Library of Souls (Page 92)

“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!”

Miss Peregrine and I were pushed through the opening together, and there was a moment, tangled in the vines, when I was able to whisper to her unnoticed.

“What should I do when we get inside?”

“Anything he asks,” she whispered back. “If we don’t anger him, we may yet survive.”

Survive, yes—but at what cost?

And then we were parting the vines and stumbling into a strange new space: a stone room open to the sky. For an instant my breath abandoned me, so shocked was I by the giant, misshapen face staring back at us from opposite wall. A wall—that’s all it was—but one with a gaping mouth for a door, two warped eyes for windows, a pair of holes for nostrils, and grown over with long grass that resembled hair and an unruly beard. The moaning wind was louder than ever here, as if the mouth-shaped door were trying to warn us away in some ancient language made of vowels a week long.

Caul indicated the door. “The library awaits.”

Bentham removed his hat. “Extraordinary,” he said, hushed and reverent. “It almost seems to be singing to us. Like all the resting souls here are coming awake to welcome us.”

“Welcoming,” said Emma. “I doubt that.”

The guards pushed us toward the door. We ducked through the low opening and into another cavelike room. Like the others we’d seen in Abaton, it had been dug by hand from soft rock, untold ages ago. It was low-ceilinged and bare, empty but for some scattered straw and broken shards of pottery. Its most unique feature was the walls, into which had been dug many dozens of small coves. They were oval-topped and flat on the bottom, large enough to hold a bottle or a candle. At the back of the room, several doors forked away into darkness.

“Well, boy?” said Caul. “Can you see any?”

I looked around. “Any what?”

“Don’t trifle with me. Soul jars.” He stepped to a wall and swept his hand inside one of the coves. “Go and pick one up.”

I turned slowly, scanning the walls. Every cove appeared to be empty. “I don’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe there aren’t any.”

“You’re lying.”

Caul nodded to my guard. The guard punched me in the stomach.

Emma and Miss Peregrine shouted as I fell to my knees, groaning. Looking down at myself, I saw blood trickling through my shirt—not from the punch, but from my hollow bite.

“Please, Jack!” cried Miss Peregrine. “He’s just a boy!”

“Just a boy, just a boy!” Caul said mockingly. “That’s the very heart of the problem! You’ve got to punish them like men, water them with a bit of blood, and then the shoot begins to spring up, the plant to grow.” He strode toward me while spinning the barrel of his odd, antique pistol. “Straighten his leg. I want a clean shot at the knee.”

The guard shoved me to the ground and grabbed ahold of my calf. My cheek ground into the dirt, my face aimed at the wall.

I heard the gun’s hammer pull back. And then, as the women begged Caul for mercy, I saw something in one the coves in the wall. A shape I hadn’t noticed before—

“Wait!” I shouted. “I see something!”

The guard flipped me over.

“Come to your senses, have you?” Caul was standing over me, looking down. “What do you see?”

I looked again, blinking. Forced myself to be calm, my vision to focus.

There in the wall, coming gradually into view like a Polaroid photo, was the faint image of a stone jar. It was a simple, unadorned thing, cylindrical in shape with a tapered neck and a cork plugging its top, its stone the same reddish color as the strange hills of Abaton.

“It’s a jar,” I said. “Just one. It was tipped over, that’s why I didn’t notice it at first.”

“Stand,” Caul said. “I want to see you pick it up.”

I drew my knees to my chest, rocked forward onto my feet, and stood, pain rioting through my midsection. I shuffled across the room and reached slowly into the cove. I slid my fingers around the jar, then got a shock and pulled my hand away.

“What is it?” Caul said.

“It’s freezing,” I replied. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Fascinating,” murmured Bentham. He’d been lingering near the door, as if reconsidering this whole endeavor, but now he took a step closer.

I reached into the cove again, ready for the cold this time, and removed the jar.

“This is wrong,” Miss Peregrine said. “There’s a peculiar soul in there, and it should be treated with respect.”