Library of Souls

by Ransom Riggs

  “Hey! How’d you get in there?” one shouted.

  “They’re kids,” said another. “Hey, this ain’t a playground!”

  They were American, and they didn’t seem to know what to make of us. We didn’t dare respond for fear that the wights in the hall might hear us, and I worried that the workers’ shouting would attract their attention, too.

  “Have you got that finger?” I whispered to Emma. “Now seems like a good time to test it out.”

  So we gave them the finger. By which I mean we put on the dust masks (wet from the stream but still serviceable), Emma crushed a tiny bit of Mother Dust’s pinky, and we walked down the pipe toward the men and attempted to launch the powder at them. First Emma tried blowing it out of her cupped hand, but it just swirled into a cloud around our heads, which made my face tingle and go a bit numb. Next I tried throwing it, which didn’t work at all. The dust, it seemed, wasn’t much good as an offensive weapon. By now the pipe builders were growing impatient, and one had jumped down from the scaffold to remove us by force. Emma tucked the finger away and made a flame with her hand—there was a poof! as Emma’s flame ignited the dust hanging in the air, turning it instantly to smoke.

  “Woah!” the man said. He began coughing and soon slumped to the floor, fast asleep. When a few of his friends ran to help him, they too fell victim to the cloud of anesthetizing smoke and fell to the ground beside him.

  Now the remaining workmen were afraid, angry, and shouting at us. We ran back to the door before the situation could devolve further. I checked that the coast was clear and we slipped into the hall.

  When I closed the door behind us, the sound of the men’s voices was muted completely, as if it hadn’t just shut them inside but had somehow turned them off.

  We ran a short way, then stopped and listened for footsteps, then ran, then stopped and listened, spiraling down the tower in stuttering bursts of action and silence. Twice more we heard people coming and ran to hide behind doors. Inside one was a steaming jungle echoing with the screams of monkeys, and another opened into an adobe room, beyond which lay hard-packed ground and looming mountains.

  The floor leveled and the hallway straightened. Around the last bend was a pair of double doors with daylight gleaming beneath them.

  “Shouldn’t there be more guards around?” I said nervously.

  Emma shrugged and nodded toward the doors, which appeared to be the only way out of the tower. I was about to push them open when I heard voices on the other side. A man telling a joke. I could hear only the burble of his voice, not the words, but it was definitely a joke, because when he finished there was an eruption of laughter.

  “Your guards,” Emma said, like a waiter presenting a fancy meal.

  We could either wait and hope they went away, or open the door and deal with them. The latter option was braver and faster, so I summoned New Jacob and told him we were going to throw open the door and fight, and to please not discuss the matter with Old Jacob, who inevitably would whine and resist. But by the time I’d gotten it all settled, Emma was already doing it.

  Silently and quickly, she pulled open one of the swinging doors. Arrayed before us were the backs of five wights in mismatched uniforms, all wearing modern police-issue-type pistols at their waists. They were standing casually, facing away from us. None had seen the door open. Beyond them was a courtyard surrounded by low barracks-like buildings, and rising in the farther distance was the fortress wall. I jabbed my finger toward the finger hidden in Emma’s pocket—sleep, I mouthed, by which I meant that rendering these wights unconscious and then dragging them inside the tower seemed the most expedient course of action. She understood, pulled the door halfway closed, and began to dig out the finger. I reached for the dust masks, which were stuffed into my waistband.

  And then a flaming mass of something flew over the fortress wall in the distance, sailed toward us through the air in a graceful arc, and fell splat in the middle of the courtyard, spraying dribbly blobs of fire everywhere and sending the guards into a state of excitement. Two ventured to see what had landed, and as they bent over to examine the flaming muck, another hunk came sailing over the wall and hit one of them. He was sent sprawling, his body aflame. (From the smell of it, which was pungent and traveled fast, it was a mixture of gasoline and excrement.)

  The remaining guards ran to extinguish him. A loud alarm began to sound. Within seconds, wights were flying out of the buildings around the courtyard and rushing toward the wall. Sharon’s assault had begun, bless him, and not a moment too soon. With any luck, it would give us enough cover to search unimpeded—at least for a few minutes. I couldn’t imagine it would take longer than that for the wights to repel a few ambro addicts armed with catapults.

  We scanned the courtyard. It was surrounded on three sides by low-slung buildings, each more or less identical to the next. There were no flashing arrows or neon signs advertising the presence of ymbrynes. We would have to search, as fast as we could, and hope we got lucky.

  Three of the wights had run off to the wall, leaving two behind to extinguish the one covered in flaming excrement. They were rolling him in the dirt, their backs to us.

  We chose a building at random—the one on the left—and ran to its door. Inside was a large room suffocatingly packed with what looked and smelled like secondhand clothes. We ran down an aisle lined with racks of clothes of every description, from all different time periods and cultures, all labeled and organized. A wardrobe, perhaps, for every loop the wights had infiltrated. I wondered if the cardigan Dr. Golan always wore to our meetings had hung in this room.

  But our friends weren’t here and the ymbrynes weren’t either, so we tore through the aisles looking for a way into the next building that didn’t lead back through the exposed courtyard.

  There were none. We’d have to risk another dash outside.

  We went to the door and watched through the crack, waiting as a straggler ran through the courtyard, pulling on his guard’s uniform as he went. Once the coast was clear, we ran out into the open.

  Catapulted objects landed all around us. Having run out of excrement, Sharon’s improvised army had begun to launch other things—bricks, garbage, small dead animals. I heard one such projectile utter a string of profanities as it smacked into the ground and recognized the shriveled form of a bridge head spinning across the ground. If my heart hadn’t been thrumming so tremendously I might’ve laughed out loud.

  We made it across the courtyard to the building opposite. Its door seemed promising: heavy and metal, it would surely have been guarded had the guard not abandoned his post to go to the wall. Surely there was something important inside.

  We opened it and slipped into a small white-tiled laboratory that smelled strongly of chemicals. My eyes were drawn to a cabinet filled with terrifying surgical tools, all steely and shining. There was a deep hum coming through the walls, the dissonant heartbeat of machines, and something else, too—

  “Do you hear that?” Emma said, tense, listening.

  I did. It was sustained and chattering, but distinctly human. Someone was laughing.

  We traded a baffled look. Emma gave Mother Dust’s finger to me and lit a flame in her hand, and we each put on our masks. Ready for anything, we thought, though in retrospect we were not at all prepared for the house of horrors that lay waiting for us.

  We moved through rooms I struggle to describe now because I’ve tried to erase them from my memory. Each was more nightmarish than the last. The first was a small operating theater, the table armed with straps and restraints. Porcelain tubs along the walls stood ready to collect drained fluids. Next was a research area where tiny skulls and other bones were connected to electrical equipment and gauges. The walls were papered in Polaroids documenting experiments conducted on animals. By then we were shuddering, shielding our eyes.

  The worst was yet to come.

  In the next room was an actual, ongoing experiment. We surprised two nurses and a doctor as they we
re performing some ghastly procedure on a child. They had a young boy stretched between two tables, newspapers spread below him to catch drips. A nurse held his feet while a doctor gripped his head and peered coldly into his eyes.

  They turned and saw us with our dust masks and flaming hands and shouted for help, but no one was there to hear them. The doctor dashed for a table full of cutting tools but Emma beat him to it, and after a brief scramble he gave up and raised his hands. We pinned the adults in the corner and demanded they tell us where the prisoners were kept. They refused to say a word, so I blew dust in their faces until they slumped into a pile on the floor.

  The child was dazed but unhurt. He couldn’t seem to generate more than a whimper in response to our hurried questions—Are you okay? Are there more like you? Where?—so we thought it best to hide him for now. Wrapping him in a sheet for warmth, we stowed him in a small closet, with promises to return that I hoped we could keep.

  The next room was wide and open like a hospital ward. Twenty or more beds were chained to the walls, and peculiars, adults and children alike, were strapped into the beds. None appeared conscious. Needles and tubes snaked from the soles of their feet to bags that were filling slowly with black liquid.

  “They’re being drained,” Emma said, her voice shaking. “Their souls drawn out.”

  I didn’t want to look at their faces, but we had to. “Who’s here, who’s here, who are you,” I muttered as we raced from bed to bed.

  I hoped, shamefully, that none of these poor wretches were our friends. There were several we recognized: the telekinetic girl, Melina. The pale brothers, Joel-and-Peter, separated so there was no chance of another destructive blast. Their faces were twisted, their muscles tense and fists clenched even in sleep, as if both were in the grip of terrible dreams.

  “My God,” Emma said. “They’re trying to fight it.”

  “Then let’s help them,” I said, and stepping to the end of Melina’s bed I drew the needle carefully from her foot. A tiny drop of black liquid leaked from the wound. After a moment her face relaxed.

  “Hello,” said a voice from elsewhere in the room.

  We spun around. In the corner sat a man in leg shackles. He was curled in a ball and rocking, and he laughed without smiling, his eyes like shards of black ice.

  It was his cold laugh we’d heard echoing through the rooms.

  “Where are the others being held?” Emma said, dropping to her knees in front of him.

  “Why, they’re all right here!” the man said.

  “No, the others,” I said. “There have to be more.”

  He laughed again, his breath coming out in a little puff of frost—which was strange, because it wasn’t cold in the room. “You’re standing on top of them,” the man said.

  “Make sense!” I shouted, losing my temper. “We don’t have time for this!”

  “Please,” Emma begged. “We’re peculiars. We’re here to help you, but first we have to find our ymbrynes. Which building are they in?”

  He repeated himself very slowly. “You’re. Standing. On top of them.” His words blew a steady stream of icy air in our faces.

  Just as I was about to grab him and shake him, the man raised an arm and pointed to something behind us. I turned around and noticed, camouflaged in the tile floor, a handle—and the square outline of a hatch door.

  On top of them. Literally.

  We ran to the handle, turned it, and pulled up a door in the floor. A set of metal stairs spiraled into darkness.

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Emma asked.

  “You don’t,” the man said, which was true enough.

  “Let’s give it a try,” I said. There was, after all, nowhere else to go but back the way we’d come.

  Emma looked torn, her gaze traveling from the stairs below to the beds around us. I knew what she was thinking, but she didn’t even ask—there was no time to go bed to bed, unhooking everyone. We’d have to come back for them. I just hoped that when we did, there would be something to come back to.

  * * *

  Emma lowered herself onto the metal stairs and descended into the dark hole in the floor. Before I followed, I locked eyes with the madman and raised a finger to my lips. He grinned and copied my gesture. I hoped he meant it. Guards would be there soon, and if he kept his mouth shut, maybe they wouldn’t follow us into the hatch. I started down the stairs and pulled the door shut after me.

  Emma and I huddled near the top of a narrow cylinder of spiraling stairs and peered down. It took a moment for our eyes to transition from the bright room above to this mostly lightless dungeon walled in rough rock.

  She gripped my arm and whispered in my ear.

  “Cells.”

  She pointed. Dimly it came into view: the bars of a prison cell.

  We crept down the stairs. The space began to reveal itself: we were at the end of a long, subterranean hallway lined with cells, and though we couldn’t see yet who was in them, I had a soaring moment of hope. This was it. This was the place we’d hoped to find.

  Then came a sudden slap of boots in the hall. Adrenaline surged through me. A guard was patrolling, rifle over his shoulder, pistol at his hip. He hadn’t seen us yet, but he would, any moment now. We were too far from the hatch to escape the way we’d come, and too far from the ground to easily leap down and fight him, so we hunkered and shrank back, hoping the stairs’ spindly railing would be enough to hide us.

  But it couldn’t be. We were nearly at his eye level. He was twenty steps away, then fifteen. We had to do something.

  So I did.

  I stood up and walked down the stairs. He noticed me right away, of course, but before he could get a good look I started talking. Loud and bossy, I said: “Didn’t you hear the alarm? Why aren’t you outside defending the walls?”

  By the time he realized that I was not someone he took orders from I had reached the floor, and by the time he’d started to grab for his gun I had already closed half the distance between us, barreling toward him like a quarterback. I hit him with my shoulder just as he pulled the trigger. The gun roared, the shot ricocheting behind me. We sprawled to the ground. I made the mistake of trying to stop him from squeezing off another shot while trying to give him the finger—I had it now—which was stuffed deep in my right pocket. I didn’t have enough limbs to do both, and he threw me off him and stood up. I’m sure that would’ve been the end of me if he hadn’t seen Emma running toward him, hands aflame, and turned to shoot her instead.

  He squeezed off a round but it was wild, too high, and that gave me just the opportunity I needed to scramble to my feet and charge him again. I tackled him and we fell across the hallway, his back slamming into the bars of one of the cells. He hit me—hard, in the face, with his elbow—and I spun and fell. And then he was raising the gun to shoot me, and neither Emma nor I were close enough to stop him.

  Suddenly, a pair of meaty hands reached out of the darkness, through the bars, and grabbed the guard by his hair. His head snapped back hard and rung the bars like a bell.

  The guard went limp and slid to the ground. And then Bronwyn came forward inside the cell, pressed her face to the bars, and smiled.

  “Mr. Jacob! Miss Emma!”

  I had never been so glad to see anyone. Her large, kind eyes, her strong chin, her lank brown hair—it was Bronwyn! We stuck our arms through the bars and hugged her as best we could, so excited and relieved that we started babbling—“Bronwyn, Bronwyn,” Emma gasped, “is it really you?”

  “Is that you, miss?” said Bronwyn. “We’ve been praying and hoping and, oh, I was so worried the wights had got you—”

  Bronwyn was squeezing us against the bars so hard I thought I might pop. The bars were thick as bricks and made of something stronger than iron, which I realized was the only reason Bronwyn hadn’t broken out of her cell.

  “Can’t … breathe,” Emma groaned, and Bronwyn apologized and let us go.

  Now that I could get a proper
look at her, I noticed a bruise on Bronwyn’s cheek and a dark stain that might’ve been blood spotting one side of her blouse. “What did they do to you?” I said.

  “Nothing serious,” she replied, “though there’s been threats.”

  “And the others?” Emma said, panicked again. “Where are the others?”

  “Here!” came a voice from down the hallway. “Over here!” came another.

  And then we turned and saw, pressed against the bars of the cells lining the hall, the faces of our friends. There they were: Horace and Enoch, Hugh and Claire, Olive, gasping through the bars at us from the top of her cell, her back against the ceiling—all there, all of them breathing and alive, except poor Fiona—lost when she fell from the cliff at Miss Wren’s menagerie. But mourning her was a luxury we didn’t have right then.

  “Oh, thank the birds, the miraculous bloody birds!” Emma cried, running to take Olive’s hand. “You can’t imagine how worried we’ve been!”

  “Not half as worried as we’ve been!” Hugh said from down the hall.

  “I told them you’d come for us!” Olive said, near tears. “I told them and told them, but Enoch kept saying I was a loony for thinking so …”

  “Never mind, they’re here now!” said Enoch. “What took you so bloody long?”

  “How in Perplexus’s name did you find us?” said Millard. He was the only one the wights had bothered to dress in prisoners’ garb—a striped jumpsuit that made him easy to see.

  “We’ll tell you the whole story,” said Emma, “but first we need to find the ymbrynes and get you all out of here!”

  “They’re down the hall!” said Hugh. “Through the big door!”

  At the end of the hall was a huge metal door. It looked heavy enough to secure a bank vault—or hold back a hollowgast.

  “You’ll need the key,” said Bronwyn, and she pointed out a ring on the unconscious guard’s belt. “It’s the big gold one. I’ve been watching him!”