Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #3)(54)

Lastly, he turned to a photo of a boy with a pair of large owlish wings that spread from behind his shoulders. He was slouched on a pedestal and regarded the camera with quiet contempt, one eye hidden behind his cocked hat. Printed across the bottom were the words We don’t need their wings.

“One of Jack’s recruiting posters,” Bentham explained.





Bentham held the second photo closer, studying his brother’s face. “There had always been a darkness in him,” he said, “but I refused to see it. Alma’s vision was sharper—she pushed Jack away early. But Jack and I were close in age and in mentality, or so I thought. We were chums, thick as thieves. But he hid his true self from me. I didn’t see him for what he was until the day I said, ‘Jack, you have stop this,’ and he had me beaten and thrown into a lightless hole to die. By then it was too late.”

Bentham looked up, his eyes reflecting the fire’s glow. “It’s quite something to realize you mean less than nothing to your own brother.” He was quiet for a moment, tangled in an awful memory.

“But you didn’t die,” said Emma. “You turned them into hollows.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I tricked them.”

“Into becoming horrible monsters?” I said.

“I never meant to turn them into monsters. I meant only to get rid of them.” He returned stiffly to the couch and lowered himself onto the cushions. “I was starving, near death when it came to me: the perfect story with which to ensnare my brother. A lie as old as humanity itself. The fountain of youth. With my finger I scratched it into the dirt of my cell floor: the steps of an obscure loop manipulation technique that could reverse, and forever eliminate, the dangers of aging forward. Or so it seemed. In reality, that was just a side effect of what the steps truly described, which was an arcane and largely forgotten procedure to collapse loops, quickly and permanently, in an emergency.”

I pictured the “autodestruct” button of sci-fi cliché. A supernova in miniature; stars winking out.

“I never expected my trick to work so well,” Bentham said. “A member of the movement whose sympathy I had earned circulated my technique as his own, and Jack believed it. He led his followers to a distant loop to enact the procedure—and there, I hoped, they would slam the door behind themselves forever.”

“But that’s not what happened,” said Emma.

“Is that when half of Siberia got blown up?” I asked.

“The reaction was so strong, it lasted a day and a night,” said Bentham. “There are photos of it, and of the aftermath …”

He nodded at the album on the floor, then waited while we found the pictures. One, taken at night in some indistinct wilderness, was striped by a jet of vertical flame, a massive but distant release of white-hot energy that lit the night like a skyscraper-sized Roman candle. The other was a ruined village made up of rubble and cracked houses and trees raked clean of bark. Just looking at it, I could almost hear a lonely wind blowing; the palpable silence of a place robbed suddenly of life.





Bentham shook his head. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine what would crawl out of that collapsed loop,” he said. “For a brief time afterward, things were quiet. Released from confinement, I began to recover. I regained control of my machine. It seemed my brother’s dark age had drawn to a close—but it was only beginning.”

“That was the start of the Hollow Wars,” Emma said.

“Soon we began to hear stories about creatures made of shadow. They were emerging from the ruined forests to feed on peculiars—and normals, and animals, and anything that would fit between their jaws.”

“Once I saw one eat a car,” Nim said.

I said, “A car?”

“I was inside it,” he replied.

We waited for him to elaborate.

“And?” said Emma.

“I got away,” he said, shrugging. “The steering column got stuck in its throat.”

“May I continue?” said Bentham.

“Of course, sir. My apologies.”

“As I was saying, there wasn’t much that would stop these new abominations, save the odd steering column—and loop entrances. Luckily, we had plenty of those. So most of us dealt with the hollowgast problem by staying put in our loops, venturing out only when we had no choice. The hollows didn’t end our lives, but they made them vastly more difficult, isolated, and dangerous.”

“What about the wights?” I asked.

“I imagine he’s coming to that,” said Emma.

“I am,” said Bentham. “Five years after encountering my first hollowgast, I met my first wight. There was a knock at my door after midnight. I was in my house, safe inside my loop—or so I thought. But when I opened the door, there stood my brother Jack, a bit worse for wear but looking like his old self—save his dead eyes, which were blank as unmarked paper.”

Emma and I had folded ourselves into cross-legged positions and were now leaning toward Bentham, hanging on his every word. Bentham stared over our heads with haunted eyes.

“He’d consumed enough peculiars to fill his hollow soul and turn himself into something that resembled my brother—but wasn’t, quite. What little humanity he’d clung to through the years was gone completely, leaked away with the color in his eyes. A wight is to the peculiar he once was as a thing copied many times is to its original. Detail is lost, and color …”