Caul turned to the door. “Oh, to hell with it,” he muttered, and opened it. “Get in there, all of you!”
Inside was the same familiar gray-walled room, only this time its missing fourth wall extended into a long, dark corridor. With a few shoves from the guards, we were hurrying along it. The smooth walls became rough and uneven, then widened into a primitive, day-lit room. The room was made from rock and clay, and I might’ve called it a cave but for its approximately rectangular door and two windows. Someone had carved them, and this room, using tools to dig it out of soft rock.
We were herded outside into a hot, dry day. The view opened dizzyingly. We were high in a landscape that could’ve been an alien world: everywhere around us, towering on one side and rolling away into valleys on the other, were humps and spires of strange, reddish rock, all honeycombed with crude doors and windows. A constant wind blew through them, producing a human-sounding moan that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Though the sun was nowhere near setting, the sky glowed orange, as if the end of the world were brewing just beyond the horizon. And despite evidence here of a civilization, other than ourselves there was no one in sight. I had a heavy, watched feeling, like we were trespassing someplace we were not meant to be.
Bentham climbed down from his bear and removed his hat in awe. “So this is the place,” he said, gazing across the hills.
Caul threw a big-brotherly arm across his shoulders. “I told you this day would come. We certainly put each other through hell getting here, didn’t we?”
“We did,” Bentham agreed.
“But I say all’s well that ends well, because now I get to do this.” Caul turned to face us. “Friends! Ymbrynes! Peculiar children!” He let his voice echo away into the strange, moaning canyons. “Today will go down in history. Welcome to Abaton!”
He paused, waiting for applause that didn’t come.
“You’re standing now in the ancient city that once protected the Library of Souls. Until recently, it hadn’t been seen in over four hundred years, nor conquered in a thousand—until I rediscovered it! Now, with you as my witnesses …”
He stopped, looked down for a moment, then laughed. “Why am I wasting my breath? You philistines will never appreciate the gravity of my achievement. Look at you—like donkeys contemplating the Sistine Chapel!” He patted Bentham on the arm. “Come on, brother. Let’s go and take what’s ours.”
“And ours as well!” said a voice behind me. One of the guards. “You won’t forget us, will you, sir?”
“Of course I won’t,” Caul said, attempting a smile and failing. He couldn’t disguise his irritation at having been challenged in front of everyone. “Your loyalty will be repaid tenfold.”
He turned with Bentham and started down a footpath, the guards pushing us after them.
*
The sunbaked path split and split again, sending branches and feeders into the spiked hills. Following a route he’d no doubt forced Perplexus to reveal and had trod many times in recent days, Caul led us down obscure and bramble-choked lanes with certainty, his every step oozing the arrogance of a colonizer. The watched feeling I had only grew. As if the rough openings bored into the rock were a colony of half-closed eyes, some ancient intelligence encased in stone, waking slowly from a thousand-year sleep.
I was fevered with anxiety, my thoughts tripping over one another. What happened next would be up to me. The wights needed me, after all. What if I refused to handle the souls for them? What if I found a way to trick them?
I knew what would happen. Caul would kill Miss Peregrine. Then he’d start killing the other ymbrynes, one after another until I gave him what he wanted. And if I didn’t, he’d kill Emma.
I wasn’t strong enough. I knew I’d do anything to stop them from hurting her—even hand Caul the keys to untold power.
Then I had a thought that scared the bejesus out of me: what if I couldn’t do it? What if Caul was wrong and I couldn’t see the soul jars, or I could see them but not handle them? He wouldn’t believe me. He’d think I was lying. He’d start murdering my friends. And even if I somehow convinced him it was true—that I couldn’t—he might get so livid that he’d kill everyone anyway.
I said a silent prayer to my grandfather—can you pray to dead people? Well, I did—and I asked, if he was watching me, to see me through this, and to make me as strong and as powerful as he once was. Grandpa Portman, I prayed, I know this sounds crazy, but Emma and my friends mean the world to me, the whole damned world, and I would gladly give every bit of it to Caul in exchange for their lives. Does that make me evil? I don’t know, but I thought you might understand. So please.
Looking up, I was surprised to see Miss Peregrine watching me from over the bear’s shoulder. As soon as she met my eyes she looked away, and I could see tears tracking through the grime on her pale cheeks. As if somehow she’d heard me.
Our route wound through an ancient maze of twisting paths and stairways cut into the hills, their steps worn into crescent moons. In some places the path all but disappeared, swallowed by weeds. I heard Perplexus complain that it had taken him years to puzzle out the way to the Library of Souls, and to have this ungrateful thief tromping along it now with no regard—a terrible insult!
And then I heard Olive say, “Why did no one ever tell us the library was real?”
“Because, my dear,” replied an ymbryne, “it wasn’t allowed. It was safer to say …”
The ymbryne paused to catch her breath.
“… that it was just a story.”
Just a story. It had become one of the defining truths of my life that, no matter how I tried to keep them flattened, two-dimensional, jailed in paper and ink, there would always be stories that refused to stay bound inside books. It was never just a story. I would know: a story had swallowed my whole life.
We’d been walking for several minutes along a plain-looking wall, the wind’s eerie moan rising and falling, when Caul raised a hand and shouted for everyone to stop.
“Have we gone too far?” he said. “I could’ve sworn the grotto was along here somewhere. Where’s the cartographer?”
Perplexus was hauled forth from the crowd.
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t shoot him?” Bentham muttered.
Caul ignored him. “Where’s the grotto?” he demanded, getting in Perplexus’s face.
“Ahh, perhaps it’s hidden itself from you,” Perplexus teased.
“Don’t test me,” Caul replied. “I’ll burn every copy of your Map of Days. Your name will be forgotten by next year.”
Perplexus knotted his fingers together and sighed. “There,” he said, pointing behind us.
We had passed it.
Caul stomped down to a vine-choked patch of wall—an opening so humble and well-hidden that anyone might’ve missed it; not so much a door as a hole. He pushed aside the vines and poked his head through. “Yes!” I heard him say, and then he pulled out his head again and began giving orders.
“Essential persons only are allowed past this point. Brother, sister.” He pointed at Bentham and Miss Peregrine. “Boy.” He pointed at me. “Two guards. And …” He searched the crowd. “It’s dark in there, we’ll need a flashlight. You, girl.” He pointed at Emma.
As my stomach turned knots, Emma was pulled out of the group.
“If the others give you trouble,” Caul said to the guards, “you know what to do.” Caul raised his pistol at the crowd. They all screamed and ducked their heads. Caul howled with laughter.
Emma’s guard pushed her through the hole. Bentham’s bear would never fit through, so Miss Peregrine was set down and my wight given double duty guarding both her and me.
The youngest children began to weep. Who knew if they would ever see her again? “Be brave, children!” Miss Peregrine called to them. “I’ll be back!”
“That’s right, children!” Caul sang mockingly. “Listen to your headmistress! Ymbryne knows best!”