A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “I wouldn’t say it precisely that way,” said Horace. “But I agree. Assistant to the anachronist in the Costumes Department? I should be advising the Ymbryne Council on strategy, at the very least. I can see the future, for birds’ sake!”

  “I thought Miss Peregrine believed in us,” said Olive.

  “She does,” said Bronwyn. “It’s the other ymbrynes. They don’t know us as well.”

  “They’re threatened by us,” said Enoch. “These assignments? They’re meant to send a message. You’re still just peculiar children.”

  Emma sidled up to me, and we trudged side by side. I asked her how her assignment meeting had gone.

  “Look at this,” Emma said, pulling a slim rectangular box from her bag. “It’s a folding camera.” She flipped a switch and a lens accordioned out of the body.

  “So they gave you the job you wanted, after all? Documenting things?”

  “Nah,” she said. “I nicked it from the equipment room. They gave me three shifts a week guarding ymbrynes during wight interrogations.”

  “That could be interesting, though. You might hear some crazy things.”

  “I don’t want to hear all that. Going over all their crimes and what they did to us for years and years . . . I’m tired of rehashing ancient history. I want to see new places, meet new people. What about you?”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “I mean, what about your assignment? I’m dying to know what they gave you. Something amazing, I’m sure.”

  “Motivational speaker,” I said.

  “What the devil is that?”

  “I’m supposed to go around to different loops telling people about myself.”

  She screwed up her face. “For what?”

  “To . . . inspire them?”

  She laughed so hard it actually hurt my feelings a little.

  “Hey. It’s not that weird,” I said.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way: I think you’re very inspiring. But I just . . . I can’t see it.”

  “Me, neither. That’s why I’m not going to do it.”

  “Really?” she said, impressed. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Something else.”

  “Oh. I see. Very mysterious.”

  “Yep.”

  “You’ll let me know?”

  I smiled. “You’ll be the first.”

  I didn’t want to keep Emma in the dark about my plans. I just didn’t exactly have plans yet, only a certainty that something would bubble up.

  And then something did. There was a noise from the river—a splash followed by a loud drawing of breath.

  Claire shouted, “Fish monster!”

  We all turned to look, but what seemed like a sea creature at first glance turned out to be a heavyset man with pale fishy skin. He was swimming quickly alongside us, submerged but for his head and shoulders, propelled beneath the surface by something we couldn’t see.

  “Ho there!” the man called out. “Young people, halt!”

  We walked faster, but somehow the man was able to match our speed.

  “I just want to ask you a question.”

  “Everyone stop,” said Millard. “This man won’t hurt us. You’re peculiar, aren’t you?”

  The man rose up and a pair of gills on his neck gasped open and spat out black water.

  “My name is Itch,” the man answered, and whether he was peculiar was no longer in question. “I only want to know one thing. You are the wards of Alma Peregrine, correct?”

  “That’s right,” said Olive, standing right at the edge of the Ditch to show she wasn’t afraid.

  “And is it true you go where you like and will never age forward? That your internal clocks have reset?”

  “That was two questions,” said Enoch.

  “Yes, it’s true,” said Emma.

  “I see,” Itch said. “And when can we have our clocks reset?”

  “Who’s we?” asked Horace.

  Four more heads popped up from of the water around him—two young boys with fins on their backs, an older woman with scaled skin, and a very old man with wide, fishy eyes, one on each side of his head. “My adoptive family,” Itch said. “We’ve been living in this cursed Ditch and breathing its polluted water for far too long.”

  “Time for a change of scenery,” the fish-eyed man croaked.

  “We want to go somewhere clean,” said the scaly woman.

  “It’s not that easy,” said Emma. “What happened to us was accidental, and it could have killed us.”

  “We don’t care,” said Itch.

  “They just don’t want to share their secret!” said one of the finned boys.

  “That’s not true,” said Millard. “We aren’t even sure if the reset could be re-created. The ymbrynes are still studying it.”

  “The ymbrynes!” The woman spat black water from her gills. “Even if they knew, they’d never tell. Then we’d all leave their loops and they’d have nobody left to lord over.”

  “Hey!” Claire shouted. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Downright treasonous,” said Bronwyn.

  “Treason!” shouted Itch, and he swam to the edge and pulled himself up onto the pavement. We edged away from him as the water ran off his body, revealing a coat of long green algae that covered him from chest to feet. “That’s a dangerous word to bandy about.”

  The boys pulled themselves up out of the Ditch and so did the woman—she was similarly clothed in algae—leaving only the old man in the water, swimming agitated circles.

  “Look,” I said—I hadn’t spoken yet, and thought maybe I could calm things down. “We’re all peculiar here. There’s no reason to fight.”

  “What do you know about it, newcomer?” said the woman.

  “He thinks he’s our savior!” said Itch. “You’re nothing but a phony who got lucky.”

  “False prophet!” shouted one of the boys, and then the other boy shouted it, too, and then they all were—“False prophet! False prophet!”—while closing in on us from three sides.

  “I never claimed I was a prophet,” I tried to say. “I never claimed I was anything.”

  Dozens of normal tenement-dwellers had leaned out of the windows of the building behind us, and now they were shouting, too, and raining garbage down on our heads.

  “You people have been in that Ditch for too long!” Enoch shouted back. “Your brains are polluted!”

  Emma started to light a flame and Bronwyn looked ready to take a swing at Itch, but the others pulled them back. We were watched closely in Devil’s Acre, and hurting another peculiar, even in self-defense, would have looked very bad.

  The dripping Ditch dwellers had backed us into an alley, their cries of “false prophet” turning into demands that we give up our secret. Finally, we had no choice but to turn and run, their shouts echoing after us as we turned a corner.

  Somehow we found our way out of the dangerous part of town and back to the center, though everything after was a bit of a blur; we were shaken, and the friendly hellos and handshakes that came at us as we parted the crowd near Bentham’s house felt unreal.

  What was behind all those smiles?

  How many of them secretly resented us?

  Then we were in the Panloopticon, getting waved through peculiar customs, plodding quietly up the stairs and down the long hall, everyone silent, in their own heads.

  * * *

  • • •

  We packed into the broom closet, then stumbled, after a lurching rush, out into a hot Florida night. Faint steam rose from the shed’s peaked roof, accompanied by a light hissing sound, like a hot engine cooling down.

  “Ozone,” said Millard.

  “Twenty-two minutes forty seconds.” Miss Peregrine was standing in the yard, arms crossed. “Is how
late you are.”

  “But, miss,” said Claire, “we didn’t mean to—”

  “No one say anything,” Emma hissed. Then, louder, “We tried a shortcut but got lost.”

  We stood there in the yard, exhausted, still freaked out from our encounter at the Ditch, and endured a lecture about punctuality and responsibility. I could hear my friends’ teeth gritting. Once she’d made it overabundantly clear that she was disappointed in us, Miss Peregrine assumed bird form, flew to the top of my roof, and perched there.

  “What just happened?” I said in a low voice.

  “That’s what she does when she needs to be alone,” said Emma. “She must be really upset.”

  “Because we were twenty-two minutes late?”

  “She’s under a lot of pressure,” said Bronwyn.

  “And she’s taking it out on us,” said Hugh. “It isn’t fair.”

  “I think there are a lot of peculiars who don’t want to listen to the ymbrynes right now,” said Olive, “but Miss P has always been able to count on us listening. So when we muck something up, even a wee little bit . . .”

  “Well, she can stuff it up her hindfeathers!” said Enoch a little too loudly.

  Bronwyn clapped her hand over his mouth, and the two of them fell to the ground, scuffling.

  “Stop it, stop it!” said Olive, and she and Emma and I pulled them apart and in the process were thrown to the ground ourselves, and then we were lying on the grass panting and beginning to sweat in the humid night air.

  “This is so stupid,” said Emma. “No more fighting amongst ourselves.”

  “Truce?” said Bronwyn.

  Enoch nodded and they shook on it.

  Everyone wanted a break and a reset from the events of the day, so we went inside the house, where Horace made something amazing from what remained of the stolen groceries, and then I introduced them to the time-honored American tradition of eating in front of the television. I channel surfed while my friends stared at the screen, some so absorbed in it that they forgot all about the plates of food growing cold in their laps. The Home Shopping Network, commercials for dog food and ladies’ hair products, a preacher on the religious network, a talent competition show, snippets of news about conflicts in foreign lands: It was all equally alien to them. Once they got over the shock of having a screen like this right in the house, with a full-color picture and surround sound and a hundred different channels to choose from, they started asking questions. Some took me by surprise.

  While lingering on an old episode of Star Trek, Hugh asked, “Do a lot of people own spaceships now?”

  Bronwyn, while watching The Real Housewives of Orange County: “Are there no poor people in America anymore?”

  And Olive: “Why are they so rude to one another?”

  During a car ad, Horace asked, “Is that noise meant to be music?”

  Flipping past a news show, Claire winced and said, “Why are they shouting like that?”

  I could see it was starting to upset them. Emma was tense, Hugh was pacing, and Horace was squeezing the arm of the sofa in a death grip.

  “It’s too much,” Emma said, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Too loud, too fast!”

  “It never settles on anything for more than an instant,” said Horace. “The effect is dizzying.”

  “No wonder normals rarely notice peculiars out in the world anymore,” said Enoch. “Their brains have melted!”

  “If modern people watch, then we shall, too,” said Millard.

  “But I don’t want a melted brain,” said Bronwyn.

  “Nothing’s going to melt,” Millard reassured her. “Think of it as a vaccine. Just a bit will be enough to inoculate you against the bigger shocks of this world.”

  We flipped channels for a while longer, but its numbing effect began to wear off and my mind drifted toward unpleasant things. It occurred to me, as we lingered on an episode of The Bachelor, how little I understood the world I’d grown up in. All my life, normal people had mostly baffled me—the ridiculous ways they strove to impress one another, the mediocre goals that seemed to drive them, the banality of their dreams. The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence. That, more than anything, was why I had felt so alone growing up. Things that normal people thought were important, I thought were dumb. And there was never anyone I could talk to about it, so I kept my thoughts to myself. I had returned to that normal world with the assurance that I now had a home waiting for me in the peculiar world. But today in Devil’s Acre left me feeling like I was a stranger there, too—a hero to some, a phony to others. Misunderstood by everybody, just like at home.

  I was trying to explain The Simpsons and succumbing to a deep sleepiness (it had been a long day) when something in my brain unlocked, and I remembered where I had seen that clerk’s face before. I handed the remote to Enoch, excused myself to the bathroom, and ran upstairs.

  Closing the door to my room, I pulled out Abe’s operations log from under my bed, and began flipping through it, searching for the clerk’s face. It took a few minutes to find it—there were so many pages and so many faces—but I finally did, in an entry from 1983. The photo was old, from the 1930s or 40s, I guessed, but the clerk looked the same today as he did in the photo, which meant he had been living in loops for a long time. His name was noted as Lester Noble, Jr. In the picture he wore a big round hat and gazed placidly at the camera, no trace in his expression of the fear I’d seen on his face earlier in the day. I read my grandfather’s notes on the mission, then pried loose the staples that attached the photo to the log page and tucked the photo into my pocket.

  I ran into Emma in the hallway.

  “I was just coming to find you,” she said.

  “And I was coming to find you. I need your help.”

  She leaned in. “Sure, anything.”

  “Cover for me. Just for an hour or two. I need to go back to the Acre.”

  “Why? For what?”

  “There’s no time to explain,” I said. “When I get back.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “I need to do this alone.”

  She crossed her arms. “This better be good.”

  “It will be. I think.”

  I kissed her, then slipped down the stairs, outside through the garage, and into the potting shed.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I got back to the lobby of the ministry building, he was gone. His window was shut and there was no one behind it. I slid over to the next window and asked the woman working there if she knew where the clerk was.

  She squinted at me through thick glasses. “Who?”

  “The man who works right there. Lester Noble.”

  “I don’t know any Lester Noble,” she said, tapping her fountain pen on her desk, “but the chap who works next to me just left for the day. You might still catch him if you—oh, there he is.”

  She pointed across the lobby. I turned to see the clerk hurrying toward the exit. I muttered a quick thanks and ran across the room, catching him just before he made it through the door.

  “Lester Noble,” I said.

  He turned a bit pale. “My name is Stevenson. And you’re blocking my way.”

  He tried to push past me, but I stood my ground, and he clearly didn’t want to make a scene. “Your name is Lester Noble, Jr., and you’re faking that British accent.”

  I pulled his photo from my pocket and held it up for him to see. He froze, then snatched it from my hand. When he looked up and met my eyes again, he seemed afraid.

  “What do you want?” he whispered.

  “To get in contact with someone.”

  His gaze flicked across the lobby, then ba
ck at me. “Walk down that hall. Meet me at room one thirty-seven in two minutes. We can’t be seen walking together.”

  I snatched the photo back. “I’m keeping this. For now.”

  Two minutes later, I met him outside a plain wooden door that was only marked 137. He fumbled with the keys. His hands were shaking. We went inside and he closed and locked the door behind us. The room was small and filled with manila file folders, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

  “Look, kid,” he said, turning to me with his hands pressed together. “I’m not a criminal, okay?” His British accent had vanished, replaced by a slight southern twang. “There are some bad people in America, and I couldn’t let them find me. I changed my name when I got here. I never thought I’d hear the old one again.”

  “Were the hollows over there really that much worse than the ones here?” I asked him.

  “They were bad, but that’s not why I left. It was the peculiars. They’re crazy.”

  “Oh? How?”

  Lester shook his head. “I’m breaking about a hundred rules, taking you back here. If you want a file, okay, but there’s no time for stories.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you have on the hollow-hunters?”

  Lester hesitated. “Who?”

  “I know you know who I’m talking about,” I said, and I told him what I knew from Abe’s mission report.

  The report said Lester had been living in a loop of January 5, 1935, in Anniston, Alabama, until the loop had been raided and its ymbryne killed. Abe and H had found Lester holed up in a motel in the present—then 1983—where he’d been in bad danger of aging forward. They’d managed to ferry him to safety in another loop. He must have found his way to England at some point afterward, which was no doubt a harrowing story all its own. But it was one I didn’t have time to hear, and one that Lester, after I’d finished telling him about himself, seemed in no mood to share, anyway.

  “How do you know all that?” Lester said. His whole body had gone rigid, like he was steadying himself for bad news.