A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “Think anyone’s here?” Emma whispered.

  “Probably not. But keep your guard up anyway.”

  We crept down a short hallway, looking into other rooms as we passed them. It was sparsely furnished in the style of a model home or a chain motel—anonymous, but enough to create the illusion that someone actually lived here. I went to the end of the hall and took a left turn into what I knew would be the living room. The layout was identical to my grandfather’s house, and it gave me a strange feeling of déjà vu to know every inch of a place I’d never set foot in. The living room windows were boarded, too, so I walked to the front door and put my eye to the peephole.

  There was Abe’s house, a few hundred feet away, across the street.

  Then we came to the garage, and it was clear the moment we stepped inside that the house’s only real purpose was this room. The walls were covered with pegs and shelves and all manner of tools and spare parts. In the center of it all, surrounded by floodlights, two cars were parked side by side.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “He did have cars.”

  One was a white Caprice Classic. It looked like a bar of soap on wheels, and was unfailingly popular with Florida’s elderly drivers. I recognized it as my grandfather’s car, the one he used before my parents made him stop driving. (I thought he’d gotten rid of it, but here it was.) The other was a muscular black coupe that looked like a sixties-era Mustang, but with wider hips and swoopier lines. I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, because there was no badging on the car to identify it.

  The Caprice was for traveling incognito, I guessed. The other was for traveling fast, and in a bit of style.

  “You really didn’t know he had these?” Emma said.

  “None. I knew he used to drive, but my dad made him give it up when he failed a vision test at the DMV. He used to go on these solo trips. Days at time, sometimes weeks. Just like when my dad was a kid, only less frequent. To go from that to needing me and my parents to drive him to the grocery store and the doctor—that must have been hard.”

  Though it occurred to me, even as I was saying it, that Abe may never have stopped driving at all; he just started keeping it a secret.

  “And yet he kept the cars,” said Emma.

  “And maintained them,” I said. The cars, unlike everything else in the house, were a little dusty, but immaculately clean otherwise. “He must’ve snuck out here every so often to work on them. Shine them, change the oil. So they’d be easily accessible but hidden from my family.”

  “It makes you wonder why he bothered,” Emma said.

  “Fighting hollows?” I asked.

  “Having a family,” she replied.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I opened the Caprice and ducked inside, popped the glove box, and found the registration card. It was still current, renewed just a few weeks before Abe died. But it wasn’t in his name.

  “Ever heard of Andrew Gandy?” I said, handing the card to Emma through the open door.

  “Must have been a false name he used.” She handed the card back. “God.”

  I shut the glove box and got out of the car. Emma had a funny look on her face. “What?”

  “I wonder if Abe was even his real name,” she said.

  It wasn’t a crazy question, but for some reason it stung me.

  “It was.”

  She looked at me. “You sure about that?”

  In her eyes was an unasked question. If Abe was capable of such deceit, was I?

  “I’m sure,” I said, and turned away. “It’s almost nine. Let’s pick a car and go.”

  “You’re driving. You choose.”

  It was an easy choice. The Caprice was more practical—it had four doors rather than two, more trunk space, and would attract less attention on the road. But the other car was much, much cooler and faster-looking, and after three whole seconds of deliberation, I pointed to it and said, “This one.” I had never been on a road trip before (just across the fat belly of Florida to visit cousins in Miami, which hardly counted), and the idea of doing one in this car was too tempting to resist.

  We got in. I opened the garage door and started the engine, which roared to life with a glorious, throaty growl that made Emma startle. As I backed it out of the driveway into the street, I saw her roll her eyes.

  “Just like Abe!” she said, shouting over the engine.

  “What is?”

  “To have a car like this for secret missions.”

  I left the car idling in the street, parked my parents’ car in Abe’s garage, and closed the door. Then I got back into the mystery coupe, grinned at Emma, and stamped my foot down on the accelerator. The engine barked like an animal as we peeled out and were thrown back into our seats.

  Sometimes you have to have a little fun. Even on a secret mission.

  * * *

  • • •

  While Emma and I were gone, Miss Peregrine had returned from her all-night meeting in the Acre and collapsed in her bed upstairs—one of the rare times I’d known her to actually sleep. We convened all the kids in a downstairs bedroom and shut the door, so our voices wouldn’t wake her.

  I asked for a show of hands.

  “Who’s in?”

  Enoch, Olive, and Millard raised their hands. Claire, Hugh, Bronwyn, and Horace did not.

  “Missions make me nervous,” said Horace.

  “Claire,” Emma said, “why isn’t your hand up?”

  “We already have missions,” she said. “I’m head of lunch and dessert distribution to all the loop reconstruction teams in Belgium.”

  “That’s not a mission, Claire, that’s a job.”

  “You’re delivering packages!” Claire sneered. “How is that a mission?”

  “The mission is helping a peculiar in danger,” said Millard. “After the packages are delivered.”

  “Bronwyn, what about you?” I said. “In or out?”

  “Lying to Miss P makes me uncomfortable. Shouldn’t we tell her about this?”

  “NO,” everyone but Claire said in unison.

  “Why not?” asked Bronwyn.

  “It makes me uncomfortable, too,” I said, “but she’ll stop us from going, so we can’t.”

  “If we really want to help peculiarkind, this is how,” said Emma. “By becoming the next generation of fighters, not posing for photo opportunities in the Acre.”

  “Or asking permission every time we want to do anything,” said Enoch.

  “Exactly!” said Millard. “The headmistress still treats us like children. We’re all nearly a century old, for bird’s sake, and it’s about time we started acting our age. Or half our age, anyway. We’ve got to start making decisions for ourselves.”

  “Just what I’ve been saying for years,” said Enoch.

  My peculiar friends had changed, I realized, but Miss Peregrine’s way of parenting them had not. They had gotten a big dose of freedom after being chased from Cairnholm—as had I—and their time in the Acre, under the supervision of not just one, but more than a dozen ymbrynes, had left them feeling suffocated. They had grown up more in the past few months than they had in the past half century.

  “What about you, Apiston?” Emma said to Hugh.

  “I would come,” he said, “but I’ve got my own mission to do.”

  We knew what he meant without having to say it. He would be searching the Panloopticon for Fiona.

  “We understand,” I said. “We’ll keep a lookout for her on our travels.”

  He nodded heavily. “Thanks, Jacob.”

  They were all in except for Horace, Claire, and Bronwyn—and then Bronwyn changed her mind.

  “Okay, I’ll come. I don’t like lying, but if we’re really out to help a peculiar child whose life in is danger, and lying is the only way to do that, then
it would be immoral not to lie, wouldn’t it?”

  “That idea went past smart and back to dumb,” said Claire.

  “Welcome aboard,” said Emma.

  All that was left was to choose our crew. I said we could only take two, which elicited some groans of disappointment. Despite what I’d said the night before, I was a little worried about their one half of a normalling lesson and a potential lack of preparedness to face the modern world. And while I wanted and needed their help, I also needed to focus on our mission, not on explaining how crosswalks and elevator doors and simple interactions with modern normals worked. But instead of going into all that, which might have hurt their feelings, I claimed I didn’t want to overload the car.

  “Then pick me!” said Olive. “I’m small and weigh next to nothing.”

  I imagined Olive forgetting to put on her shoes and having to chase after her like a lost balloon. “For this one, we need people who look older.” I didn’t say why, and she didn’t ask.

  Emma and I talked in the corner for a minute, then announced our choices—Millard and Bronwyn. Bronwyn for her brute strength and reliability, and Millard for his mind, mapping abilities, and his ability to slip away when cornered, simply by taking off his clothes.

  The others were disappointed, but we promised to take them on future missions.

  “If there are future missions,” said Enoch. “Provided you don’t muck this one up.”

  “And what shall the rest of us do while you’re gone?” asked Horace.

  “Just do your assignments in the Acre and act like nothing’s wrong. You don’t know anything about us or what we’re up to.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Claire. “And if Miss Peregrine asks, I’m telling her.”

  Bronwyn picked up Claire by the armpits and held her at eye level. “Now, that is a dumb idea,” she said, the threat in her voice both clear and surprising. Bronwyn always handled the two smallest peculiars with kid gloves.

  Claire’s backmouth growled at Bronwyn. “Put me down!” she shouted with her normal mouth.

  Bronwyn did, but Claire looked chastened, anyway. Message received.

  “When Miss Peregrine wakes up, she’ll start asking where we are,” said Emma. “She really just . . . went to sleep?”

  It was very out of character for an ymbryne, even after an all-nighter.

  “I may have blown just a pinch of dust into the room,” said Millard.

  “Millard!” Horace cried. “You scoundrel!”

  “Well, that will certainly buy us some time,” Emma said. “With any luck, she won’t notice we’re gone until tonight.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Now this,” Millard said, slapping the hood of the black coupe as we stood around it in the driveway, “is a proper road journey car.”

  “It isn’t,” said Bronwyn. “It’s too flash, and it’s British.”

  It was cool-looking, certainly, but it wasn’t what I thought of as super-attention-grabbing—it wasn’t bright red and didn’t have shiny rims or a big spoiler, like a lot of sports cars did.

  “What’s wrong with it being British?” asked Emma.

  “It’ll break down a lot. That’s what they say about British cars, anyway.”

  “Would Abe really have used this for rescue missions if it was mechanically unsound?” said Millard.

  “Abe knew lots about cars, including how to fix them,” said Enoch.

  He was leaning against the trunk with a bag over his shoulder and a smug smile on his face.

  “You’re not coming with us,” I said. “There’s no room.”

  “Did I say I wanted to come?” said Enoch.

  “You look like you want to come,” said Emma. “Now move.”

  I nudged him aside so we could open the trunk (sorry, the “boot”) and load our bags—but after twenty seconds of fiddling around, I realized I didn’t know how.

  “Allow me,” said Enoch, and he twisted a knob between the taillights that popped the trunk. “Aston Martin.” He caressed the side panel as he walked the length of the car. “Abe always did have style.”

  “I thought it was some kind of Mustang,” I said.

  “How dare you,” said Enoch. “This is a 1979 Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Three hundred ninety horsepower, zero to sixty in five seconds, top speed a hundred seventy miles per hour. A real beast—Britain’s first true muscle car.”

  “Since when do you know so much about cars?” I said. “Especially ones made after 1940?”

  “Magazines and manuals via mail order,” said Millard. “Delivered to his post office box in present-day Cairnholm.”

  “Oh, he loves cars,” said Emma, rolling her eyes. “Never actually drove one, mind you, but don’t get him started on what’s under the bonnet . . .”

  “I’m fascinated by the mechanical as well as the biomedical,” Enoch said. “Organs. Engines. Swap oil for blood and they aren’t so different. And I can resurrect a dead engine without needing a jar of hearts. Which is a good thing because this car, being British and nearly forty years old, is notoriously unreliable unless religiously maintained. And with Abe being dead and all, I’m fairly certain that I’m the only person within a thousand miles of here qualified to work on this car. Which is why, even though I don’t want to”—he tossed his bag into the boot alongside mine—“you need me to come with you.”

  “Oh, just get in so we can go already,” said Emma.

  “Shotgun!” Enoch cried, diving into the passenger seat.

  “It’s going to be a very long trip,” said Millard.

  I sighed. It seemed I had no choice.

  Our friends gathered in the driveway to see us off. We exchanged hugs and they wished us good luck—all but Claire, who sulked in the doorway.

  “When will you be back?” asked Hugh.

  “Give us a week before you start worrying,” I said.

  “Way ahead of you,” said Horace. “I’m worrying already.”

  We drove down the key and over the bridge, then out toward the boonies and the far edge of town. That’s where we would pick up Interstate 75 and head north. The first stop was Flaming Man, whatever that was, which H had indicated could be found inside the wet-glass ring he’d made on the Mel-O-Dee map. That narrowed down our destination to about thirty square miles in the swampy middle of the state, a few hundred miles to the north.

  I was at the wheel, consumed with the task of mastering my grandfather’s powerful but quirky old car. It had heavy steering and lurched around corners in a way that made my heart skip, and all its dials and gauges were located in odd places. Emma sat beside me in the passenger seat, a regular, non-peculiar road atlas of Florida spread across her lap. (Millard had also brought along Peculiar Planet, though its maps were very out-of-date.) I had insisted Emma be our navigator because it gave me an excuse to force Enoch into the back seat and to spend the next couple of days glancing over at her face instead of his. Enoch sulked out the window and periodically gave the back of my seat a kick. Millard sat beside him, squished against Bronwyn, who had to turn diagonally so her long legs would fit.

  “From here to the ring on the map it’s about three hundred miles,” said Emma, looking from the cartoon map to the road atlas and back. “If we don’t stop, we could be there in five hours.”

  “We’ve got to stop sometime,” said Bronwyn. “You haven’t bought us modern clothes yet.”

  She was right. Everyone I’d taken shopping had stayed behind; the ones who had come were still wearing the clothes they had arrived in. Their outfits would soon become a liability.

  “We’ll stop soon,” I said. “I just want to put some distance between us and Miss Peregrine first.”

  “Where do you think Portal is?” asked Enoch. “Very far?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Will you be able to sta
nd that much driving?” asked Millard.

  “I’ll have to,” I said. We couldn’t drive in shifts because my friends didn’t have licenses. And besides that, Millard was invisible, which would get us pulled over instantly, Bronwyn was too scared to drive, and Enoch had no experience. Only Emma was competent behind the wheel, but again, no license. So it was all me.

  “Just keep me caffeinated,” I said.

  “I’ll help,” said Enoch. “I’ll get us there a lot faster than you could, too.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “You can take a driver’s-ed class when we get back, but this is no time to learn.”

  “I don’t need lessons,” he said. “I already know everything about how cars work.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  He kicked my seat again, hard.

  “What was that for?”

  “Driving like a granny.”

  We happened, just then, to arrive at the interstate on-ramp. I swung the car onto it and floored the accelerator. The engine wailed and I let out a giddy laugh, and by the time we’d merged onto the highway Enoch was screeching at me to slow down. I checked my mirrors for police cars, eased back on the gas, and pushed all the window buttons.

  “Oooooh,” Bronwyn cooed as her window slid down. “Fancy!”

  “Music?” I said.

  “Yes, please,” said Emma.

  Abe had a radio and some ancient kind of tape deck. There was already a cartridge inside, so I hit play. A moment later, a wailing guitar and a huge voice came crashing out of the speakers—Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” After three minutes I was convinced no music had ever sounded as good, and my friends, who were all grinning and bopping in their seats, the wind in their hair, seemed to agree. There was something in the act of shouting along to that particular song with these particular people while driving that particular car that gave me a crazy, spine-tingling high like I’d never experienced before. It felt like we were claiming the world for ourselves and our lives as our own.

  This is mine. Yes. I’ll do with it what I like.