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by
Ransom Riggs
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October 18 - October 21, 2021
I’ve lost my soul, I’m afraid, but I can’t remember how.
I felt strangely superstitious, too, about trying to fight a hollowgast here, in the very place my grandfather had been killed by one. Like it would be tempting fate.
I had seen the same letters inside certain editions of the Tales. For peculiar eyes only.
I floored the gas pedal. The car’s engine howled with a fury that old, boatlike Chevy Caprices were never meant to have.
Miss Avocet reached out and patted her hand. “That’s good. Though a modicum of fear wouldn’t hurt, either. It’s the absolutely unafraid who tend to die first, and we need you, dear. We need you badly.”
We lived in trying times, and there were so many ways to not be okay.
“Don’t lose your wig,” said Enoch, rolling his eyes. “I will, I will lose my wig when it’s appropriate!” Horace shouted. He crawled out from under the table and stood next to it, gesticulating wildly.
Everyone was staring. His lip, and then the rest of him, began to quiver. “I’ll just go back under the table.”
“So he’ll just enslave us all,” Enoch said, “make us lick his boots and sing his praises and go on retreats at the weekend to murder normals, or whatever gives him his jollies.”
And anxious, highly independent peculiar children who were prone to ignoring her orders were a headache she didn’t need.
In local news, the lead and the understudy in Miss Grackle’s production of The Grass Menagerie have fallen ill with a touch of plague, so tonight’s performance has been cancelled.
Enoch teased me the rest of the way down the hall, bowing and scraping, until I turned red from embarrassment. “Apologies, Mr. Portman, right this way, Mr. Portman! There’s a spot of mud on your boots, Mr. Portman, might I lick it clean for you?”
The boy’s hat fell off as he yanked at the knife. Someone grabbed him by the waist as he flailed. Horace slapped him in the head and Noor kicked him in the face.
Mind control sounded a lot more problematic to me than one bad apple succumbing to Caul’s poisonous rhetoric, but to the ymbrynes, a traitor was infinitely worse. Loyalty was everything; we were supposed to be family.
“I wouldn’t trust them to defend my lunch, much less my loop,” said Enoch.
“These murderers’ hearts are tops if you need your resurrectee to do something physical, but for strength of mind, a poet’s heart would be ideal … if I can lay my hands on one … Might need to sneak down to Westminster Abbey with a spade—” “Don’t you dare,” said Miss Peregrine.
Desperation could make good people do bad things … and morally ambivalent people do really bad things.
It was unimaginable that it had all happened less than a year ago. That such a short time ago I hadn’t met Millard yet or Emma or Miss Peregrine. The boy I’d been then was a stranger to me now. That was another life.
I wanted Millard to jump in and back me up, but he knew we were having a private conversation and was probably a tactful ten strides ahead of us.
“Oh, come on!” Enoch said, shaking the heart as if it were a stopped clock.
Enoch threw the exhausted heart on the floor. “Is that it?” he shouted at V. “I go to all the trouble of bringing you back from the dead, and we get a bedtime story?”
“Think back to your loop history classes.” No one had an answer. She frowned. “I think I let you spend too many days cavorting in the sun instead of studying. Miss Wren, if you please …
“This one’s different from any we’ve seen before. But in any case it’s wreaking havoc and hurting people, so if you aren’t too busy, Mr. Portman, could you please spare a moment to go and kill it?”
“This one’s different how?” I called after the boy as we chased him down the steps. He stopped at the footbridge and turned to face me. He looked frightened. “Mr. Portman, sir, even I can see this one.”
Earlier in the day, one of Parkins’s Californios had even been discovered napping—snoring loudly, in fact—with two cocked and loaded guns on his lap and an enormous knife gripped in his hand.
Across the Ditch, the ymbrynes began to sing in Old Peculiar and walk slowly in a circle. “Hope they don’t collapse the place by accident,” Enoch whispered to a pretty, curly-haired girl standing beside him in the crowd, and she looked so alarmed Enoch had to reassure her that he was kidding.
“What’s deadly is how boring you are. If I wasn’t here to lighten the mood now and then, everyone would’ve hung themselves ages ago.”
Horace was clearly exhausted by the events of the day but also said our cause would be better served by him taking a sleeping dram and going to bed, in the hopes that he might have some useful prophetic dreams.
Enoch rounded on him. “They’re working themselves to death trying to save us from Caul, that’s what going on!” Emma gaped at him in surprise.
“Bollocks to that,” Enoch said, and then he bellowed, “MISS PEREGRINE! IT’S ENOCH! LET US IN!”
Enoch was released and strode quickly back, brushing off his vest and casting obscene gestures at the guards, who, from the looks of it, were imagining cracking him in the head with their batons.
“Ahhh,” he said, steam escaping his lips. “When you’re as old as I am, coffee’s practically the only thing keeping you alive.”
“I detest war and fighting,” he said, “but I’m coming nevertheless. You’re going to need me. I’m not sure why yet, but it’s not for my knitting skills.”
She dug into the ice with her fingers and fished out V’s hand, blue from death and cold, kneading it as she talked. I think she said I love you and I’m sorry, but I was trying not to listen, because it felt too private and because it was hurting my heart.
We had, as usual, little choice but to entrust our lives to a person who in the normal world would be considered deeply unwell.
“Let’s get cozy,” Enoch said with a snicker. He unshouldered his pack and dropped it in the mud. “Anyone want to give me a shoulder rub?” Bronwyn proceeded to, but Enoch flinched away, yelping, “Oww, not so hard!”
How many people would spend their lives among shades and ghosts, were they able? Every parent who’d lost a child, every lover who’d lost a mate: If they had the choice, wouldn’t most do the same? We’re all riddled with holes, and there were days when I would’ve done anything to patch mine, if just for a while. I was glad I didn’t have a choice. Gladder still that I didn’t have the powers of an ymbryne. The temptation to misuse them would’ve been overwhelming.
“What could be worse?” Sebbie asked. And then we heard a roar from outside, a sound I associated with Godzilla or the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park
Paradoxically, the inside of a WWI-era tank looked like it was designed to kill its occupants just as much as the outside was designed to kill the enemy.
If we survived these ordeals I’d probably develop a twitch or resume the crippling nightmares that used to plague me. Maybe one day a therapist would help me unpack it all. And not some quack my parents had hired, or a wight in disguise. A peculiar one. I asked my friends if there was such a thing as a brain-mender, but they looked at me strangely, and I didn’t feel like explaining why I’d asked.
“It’s looking more like death with every passing hour,” said Enoch. “Your life took a bad turn when you found us, American boy. You should never have stayed on. Look what it’s got you: a no-return ticket to the graveyard.” He nodded his head at the stones behind us, which weren’t just slabs of rock, I realized, but dozens of weathered grave markers. They were tilted in long rows against the tree’s trunk, greening with moss and so old the names had been worn away. “If Caul has his way, we’ll soon be as forgotten as them. And all of the hard, horrible things we’ve had to do will have been for
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“I did. You were quite adamant. You said all our lives depended on it, and that I must keep it a secret.” A rat poked its head out of his sleeve and squeaked, and Sharon replied, “No, of course not, Daddy keeps nothing secret from you, Percy.”
“Then we’ll go to Florida, and no one’s ever cold in Florida.” I smiled, something I hadn’t done in what felt like a long time. I loved Olive and her irrepressible optimism. I loved them all.
“Somnusson could catch a sunburn in full shade,” said Enoch, mumbling through split lips from his bed. It was the first I’d heard him speak since he’d been hurt, and my heart leapt.
“They’ll be powdered and made into medicines. Ymbryne bones have many uses and it’s a crime to waste them.” It was fitting. An ymbryne’s life was one of endless service. Even in death they had a job to do.
