In the middle of the floor were Miss Wren and Miss Peregrine. Miss Wren was on her knees, and she had Miss Peregrine pinned to the floorboards, her hands in thick falconing gloves, sweating and chanting in Old Peculiar, while Miss Peregrine squawked and flailed with her talons. But no matter how hard Miss Peregrine thrashed, Miss Wren wouldn’t let go.
At some point in the night, Miss Wren’s gentle massage had turned into something resembling an interspecies pro-wrestling match crossed with an exorcism. The bird half of Miss Peregrine had so thoroughly dominated her nature that it was refusing to be driven away without a fight. Both ymbrynes had sustained minor injuries: Miss Peregrine’s feathers were everywhere, and Miss Wren had a long, bloody scratch running down one side of her face. It was a disturbing sight, and many of the children looked on with openmouthed shock. Wild-eyed and savage, the bird Miss Wren was grinding into the floor was one we hardly recognized. It seemed incredible that a fully restored Miss Peregrine of old might result from this violent display, but Althea kept smiling at us and giving us encouraging nods as if to say, Almost there, just a little more floor-grinding!
For such a frail old lady, Miss Wren was giving Miss Peregrine a pretty good clobbering. But then the bird jabbed at Miss Wren with her beak and Miss Wren’s grasp slipped, and with a big flap of her wings Miss Peregrine nearly escaped from her hands. The children reacted with shouts and gasps. But Miss Wren was quick, and she leapt up and managed to catch Miss Peregrine by her hind leg and thump her down against the floorboards again, which made the children gasp even louder. We weren’t used to seeing our ymbryne treated like this, and Bronwyn actually had to stop Hugh from rushing into the fight to protect her.
Both ymbrynes seemed profoundly exhausted now, but Miss Peregrine more so; I could see her strength failing. Her human nature seemed to be winning out over her bird nature.
“Come on, Miss Wren!” Bronwyn cried.
“You can do it, Miss Wren!” called Horace. “Bring her back to us!”
“Please!” said Althea. “We require absolute silence.”
After a long time, Miss Peregrine quit struggling and lay on the ground with her wings splayed, gasping for air, feathered chest heaving. Miss Wren took her hands off the bird and sat back on her haunches.
“It’s about to happen,” she said, “and when it does, I don’t want any of you to rush over here grabbing at her. Your ymbryne will likely be very confused, and I want the first face she sees and voice she hears to be mine. I’ll need to explain to her what’s happened.” And then she clasped her hands to her chest and murmured, “Come back to us, Alma. Come on, sister. Come back to us.”
Althea stepped down from the table and picked up a sheet, which she unfolded and held up in front of Miss Peregrine to shield her from view. When ymbrynes turned from birds into humans, they were naked; this would give her some privacy.
We waited in breathless suspense while a succession of strange noises came from behind the sheet: an expulsion of air, a sound like someone clapping their hands once, sharply—and then Miss Wren jumped up and took a shaky step backward.
She looked frightened—her mouth was open, and so was Althea’s. And then Miss Wren said, “No, this can’t be,” and Althea stumbled, faint, letting the sheet drop. And there on the floor we saw a human form, but not a woman’s.
He was naked, curled into a ball, his back to us. He began to stir, and uncurl, and finally to stand.
“Is that Miss Peregrine?” said Olive. “She came out funny.”
Clearly, it was not. The person before us bore no resemblance whatsoever to Miss Peregrine. He was a stunted little man with knobby knees and a balding head and a nose like a used pencil eraser, and he was stark naked and slimed head to toe with sticky, translucent gel. While Miss Wren gaped at him and grasped for something to steady herself against, in shock and anger the others all began to shout, “Who are you? Who are you? What have you done with Miss Peregrine!”
Slowly, slowly, the man raised his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. Then, for the first time, he opened them.
The pupils were blank and white.
I heard someone scream.
Then, very calmly, the man said, “My name is Caul. And you are all my prisoners now.”
* * *
“Prisoners!” said the folding man with a laugh. “What he mean, we are prisoners?”
Emma shouted at Miss Wren. “Where’s Miss Peregrine? Who’s this man, and what have you done with Miss Peregrine?”
Miss Wren seemed to have lost the ability to speak.
As our confusion turned to shock and anger, we barraged the little man with questions. He endured them with a slightly bored expression, standing at the center of the room with his hands folded demurely over his privates.
“If you’d actually permit me to speak, I’ll explain everything,” he said.
“Where is Miss Peregrine?!” Emma shouted again, trembling with rage.
“Don’t worry,” Caul said, “she’s safely in our custody. We kidnapped her days ago, on your island.”
“Then the bird we rescued from the submarine,” I said, “that was …”
“That was me,” Caul said.
“Impossible!” said Miss Wren, finally finding her voice.
“Wights can’t turn into birds!”
“That is true, as a general rule. But Alma is my sister, you see, and though I wasn’t fortunate enough to inherit any of her talents for manipulating time, I do share her most useless trait—the ability to turn into a vicious little bird of prey. I did a rather excellent job impersonating her, don’t you think?” And he took a little bow. “Now, may I trouble you for some pants? You have me at a disadvantage.”
His request was ignored. Meanwhile, my head was spinning. I remembered Miss Peregrine once mentioning that she’d had two brothers—I’d seen their photo, actually, when they were all in the care of Miss Avocet together. Then I flashed back to the days we’d spent with the bird we had believed was Miss Peregrine; all we’d gone though, everything we’d seen. The caged Miss Peregrine that Golan had thrown into the ocean—that had been the real one, while the one we “rescued” had been her brother. The cruel things Miss Peregrine had done recently made more sense now—that hadn’t been Miss Peregrine at all—but I was still left with a million questions.
“All that time,” I said. “Why did you stay a bird? Just to watch us?”
“While my lengthy observations of your childish bickering were incontrovertibly fascinating, I was quite hoping you could help me with a piece of unfinished business. When you killed my men in the countryside, I was impressed. You proved yourselves to be quite resourceful. Naturally, my men could’ve swept in and taken you at any point after that, but I thought it better to let you twist in the wind awhile and see if your ingenuity might not lead us to the one ymbryne who’s consistently managed to evade us.” With that, he turned to Miss Wren and grinned broadly. “Hello, Balenciaga. So good to see you again.”
Miss Wren moaned and fanned herself with her hand.
“You idiots, you cretins, you morons!” the clown shouted.
“You led them right to us!”
“And as a nice bonus,” said Caul, “we paid a visit to your menagerie, as well! My men came by not long after we left; the stuffed heads of that emu-raffe and boxer dog will look magnificent above my mantelpiece.”
“You monster!” Miss Wren screeched, and she fell back against the table, legs failing her.
“Oh, my bird!” exclaimed Bronwyn, her eyes wide. “Fiona and Claire!”
“You’ll see them again soon,” Caul said. “I’ve got them in safekeeping.”
It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. Caul knew he’d be welcomed into Miss Wren’s menagerie disguised as Miss Peregrine, and when she wasn’t at home to be kidnapped, he’d nudged us after her, toward London. In so many ways, we’d been manipulated from the very beginning—from the moment we chose to leave the island and I chose to go along. Even the tale he’d chosen for Bronwyn to read that first night in the forest, about the stone giant, had been a manipulation. He wanted us to find Miss Wren’s loop, and think that it was we who’d cracked its secret.