Tales of the Peculiar Page 5

  “When the weather thaws, perhaps. We’d likely freeze to death in any new loop I made now.”

  “Then we’ll wait,” he said. “We’ll just have to starve a little, until a good thaw comes.”

  “And then what?” she said. “More peculiars in need will come, and soon we’ll outgrow that loop, too. A limit will be reached. I can only handle so much responsibility.”

  Englebert sighed and scratched his head. “If only you could copy yourself.”

  A strange look came over Ymeene’s face. “What was that you said?”

  “If you could copy yourself,” Englebert repeated. “Then you could make multiple loops, and we could spread out a bit. I worry about putting so many of us in one place. Factions will divide us and fights will break out. And if, Heaven forfend, something tragic were to happen to this loop, the population of peculiars in Britain would be halved in a single stroke.”

  Ymeene was facing Englebert, but her eyes were staring past him.

  “What is it?” he said. “Have you thought of a way to copy yourself?”

  “Perhaps,” she replied. “Perhaps.”

  The next morning Ymeene gathered the peculiars and told them she was going away for a while. Ripples of panic spread through the crowd, though she assured them she’d be back in time to reset the loop. They begged her not to go, but she insisted it was crucial to their survival.

  She left Englebert in charge, assumed bird form, and flew out of her loop for the first time since its creation. Soaring over the frozen forests of Oddfordshire, she asked the same question of every bird she saw: “Do you know any birds who can turn into humans?” She searched all day and night, but everywhere she went the answer was no. She returned to her loop late that night, tired and discouraged—but not defeated. She reset the loop, dodged Englebert’s questions, and flew out again without a moment’s rest.

  She searched and searched until her wings and her eyes ached, thinking: “I couldn’t really be the only creature in the world like me, could I?”

  After another long day of fruitless scouting, she was almost convinced that she was absolutely unique. It was a thought that made her desperate—and desperately lonely.

  Then, just as the sun was setting, and she was about to turn back toward her loop, Ymeene flew over a forest clearing and spied below her a flock of kestrels—and among them, a young woman. It all happened in a flash. The kestrels saw her and took off, scattering into the woods. In the tumult, the young woman seemed to have disappeared. But where could she have gone so quickly?

  Could she have turned into a kestrel and flown away with the others?

  Ymeene dove after them and gave chase, and for an hour tried to track the kestrels down—but kestrels are the natural prey of goshawks, and they were terrified of Ymeene. She would have to try another approach.

  It was dark. She returned to her loop, reset it, wolfed down five ears of roasted corn and two bowls of leek soup—flying all day was hungry work—and returned to the kestrels’ woods the next morning. This time she approached their clearing not from the air as a goshawk, but on foot as a human. When the kestrels saw her they flew up into the trees and sat watching her, cautious but unafraid. Ymeene stood in the middle of the clearing and addressed them not in human language, or in go-talk (the speech of goshawks), but in the few halting words of kestrel she knew, as well as her human throat could reproduce them.

  “One among you is not like the others,” she said, “and it is to that young woman that I address myself. You are both bird and human. I am afflicted and blessed with the same ability, and I would very much like to speak with you.”

  The spectacle of a human speaking kestrel incited a flurry of chittering in the trees, and then Ymeene heard a flap of wings. After a few moments, a young woman showed herself from behind a tree trunk. She had dark, smooth skin and close-cropped hair, a tall, finely boned frame that was distinctly birdlike, and she wore furs and leathers to protect against the cold.

  “Can you understand me?” Ymeene asked her in English.

  The young woman gave a tentative nod. A little, she seemed to say.

  “Can you speak human?” said Ymeene.

  “Sí, un poco,” replied the young woman.

  Ymeene recognized the language as human but couldn’t understand the words. Perhaps the young woman was from a migratory clan, and had picked them up elsewhere.

  “My name is Ymeene,” she said, indicating herself. “What’s yours?”

  The young woman cleared her throat and made a loud cry in kestrel-ese.

  “Perhaps we’ll just call you Miss Kestrel for now,” said Ymeene. “Miss Kestrel, I’ve an important question for you. Have you ever made something happen . . . more than once?”

  She drew a large circle in the air with her finger, hoping the young woman would understand.

  Miss Kestrel came forward a few paces, her eyes widening. Just then a clump of snow fell from a tree branch, and with a flourish of her arms, Miss Kestrel made it disappear from the ground and fall from the tree a second time.

  “Yes!” Ymeene cried. “You can do it, too!” And then she waved her arm and repeated the snowfall, too, and Miss Kestrel’s jaw fell open with astonishment.

  They ran to each other, laughing, and clasped hands and shouted and then hugged, each chattering excitedly in a language the other could hardly understand. The kestrels in the trees were jubilant, too, and sensing that Ymeene was a friend, they flew down from their branches and fluttered around the two women, twittering with excitement.

  The relief Ymeene felt was indescribable. Though she was peculiar even among peculiars, now she knew she was not alone. There were more like her, which meant that—perhaps—peculiar society could be made a safer, saner place, no longer ruled by the shortsighted whims of prideful men. She had only an inkling of what form that society might take, but she knew that finding Miss Kestrel had been an important breakthrough. They spoke, in their halting way, for nearly an hour, and by the end of it Miss Kestrel had agreed to follow Ymeene back to the loop.

  The rest, as they say, is history. Miss Kestrel came to live with the peculiars. Ymeene taught her everything she knew about loops, and soon Miss Kestrel was skilled enough to keep their loop going by herself. This allowed Ymeene to embark on long-distance expeditions to find more time-looping birdwomen like themselves—which she did, bringing their number to five—and when the new arrivals had been trained, and the hard, hungry winter had thawed into spring, they divided the peculiars among them and set out across the land to establish five new, permanent loops.

  They were regarded as safe havens of sanity and order, and word of them spread quickly. Peculiars who had survived the purges traveled from all across Britain to seek refuge in them, though in order to be admitted they had to agree to live under the rules of the birdwomen. The women became known as ymeenes, to honor the first of their kind (though with the passage of time and the gradual shifting of tongues in Britain the word became ymbryne).

  The ymbrynes held council twice a year to trade wisdom and collaborate. For many years Ymeene herself oversaw the proceedings, watching with pride as their network of ymbrynes and loops increased, and the number of peculiars they were able to protect grew to many hundreds. She lived to the ripe and happy age of one hundred and fifty-seven. For all those years she and Englebert shared a house (but never a room), for they loved each other in a steady, companionable way. It was the Black Plague, on one of its pitiless sweeps through Europe, that finally took her. When she was gone, all the peculiars she had saved who were still living, and all their children and grandchildren, risked their lives to cross hostile territory and carry her in a grand procession to the forest and, to the best of Englebert’s reckoning, to the very tree in which she had been born, and they buried her there among its roots.9

  The Woman Who Befriended Ghosts

  There was once a peculiar woma
n named Hildy. She had a high laughing voice and dark brown skin, and she could see ghosts. She wasn’t frightened by them at all. Her twin sister drowned when they were children, and when Hildy was growing up, her sister’s ghost was her closest friend. They did everything together: ran through the poppy fields that surrounded their house, played stick-a-whack on the village green, and stayed up late telling each other scary stories about living people. The ghost of Hildy’s sister even came to school with her. She would entertain Hildy by making rude faces at the teacher that no one else could see, and help her on examinations by looking at other students’ answers and whispering them into Hildy’s ear. (She could have shouted them and no one but Hildy would have heard, but it seemed prudent to whisper, just in case.)

  On Hildy’s eighteenth birthday, her sister got called away on ghost business.

  “When will you be back?” Hildy asked, distraught. They hadn’t been apart a single day since her sister died.

  “Not for years,” replied her sister. “I’ll miss you terribly.”

  “Not more than I’ll miss you,” Hildy said miserably.

  Hildy’s sister hugged her, ghostly tears standing in her eyes. “Try to make some friends,” she said, then vanished.

  Hildy tried to take her sister’s advice, but she had never had a living friend. She accepted an invitation to a party but couldn’t bring herself to speak to anyone. Her father arranged a tea for Hildy with the daughter of a coworker, but Hildy was stiff and awkward, and the only thing she could think of to say was, “Have you ever played stick-a-whack?”

  “That’s a game for children,” the woman replied, then made an excuse to leave early.

  Hildy found she preferred the company of ghosts to living people, and so she decided to make some ghost friends. The trouble was how to do it. Even though Hildy could see ghosts, they were not easy to talk to. Ghosts, you see, are a bit like cats—they’re never around when you want them, and rarely come when called.10

  Hildy went to a cemetery. She stood around waiting for hours, but no ghosts came to talk to her. They watched Hildy from across the grass, standoffish and suspicious. She thought perhaps they’d been dead too long and had learned not to trust living people. Hoping the recently deceased would be easier to befriend, she started going to funerals. Because people she knew didn’t die very often, she had to go to strangers’ funerals. When the mourners would ask why she was there, Hildy would lie and say she was a distant relative, then ask whether the deceased had been a nice person, and had they enjoyed running in fields or playing stick-a-whack? The mourners thought she was strange (which, to be fair, she was), and the ghosts, sensing their relatives’ disapproval, gave Hildy the cold shoulder.

  It was around this time that Hildy’s parents died. Perhaps they will be my ghost friends, she thought, but no—they went off to find her dead sister and left Hildy all alone.

  She hatched a new idea: she would sell her parents’ house and buy a haunted one instead, which would have its own ghosts built in! So she went shopping for a new house. The real estate agent thought she was frustrating and strange (which, to be fair, she was) because every time she showed Hildy a perfectly nice house, Hildy’s only question was whether anything terrible had ever happened there, like a murder or a suicide, or better yet a murder and a suicide, and she’d ignore the generous kitchen and light-filled drawing room to go look at the attic and basement.

  Finally, she found a properly haunted house and bought it. It was only after she moved in, though, that she realized the ghost that came with it was only there part-time, stopping by every few nights to rattle chains and slam doors.

  “Don’t go,” Hildy said, catching up to the ghost as he was leaving.

  “Sorry, I have other houses to haunt,” he replied, and hurried away.

  Hildy felt cheated. She needed more than a part-time ghost. She’d gone to so much trouble to find a haunted house, but it seemed the one she bought wasn’t haunted enough. She decided she needed the most haunted house in the world. She bought books about haunted houses and did research. She asked her part-time ghost what he knew, shouting questions after him as he raced from room to room, clanking here and slamming there. (He always seemed to be late for some more-important haunting, which Hildy tried not to take personally.) He said something about “Kwimbra,” then left in a hurry. Hildy discovered that this was actually a town in Portugal—spelled Coimbra—and once she knew that, it was simple enough to track down which house in the town was most haunted. She exchanged letters with the man who lived there, in which he described being bothered day and night by disembodied screams and bottles that flew off tables, and she told him how pleasant that sounded. He thought this was strange, but also that she wrote very nicely, and when she offered to buy his house, his refusal was as gentle as could be. It had been in his family for generations, he explained, and so it had to remain. The house was his burden to bear.

  Hildy was getting desperate. At a particularly low moment, she even entertained the thought of killing someone, because then their ghost would haunt her—but that didn’t seem like a very good way to start a friendship, and she quickly abandoned the idea.

  Finally, she decided that if she couldn’t buy the most haunted house in the world, she would build it herself. First she chose the most haunted spot she could think of upon which to build it: the top of a hill that had been the site of a mass burial during the last outbreak of plague. Then she collected the most haunted building materials she could find: wood salvaged from a shipwreck with no survivors, bricks from a crematorium, stone columns from a poorhouse that had burned with hundreds of people inside, and windows from the palace of a mad prince who had poisoned his whole family. Hildy decorated the house with furniture, carpets, and objets d’art bought from other haunted houses, including that of the man in Portugal, who sent her a bureau from which emanated, at precisely three o’clock every morning, the sound of a crying baby. Just for good measure, she let bereaved families hold wakes in her parlor for an entire month, and then, just after the stroke of midnight in the middle of a howling rainstorm, she moved in.

  Hildy was not disappointed—at least not right away. There were ghosts everywhere! In fact, there was hardly room in the house to hold them all. Ghosts crowded the basement and the attic, fought for space under the bed and in the closets, and there was always a line for the bathroom. (They didn’t use the toilet, of course, but liked to check their hair in the mirror, to make sure it was disheveled and frightening.) They danced on the lawn at all hours—not because ghosts especially liked to dance, but because the people buried under the house had died of Dancing Plague.11

  The ghosts clanked pipes and rattled windows and threw books down from shelves. Hildy walked from room to room introducing herself.

  “You can see us?” asked the ghost of a young man. “And you aren’t frightened?”

  “Not at all,” Hildy replied. “I like ghosts. Have you ever played stick-a-whack?”

  “No, sorry,” the ghost muttered, and turned away.

  He seemed disappointed, as if all he’d wanted was to scare someone and she’d robbed him of the chance. So she pretended to be frightened by the next ghost she met, an old woman in the kitchen who was making knives float.

  “Ahhhh!” Hildy cried. “What’s happening to my knives! I must be losing my mind!”

  The old woman ghost seemed pleased, so she stepped back and raised her arms to make the knives float even higher—and then tripped over another ghost who was crawling on the floor behind her. The old lady ghost went sprawling and the knives clattered onto the counter.

  “What do you think you’re doing down there?” the old woman ghost shouted at the crawling ghost. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”

  “You should watch where you’re going!” the crawling ghost shouted back.

  “Watch where I’m going?”

  Hildy started to laugh; she
couldn’t help it. The two ghosts stopped bickering and stared at her.

  “I think she can see us,” said the crawling ghost.

  “Yes, obviously,” said the old woman ghost. “And she isn’t frightened in the least.”

  “No—I was!” Hildy said, stifling her laughter. “Honestly!”

  The old woman ghost stood up and dusted herself off. “You’re clearly humoring me,” she said. “I’ve never been so humiliated in all my death.”

  Hildy didn’t know what to do. She had tried being herself and that hadn’t worked, and she’d tried acting like she thought the ghosts wanted her to, and that hadn’t worked, either. Discouraged, she went to the hallway where the ghosts were lined up to use the bathroom and said, “Does anyone want to be my friend? I’m very nice, and I know lots of scary stories about living people that you might enjoy hearing.” But the ghosts shuffled their feet and looked at the floor and said nothing. They could see her desperation, and it made them feel awkward.

  After a long silence she slouched away, her face burning with embarrassment. She sat on the porch and watched the plague ghosts dance in the yard. It seemed she had failed. You can’t force people to be friends with you—not even dead people.

  Feeling ignored was even worse than feeling alone, so Hildy made plans to sell the house. The first five people who came to look at it were scared away before they even got through the front door. Hildy attempted to make the house somewhat less ghost-infested by selling some of the haunted furnishings back to their original owners. She wrote a letter to the man in Portugal asking if he’d be interested in taking back his wailing bureau. He replied straightaway. He didn’t want the bureau, he said, but hoped she was doing well. And he signed the letter like this: “Your friend, João.”

  Hildy stared at the words for several minutes. Could she really call this man her friend? Or was he just being . . . friendly?