Library of Souls (46 page)

We were halfway there, stumbling through a clearing, when the ground beneath us shook so violently that we were all thrown off our feet. I'd never heard a volcano erupt in person, but it couldn't have sounded much scarier than the thunderous boom that echoed from the low hills behind us. We turned in shock to see acres of pulverized rock flying into the air—and then we heard, clear as day, the
screams of Bentham and Caul.

They were free of the library now. They had torn through the cavern ceiling, and untold depths of stone, to daylight.

“We can't wait any longer!” Miss Peregrine cried. She picked herself up and held aloft Bentham's crumple of paper. “Sisters, it's time to close this loop!”

That's when I realized what it was he'd given us, and why Miss Peregrine had let him go.
A recipe
, he'd called it.
It worked once …

It was the procedure he'd tricked Caul and his followers into enacting, all those years ago in 1908. The one that had collapsed the loop they were in, rather than resetting their internal clocks as they'd hoped. This time the collapse would be intentional. There was only one problem …

“Won't that turn them into hollows?” asked Miss Wren.

“A hollow's no problem,” I said, “but last time someone collapsed a loop this way, didn't it make an explosion big enough to flatten half of Siberia?”

“The ymbrynes my brother coerced into helping him were young and inexperienced,” Miss Peregrine said. “We'll do a better job.”

“We'd better,” said Miss Wren.

Over the hill, a giant face rose like a second sun peeking over the horizon. It was Caul, large as ten houses now. In a terrible voice that trumpeted across the hills, he bellowed,
“ALMAAAAAAAAA!”

“He's coming for you, miss!” Olive cried. “We must get to safety!”

“In a moment, dear.”

Miss Peregrine shooed all of us peculiar children (and Sharon and his cousins) a good distance away, then gathered the ymbrynes around her. They looked like some mystical secret society about to enact an ancient ritual. Which, I suppose, they were. Reading from the paper, Miss Peregrine said, “According to this, once we start the reaction, we'll have only a minute to escape the loop.”

“Will that be that enough time?” said Miss Avocet.

“It'll have to be,” said Miss Wren grimly.

“Perhaps we should get closer to the exit before we try,” suggested Miss Glassbill, who had just recently come to her senses.

“There isn't time,” said Miss Peregrine. “We have to—”

The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a distant-but-thunderous shout from Caul, his words gibberish now, his mind likely melting from the extraordinary stress of rapid growth. His breath reached us a few seconds after his voice, a foul yellow wind that curdled the air.

Bentham hadn't been heard from in a few minutes. I wondered if he'd been killed.

“Wish your elders luck!” Miss Peregrine shouted to us.

“Good luck!” we all cried.

“Don't blow us up!” Enoch added.

Miss Peregrine turned to her sisters. The twelve ymbrynes formed a tight circle and joined hands. Miss Peregrine spoke in Old Peculiar. The others replied in unison, all their voices rising in an eerie, lilting song. This went on for thirty seconds or more, during which time Caul started to climb out of the cavern, rubble tumbling down the hills where his massive hands grasped for purchase.

“Well, this is fascinating,” Sharon said, “and you're all free to stay and watch, but I think my cousins and I will be going.” He began to walk away, then saw that the path ahead split five ways, and the hard ground had captured none of our footprints. “Um,” he said, turning back, “does anyone happen to remember the way?”

“You'll have to wait,” Addison growled. “No one leaves until the ymbrynes do.”

Finally they unclasped their hands and broke their circle.

“That's it?” Emma said.

“That's it!” Miss Peregrine replied, hurrying toward us. “Let's be on our way. We don't want to be here fifty-four seconds from now!”

Where the ymbrynes had been standing a crack was splitting open in the ground, the clay falling away into a quickly widening sinkhole from which a loud, almost mechanical buzz issued forth. The collapse had begun.

In spite of exhaustion and broken bodies and faltering steps, we ran, pushed faster by terror and awful, apocalyptic noises—and by the giant, lumbering shadow that fell across our path. We ran over ground that was splitting open, down ancient stairways that crumbled beneath our feet, back into the first house we'd exited from, choked with red dust from pulverizing walls, and finally into the passageway that led back to Caul's tower.

Miss Peregrine herded us through, the passageway disintegrating around us, and then out the other side, into the tower. I looked back to see the passage cave in behind us, a giant fist smashing down through its roof.

Miss Peregrine, frantic: “Where's the door gone? We must close it, or the collapse may spread beyond this loop!”

“Bronwyn kicked it in!” Enoch tattled. “It's broken!”

She'd been the first to reach it and, for Brownyn, kicking down the door had been faster than turning its knob. “I'm sorry!” she cried. “Have I doomed us all?”

The loop's shaking had begun to spread to the tower. It swayed, spilling us from one side of the hall to the other.

“Not if we can escape the tower,” Miss Peregrine said.

“We're too high!” cried Miss Wren. “We'll never make it to the bottom in time!”

“There's an open deck just above us,” I said. Though I wasn't sure why I said it, because leaping to our deaths seemed no better than being crushed in a collapsing tower.

“Yes!” cried Olive. “We'll jump!”

“Absolutely not!” Miss Wren said. “We ymbrynes would be just fine, but you children …”

“I can float us!” Olive said. “I'm strong enough!”

“No way!” Enoch said. “You're tiny, and there are too many of us!”

The tower rocked sickeningly. Ceiling tiles crashed down around us and cracks spidered through the floor.

“Fine, then!” Olive said. “Stay behind!”

She started upstairs. It took the rest of us only a moment, and one more wobble of the tower, to decide that Olive was our only hope.

Our lives were now in the dainty hands of our smallest member. Bird help us.

We ran up the sloping hallway, then out into open air and what remained of the day. Below us spread a commanding view of Devil's Acre: the compound and its pale walls, the misty chasm and its hollow-gapped bridge, the black tinders of Smoking Street and the packed tenements beyond—and then the Ditch, snaking along the loop's edge like a ring of scum. Whatever happened next, whether we lived or died, I'd be happy at least to see the last of this place.

We bellied up to the circular railing. Emma gripped my hand. “Don't look down, eh?”

One by one the ymbrynes turned to birds and perched on the rail, ready to help however they could. Olive took hold of the railing with both hands and slipped out of her shoes. Her feet bobbed upward until she was doing a weightless headstand on the rail, her heels aimed at the sky.

“Bronwyn, take my feet!” she said. “We'll make a chain. Emma grabs Bronwyn's legs, and Jacob Emma's legs, and Horace Emma's, and Horace Hugh's …”

“My left leg's hurt!” Hugh said.

“Then Horace will grab your right one!” Olive said.

“This is madness!” said Sharon. “We'll be much too heavy!”

Olive started to argue, but a sudden tremor shook the tower so hard that we had to cling to the rail or be shaken off.

It was Olive's way or nothing.

“You get the idea!” Miss Peregrine shouted. “Do as Olive says and, most importantly, don't let go until we reach the ground!”

Little Olive bent her knees, kicked one foot down toward Bronwyn, and offered it to her. Bronwyn took Olive's foot, then reached up and grabbed the other one. Olive let go of the rail and stood up in Bronwyn's hands, pushing toward the sky like a swimmer kicking off the wall of a pool.

Bronwyn was lifted off her feet. Emma quickly grabbed hold of Bronwyn's legs, and then she was lifted, too, as Olive strained upward, gritting her teeth, willing herself higher. Then it was my turn—but Olive, it seemed, was running out of lift power. She struggled and groaned, dog-paddling toward the sky, but she was out of juice. That's when Miss Peregrine turned into a bird, flapped into the air, hooked her talons through the back of Olive's dress, and lifted.

My feet came off the ground. Hugh grabbed onto my legs and Horace onto his legs and Enoch onto his and so on, until even Perplexus and Addison and Sharon and his cousins had caught a ride. We strung out into the air like a strange, wiggling kite, Millard its invisible tail. The other, smaller ymbrynes hooked into our clothes here and there and flapped furiously, adding what lift they could.

The last of us had only just left the tower when the whole thing began to crumble. I looked down in time to see it fall. It happened quickly, tumbling in on itself, the top section seeming to implode as if it had been sucked into the collapsing loop. After that the rest just went, tipping over in one section before breaking in the middle and slumping into a huge cloud of dust and debris, the sound like a million bricks being poured into a quarry. By then Miss Peregrine's strength was flagging and we were falling slowly toward the ground, the ymbrynes pulling us hard to one side for a soft landing away from the wreckage.

We touched down in the courtyard, Millard first and then finally Olive, who was so spent that she landed on her back and stayed there, breathing like she'd just run a marathon. We gathered around,
cheering and applauding her.

Her eyes got big and she pointed up. “Look!”

In the air behind us, where the top of the tower had been just moments before, there spun a small vortex of shimmering silver, like a miniature hurricane. It was the last of the collapsing loop. We watched hypnotized as it shrank, spinning faster and faster. When it became too small to see, there issued from it a sound like the crack of a sonic boom:

“ALMAAAAAAAAAA …”

And then the whirlwind winked out, sucking Caul's voice away with it.

A
fter the loop collapsed and the tower fell, we weren't allowed to stand shell-shocked and gaping—at least not for long. Though it seemed the worst dangers were behind us and most of our enemies had been felled or captured, there was chaos all around and work to be done. Despite our exhaustion and bruises and sprains, the ymbrynes set about doing what ymbrynes do best, which was to create order. They changed into human form and took charge. The compound was searched for hidden wights. Two surrendered outright, and Addison discovered another—a miserable-looking woman hiding in a hole in the ground.

She came out with her arms raised, begging for mercy. Sharon's cousins were employed constructing a makeshift jail to hold our small but growing number of prisoners, and they set happily to work, singing while they hammered. Sharon was interrogated by Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet, but after just a few minutes of questioning, they were satisfied that he was merely a mercenary, not a secret operative or a traitor. Sharon had seemed as shocked by Bentham's betrayal as the rest of us.

In short order the wights' prisons and laboratories were emptied and their machines of terror smashed. The subjects of their horrible experiments were brought out into the open and attended to. Dozens more were freed from another block of cells. They emerged from the underground building where they'd been held looking thin and ragged. Some wandered in a daze and had to be corralled and watched, lest they walk away and get lost. Others were so overwhelmed
by gratitude that they couldn't stop thanking us. One small girl spent half an hour going from one peculiar to another, surprising us with hugs. “You don't know what you did for us,” she kept saying. “You don't know what you did.”