A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “I want to see,” said Olive. “Can we look around?”

  “Sorry, there’s no time today,” I said, stealing a glance at Emma in my mirror. I could see only the back of her head; she was turned all the way around, staring out the rear window at the guard station that marked the beginning of the neighborhood.

  “But we’re here now,” Olive said. “Remember how we always used to talk about visiting? Didn’t you always wonder what his house looked like?”

  “Olive, no,” said Millard. “It’s a bad idea.”

  “Yeah,” said Bronwyn, poking Olive and then jerking her head toward Emma. “Maybe another day.”

  Olive finally got the hint. “Oh. Okay. You know, actually, I don’t feel like it, either . . .”

  I hit the turn signal. I was just about to pull onto the road when Emma faced forward in her seat.

  “I want to go,” she said. “I want to see his house.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Millard.

  “Yes.” She frowned. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Like I won’t be able to handle it.”

  “Nobody said that,” said Millard.

  “You were thinking it.”

  “What about the clothes shopping?” I said, still hoping to get out of this.

  “I think we should pay our respects,” said Emma. “That’s more important than clothes.”

  The idea of touring them around Abe’s half-empty house sounded downright morbid, but at this point it seemed cruel to deny them.

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “Just for a minute.”

  For the others, I think, it was simple curiosity, to learn more about who Abe had become after he left their loop. For Emma, it was more than that. Since she had arrived in Florida, I knew she had been thinking about my grandfather. She had spent years trying to imagine how and where he lived, piecing together an incomplete picture of his life in America from occasional letters. For years she had dreamed of coming to visit him and now that she was actually here, she couldn’t put it out of her mind. I felt her trying to, and failing. She’d spent too long dreaming about it—about him, about this place. In a way that felt entirely new and unsettling, I had started to feel his ghost looming between us in private moments. Maybe seeing where he had lived—and died—would help lay it to rest.

  * * *

  • • •

  I hadn’t been to my grandfather’s house in months, not since before my dad and I left for Wales—back when I knew nothing. Of all the surreal moments I had experienced since my friends came to stay, none felt more like a dream than driving through my grandfather’s lazy, looping neighborhood with the very people he’d sent me abroad to find.

  How little it had changed: Here was the same guard waving us through the gate, his face ghostly white with sunblock. Here were the yard gnomes and plastic flamingoes and rusting fish-shaped mailboxes, the houses they fronted all alike, a paint box of fading pastels. Here were the same craggy wraiths, slow-pedaling their orthopedic tricycles between the shuffleboard court and the community center. As if this place, too, were stuck in a time loop. Maybe that’s what my grandfather had liked about it.

  “Certainly is a humble place,” said Millard. “No one would think a famous hollow-hunter lived here, that’s certain.”

  “I’m sure that was intentional,” said Emma. “Abe had to keep a low profile.”

  “Even so, I was expecting something a bit grander.”

  “I think it’s sweet,” said Olive. “Little houses all in a row. I’m just sorry that after all these years wishing we could pay Abe a visit, he isn’t here to greet us.”

  “Olive!” Bronwyn hissed.

  Olive glanced at Emma and winced.

  “It’s fine,” Emma said breezily. But then I met her eyes in the rearview mirror, and she quickly looked away.

  I wondered if the real reason she’d wanted to come here was to prove something to me—that she was over him, that the old wounds didn’t ache anymore.

  Then I turned a corner, and there it was, finally, humble as a shoebox, at the end of a weedy cul-de-sac. All along Morningbird Lane the houses looked a bit abandoned—most of the neighbors were still up north for the summer—but Abe’s looked worse, its lawn gone to seed, the yellow trim along the roofline beginning to flake and peel. Abe, as his neighbors would return to find come autumn, was gone forever.

  “Well, this it,” I said, pulling into the driveway. “Just a regular house.”

  “How long did he live here?” Bronwyn asked.

  I was about to answer, but I was distracted by something unfamiliar that had escaped my notice until just then: a FOR SALE sign staked into the grass. I got out and marched through the yard, pulled it out of the ground, and threw it into the ditch.

  No one had told me. Of course they hadn’t: I would have thrown a fit, and my parents didn’t want to deal with it. My feelings were too much trouble.

  Emma came up behind me. “Are you okay?”

  “I should be asking you that,” I said.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “It’s just a house. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. “So why does it bother me so much that my parents are selling it?”

  She hugged me from behind. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”

  “Thanks. And I totally get it if you need to leave, whenever. Just say the word.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. Then, quieter, “But thank you.”

  There was a sudden commotion behind us, and we turned to see Bronwyn and Olive standing by the trunk of the car.

  “There’s someone in the boot!” Bronwyn cried.

  We ran over. I could hear a muffled voice shouting. I pushed a button on the key fob and the trunk opened. Enoch popped up.

  “Enoch!” cried Emma.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

  “You really thought I was going to let you leave me behind?” He blinked in the sudden sunlight. “Think again!”

  “Your brain,” said Millard, shaking his head. “Sometimes it just defies belief.”

  “Yes, my brilliance catches a lot of people off guard.” Enoch clambered out onto the driveway, then looked around, confused. “Wait. This isn’t a clothing shop.”

  “Goodness, he is brilliant,” said Millard.

  “It’s Abe’s house,” said Bronwyn.

  Enoch mouth fell open. “What!” He raised an eyebrow at Emma. “Whose idea was this?”

  “Mine,” I said, hoping to shut down an awkward conversation before it began.

  “We’re here to pay our respects,” said Bronwyn.

  “If you say so,” said Enoch.

  I hadn’t brought the keys to the house, but it didn’t matter. There was a spare hidden beneath a conch shell in the vegetable garden, one only Grandpa Portman and I knew about. There was something sweet about finding it just where it was supposed to be. Moments later I was unlocking the front door and we were stepping inside.

  The air-conditioning had probably been off for most of the summer, and the house was hot and stale. Worse than the stifling temperature was the state of the place. Clothes and papers were stacked in unsteady piles on the floor, household items were littered across countertops, trash spilled from a pyramid of garbage bags in the corner. My father and my aunt had never finished sorting through Grandpa Portman’s things. Dad abandoned the project (and the house, it seemed) when we left for Wales and planted a FOR SALE sign out front in the hope someone else might do the work instead. It looked like a ransacked Salvation Army store, not the home of a respected elder, and I was overcome by a wave of shame. I found myself trying to apologize and explain and tidy up all at the same time, as if I could hide what my friends had already seen.

 
“Gosh,” said Enoch, clicking his tongue as he looked around, “he must have really been bad off at the end.”

  “No—it was—it was never like this,” I stammered, scooping old magazines from the seat of Abe’s armchair. “At least, not while he was alive—”

  “Jacob, wait,” said Emma.

  “Can you guys go outside for a minute while I do this?”

  “Jacob!” Emma caught me by the shoulders. “Stop.”

  “I’ll be quick,” I said. “He didn’t live like this. I swear.”

  “I know,” said Emma. “Abe wouldn’t even have breakfast without a clean collared shirt on.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So—”

  “We want to help.”

  Enoch pulled a face. “We do?”

  “Yes!” said Olive. “We’ll all pitch in.”

  “I agree,” said Bronwyn. “It shouldn’t be left like this.”

  “Why not?” said Enoch. “Abe’s dead. Who cares if his house is clean?”

  “We do,” said Millard, and Enoch stumbled as if Millard had shoved him. “And if you’re not going to help, go lock yourself in the boot of the car again!”

  “Yeah!” cried Olive.

  “No need to get violent, mates.” Enoch grabbed a broom from the corner and twirled it around. “See, I’m game. Sweepy-sweep!”

  Emma clapped her hands. “Then let’s get this place shipshape.”

  We dove in and started working. Emma took charge, giving orders like a drill sergeant, which I think helped keep her mind from wandering into painful territory. “Books on shelves. Clothes in closets. Trash in cans!”

  With one hand, Bronwyn lifted Abe’s easy chair over her head. “Where does this go?”

  We dusted and swept. We threw open windows to let in fresh air. Bronwyn took room-sized carpets into the yard and beat the dust out of them—by herself. Even Enoch didn’t seem to mind the work once we settled into a rhythm. Everything was coated with dust and grime, and it got onto our hands and clothes and in our hair. But nobody minded.

  As we worked, I saw ghostly images of my grandfather everywhere. In his plaid chair, reading one of his spy novels. At the living room window, silhouetted against a bright afternoon, just watching—for the postman, he would say, and chuckle. Stooped over a pot of Polish stew in the kitchen, tending it while telling me stories. At the big drawing table he kept in the garage, pushpins and yarn spread out everywhere, making maps with me on a summer afternoon. “Where should the river go?” he would say, handing me a blue marker. “What about the town?” White hair rising like tendrils of smoke from his scalp. “Here maybe is better?” he’d say, urging my hand a little this way or that.

  When my friends and I were finished, we went out to the lanai, seeking refuge in the slight breeze and mopping our brows. Enoch had been right, of course—no one would care that the work had been done. It was a gesture, useless but meaningful. Abe’s friends had not been able to attend his funeral. Somehow, cleaning his house had become their goodbye.

  “You guys didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “We know,” said Bronwyn. “But it felt good.”

  She popped the top on a soda we’d found in the fridge, then took a long drink, burped, and passed it to Emma.

  “I’m only sorry the others couldn’t be here,” said Emma, taking a small sip. “We should bring them later, so they can see it, too.”

  “We’re not finished, are we?” said Enoch. He actually sounded let down.

  “That’s the whole house,” I replied. “Unless you want to clean the yard, too.”

  “What about the war room?” asked Millard.

  “The what?”

  “You know, where Abe planned attacks on hollowgast, received encoded communications from other hollow-hunters, et cetera . . . he must have had one.”

  “He, uh—No, he didn’t.”

  “Maybe he didn’t tell you about it,” said Enoch. “It was probably full of top secret stuff, and you were just too small and dumb to understand.”

  “I’m sure if Abe had had a war room, Jacob would have known,” said Emma.

  “Yeah,” I said. Though I wasn’t so sure. I was the same kid who, after my grandfather had told me the truth about the peculiars, had let bullies at school convince me it was a fairy tale. I’d basically called him a liar to his face, which I know had hurt his feelings. So maybe he wouldn’t have trusted me with a secret like that, because I hadn’t trusted him. And anyway, how could you hide something like a war room in a little house like this?

  “What about a basement?” asked Bronwyn. “Abe must have had a fortified basement to protect against hollowgast attacks.”

  “If he’d had a place like that,” I said, getting frustrated, “then he wouldn’t have gotten killed by a hollowgast, would he?”

  Bronwyn looked hurt. There was a brief, awkward silence.

  “Jacob?” ventured Olive. “Is this what I think it is?”

  She was standing by the screen door that opened to the backyard, running her hand down a long, flapping gash in the netting.

  I felt a new flare of anger toward my father. Why hadn’t he fixed it, or torn it out entirely? Why was it still hanging there, like evidence at a crime scene?

  “Yeah. That’s where the hollow came in,” I said. “But it didn’t happen here. I found him . . .” I pointed at the woods. “Way out.”

  Olive and Bronwyn exchanged a loaded glance. Emma looked at the floor, the color draining from her cheeks. Maybe this, finally, was too much for her.

  “There’s nothing to see, really, it’s just bushes and stuff,” I said. “I’m not sure I could find the exact spot again, anyway.”

  A lie. I could have found it blindfolded.

  “If you could bring yourself to try,” Emma said, looking up at me. Her jaw was set, her brow furrowed. “I need to see the place where it happened.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I led them through knee-high grass to the edge of the woods, then plunged into the gloomy pine forest. I showed them how to navigate the spiny underbrush so they didn’t get cut on saw-toothed palmettoes or tangled in thickets of vine, and how to identify and avoid the patches where snakes made their nests. As we made our way, I retold the story of what happened that fateful evening—the night that had split my life into Before and After. The panicked call I’d gotten from Abe while I was at work. My delay in getting here because I’d had to wait to catch a ride with a friend—a delay that may have either cost my grandfather his life, or saved mine. How I’d found the house a wreck, then noticed my grandfather’s still-lit flashlight in the grass, shining into the woods. Fording into the black trees, just like we were doing now, and then—

  A rustle in the brush sent everyone leaping into the air.

  “It’s just a raccoon!” I said. “Don’t worry, if there were any hollows around right now, I’d feel it.”

  We circled a patch of brush that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t be sure I’d found the exact spot where my grandfather died. The woods in Florida grew quickly, and since I’d been here last it had squirmed and shifted into an unfamiliar new configuration. I guess I couldn’t have found it blindfolded, after all. It had been too many months.

  I stepped into a sunny clearing where the vines were low and the brush seemed to have been tamped down. “It was around here. I think.”

  We gathered in a loose circle and observed a spontaneous moment of silence. Then, one by one, my friends took turns saying goodbye to him.

  “You were a great man, Abraham Portman,” said Millard. “Peculiarkind could use more like you. We miss you dearly.”

  “It isn’t fair, what happened to you,” said Bronwyn. “I wish we could have protected you like you used to protect us.”

  “Thank you for sending Jacob,” said Olive. “We would all be dead w
ithout him.”

  “Let’s not go overboard,” said Enoch, and then because he had spoken, it was his turn. He twisted his shoe in the dirt for a long moment, then said, “Why’d you have to do something stupid, like get yourself killed?” He laughed dryly. “I’m sorry if I was ever an ass to you. If it changes anything, I wish you weren’t dead.” And then he turned his face away and said quietly, “Goodbye, old friend.”

  Olive touched her heart. “Enoch, that was nice.”

  “Okay, settle down.” Enoch shook his head, embarrassed, and started walking back. “I’ll be at the house.”

  Bronwyn and Olive looked to Emma, who hadn’t spoken yet.

  “I’d like a moment alone, please,” she said.

  The girls looked a little disappointed, and then everyone but me went after Enoch.

  Emma glanced at me. I raised my eyebrows.

  Me too?

  She looked a bit sheepish.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course. I’ll just be over here. In case you need anything.”

  She nodded. I walked about thirty paces, leaned against a tree, and waited. Emma stood at the spot for several minutes. I tried not to stare at her, but the more time passed, the more I caught myself watching the back of her head to see if it was bobbing, and her shoulders to see if they were shaking.

  My eyes drifted to a vulture circling overhead. I looked down a moment later when I heard a noise in the brush.

  Bronwyn was racing toward me. I startled so badly that I almost fell over.

  “Jacob! Emma! You have to come quick!”

  Emma saw and ran over to us.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “We found something,” said Bronwyn. “In the house.”

  The look on her face made me think it was something awful. A dead body. But her voice was full of excitement.

  * * *

  • • •

  They were standing in the room Abe had used as his office. The old Persian carpet that stretched nearly wall to wall had been rolled up and pushed to one side, revealing pale, worn floorboards beneath.