside the wights’ fortress, but we’d already established that there was no getting inside. That’s when Sharon stepped out of
the shadows that had been growing at the edges of the room to give us a bit of good news.

  “Remember your friend who got smashed by a falling bridge?” he said. “Turns out he’s not quite dead. They pulled him out of the Ditch a few hours ago.”

  “They?” I said.

  “The pirates. They’ve got him chained and caged down the end of Oozing Street. He’s causing quite a stir, I hear.”

  “That’s it, then,” Emma said, tensing with excitement. “We’ll steal the hollow and bring him back here, restart Mr. Bentham’s machine, open a door to the wights’ fortress, and get our friends back.”

  “Simple!” Sharon said, and he let out a barking laugh. “Except for that last part.”

  “And the first,” I said.

  Emma stepped close to me. “Sorry, love. I volunteered your services without asking. Think you can handle that hollow?”

  I wasn’t sure. True, I’d been able to make it perform a few spectacular moves in Fever Ditch, but bringing it to heel like a puppy and leading it all the way back to Bentham’s house was asking a great deal of my rudimentary hollow-taming skills. My confidence, too, was at an all-time low after my last disastrous encounter. But everything hinged on me being able to do it.

  “Of course I can handle it,” I took too long to say. “When can we go?”

  Bentham clapped his hands. “That’s the spirit!”

  Emma’s gaze lingered on my face. She could tell I was faking.

  “You can leave as soon as you’re ready,” Bentham said. “Sharon will be your guide.”

  “We shouldn’t wait,” Sharon said. “Once the locals have had their fun with that hollow, I reckon they’ll kill it.”

  Emma picked at the front of her poufy dress. “In that case, I think we should change.”

  “Naturally,” said Bentham, and he sent Nim to find us clothes more befitting our errand. He returned a minute later with thick-soled boots and modern work pants and jackets: black, waterproof, and with a bit of stretch to them.

  We retreated to separate rooms to change and then met in a hallway, just Emma and me dressed in our adventure clothes. Rough and shapeless, they made Emma look slightly mannish (though not in a bad way), but she didn’t grumble—she just tied back her hair, snapped her head to attention, and saluted me. “Sergeant Bloom, reporting for duty.”

  “Purdiest soldier I ever did see,” I said, drawling out a terrible John Wayne impression.

  There was a direct correlation between how nervous I was and how many dumb jokes I made. And right now I was practically quaking, my stomach a leaky faucet dripping acid all over my insides. “You really think we can do this?” I said.

  “I do,” she said.

  “You never doubt, ever?”

  Emma shook her head. “Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.”

  She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn’t bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma’s confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft.

  I’d come to regard her faith in me as somewhat reckless. She seemed to think that I should be able to snap my fingers and make hollowgast dance at will. That I was allowing some inner weakness to block my ability. Part of me resented that, and part of me wondered if maybe she was right. The only way to find out for sure was to approach the next hollow with an unshakable belief that I could master it.

  “I wish I could see myself the way you do,” I whispered.

  She hugged me harder, and I resolved to try.

  Sharon and Bentham came into the hall. “Ready?” Sharon asked.

  We let go of each other. “Ready,” I said.

  Bentham shook my hand, then Emma’s. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he said. “It’s proof, I think, that the stars are beginning to align for us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Emma said.

  We were about to go when a question came to me that I’d been meaning to ask the whole time—and it occurred to me that, in a worst-case scenario, this could be my last chance to ask it.

  “Mr. Bentham,” I said, “we never did talk about my grandfather. How did you know him? Why were you looking for him?”

  Bentham’s eyebrows shot up and then he smiled quickly, as if to cover his moment of surprise. “I missed him, that’s all,” he said. “We were old friends, and I hoped I might see him again one day.”

  I knew that wasn’t the whole truth, and I could see in Emma’s narrowed eyes that she knew it, too, but there was no time to dig any further. Right now the future was of much greater concern than the past.

  Bentham raised his hand goodbye. “Be careful out there,” he said. “I’ll be here, preparing my Panloopticon for its triumphant return to service.” And then he hobbled back into his library, and we could hear him shouting at his bear. “PT, up! We have work to do!”

  Sharon led us down a long hall, his wooden staff swinging and his massive bare feet slapping the stone floor. When we came to the door that led outside, he stopped, bent down to match our height, and laid out his ground rules.

  “It’s dangerous where we’re going. There are very few unowned peculiar children left in Devil’s Acre, so people will notice you. Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Follow me at a slight distance, but never lose sight of me. We’ll pretend you’re my slaves.”

  “What?” said Emma. “We will not.”

  “It’s the safest thing,” said Sharon.

  “It’s demeaning!”

  “Yes, but it will raise the fewest questions.”

  “How do we do it?” I said.

  “Just do whatever I say, immediately and without question. And keep a slightly glazed expression.”

  “Yesss, master,” I said robotically.

  “Not like that,” Emma said. “He means like the kids in that awful place on Louche Lane.”

  I let my face slacken and said in a flat voice: “Hello, we’re all very happy here.”

  Emma shuddered and turned away.

  “Very good,” said Sharon, and then he looked at Emma. “Now you try.”

  “If we must do this,” she said, “I’ll pretend to be mute.”

  That was good enough for Sharon. He opened the door and swept us out into the dying day.

  The air outside was a toxic-looking yellowish soup, such that I couldn’t tell the position of the sun in the sky except to say it must’ve been getting toward evening, the light slowly leaking away. We walked a few paces behind Sharon, struggling to keep up whenever he saw someone he knew on the street and sped up to avoid conversation. People seemed to know him; he had a reputation, and I think he was concerned that we might do something to ruin it.

  We made our way down oddly cheerful Oozing Street, with its window-box flowers and brightly painted houses, then turned onto Periwinkle Street, where the pavement gave way to mud and the houses to shabby, sagging flats. Men with hats pulled low over their eyes were congregating around the end of a seedy cul-de-sac. They appeared to be guarding the door to a house with its windows blacked out. Sharon told us to stay put, and we waited while he went to talk with them.

  The air smelled faintly of gasoline. In the distance loud, laughing voices swelled and fell away, swelled and fell away. It was the sound of men in a sports bar watching a game—only it couldn’t have been; that was strictly a modern sound, and there were no televisions here.

  A man in mud-splashed pants came out of the house. As the door swung open, the voices grew louder and then faded when it slammed shut. He walked across the street carrying a bucket. We turned, watching as he walked toward something I hadn’t noticed: a pair of bear cubs chained to a sawed-off lamppost at the edge of the street. They were terribly sad looking, with only a few feet of slack on their chains, and they sat on the muddy ground watching the man approach with something like dread, their furry ears flattened back. The man dumped some putrid table scraps before them and left without a
word. The whole scene made me unutterably depressed.

  “Those there are training grims,” Sharon said, and we turned to find him standing behind us. “Blood sport is big business here, and fighting a grimbear is considered the ultimate challenge. Young fighters have to train somehow, so they start out fighting the cubs.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “The bears have the day off, though, thanks to your beastie.” Sharon pointed at the little house. “He’s in there, out through the back. But before we go in, I should warn you: this is an ambrosia den, and there’ll be peculiars in there who are lit out of their minds. Don’t talk to them, and whatever you do, don’t look them in the eye. I know people who’ve been blinded that way.”

  “What do you mean, blinded?” I said.

  “Just what it sounds like. Now follow me and don’t ask any more questions. Slaves don’t question their masters.”

  I saw Emma grit her teeth. We fell in behind Sharon as he crossed to the men clustered around the door of the house.

  Sharon talked with the men. I struggled to overhear while maintaining a slavelike distance and averting my eyes. One of them told Sharon there was an “admission fee,” and he dug a coin from his cloak and paid it. Another asked about us.

  “I haven’t given them names yet,” Sharon said. “Just got ’em yesterday. They’re still so green, I don’t dare let them out of my sight.”

  “Is that right?” the man said, approaching us. “Don’t have names?”

  I shook my head no, playing mute along with Emma. The man looked us up and down. I wanted to squirm out of my skin. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” he said, leaning closer.

  I said nothing.

  “Maybe in the window at Lorraine’s,” Sharon offered.

  “Nah,” the man said, then waved his hand. “Ah, I’m sure it’ll come to me.”

  I only risked a direct look at him once he’d turned away. If he was a Ditch pirate, he wasn’t one of those we’d tangled with. He had a bandage over his chin and another over his forehead. Several of the other men were similarly bandaged, and one sported an eyepatch. I wondered if they’d been injured fighting grims.