“Bear with me for just a moment longer,” Millard said. He was pacing now, getting excited. “I don’t suppose you heard about the time a normal actually did enter a loop?”
“No, because everyone knows that’s impossible,” said Enoch.
“It nearly is,” said Millard. “It isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty, but it has been done—once. An illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine’s own brother, I believe, in the years before he went mad and formed the splinter group that would become the wights.”
“Then why haven’t I ever heard about this?” said Enoch.
“Because it was extremely controversial and the results were immediately covered up, so no one would attempt to replicate them. In any event, it turns out that you can bring a normal into a loop, but they have to be forced through, and only someone with an ymbryne’s power can do it. But because normals do not have a second soul, they cannot handle a time loop’s inherent paradoxes, and their brains turn to mush. They become drooling, catatonic vegetables from the moment they enter. Not unlike these poor people before us.”
There was a moment of quiet while Millard’s words registered. Then Emma’s hands went to her mouth and she said quietly, “Oh, hell. He’s right.”
“Well, then,” said the clown. “In that case, things are even worse than we thought.”
I felt the air go out of the room.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Horace.
“He said the monsters stole their souls!” Olive shouted, and then she ran crying to Bronwyn and buried her face in her coat.
“These peculiars didn’t lose their abilities,” said Millard. “They were stolen from them—extracted, along with their souls, which were then fed to hollowgast. This allowed the hollows to evolve sufficiently to enter loops, a development which enabled their recent assault on peculiardom—and netted the wights even more kidnapped peculiars whose souls they could extract, with which they evolved still more hollows, and so on, in a vicious cycle.”
“Then it isn’t just the ymbrynes they want,” said Emma. “It’s us, too—and our souls.”
Hugh stood at the foot of the whispering man’s bed, his last bee buzzing angrily around him. “All the peculiar children they kidnapped over the years … this is what they were doing to them? I figured they just became hollowgast food. But this … this is leagues more evil.”
“Who’s to say they don’t mean to extract the ymbrynes’ souls, too?” said Enoch.
That sent a special chill through us. The clown turned to Horace and said, “How’s your best-case scenario looking now, fella?”
“Don’t tease me,” Horace replied. “I bite.”
“Everyone out!” ordered the nurse. “Souls or no souls, these people are ill. This is no place to bicker.”
We filed sullenly into the hall.
“All right, you’ve given us the horror show,” Emma said to the clown and the folding man, “and we are duly horrified. Now tell us what you want.”
“Simple,” said the folding man. “We want you to stay and fight with us.”
“We just figured we’d show you how much it’s in your own best interest to do so,” said the clown. He clapped Millard on the back. “But your friend here did a better job of that than we ever could’ve.”
“Stay here and fight for what?” Enoch said. “The ymbrynes aren’t even in London—Miss Wren said as much.”
“Forget London! London’s finished!” the clown said. “The battle’s over here. We lost. As soon as Wren has saved every last peculiar she can from these ruined loops, we’ll posse up and travel—to other lands, other loops. There must be more survivors out there, peculiars like us, with the fight still burning in them.”
“We will build army,” said the folding man. “Real one.”
“As for finding out where the ymbrynes are,” said the clown, “no problem. We’ll catch a wight and torture it out of him. Make him show us on the Map of Days.”
“You have a Map of Days?” said Millard.
“We have two. The peculiar archives is downstairs, you know.”
“That is good news indeed,” Millard said, his voice charged with excitement.
“Catching a wight is easier said than done,” said Emma. “And they lie, of course. Lying is what they do best.”
“Then we’ll catch two and compare their lies,” the clown said.
“They come sniffing around here pretty often, so next time we see one—bam! We’ll grab him.”
“There’s no need to wait,” said Enoch. “Didn’t Miss Wren say there are wights in this very building?”
“Sure,” said the clown, “but they’re frozen. Dead as doornails.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t be interrogated,” Enoch said, a grin spreading across his face.
The clown turned to the folding man. “I’m really starting to like these weirdos.”
“Then you are with us?” said the folding man. “You stay and fight?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Emma. “Give us a minute to talk this over.”
“What is there to talk over?” said the clown.
“Of course, take all time you need,” said the folding man, and he pulled the clown down the hall with him. “Come, I will make coffee.”
“All right,” the clown said reluctantly.
We formed a huddle, just as we had so many times since our troubles began, only this time rather than shouting over one another, we spoke in orderly turns. The gravity of all this had put us in a solemn state of mind.
“I think we should fight,” said Hugh. “Now that we know what the wights are doing to us, I couldn’t live with myself if we just went back to the way things were, and tried to pretend none of this was happening. To fight is the only honorable thing.”
“There’s honor in survival, too,” said Millard. “Our kind survived the twentieth century by hiding, not fighting—so perhaps all we need is a better way to hide.”
Then Bronwyn turned to Emma and said, “I want to know what you think.”
“Yeah, I want to know what Emma thinks,” said Olive.
“Me too,” said Enoch, which took me by surprise.