Library of Souls

by Ransom Riggs

  The table was ripped away, leaving me exposed. I leapt to my feet. Stop, stop, I shouted, taking small hops backward as the hollow’s tongues lashed at me, missing by mere inches.

  My back hit the wall. There was nowhere left to go.

  I took a blow to the stomach, and then the tongue that had hit me uncurled and moved to wrap around my neck. I needed to run but I was stunned, doubled over, breath knocked out of me. Then I heard an angry snarl—one that hadn’t come from the hollow—and a stout, echoing bark.

  Addison.

  Suddenly the tongue that was reaching for my neck stiffened, as if in pain, and retracted across the room. The dog, that brave little boxer, had bitten it. I heard him growling and yelping as he began to do battle with an invisible creature twenty times his size.

  I slid to the floor, back against the wall, breath filling my lungs again. I held up the vial, determined now. Convinced I had no chance without it. I pulled the cork, raised the bottle above my eyes, and tilted back my head.

  And then I heard my name. “Jacob,” softly spoken in the dark, a few feet away.

  I turned to look, and there on the floor, lying amidst a pile of parts, was Miss Peregrine. Bruised, tied, struggling to speak through a haze of pain or drugs, but there nonetheless and gazing at me with those piercing green eyes.

  “Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t do that.” Her voice barely audible, barely there.

  “Miss Peregrine!”

  I lowered the vial, corked it, scrambled on my hands to where she lay. This second mother of mine, this peculiar saint. Fallen, hurt. Dying, perhaps.

  “Tell me you’re okay,” I said.

  “Put that down,” she said. “You don’t need it.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m not like he was.”

  We both knew who I meant: my grandfather.

  “Yes, you are,” she said. “Everything you need is inside you already. Put it down and take that instead.” She nodded at something lying between us: a jagged stake of wood from a broken chair.

  “I can’t. It’s not enough.”

  “It is,” she assured me. “Just aim for the eyes.”

  “I can’t,” I said, but I did. I put down the vial and took the stake.

  “Good lad,” she whispered. “Now, go and do something gruesome with it.”

  “I will,” I said, and she smiled, her head sinking back to the floor.

  I stood up, determined now, the wooden stake gripped in my hand. Across the room, Addison had his teeth clamped deep into one of the hollow’s tongues and was riding it like a rodeo cowboy, clinging valiantly and snarling as the hollow whipped him back and forth. Emma had cut down Miss Wren from the rope where she’d been hanging and was standing guard over her, swinging her flaming hands blindly.

  The hollow smacked Addison into a pole, and the dog was flung loose.

  I started toward the hollow, running as fast as I could through an obstacle course of scattered limbs. But like a moth to flame, the creature seemed more interested in Emma. It was starting to close in on her, and so I shouted at it, first in English—“Hey! Over here!”—and then in Hollow: Come and get me, you bastard!

  I picked up the closest thing at hand—which happened to be a hand—and threw it. It bounced off the hollow’s back, and the thing turned around to face me.

  Come and get me come and get me

  For a moment the hollow was confused, which was just enough time for me to get close to it without getting caught up in its tongues. I stabbed it with the stake, once, twice in the chest. It reacted as if it’d been stung by a bee—no worse than that—and then knocked me to the ground with a tongue.

  Stop, stop, stop, I shouted in Hollow, desperate for something to get through, but the beast seemed bulletproof, totally inoculated against my suggestions. And then I remembered the finger, the little chalk-stub of dust in my pocket. As I reached for it, a tongue wrapped around me and hoisted me into the air. I could hear Emma shouting at it to put me down—and Caul, too. “Don’t you eat him!” he screeched over the PA. “He’s mine!”

  As I drew Mother Dust’s finger from my pocket, the hollow dropped me into its open jaws.

  I was trapped in its mouth from knees to chest, its teeth pinning me in place, starting to cut into my flesh, its jaws quickly expanding to swallow me.

  This would be my last act. My last moment. I crushed the finger in my hand and shoved it down what I hoped was the hollow’s throat. Emma was beating it, burning it—and then, just before it could close its jaws and saw me in half with its teeth, the creature began to choke. It stumbled away from Emma, burned and gagging, retreating toward the grate in the floor from which it had crawled. Bounding back to its nest, where it would have all the time it wanted to devour me.

  I tried to stop it, to shout (Let me go!) but it was biting down and the pain was so blacking that I couldn’t think—and then we were there, at the grate, slipping down into it. Its mouth so full of me that it couldn’t catch hold of the rungs on the wall and it was falling, falling and choking, and I was still, somehow, alive.

  When we hit bottom, it was with a great, bone-breaking crack that flattened our lungs and sent all the sedative dust I’d shoved down the hollow’s gullet blowing into the air around us. As it snowed down I could feel it working, numbing my pain and dulling my brain, and it must’ve been doing the same to the hollow because it was hardly biting me at all now, its jaws slackening.

  As we lay in a stunned and tranquilized pile, racing toward sleep, I could see forming before me, through all those billowing white particles, a dank and lightless tunnel heaped with bones. The last thing I saw before the dust took me was a throng of hollows, hunched and curious, shuffling forward.

  I woke up. That in itself is worthy of note, I think, given the circumstances.

  I was in the hollows’ burrow, and piled around me were the bodies of many hollowgast. They might’ve been dead, but it was likelier they’d breathed what remained of Mother Dust’s pinky finger, and the result was tangled in a spaghetti of stinking, snoring, mostly unconscious hollowflesh.

  I gave a silent prayer of thanks for Mother Dust and then wondered, with rising alarm, how long I’d been down here. An hour? A day? What had happened to everyone above?

  I had to go. A few of the hollows were beginning to stir from sleep, like me, but they were still woozy. With great effort, I stood. Apparently my wounds were not so grave, my bones not so broken. I swayed, dizzy, then caught my balance and began to move through the enmeshed hollows.

  I kicked one in the head by accident. With a grunt it came awake and opened its eyes. I froze, thinking that if I ran it would only chase me down. It seemed to register me—but as neither a threat nor a potential meal—then closed its eyes again.

  I continued on, placing each foot with care until I had passed the carpet of hollows and reached a wall. Here the tunnel ended. The way out was above me: a chute leading upward a hundred feet or so to an open grate and that cluttered room. There were holds along the chute, but they were spaced too far apart, built for hollows’ acrobatic tongues, not human hands and feet. I stood peering up at a ring of dim light far overhead, hoping a friendly face might appear there, but I dared not shout for help.

  In desperation I jumped, scrabbling at the hard wall and grasping for the first hold. Somehow I reached it. Pulled myself up. Suddenly I was more than ten feet off the ground. (How had I done that?) I jumped again and reached the next hold—and the next one. I was climbing the chute, my legs launching me higher and my arms reaching farther than I knew was possible—this is insane—and then I was at the top, poking my head out, pushing myself up into the room.

  I wasn’t even breathing hard.

  I looked around, saw Emma’s firelight, and ran toward it across the cluttered floor. I tried calling out but couldn’t seem to make the words. No matter—there she was, on the other side of the open glass door, in the office. Warren was on this side, tied to the chair Miss Glassbill had sat in, and when I came
close he groaned fearfully and knocked himself over. Then their faces were at the door, suspicious and peering—Emma and Miss Peregrine and Horace, and behind them other ymbrynes and friends, too. All there, alive, beautiful. They had been freed from their cells only to be imprisoned once more in here, locked behind Caul’s bomb-proof bunker door, safe from wights (for now) but trapped.

  Their expressions were fearful, and the closer I got to the glass door, the more terrified they became. It’s me, I tried to say, but the words didn’t come out right, and my friends jumped back.

  It’s me, it’s Jacob!

  What came out instead of English was a husky snarl and three long, fat tongues, waving in the air before me, spat from my own mouth in my attempt to speak. And then I heard one of my friends—Enoch, it was Enoch—say aloud the terrible thing that had just occurred to me:

  “It’s a hollow!”

  I’m not, I tried to say, I’m not—but all evidence was to the contrary. I had somehow become one of them, been bitten and turned, like a vampire, or been killed, eaten, recycled, reincarnated—oh god oh god oh god it can’t be …

  I tried to reach out with my hands, to make some sign that might be recognized as human now that my mouth had failed me, but it was my tongues that reached out.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to drive this thing

  Emma swiped blindly at me with her hand—and connected. Sudden, searing pain flashed through me.

  And then I woke up.

  Again.

  Or rather, jolted by sudden pain, I woke back into my body—my hurt, human body, still lying in the dark in the slack jaws of a sleeping hollow. And yet I was still the hollow above, too, snatching my hurt tongue back into my mouth and stumbling away from the door. I was somehow dually present in both my mind and the hollow’s, and I found now that I could control both—could lift my own arm and the hollow’s, turn my own head and the hollow’s, and do it all without saying a word aloud, but merely by thinking.

  Without realizing it—without consciously trying—I had mastered the hollow to such a degree (seeing through its eyes, feeling through its skin) that it had felt, for a time, like I was the hollow. But now a distinction was becoming clear. I was this fallible and broken-bodied boy, deep in a hole surrounded by groggy monsters. They were waking, all but the one who had brought me down here in its jaws (it had so much dust in its system that it might sleep for years), and they were sitting up now, shaking the numbness from their limbs.

  But they didn’t seem interested in killing me. They were watching me, quiet and attentive. Semicircled around like well-behaved children at storytime. Waiting for input.

  I rolled myself out of the hollow’s jaws and onto the floor. I could sit up but was too hurt to stand. But they could stand.

  Stand.

  I didn’t say it, didn’t even think it, really. It felt like doing, only it wasn’t me who did it. They did it, eleven hollowgast all rising to their feet before me in perfect synchrony. This was astounding, of course, and yet I felt a profound sense of calm spreading through me. I was relaxing into the purest depths of my ability. Something about shutting down all our minds at once, then bringing them back online together—a collective reboot—had brought us into a kind of harmony, allowing me to tap into the unconscious heart of my power, as well as into the hollows’ minds at just the moment their defenses were down.

  And now they were mine. Marionettes I could control with invisible strings. But how much could I do? What were the limits? How many could I control at once, discretely?

  To find out, I began to play.

  In the room above, I lay the hollow down.

  He lay down.

  (They were all hes, I had decided.)

  I made the ones in front of me jump.

  They jumped.

  They were two distinct groups now, the loner above and the ones before me. I tried controlling each individually, making one raise a hand without the rest doing it. It was a bit like asking just one toe on your foot to wiggle—difficult, not impossible—but before long I’d gotten the hang of it. The less conscious I was of trying, the easier it became. The control came most naturally when I simply imagined an action being performed.

  I sent them away into the bone-piles farther down the tunnel, then had them pick up bones with their tongues and toss them to one another: first one at a time, then two, then three and four, piling action upon action until I’d gotten up to six. It was only when I made the hollow upstairs stand and do jumping jacks that the bone-tossers began to miss catches.

  I don’t think it would be bragging to say I was very good at this. A natural, even. I could tell that with more time to practice, I had the capacity to become masterful. I could’ve played both sides of an all-hollow basketball game. I could’ve made them dance every role in Swan Lake. But there was no more time to practice; this would have to do. And so I gathered them around me, had the strongest one pick me up and saddle me to its back with a wrapped-around tongue, and one by one my monstrous little army bounded up the chute and into the room above.

  * * *

  The overhead lights had been turned on in the cluttered room, and in their harsh glow I could see that the only bodies remaining were mannequins and models—the ymbrynes had all been taken out. The glass door to Caul’s observation room was closed. I made the hollows hang back while I approached it alone, save the hollow I was riding, then called out to my friends—this time with my own voice, in English.

  “It’s me! It’s Jacob!”

  They rushed to the door, Emma’s face circled by the others’.

  “Jacob!” Her voice was muffled behind the glass. “You’re alive!” But as she studied me her face turned strange, as if she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Because I was on the hollow’s back, I realized, it looked to Emma like I was floating above the ground.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “I’m riding a hollowgast!” I slapped its shoulder to prove there was something solid and fleshy beneath me. “He’s completely under my control—and so are these.”

  I brought the eleven hollows forward, stamping their feet to announce themselves. My friends’ mouths went oval-shaped with wonder.

  “Is that really you, Jacob?” Olive asked.

  “What do you mean you’re controlling them?” Enoch said.

  “You’ve got blood on your shirt!” said Bronwyn.

  They opened the glass door just wide enough to talk through. I explained how I fell into the hollows’ pit, was nearly bitten in half, was numbed and put to sleep, and woke up with a dozen of them under my control. As further demonstration I had the hollows pick up Warren, the chair he was tied to and all, and toss him back and forth a few times, the chair flipping end over end until the kids were cheering and Warren was groaning as if he was going to be sick. Finally I had them set him down.

  “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d never have believed it,” Enoch said. “Not in a million years!”

  “You’re fantastic!” I heard a little voice say, and there was Claire.

  “Let me get a look at you!” I said, but when I approached the open door she shrank away. Impressed with my skills though they were, overcoming a peculiar’s natural fear of hollowgast is no easy thing—and the smell probably didn’t help, either.

  “It’s safe,” I said, “I promise.”

  Olive came right to the door. “I’m not scared.”

  “Me, neither,” said Emma, “and me first.”

  She stepped through the door and came to meet me. I made the hollow kneel, leaned away from it, and managed somewhat awkwardly to put my arms around Emma. “Sorry, I can’t quite stand up on my own,” I said, my face against her cheek, my closed eyes brushing her soft hair. It wasn’t enough, but for now it would have to be.

  “You’re hurt.” She pulled away to look me over. “You’ve got cuts everywhere—and they’re deep.”

  “I can’t feel them. I got dust all over me …”

  “Tha
t could mean you’re only numb, not healed.”

  “I’ll worry about it later. How long was I down there?”

  “Hours,” she whispered. “We thought you were dead.”

  I nudged her forehead with mine. “I made you a promise, remember?”

  “I need you to make me a new promise. Quit scaring the hell out of me.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “No. Promise.”

  “Once this is over, I’ll make any promise you like.”

  “I’m going to remember that,” she said.

  Miss Peregrine appeared at the door. “You two had better come in here. And leave that beast outside, please!”

  “Miss P,” I said, “you’re on your feet!”

  “Yes, I’m recovering,” she replied. “I was spared by my late arrival here, and by some nepotistic favoritism on my brother’s part. Not all my fellow ymbrynes were so lucky.”

  “I wasn’t sparing you, sister,” said a booming voice from above—Caul again, through the PA system. “I was merely saving the tastiest dish for last!”

  “You shut up!” Emma shouted. “When we find you, Jacob’s hollows will eat you for breakfast!”

  Caul laughed. “I doubt that,” he said. “You’re more powerful than I imagined, boy, but don’t be fooled. You’re surrounded with no way out. You’ve only delayed the inevitable. But if you give up now, I might consider sparing some of you …”

  With a quick flick of their tongues, I made the hollows rip the speakers from the ceiling and smash them on the ground. As wires and parts sprang everywhere, Caul’s voice went dead.

  “When we find him,” Enoch said, “I’d like to pull out his fingernails before we kill him. Anyone have a problem with that?”

  “As long as I can send a squadron of bees up his nose first,” said Hugh.

  “That’s not our way,” Miss Peregrine said. “When this is all over, he’ll be sentenced by ymbrynic law to rot in a punishment loop for the rest of his unnatural life.”