Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Chapter 6

When the last cottages had disappeared behind us, we slipped quietly from the wagon and then crossed the ridge on foot in the direction of the forest. Emma walked on one side of me, silent and brooding, never letting go of my arm, while on the other Millard hummed to himself and kicked at stones. I was nervous and baffled and queasily excited all at the same time. Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up with may face in a puddle of drool on the Smart Aid break room table and think, Well, that was strange, and then return to the boring old business of being me.

But I didn’t wake up. We just kept walking, the girl who could make fire with her hands and the invisible boy and me. We walked through the woods, where the path was as wide and clear as any trail in a national park, then emerged onto a broad expanse of lawn blooming with flowers and striped with neat gardens. We’d reached the house.

I gazed at it in wonder—not because it was awful, but because it was beautiful. There wasn’t a shingle out of place or a broken window. Turrets and chimneys that had slumped lazily on the house I remembered now pointed confidently toward the sky. The forest that had seemed to devour its walls stood at a respectful distance.

I was led down a flagstone path and up a set of freshly painted steps to the porch. Emma no longer seemed to regard me as the threat she once did, but before going inside she tied my hands behind me—I think just for the sake of appearances. She was playing the returning hunter, and I was the captured prey. She was about to take me inside when Millard stopped her.

“His shoes are caked with filth,” he said. “Can’t have him tracking in mud. The Bird’ll have an attack.” So, as my captors waited, I removed my shoes and socks, also stained with mud. Then Millard suggested I roll up the cuffs of my jeans so they wouldn’t drag on the carpet, and I did, and Emma grabbed me impatiently and yanked me through the door.

We proceeded down a hall I remembered being almost impassably clogged with broken furniture, past the staircase, now gleaming with varnish, curious faces peeking at me through the banisters, through the dining room. The snowfall of plaster was gone; in its place was a long wooden table ringed by chairs. It was the same house I’d explored, but everything had been restored to order. Where I remembered patinas of green mold there was wallpaper and wainscoting and cheerful shades of paint. Flowers were arranged in vases. Sagging piles of rotted wood and fabric had rebuilt themselves into fainting couches and armchairs, and sunlight streamed through high windows once so grimy I’d thought they were blacked out.

Finally we came to a small room that looked out onto the back. “Keep hold of him while I inform the headmistress,” Emma said to Millard, and I felt his hand grasp my elbow. When she left, it fell away.

“You’re not afraid I’ll eat your brain or something?” I asked him.

“Not particularly.”

I turned to the window and gazed out in wonder. The yard was full of children, almost all of whom I recognized from yellowed photographs. Some lazed under shade trees; others tossed a ball and chased one another past flowerbeds exploding with color. It was exactly the paradise my grandfather had described. This was the enchanted island; these were the magical children. If I was dreaming, I no longer wanted to wake up. Or at least not anytime soon.

Out on the grassy pitch, someone kicked a ball too hard, and it flew up into a giant topiary animal and got stuck. Arranged all in a row were several of these animal bushes—fantastic creatures as tall as the house, standing guard against the woods—including a winged griffin, a rearing centaur, and a mermaid. Chasing after their lost ball, a pair of teenage boys ran to the base of the centaur, followed by a young girl. I instantly recognized her as the “levitating girl” from my grandfather’s pictures, only now she wasn’t levitating. She walked slowly, every plodding step a chore, anchored to the ground as if by some surplus of gravity.

When she reached the boys she raised her arms and they looped a rope around her waist. She slipped carefully out of her shoes and then bobbed up in the air like a balloon. It was astonishing. She rose until the rope around her waist went taut, then hovered ten feet off the ground, held by the two boys.

The girl said something and the boys nodded and began letting out the rope. She rose slowly up the side of the centaur; when she was level with its chest she reached into the branches for the ball, but it was stuck deep inside. She looked down and shook her head, and the boys reeled her down to the ground, where she stepped back into her weighted shoes and untied the rope.

“Enjoying the show?” asked Millard. I nodded silently. “There are far easier ways to retrieve that ball,” he said, “but they know they have an audience.”

Outside, a second girl was approaching the centaur. She was in her late teens and wild looking, her hair a nest well on its way to becoming dreadlocks. She bent down, took hold of the topiary’s long leafy tail and wrapped it around her arm, then closed her eyes as if concentrating. A moment later I saw the centaur’s hand move. I stared through the glass, fixed on that patch of green, thinking it must’ve been the breeze, but then each of its fingers flexed as if sensation were slowly returning to them. I watched, astonished, as the centaur’s huge arm bent at the elbow and reached into its own chest, plucked out the ball, and tossed it back to the cheering kids. As the game resumed, the wild-haired girl dropped the centaur’s tail, and it went still once more.

Millard’s breath fogged the window by me. I turned to him in amazement. “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but what are you people?”

“We’re peculiar,” he replied, sounding a bit puzzled. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Why have you let go of him?” a voice behind us demanded, and I turned to see Emma standing in the doorway. “Oh, never mind,” she said, coming over to grab the rope. “Come on. The headmistress will see you now.”

We walked through the house, past more curious eyes peeping through door cracks and from behind sofas, and into a sunny sitting room, where on an elaborate Persian rug, in a high-backed chair, a distinguished-looking lady sat knitting. She was dressed head to toe in black, her hair pinned in a perfectly round knot atop her head, with lace gloves and a high-collared blouse fastened tightly at her throat—as fastidiously neat as the house itself. I could’ve guessed who she was even if I hadn’t remembered her picture from those I’d found in the smashed trunk. This was Miss Peregrine.

Emma guided me onto the rug and cleared her throat, and the steady rhythm of Miss Peregrine’s needles came to a halt.

“Good afternoon,” the lady said, looking up. “You must be Jacob.”

Emma gaped at her. “How do you know his—”

“My name is Headmistress Peregrine,” she said, holding up a finger to silence Emma, “or if you prefer, since you are not currently under my care, Miss Peregrine. Pleased to finally meet you.”

Miss Peregrine dangled a gloved hand in my direction and, when I failed to take it, noticed the rope that bound my wrists.

“Miss Bloom!” she cried. “What is the meaning of this? Is that any way to treat a guest? Free him at once!”

“But Headmistress! He’s a snoop and a liar and I don’t know what else!” Casting a mistrustful glance at me, Emma whispered something in Miss Peregrine’s ear.

“Why, Miss Bloom,” said Miss Peregrine, letting out a booming laugh. “What undiluted balderdash! If this boy were a wight you’d already be stewing in his soup kettle. Of course he’s Abraham Portman’s grandson. Just look at him!”

I felt a flush of relief; maybe I wouldn’t have to explain myself after all. She’d been expecting me!

Emma began to protest, but Miss Peregrine shut her down with a withering glare. “Oh, all right,” Emma sighed, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” And with a few tugs at the knot, the rope fell away.

“You’ll have to pardon Miss Bloom,” said Miss Peregrine as I rubbed at my chafed wrists. “She has a certain flair for the dramatic.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

Emma scowled. “If he’s who he says he is, then why don’t he know the first thing about loops—or even what year he’s in? Go on, ask him!”

“Why doesn’t he know,” Miss Peregrine corrected. “And the only person whom I’ll be subjecting to questioning is you, tomorrow afternoon, regarding the proper use of grammatical tenses!”

Emma groaned.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” Miss Peregrine said, “I need to have a word with Mr. Portman in private.”

The girl knew it was useless to argue. She sighed and went to the door, but before leaving turned to give me one last look over her shoulder. On her face was an expression I hadn’t seen from her before: concern.

“You, too, Mr. Nullings!” Miss Peregrine called out. “Polite persons do not eavesdrop on the conversations of others!”

“I was only lingering to inquire if you should like some tea,” said Millard, who I got the feeling was a bit of a suck-up.

“We should not, thank you,” Miss Peregrine answered curtly. I heard Millard’s bare feet slap away across the floorboards, and the door swung shut behind him.

“I would ask you to sit,” said Miss Peregrine, gesturing at a cushy chair behind me, “but you appear to be encrusted with filth.” Instead I knelt on the floor, feeling like a pilgrim begging advice from an all-knowing oracle.

“You’ve been on the island for several days now,” Miss Peregrine said. “Why have you dawdled so long before paying us a visit?”

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said. “How’d you know I was?”

“I’ve been watching you. You’ve seen me as well, though perhaps you didn’t realize it. I had assumed my alternate form.” She reached up and pulled a long gray feather from her hair. “It’s vastly preferable to assume the shape of a bird when observing humans,” she explained.

My jaw dropped. “That was you in my room this morning?” I said. “The hawk?”

“The falcon,” she corrected. “A peregrine, naturally.”

“Then it’s true!” I said. “You are the Bird!”

“It’s a moniker I tolerate but do not encourage,” she replied. “Now, to my question,” continued Miss Peregrine. “What on earth were you searching for in that depressing old wreck of a house?”

“You,” I replied, and her eyes widened a bit. “I didn’t know how to find you. I only figured out yesterday that you were all—”

And then I paused, realizing how strange my next words would sound. “I didn’t realize you were dead.”

She flashed me a tight smile. “My goodness. Hasn’t your grandfather told you anything about his old friends?”

“Some things. But for a long time I thought they were fairy tales.”

“I see,” she replied.

“I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“It’s a little surprising, that’s all. But in general that is how we prefer to be thought of, for it tends to keep away unwanted visitors. These days fewer and fewer people believe in those things—fairies and goblins and all such nonsense—and thus common folk no longer make much of an effort to seek us out. That makes our lives a good bit easier. Ghost stories and scary old houses have served us well, too—though not, apparently, in your case.” She smiled. “Lion-heartedness must run in your family.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said with a nervous laugh, though in truth I felt as if I might pass out at any moment.

“In any case, as regards this place,” she said, gesturing grandly. “As a child you believed your grandfather was ‘making it all up,’ as they say? Feeding you a great walloping pack of lies. Is that right?”

“Not lies exactly, but—”

“Fictions, whoppers, paradiddles—whatever terminology you like. When did you realize Abraham was telling you the truth?”

“Well,” I said, staring at the labyrinth of interlocking patterns woven into the carpet, “I guess I’m just realizing it now.”

Miss Peregrine, who had been so animated, seemed to fade a little. “Oh my, I see.” And then her expression turned grim, as if, in the brief silence between us, she had intuited the terrible thing I’d come to tell her. And yet I still had to find a way to say it aloud.

“I think he wanted to explain everything,” I said, “but he waited too long. So he sent me here to find you instead.” I pulled the crumpled letter out of my jacket. “This is yours. It’s what brought me here.”

She smoothed it carefully over the arm of her chair and held it up, moving her lips as she read. “How ungraceful! the way I practically beg him for a reply.” She shook her head, wistful for a moment. “We were always so desperate for news of Abe. I asked him once if he should like to worry me to death, the way he insisted on living out in the open like that. He could be so deucedly stubborn!”

She refolded the letter into its envelope, and a dark cloud seemed to pass over her. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

I nodded. Haltingly, I told her what had happened—that is, I told her the story the cops had settled on and that, after a great deal of counseling, I, too, had come to believe. To keep from crying, I gave her only the broad strokes: He lived on the rural outskirts of town; we’d just been through a drought and the woods were full of starving, desperate animals; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “He shouldn’t have been living alone,” I explained, “but like you said, he was stubborn.”

“I was afraid of this,” she said. “I warned him not to leave.” She made tight fists around the knitting needles in her lap, as if considering who to stab with them. “And then to make his poor grandson bear the awful news back to us.”

I could understand her anger. I’d been through it myself. I tried to comfort her, reciting all the reassuring half-truths my parents and Dr. Golan had spun during my blackest moments last fall: “It was time for him to go. He was lonely. My grandma had been dead a lot of years already, and his mind wasn’t sharp anymore. He was always forgetting things, getting mixed up. That’s why he was out in the woods in the first place.”

Miss Peregrine nodded sadly. “He let himself grow old.”

“He was lucky in a way. It wasn’t long and drawn-out. No months in a hospital hooked up to machines.” That was ridiculous, of course—his death had been needless, obscene—but I think it made us both feel a little better to say it.

Setting aside her needlework, Miss Peregrine rose and hobbled to the window. Her gait was rigid and awkward, as if one of her legs were shorter than the other.

She looked out at the yard, at the kids playing. “The children mustn’t hear of this,” she said. “Not yet, at least. It would only upset them.”

“Okay. Whatever you think.”

She stood quietly at the glass for a while, her shoulders trembling. When she finally turned to face me again, she was composed and businesslike. “Well, Mr. Portman,” she said briskly, “I think you’ve been adequately interrogated. You must have questions of your own.”

“Only about a thousand.”

She pulled a watch from her pocket and consulted it. “We have some time before supper-hour. I hope that will prove sufficient to enlighten you.”

Miss Peregrine paused and cocked her head. Abruptly, she strode to the sitting room door and threw it open to find Emma crouched on the other side, her face red and streaked with tears. She’d heard everything.

“Miss Bloom! Have you been eavesdropping?”

Emma struggled to her feet, letting out a sob.

“Polite persons do not listen to conversations that were not meant for—” but Emma was already running from of the room, and Miss Peregrine cut herself short with a frustrated sigh. “That was most unfortunate. I’m afraid she’s quite sensitive as regards your grandfather.”

“I noticed,” I said. “Why? Were they …?”

“When Abraham left to fight in the war, he took all our hearts with him, but Miss Bloom’s especially. Yes, they were admirers, paramours, sweethearts.”

I began to understand why Emma had been so reluctant to believe me; it would mean, in all likelihood, that I was here to deliver bad news about my grandfather.

Miss Peregrine clapped her hands as if breaking a spell. “Ah, well,” she said, “it can’t be helped.”

I followed her out of the room to the staircase. Miss Peregrine climbed it with grim resolve, holding the banister with both hands to pull herself up one step at a time, refusing any help. When we reached the landing, she led me down the hall to the library. It looked like a real classroom now, with desks arranged in a row and a chalkboard in one corner and books dusted and organized on the shelves. Miss Peregrine pointed to a desk and said, “Sit,” so I squeezed into it. She took her place at the front of the room and faced me.

“Allow me to give you a brief primer. I think you’ll find the answers to most of your questions contained herein.”

“Okay.”

“The composition of the human species is infinitely more diverse than most humans suspect,” she began. “The real taxonomy of Homo sapiens is a secret known to only a few, of whom you will now be one. At base, it is a simple dichotomy: there are the coerlfolc, the teeming mass of common people who make up humanity’s great bulk, and there is the hidden branch—the crypto-sapiens, if you will—who are called syndrigast, or “peculiar spirit” in the venerable language of my ancestors. As you have no doubt surmised, we here are of the latter type.”

I bobbed my head as if I understood, though she’d already lost me. Hoping to slow her down a little, I asked a question.

“But why don’t people know about you? Are you the only ones?”

“There are peculiars all over the world,” she said, “though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were. Those who remain live in hiding, as we do.” She lapsed into a soft regretful voice. “There was a time when we could mix openly with common folk. In some corners of the world we were regarded as shamans and mystics, consulted in times of trouble. A few cultures have retained this harmonious relationship with our people, though only in places where both modernity and the major religions have failed to gain a foothold, such as the black-magic island of Ambrym in the New Hebrides. But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”

“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”

“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually, bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”

“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways. It wasn’t so many centuries ago that the parents of peculiar children simply assumed that their ‘real’ sons or daughters had been made off with and replaced with changelings—that is, enchanted and malevolent, not to mention entirely fictitious, lookalikes—which in darker times was considered a license to abandon the poor children, if not kill them outright.”

“That’s awful.”

“Extremely. Something had to be done, so people like myself created places where young peculiars could live apart from common folk—physically and temporally isolated enclaves like this one, of which I am enormously proud.”

“People like yourself?”

“We peculiars are blessed with skills that common people lack, as infinite in combination and variety as others are in the pigmentation of their skin or the appearance of their facial features. That said, some skills are common, like reading thoughts, and others are rare, such as the way I can manipulate time.”

“Time? I thought you turned into a bird.”

“To be sure, and therein lies the key to my skill. Only birds can manipulate time. Therefore, all time manipulators must be able to take the form of a bird.”

She said this so seriously, so matter-of-factly, that it took me a moment to process. “Birds … are time travelers?” I felt a goofy smile spread across my face.

Miss Peregrine nodded soberly. “Most, however, slip back and forth only occasionally, by accident. We who can manipulate time fields consciously—and not only for ourselves, but for others—are known as ymbrynes. We create temporal loops in which peculiar folk can live indefinitely.”

“A loop,” I repeated, remembering my grandfather’s command: find the bird, in the loop. “Is that what this place is?”

“Yes. Though you may better know it as the third of September, 1940.”

I leaned toward her over the little desk. “What do you mean? It’s only the one day? It repeats?”

“Over and over, though our experience of it is continuous. Otherwise we would have no memory of the last, oh, seventy years that we’ve resided here.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Of course, we were here on Cairnholm a decade or more before the third of September, 1940—physically isolated, thanks to the island’s unique geography—but it wasn’t until that date that we also needed temporal isolation.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because otherwise we all would’ve been killed.”

“By the bomb.”

“Assuredly so.”

I gazed at the surface of the desk. It was all starting to make sense—though just barely. “Are there other loops besides this one?”

“Many,” she said, “and nearly all the ymbrynes who mother over them are friends of mine. Let me see: There’s Miss Gannett in Ireland, in June of 1770; Miss Nightjar in Swansea on April 3, 1901; Miss Avocet and Miss Bunting together in Derbyshire on Saint Swithin’s Day of 1867; Miss Treecreeper I don’t remember where exactly—oh, and dear Miss Finch. Somewhere I have a lovely photograph of her.”

Miss Peregrine wrestled a massive photo album down from a shelf and set it before me on the desk. She leaned over my shoulder as she turned the stiff pages, looking for a certain picture but pausing to linger over others, her voice tinged with dreamy nostalgia. As they flicked by I recognized photos from the smashed trunk in the basement and from my grandfather’s cigar box. Miss Peregrine had collected them all. It was strange to think that she’d shown these same pictures to my grandfather all those years ago, when he was my age—maybe right here in this room, at this desk—and now she was showing them to me, as if somehow I’d stepped into his past.

Finally she came to a photo of an ethereal-looking woman with a plump little bird perched on her hand, and said, “This is Miss Finch and her auntie, Miss Finch.” The woman and the bird seemed to be communicating.

“How could you tell them apart?” I asked.

“The elder Miss Finch preferred to stay a finch most all of the time. Which was just as well, really. She never was much of a conversationalist.”

Miss Peregrine turned a few more pages, this time landing on a group portrait of women and children gathered humorlessly around a paper moon.

“Ah, yes! I’d nearly forgotten about this one.” She slipped the photo out of its album sleeve and held it up reverently. “The lady in front there, that’s Miss Avocet. She’s as close to royalty as we peculiars have. They tried for fifty years to elect her leader of the Council of Ymbrynes, but she would never give up teaching at the academy she and Miss Bunting founded. Today there’s not an ymbryne worth her wings who didn’t pass under Miss Avocet’s tutelage at one time, myself included! In fact, if you look closely you might recognize that little girl in the glasses.”

I squinted. The face she pointed to was dark and slightly blurred. “Is that you?”

“I was one of the youngest Miss Avocet ever took on,” she said proudly.

“What about the boys in the picture?” I said. “They look even younger than you.”

Miss Peregrine’s expression darkened. “You’re referring to my misguided brothers. Rather than split us up, they came along to the academy with me. Mollycoddled like a pair of little princes, they were. I dare say it’s what turned them rotten.”

“They weren’t ymbrynes?”

“Oh, no,” she huffed. “Only women are born ymbrynes, and thank heaven for that! Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such grave responsibilities. We ymbrynes must scour the countryside for young peculiars in need, steer clear of those who would do us harm, and keep our wards fed, clothed, hidden, and steeped in the lore of our people. And as if that weren’t enough, we must also ensure that our loops reset each day like clockwork.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

She raised a fluttering hand to her brow and staggered back, pantomiming horror. “Catastrophe, cataclysm, disaster! I dare not even think of it. Fortunately, the mechanism by which loops are reset is a simple one: One of us must cross through the entryway every so often. This keeps it pliable, you see. The ingress point is a bit like a hole in fresh dough; if you don’t poke a finger into it now and then the thing may just close up on its own. And if there’s no ingress or egress—no valve through which may be vented the various pressures that accrue naturally in a closed temporal system—” She made a little poof! gesture with her hands, as if miming the explosion of a firecracker. “Well, the whole thing becomes unstable.”

She bent over the album again and riffled through its pages. “Speaking of which, I may have a picture of—yes, here it is. An ingress point if ever there was one!” She pulled another picture from its sleeve. “This is Miss Finch and one of her wards in the magnificent entryway to Miss Finch’s loop, in a rarely used portion of the London Underground. When it resets, the tunnel fills with the most terrific glow. I’ve always thought our own rather modest by comparison,” she said with a hint of envy.

“Just to make sure I understand,” I said. “If today is September third, 1940, then tomorrow is … also September third?”

“Well, for a few of the loop’s twenty-four hours it’s September second, but, yes, it’s the third.”

“So tomorrow never comes.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Outside, a distant clap of what sounded like thunder echoed, and the darkening window rattled in its frame. Miss Peregrine looked up and again drew out her watch.

“I’m afraid that’s all the time I have at the moment. I do hope you’ll stay for supper.”

I said that I would; that my father might be wondering where I was hardly crossed my mind. I squeezed out from behind the desk and began following her to the door, but then another question occurred to me, one that had been nagging at me for a long time.

“Was my grandfather really running from the Nazis when he came here?”

“He was,” she said. “A number of children came to us during those awful years leading up to the war. There was so much upheaval.” She looked pained, as if the memory was still fresh. “I found Abraham at a camp for displaced persons on the mainland. He was a poor, tortured boy, but so strong. I knew at once that he belonged with us.”

I felt relieved; at least that part of his life was as I had understood it to be. There was one more thing I wanted to ask, though, and I didn’t quite know how to put it.

“Was he—my grandfather—was he like …”

“Like us?”

I nodded.

She smiled strangely. “He was like you, Jacob.” And she turned and hobbled toward the stairs.

Miss Peregrine insisted that I wash off the bog mud before sitting down to dinner, and asked Emma to run me a bath. I think she hoped that by talking to me a little, Emma would start to feel better. But she wouldn’t even look at me. I watched as she ran cold water into the tub and then warmed it with her bare hands, swirling them around until steam rose.

“That is awesome,” I said. But she left without saying a word in response.

Once I’d turned the water thoroughly brown, I toweled off and found a change of clothes hanging from the back of the door—baggy tweed pants, a button-up shirt, and a pair of suspenders that were far too short but that I couldn’t figure out how to adjust. I was left with the choice of wearing the pants either around my ankles or hitched up to my bellybutton. I decided the latter was the lesser of evils, so I went downstairs to have what would likely be the strangest meal of my life while dressed like a clown without makeup.

Dinner was a dizzying blur of names and faces, many of them half-remembered from photographs and my grandfather’s long-ago descriptions. When I came into the dining room, the kids, who’d been clamoring noisily for seats around the long table, froze and stared at me. I got the feeling they didn’t get a lot of dinner guests. Miss Peregrine, already seated at the head of the table, stood up and used the sudden quiet as an opportunity to introduce me.

“For those of you who haven’t already had the pleasure of meeting him,” she announced, “this is Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. He is our honored guest and has come a very long way to be here. I hope you will treat him accordingly.” Then she pointed to each person in the room and recited their names, most of which I immediately forgot, as happens when I’m nervous. The introductions were followed by a barrage of questions, which Miss Peregrine batted away with rapid-fire efficiency.

“Is Jacob going to stay with us?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Where’s Abe?”

“Abe is busy in America.”

“Why does Jacob got Victor’s trousers on?”

“Victor doesn’t need them anymore, and Mr. Portman’s are being washed.”

“What’s Abe doing in America?”

At this question I saw Emma, who had been glowering in a corner, rise from her chair and stalk out of the room. The others, apparently used to her volatile moods, paid no attention.

“Never mind what Abe’s doing,” Miss Peregrine snapped.

“When’s he coming back?”

“Never mind that, too. Now let’s eat!”

Everyone stampeded to their seats. Thinking I’d found an empty chair, I went to sit and felt a fork jab my thigh. “Excuse me!” cried Millard. But Miss Peregrine made him give it up anyway, sending him out to put on clothes.

“How many times must I tell you,” she called after him, “polite persons do not take their supper in the nude!”

Kids with kitchen duty appeared bearing trays of food, all covered with gleaming silver tops so that you couldn’t see what was inside, sparking wild speculation about what might be for dinner.

“Otters Wellington!” one boy cried.

“Salted kitten and shrew’s liver!” another said, to which the younger children responded with gagging sounds. But when the covers were finally lifted, a feast of kingly proportions was revealed: a roasted goose, its flesh a perfect golden brown; a whole salmon and a whole cod, each outfitted with lemons and fresh dill and pats of melting butter; a bowl of steamed mussels; platters of roasted vegetables; loaves of bread still cooling from the oven; and all manner of jellies and sauces I didn’t recognize but that looked delicious. It all glowed invitingly in the flicker of gaslight lamps, a world away from the oily stews of indeterminate origin I’d been choking down at the Priest Hole. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and proceeded to stuff myself silly.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that peculiar children have peculiar eating habits, but between forkfuls of food I found myself sneaking glances around the room. Olive the levitating girl had to be belted into a chair screwed to the floor so that she wouldn’t float up to the ceiling. So the rest of us wouldn’t be plagued by insects, Hugh, the boy who had bees living in his stomach, ate under a large mosquito net at a table for one in the corner. Claire, a doll-like girl with immaculate golden curls, sat next to Miss Peregrine but ate not a morsel.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked her.

“Claire don’t eat with the rest of us,” Hugh volunteered, a bee escaping from his mouth. “She’s embarrassed.”

“I am not!” she said, glaring at him.

“Yeah? Then eat something!”

“No one here is embarrassed of their gift,” Miss Peregrine said. “Miss Densmore simply prefers to dine alone. Isn’t that right, Miss Densmore?”

The girl stared at the empty place before her, clearly wishing that all the attention would vanish.

“Claire has a backmouth,” explained Millard, who sat beside me now in a smoking jacket (and nothing else).

“A what?”

“Go on, show him!” someone said. Soon everyone at the table was pressuring Claire to eat something. And finally, just to shut them up, she did.

A leg of goose was set before her. She turned around in her chair, and gripping its arms she bent over backward, dipping the back of her head to the plate. I heard a distinct smacking sound, and when she lifted her head again a giant bite had disappeared from the goose leg. Beneath her golden hair was a set of sharp-toothed jaws. Suddenly, I understood the strange picture of Claire that I’d seen in Miss Peregrine’s album, to which the photographer had devoted two panels: one for her daintily pretty face and another for the curls that so thoroughly masked the back of her head.

Claire turned forward and crossed her arms, annoyed that she’d let herself be talked into such a humiliating demonstration. She sat in silence while the others peppered me with questions. After Miss Peregrine had dismissed a few more about my grandfather, the children turned to other subjects. They seemed especially interested in what life in the twenty-first century was like.

“What sort of flying motorcars do you have?” asked a pubescent boy named Horace, who wore a dark suit that made him look like an apprentice undertaker.

“None,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Have they built cities on the moon?” another boy asked hopefully.

“We left some garbage and a flag there in the sixties, but that’s about it.”

“Does Britain still rule the world?”

“Uh … not exactly.”

They seemed disappointed. Sensing an opportunity, Miss Peregrine said, “You see, children? The future isn’t so grand after all. Nothing wrong with the good old here and now!” I got the feeling this was something she often tried to impress upon them, with little success. But it got me wondering: Just how long had they been here, in the “good old here and now?”

“Do you mind if I ask how old you all are?” I said.

“I’m eighty-three,” said Horace.

Olive raised her hand excitedly. “I’ll be seventy-five and a half next week!” I wondered how they kept track of the months and years if the days never changed.

“I’m either one hundred seventeen or one hundred eighteen,” said a heavy-lidded boy named Enoch. He looked no more than thirteen. “I lived in another loop before this one,” he explained.

“I’m nearly eighty-seven,” said Millard with his mouth full of goose drippings, and as he spoke a half-chewed mass quavered in his invisible jaw for all to see. There were groans as people covered their eyes and looked away.

Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids’ eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days—this perpetual deathless summer—had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

A sudden boom sounded from outside, the second one this evening, but louder and closer than the first, rattling silverware and plates.

“Hurry up and finish, everyone!” Miss Peregrine sang out, and no sooner had she said it than another concussion jolted the house, throwing a framed picture off the wall behind me.

“What is that?” I said.

“It’s those damned Jerries again!” growled Olive, thumping her little fist on the table, clearly in imitation of some ill-tempered adult. Then I heard what sounded like a buzzer going off somewhere far away, and suddenly it occurred to me what was happening. This was the night of September third, 1940, and in a little while a bomb was going to fall from the sky and blow a giant hole in the house. The buzzer was an air-raid siren, sounding from the ridge.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, panic rising in my throat. “We have to go before the bomb hits!”

“He doesn’t know!” giggled Olive. “He thinks we’re going to die!”

“It’s only the changeover,” said Millard with a shrug of his smoking jacket. “No reason to get your knickers in a twist.”

“This happens every night?”

Miss Peregrine nodded. “Every single evening,” she said. Somehow, though, I was not reassured.

“May we go outside and show Jacob?” said Hugh.

“Yes, may we?” Claire begged, suddenly enthused after twenty minutes of sulking. “The changeover is ever so beautiful!”

Miss Peregrine demurred, pointing out that they hadn’t yet finished their dinners, but the children pleaded with her until she relented. “All right, so long as you all wear your masks,” she said.

The children burst out of their seats and ran from the room, leaving poor Olive behind until someone took pity and came to unbelt her from her chair. I ran after them through the house into the wood-paneled foyer, where they each grabbed something from a cabinet before bounding out the door. Miss Peregrine gave me one, too, and I stood turning it over in my hands. It looked like a sagging face of black rubber, with wide glass portholes like eyes that were frozen in shock, and a droopy snout that ended in a perforated canister.

“Go ahead,” said Miss Peregrine. “Put it on.” Then I realized what it was: a gas mask.

I strapped it over my face and followed her out onto the lawn, where the children stood scattered like chess pieces on an unmarked board, anonymous behind their upturned masks, watching billows of black smoke roll across the sky. Treetops burned in the hazy distance. The drone of unseen airplanes seemed to come from everywhere.

Now and then came a muffled blast I could feel in my chest like the thump of a second heart, followed by waves of broiling heat, like someone opening and closing an oven right in front of me. I ducked at each concussion, but the kids never so much as flinched. Instead they sang, their lyrics timed perfectly to the rhythm of the bombs.

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, RUN!

Bang, bang, BANG goes the farmer’s gun

He’ll get by without his rabbit pie, so

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, RUN!

Bright tracer bullets scored the heavens just as the song ended. The kids applauded like onlookers at a fireworks display, violent slashes of color reflected in their masks. This nightly assault had become such a regular part of their lives that they’d ceased to think of it as something terrifying—in fact, the photograph I’d seen of it in Miss Peregrine’s album had been labeled Our beautiful display. And in its own morbid way, I suppose it was.

It began to drizzle, as if all that flying metal had riven holes in the clouds. The concussions came less frequently. The attack seemed to be ending.

The children started to leave. I thought we were going back inside, but they passed the front door and headed for another part of the yard.

“Where are we going?” I asked two masked kids.

They said nothing, but seeming to sense my anxiety, they took me gently by the hands and led me along with the others. We rounded the house to the back corner, where everyone was gathering around a giant topiary. This one wasn’t a mythical creature, though, but a man reposing in the grass, one arm supporting him, the other pointing to the sky. It took a moment before I realized that it was a leafy replica of Michelangelo’s fresco of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Considering that it was made from bushes, it was really impressive. You could almost make out the placid expression on Adam’s face, which had two blooming gardenias for eyes.

I saw the wild-haired girl standing nearby. She wore a flower-print dress that had been patched so many times it almost looked like a quilt. I went over to her and, pointing to Adam, said, “Did you make this?”

The girl nodded.

“How?”

She bent down and held one of her palms above the grass. A few seconds later, a hand-shaped section of blades wriggled and stretched and grew until they were brushing the bottom of her palm.

“That,” I said, “is crazy.” Clearly, I was not at my most articulate.

Someone shushed me. The children were all standing silently with their necks craned, pointing at a section of sky. I looked up but could see only clouds of smoke, the flickering orange of fires reflected against them.

Then I heard a single airplane engine cut through the rest. It was close, and getting closer. Panic flooded me. This is the night they were killed. Not just the night, but the moment. Could it be, I wondered, that these children died every evening only to be resurrected by the loop, like some Sisyphean suicide cult, condemned to be blown up and stitched back together for eternity?

Something small and gray parted the clouds and came hurtling toward us. A rock, I thought, but rocks don’t whistle as they fall.

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run. I would’ve but now there was no time; all I could do was scream and dive to the ground for cover. But there was no cover, so I hit the grass and threw my arms over my head as if somehow that would keep it attached to my body.

I clenched my jaw and shut my eyes and held my breath, but instead of the deafening blast I was bracing for, everything went completely, profoundly quiet. Suddenly there were no growling engines, no whistling bombs, no pops of distant guns. It was as if someone had muted the world.

Was I dead?

I uncovered my head and slowly looked behind me. The wind-bent boughs of trees were frozen in place. The sky was a photograph of arrested flames licking a cloud bank. Drops of rain hung suspended before my eyes. And in the middle of the circle of children, like the object of some arcane ritual, there hovered a bomb, its downward-facing tip seemingly balanced on Adam’s outstretched finger.

Then, like a movie that burns in the projector while you’re watching it, a bloom of hot and perfect whiteness spread out before me and swallowed everything.

The first thing I heard when I could hear again was laughter. Then the white faded away and I saw that we were all arranged around Adam just as we had been before, but now the bomb was gone and the night was quiet and the only light in the cloudless sky was a full moon. Miss Peregrine appeared above me and held out her hand. I took it, stumbling to my feet in a daze.

“Please accept my apologies,” she said. “I should have better prepared you.” She couldn’t hide her smile, though, and neither could the other kids as they stripped off their masks. I was pretty sure I’d just been hazed.

I felt lightheaded and out-of-sorts. “I should probably head home for the night,” I said to Miss Peregrine. “My dad’ll worry.” Then I added quickly, “I can go home, right?”

“Of course you can,” she replied, and in a loud voice asked for a volunteer to escort me back to the cairn. To my surprise, Emma stepped forward. Miss Peregrine seemed pleased.

“Are you sure about her?” I whispered to the headmistress. “A few hours ago she was ready to slit my throat.”

“Miss Bloom may be hot-tempered, but she is one of my most trusted wards,” she replied. “And I think you and she may have a few things to discuss away from curious ears.”

Five minutes later the two of us were on our way, only this time my hands weren’t tied and she wasn’t poking a knife in my spine. A few of the younger kids trailed us as far as the edge of the yard. They wanted to know whether I’d be back again tomorrow. I made vague assurances, but I could hardly wrap my mind around what was happening at this moment, much less in the future.

We passed into the dark woods alone. When the house had disappeared behind us, Emma held out an upturned palm, flicked her wrist, and a petite ball of fire flared to life just above her fingers. She held it before her like a waiter carrying a tray, lighting the path and casting our twin shadows across the trees.

“Have I told you how cool that is?” I said, trying to break a silence that grew more awkward by the second.

“It isn’t cool at all,” she replied, swinging the flame close enough that I could feel its radiating heat. I dodged it and fell back a few paces.

“I didn’t mean—I meant it’s cool that you can do that.”

“Well, if you’d speak properly I might understand you,” she snapped, then stopped walking.

We stood facing each other from a careful distance. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she said.

“Oh yeah? How do I know you don’t think I’m some evil creature and this is just a plot to get me alone so you can finally kill me?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You came unannounced, a stranger I didn’t recognize, and chased after me like a madman. What was I meant to think?”

“Fine, I get it,” I said, though I didn’t really mean it.

She dropped her eyes and began digging a little hole in the dirt with the tip of her boot. The flame in her hand changed color, fading from orange to a cool indigo. “It’s not true, what I said. I did recognize you.” She looked up at me. “You look so much like him.”

“People tell me that sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I said all those terrible things earlier. I didn’t want to believe you—that you were who you said. I knew what it would mean.”

“It’s okay,” I replied. “When I was growing up, I wanted so much to meet all of you. Now that it’s finally happening …” I shook my head. “I’m just sorry it has to be because of this.”

And then she rushed at me and threw her arms around my neck, the flame in her hand snuffing out just before she touched me, her skin hot where she’d held it. We stood like that in the darkness for a while, me and this teenaged old woman, this rather beautiful girl who had loved my grandfather when he was the age I am now. There was nothing I could do but put my arms around her, too, so I did, and after a while I guess we were both crying.

I heard her take a deep breath in the dark, and then she broke away. The fire flared back to life in her hand.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “I’m not usually so …”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“We should be getting on.”

“Lead the way,” I said.

We walked through the woods in a comfortable silence. When we came to the bog she said, “Step only where I step,” and I did, planting my feet in her prints. Bog gases flared up in green pyres in the distance, as if in sympathy with Emma’s light.

We reached the cairn and ducked inside, shuffling in single-file to the rear chamber and then out again to a world shrouded in mist. She guided me back to the path, and when we reached it she laced her fingers through mine and squeezed. We were quiet for a moment. Then she turned and went back, the fog swallowing her so quickly that for a moment I wondered if she’d been there at all.

Returning to town, I half-expected to find horse-drawn wagons roaming the streets. Instead I was welcomed by the hum of generators and the glow of TV screens behind cottage windows. I was home, such as it was.

Kev was manning the bar again and raised a glass in my direction as I came in. None of the men in the pub offered to lynch me. All seemed right with the world.

I went upstairs to find Dad asleep in front of his laptop at our little table. When I shut the door he woke with a start.

“Hi! Hey! You’re out late. Or are you? What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Before nine I think. The gennies are still on.”

He stretched and rubbed his eyes. “What’d you do today? I was hoping I’d see you for dinner.”

“Just explored the old house some more.”

“Find anything good?”

“Uh … not really,” I said, realizing that I probably should’ve bothered to concoct a more elaborate cover story.

He looked at me strangely. “Where’d you get those?”

“Get what?”

“Your clothes,” he said.

I looked down and realized I’d completely forgotten about the tweed-pants-and-suspenders outfit I was wearing. “I found them in the house,” I said, because I didn’t have time to think of a less weird answer. “Aren’t they cool?”

He grimaced. “You put on clothes that you found? Jake, that’s unsanitary. And what happened to your jeans and jacket?”

I needed to change the subject. “They got super dirty, so I, uh …” I trailed off, making a point of noticing the document on his computer screen. “Whoa, is that your book? How’s it coming?”

He slapped the laptop shut. “My book isn’t the issue right now. What’s important is our time here be therapeutic for you. I’m not sure that spending your days alone in that old house is really what Dr. Golan had in mind. When he green-lighted this trip.”

“Wow, I think that was the record,” I said.

“What?”

“The longest streak ever of you not mentioning my psychiatrist.” I pretended to look at a nonexistent wristwatch. “Four days, five hours, and twenty-six minutes.” I sighed. “It was good while it lasted.”

“That man has been a great help to you,” he said. “God only knows the state you’d be in right now if we hadn’t found him.”

“You’re right, Dad. Dr. Golan did help me. But that doesn’t mean he has to control every aspect of my life. I mean, Jesus, you and mom might as well buy me one of those little bracelets that says What Would Golan Do? That way I can ask myself before I do anything. Before I take a dump. How would Dr. Golan want me to take this dump? Should I bank it off the side or go straight down the middle? What would be the most psychologically beneficial dump I could take?”

Dad didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and when he did his voice was all low and gravelly. He told me I was going birding with him the next day whether I liked it or not. When I replied that he was sadly mistaken, he got up and went downstairs to the pub. I thought he’d be drinking or something, so I went to change out of my clown clothes, but a few minutes later he knocked on my bedroom door and said there was someone on the phone for me.

I figured it was Mom, so I gritted my teeth and followed him downstairs to the phone booth in the far corner of the pub. He handed me the receiver and went to sit at a table. I slid the door closed.

“Hello?”

“I just spoke to your father,” a man said. “He sounded a little upset.”

It was Dr. Golan.

I wanted to say that he and my dad could both stuff it up their asses, but I knew this situation required some tact. If I pissed Golan off now it would be the end of my trip. I couldn’t leave yet, not with so much more to learn about the peculiar children. So I played along and explained what I’d been up to—all except the kids-in-a-time-loop part—and tried to make it sound like I was coming around to the idea that there was nothing special about the island or my grandfather. It was like a mini-session over the phone.

“I hope you’re not just telling me what I want to hear,” he said. That had become his standard line. “Maybe I should come out there and check on you. I could use a little vacation. How does that sound?”

Please be joking, I prayed.

“I’m okay. Really,” I said.

“Relax, Jacob, I’m only kidding, though Lord knows I could use some time away from the office. And actually, I believe you. You do sound okay. In fact, just now I told your father that probably the best thing he could do is to give you a little breathing room and let you sort things out on your own.”

“Really?”

“You’ve had your parents and me hovering over you for so long. At a certain point it becomes counterproductive.”

“Well, I really appreciate that.”

He said something else I couldn’t quite hear; there was a lot of noise on his end. “It’s hard to hear you,” I said. “Are you in a mall or something?”

“The airport,” he replied. “Picking up my sister. Anyway, all I said was to enjoy yourself. Explore and don’t worry too much. I’ll see you soon, all right?”

“Thanks again, Dr. G.”

As I hung up the phone, I felt bad for having ragged on him earlier. That was twice now he’d stuck up for me when my own parents wouldn’t.

My dad was nursing a beer across the room. I stopped by his table on my way upstairs. “About tomorrow …” I said.

“Do what you want, I guess.”

“Are you sure?”

He shrugged sullenly. “Doctor’s orders.”

“I’ll be home for dinner. Promise.”

He just nodded. I left him in the bar and went up to bed.

Falling asleep, my thoughts drifted to the peculiar children and the first question they’d asked after Miss Peregrine had introduced me: Is Jacob going to stay with us? At the time I’d thought, Of course not. But why not? If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.