by Ransom Riggs
Two old-style police cars screamed into the parking lot. I scooped the two packages into my arms and folded the place mat map between them, then slid out of the booth. H did a two-finger whistle. His hollowgast uncurled itself from the floor and bounded after us toward the hallway, tame as an old hound.
“A few things to remember,” H said, talking as we walked. “Peculiar places and people in America aren’t like what you’re used to. It’s a mess over here. No ymbrynes to speak of. In some places, it’s every peculiar for themselves, and you can’t trust just anybody.”
“And there’s been fighting between some of the loops?” I said.
He shot me a look over his shoulder. “Let’s hope not. And I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I will say this. You might have chased the wights out of Europe, but I have a feeling they’re not done with us over here. I think they’d like a war between the peculiars. I think that would suit their ends just fine.”
He opened the door to the cold-storage room and we filed in. “Another thing. Don’t tell people who you’re working with. The organization never reveals itself.”
“What about Miss Peregrine?” Emma asked.
“Not even her.”
We entered the curtained-off area and crowded into the corner where the X had been. As we were crossing over, something occurred to me. When the rushing sensation had abated and we were all back in the present, I asked, “If there are no ymbrynes anymore, how does this loop stay open?”
H parted the plastic curtains and his hollowgast ran out. “I didn’t say there were none,” H said. “But the ones we’ve got—the ones that are left, I should say—aren’t exactly of the caliber you’re used to.”
Out in the hallway, our friendly old waitress was leaned against the wall, puffing from a cigarette and blowing the smoke out an exit door.
“We were just talking about you,” said H, smiling wide. “Miss Abernathy, how are you doing?”
She tossed her cigarette out the door and gave H a spindly hug. “You don’t come visit me anymore, you bad man.”
“Been real busy, Norma.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Is she an ymbryne?” said Emma.
“Some people call us demi-ymbrynes,” Norma said, “but I think loop-keeper rolls off the tongue better. I can’t turn myself into a bird or make new loops or anything fancy like that, but I can keep open ones going a good long time. Pay’s okay, too.”
“The pay?”
“You think I’d do this out of the goodness of my heart?” She threw back her head and cackled.
“Norma here manages a small portfolio of loops around South Florida,” said H. “The organization keeps her on retainer.” H reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money in a rubber band. “Thanks for your help today.”
“It’s a strictly cash business,” said Norma, winking as she stuffed the wad into her apron. “Gotta avoid the tax man!” She laughed again and waddled into the storage room. “I better close up shop, see what kind of mess you all made. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.”
We went out to the parking lot together. The moon was high and the night air cool. The hollowgast ran to chase a stray cat, and we walked toward my car, one of only two left in the lot.
“So,” I said, “we deliver these packages, then we get the real mission?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
He grinned out of the side of his mouth. “On whether you make it.”
“We’ll make it,” said Emma. “But no more surprise hollowgast attacks, okay?”
“If you see any more hollows, they won’t be Horatio, so you better make sure you kill ’em.”
We arrived at my car. When H saw the missing bumper and the wired-shut door, he winced. “You can drive, can’t you, son?”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I’m a good driver.”
“I hope so, because you need to be for this job. Good or not, you can’t drive that thing—you’ll get pulled over by the cops every ten miles. Take one of Abe’s instead.”
“Abe didn’t drive. He doesn’t have a car.”
“Oh, he does. A beauty, too.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “You mean to tell me you got all the way down to his underground bunker but you didn’t find his . . .” He laughed and shook his head.
“His what?” Emma and I said at the same time.
“There’s another door down there.”
He turned to go.
“Can you tell us anything about the mission?” I said.
“You’ll know when you need to know, and no sooner,” he replied. “But I can tell you this: It involves an uncontacted peculiar child who’s in trouble. In New York City.”
“So why don’t you go help them?” Emma said.
“I’m getting a bit long in the tooth, if you haven’t noticed. I got sciatica, bad knees, high sugar . . . and anyhow, I’m not the right person for the job.”
“We are,” I said. “I promise you that.”
“That’s what I’m hoping. Good luck to you both.”
He walked off toward the other car in the lot—a sleek old Cadillac with suicide doors—and whistled for his hollowgast. It came running and dove through an open window into the back seat. The car started with an uproarious noise. H gave us a little salute, then peeled out of the lot with a trail of tire-smoke.
* * *
• • •
“So this is totally nuts, right?” I was driving but staring mostly at Emma in the passenger seat, my eyes flicking back to the road ahead every few seconds. “I mean, this is a certifiably terrible idea for all sorts of reasons. Right?”
She was nodding. “We barely know who this man is. We just met him.”
“Right.”
“We don’t even know his real name. And he’s trying to send us on some strange long-distance errand—”
“Right, right . . .”
“Running packages we’re not even allowed to look inside—”
“Right! And this mission could be really dangerous. Whatever it is! We don’t even know.”
“And Miss Peregrine will be so mad at us.”
I pulled into the oncoming lane to pass a car. I drive fast when I’m anxious.
“She’ll be furious,” I said. “She may never speak to us again.”
“And not all of our friends will agree with this.”
“I know, I know.”
“It could split the group,” she said.
“That would be so terrible.”
“It would,” she said.
“It really would.”
I glanced at her. “And yet.”
She sighed. Folded her hands in her lap and looked out the window.
“And yet.”
Red light. I slowed to a stop. It was quiet for a moment, and now I could hear a song playing quietly on the classic rock station, which I had not quite turned all the way down. I took my hands off the wheel and turned my body to face her.
She looked at me. “We’re doing this, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. I think we are.”
It began, gently, to rain. The lights of suburbia blurred around us. I flicked on the windshield wipers.
As we drove to my house, we talked specifics. We would tell our friends but not Miss Peregrine, in the hope she wouldn’t find out what we were up to until we were too far away to be stopped. We would bring two friends with us—whoever seemed most capable and enthusiastic. And from this point on, we would entertain no second thoughts. My gut was telling me very loudly that this mission was something I needed. That this was the life I wanted to make for myself: One not completely of the normal world, not completely of the peculiar one, and not ruled by the whims and dictates of the ymbrynes.
Part of me wanted to go directly to
Abe’s house to satisfy my curiosity about what else was down in his bunker (a car? really?) but before we did anything else, we had to talk to the others.
When we walked through the front door of my house, the first thing I heard was Olive’s voice above my head—“Where have you been?”—and I nearly fell over with a heart attack. She was glaring at us from the ceiling, seated upside down, arms crossed.
“How long have you been waiting there?” said Emma.
“Long enough.” Olive pushed off the ceiling toward the floor, where she righted herself and tucked her feet into the leaden shoes that were waiting for her there in one deft move.
The others heard us and crowded into the front hall from various points around the house, eager to interrogate us.
“Where’s Miss Peregrine?” I said, glancing past them toward the living room.
“Still in the Acre,” said Horace. “Lucky for you all the ymbrynes are in a very long council meeting.”
“Something big is going on,” said Millard.
“Where were you two?” said Hugh.
“Bum-touching on the beach?” said Enoch.
“Off in Abe’s secret bunker?” said Bronwyn.
“And what secret bunker would you be referring to?” asked Hugh.
He wasn’t with us when we’d found it. He didn’t know.
“We weren’t sure if you wanted us to tell everyone,” said Bronwyn.
I started to explain but things soon devolved into a chaos of shouted questions, everyone talking over one another, until finally Emma had to flap her arms and shout for quiet. “Everyone, come into the living room. Jacob and I have a story to tell.”
We sat them down and proceeded to lay it all out—the discoveries we’d made the previous day at Abe’s house, the meeting we’d had with H, and the miniature quest he’d given us, along with a promise of a much more important one.
“You’re not actually considering this, are you?” said Horace.
“Damn right, we are,” I said. “And we want a couple of you to come with us.”
“We’re a team,” said Emma. “All of us.”
Their reactions were divided. Claire got angry and Horace got quiet and nervous. Hugh and Bronwyn were cautious, but I thought they could be swayed. Enoch, Millard, and Olive, on the other hand, seemed ready to jump in the car with us right then.
“Miss P’s been so good to us,” Claire said dourly. “We owe her more than this.”
“I agree,” said Bronwyn. “I won’t lie to her. I hate lying.”
“In my opinion, we’re much too concerned with what Miss Peregrine thinks,” said Emma.
“I think missions like the ones my grandfather and his group used to do are what we’re supposed to be doing,” I said. “Not glorified office work for the reconstruction.”
“I like my assignment,” said Hugh.
“But we’re wasted in the Acre,” said Millard. “We can go fearlessly into the present. Who else with our level of experience can do that?”
“She didn’t mean we should go now,” said Hugh. “We’ve only had one day of normalling lessons!”
“You could be ready,” I said.
“Half of us don’t even have modern clothes yet!” said Horace.
“We’ll figure it out!” I said. “Look, there are peculiar children in America who need our help, and I think that’s more important than rebuilding some loops.”
“Hear, hear,” said Emma.
“There’s one who needs help,” said Hugh. “Maybe. If this H fellow isn’t lying.”
“Abe’s logbook is filled with hundreds of missions,” I said, trying not to show my rising frustration, “half of which involved helping young peculiars in danger. Peculiars didn’t stop being born after Abe stopped working. They’re still out there, and they still need help.”
“They have no real ymbrynes of their own,” said Emma.
“This is why you’re here,” I said. “This is what we’re supposed to do. The hollow-hunters got old, the ymbrynes are too busy having meetings, and there’s no one more equipped to help than us. This is our time!”
“If we can just prove it to some guy we don’t even know!” Enoch said sarcastically.
“It’s a test,” I said. “And it’s one I intend to pass. Anybody who feels the same, be downstairs with a bag packed at nine a.m. sharp.”
I was packing a bag in my room later that night when my eyes stopped on something: the maps plastered on the wall above my bed. There were layers upon layers of them, taped and tacked over one another in a big mosaic that had become, over time, little more than wallpaper to me. But I noticed something now that grabbed my attention, and I stopped what I was doing to climb onto my bed. I stood on my pillows to study a little drawing that peeked out from under three intersecting National Geographic maps: a cartoon alligator sipping a cocktail.
I untacked the maps that were on top of it and peeled them away to find an old place mat from the Mel-O-Dee, the one with the map of Florida on it. The Mel-O-Dee used to give out crayons for kids to draw with while they ate, and my grandfather and I had used them to decorate this place mat. I had forgotten about that day, or that this map was even here. But now I saw what Abe had done—it was mostly his steady hand that had drawn on this map. Right in the center he had circled Mermaid Fantasyland, just as H’s wet glass had. Abe had also drawn a little skull and crossbones beside it. Deep in the Everglades swamp, he had doodled a school of fish with legs. (Or were they people with fish heads?) He had also drawn spiral shapes in several places around the state, and if I remembered the legend from Miss Peregrine’s now-lost Map of Days correctly, that meant LOOP HERE. There were a few other symbols I couldn’t decipher, too.
We don’t make maps, H had said. But if that was one of the hollow-hunters’ laws, Abe had broken it by drawing me this one. And in doing it, he had taken a risk.
The question was, why?
I took the map down carefully, then I scoured the rest of the wall for anything Abe had drawn on. What other bread crumbs had he left for me, hiding in plain sight? I worked myself into a frenzy, taking down anything that had been annotated or added to. I found a few maps that had been drawn from scratch on blank construction paper, but they weren’t labeled and there were no boundary lines around them with shapes I could recognize. There was a AAA map of Maryland and Delaware that had markings on it, so I folded it and stacked it with the Mel-O-Dee map. There were a couple of postcards pinned to the wall from places Abe had traveled through—motels, roadside tourist traps, towns I’d never heard of. Abe only stopped traveling when I was about eleven. Despite my parents’ objections, he used to go on road trips by himself “to visit friends out of state,” and while he never bothered to call my dad to check in, he would always send me postcards from the places he went. I didn’t know if they had any relevance, but I stacked them with the maps, just in case, and slid them all inside a hardcover book. Then I put that in my duffel bag, on top of the changes of clothes I’d packed. Earlier in the day I had gathered up whatever cash I could find around the house, which wasn’t a lot except for the wad my parents kept in a sock in one of their dresser drawers. I wrapped it in a rubber band and packed it into my old plastic Pokémon lunch box with some basic toiletries, including a package of Tums and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, in case we spent any appreciable time near a hollowgast.
I was about to zip the whole thing shut when I thought of something. I knelt down and pulled Abe’s operations log out from under the bed. I picked it up and weighed it in my hand, trying to decide whether to take it. It was fat and heavy and full of sensitive information that H would almost certainly not want me exposing to possible loss or theft. I knew I probably should have locked it in Abe’s bunker for safekeeping. But what if I needed it? It was packed with photos and clues about how Abe and H had done their work. It was a gold mine.
I pull
ed the clothes and toiletries from the duffel, then took the maps and postcards out of the hardback and tucked them into the back flap of the logbook instead. I shoved the logbook into the bottom of the duffel bag, stacked the clothes and toiletries on top, zipped the bag shut, and test-lifted it with one hand. It was like curling a thirty-pound dumbbell. I dropped it onto the bed. It bounced and rolled onto the floor and made a thud that shook the room.
* * *
• • •
I hardly slept a wink that night. In the morning I rose at dawn and snuck out with Emma. We drove to Abe’s house, threw open the hatch in the floor of his office, and descended into the bunker to see what undiscovered thing lay waiting for us there. I was hoping—as H had implied—that it would be a car with four working doors, but I could not fathom how a car would fit inside a tunnel too small for me to stand up in, or how I would drive it out again, even if one did.
We’d only been looking around my grandfather’s subterranean workshop for a few minutes when we found the handle in the wall. It was partially hidden in a darkened gap between two metal shelves. I reached in and twisted the handle, and a door in the wall opened outward, moving the shelves with it and revealing a new section of tunnel. We ventured in—hunched over once again, as this tunnel was even more claustrophobically low-ceilinged than the other section. Emma lit a flame for light and I propped the door with a metal box filled with freeze-dried “breakfast entree” from one of Abe’s shelves.
After a hundred feet or so, we came to a narrow concrete staircase. It led to a thick metal door, which slid to the side rather than swinging in or out. Beyond it was a closet. A carpeted household closet. I slid open its slatted door and we walked out into a suburban bedroom. There was a bed with a bare mattress, a nightstand, and a dresser. Nothing on the walls. The windows were shuttered, the only light in the room filtering through cracks between the nailed-on boards.
We were in another house in Abe’s cul-de-sac.
“What is this place?” said Emma, tracing a finger-trail on the dusty dresser.
“It could be a safe house,” I said, peeking into the attached bathroom, empty but for a single pink hand towel hung by the sink.