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Would the Library of Souls bury them? Would it be their grave, their prison? Or would it crack open like an eggshell and birth these horrors into the world?
We reached the grotto exit and dashed once again into the orange daylight. The rumble behind us had become constant, a quake that reverberated through the hills.
“We must keep going!” Miss Peregrine shouted. “To the loop exit!”
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 sai
d. 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!”
