by Ransom Riggs
* * *
• • •
It felt so strange and unnatural to think of Miss Peregrine as anything other than our protector and champion, but today she felt like an adversary. When she found out that we had left, it was inevitable she would come looking for us, and she’d do it the best way she knew how—from the air. Her speed, the heights she could fly to, her precise, long-distance vision, and her inbuilt radar for peculiar children meant that we wouldn’t be hard to find if we were within a hundred miles and out in the open. That’s why I didn’t stop at all for the first three hours, not even to let Bronwyn use the bathroom. I wanted to put as much distance between the headmistress and us as possible. After two hundred miles, I finally relented to the rising chorus of complaints from the back seat, but even then I was wary, glancing at the clouds as we exited the highway into a shopping center parking lot. I saw Emma do the same thing.
I filled the Aston’s tank while the others used the bathroom in the filling station’s convenience store. Through its big windows, I could see the clerk and a few other customers checking out my friends as they waited their turn for the single restroom—craning their heads, whispering to one another, outright staring. One guy even took a picture of them with his phone.
“We’ve got to buy you modern outfits,” I said when they came back outside. “Now.”
No one objected. And anyway, I had chosen this highway exit with that in mind. Across the street from the filling station was the biggest of all big-box stores: a twenty-four-hour Super All-Mart. It was the retail mother ship. A city unto itself.
“My God, what is this place?” Millard said as we pulled into its endless parking lot.
“It’s just a store,” I said. “A big one.”
We crossed the parking lot to the entrance, and a bank of automatic doors hissed open before us. Enoch leapt with fight-or-flight surprise.
“What, what, WHAT!” he shouted, raising his fists.
Now people were staring. We hadn’t even made it inside.
I took my friends aside and explained about motion sensors and sliding doors.
“What’s wrong with using a handle to open a door?” Enoch asked, irritated and embarrassed.
“It’s hard if you have a lot of stuff,” I said. “Like this guy.” I pointed at a man pushing a full cart out through the whooshing doors.
“Why would anyone need so many things?” said Emma.
“Maybe he’s stocking up for an air raid,” said Enoch.
“I think you’ll understand once we’re inside,” I said.
I’d grown up shopping at stores like All-Mart, so the essential strangeness of them had never fully occurred to me. But as my friends followed me inside and came to a dead stop at the checkout stands, shock and wonder on their faces, I began to understand.
Aisles stretched into a hazy distance. A kaleidoscopic array of items sang out for attention from every shelf. A small army of sullen stock clerks patrolled in uniforms emblazoned with giant yellow smiley faces. It was a thousand times larger than the corner store Millard had stolen groceries from. Of course my friends were overwhelmed.
“Just a store, he says,” Emma said, craning her neck to take it all in. “This isn’t like any store I’ve seen.”
Enoch whistled. “More like a blimp hangar.”
I grabbed a cart, and, with some cajoling, managed to get us moving again, if not quite in the right direction. Once they got over the sheer size of the place, they marveled at the huge and bizarre variety of things for sale. I was attempting to navigate us toward the clothing section, but my friends kept getting distracted, splitting off from the group, and plucking random things from shelves.
“What’s this?” Enoch said, waggling a pair of slippers with microfiber knobbles on the bottom.
I took it from him and put it back. “It’s so you can dust the floor with your feet? I think?”
“And this?” said Emma, pointing at a box labeled TALKING BIRD FEEDER—NOW WITH BLUETOOTH!
“I’m not really sure,” I said, feeling like a harried mom herding toddlers, “but we only have seventy-two hours to complete these tasks, so we shouldn’t—”
“Sixty-two now,” said Emma. “Or maybe less.”
A display of books came tumbling down at the end of the aisle, and I had to run and stop Millard—naked and thus invisible—from trying to right it again. I kept an especially watchful eye on Millard (or where I thought he might be) because I really didn’t want to lose an invisible boy in All-Mart.
Our momentum never lasted long. We’d just moved past the Bluetooth bird feeders when Enoch got hung up in the sporting goods aisle. “Ooh, this little sweetheart would make quick work of a chicken’s rib cage!” he cooed at some folding knives in a locked case.
Emma kept asking why. Why did we need so many varieties of everything? What was it all for? She found the women’s beauty aisle especially vexing. “Who would need so many different kinds of skin cream?” she asked, plucking a box labeled EXTRA-FIRMING ANTI-AGING OVERNIGHT RENEWAL SERUM from a shelf. “Is everyone ill with skin diseases? Has there been a plague of skin-related deaths?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“It’s very strange!”
“Easy for you to say, honey,” said a lady with voluminous hair and hoop earrings who’d been standing nearby. “You’ve got skin like a baby!”
Emma returned the box quickly to its shelf, and we slinked away.
Millard didn’t say much (because I’d begged him not to), but I could tell he was taking mental notes from the little sighs and hmms he made. How many lifetimes of loop days would it take, I wondered, for Millard to make a history of everything that happened in this place in a twenty-four-hour period?
When we finally made it to the clothing section, I was feeling pressed for time—I worried about the ticking clock, about the normals who’d been staring since we walked in, about Miss Peregrine finding us if we stayed put too long, even though we were hundreds of miles from my house and she was hopefully still sleeping off the effects of Mother Dust’s powder. I barely paid attention to the clothes my friends put into our cart. And I only realized that I was hungry as we were checking out. Everyone else was, too, but rather than diving back into the store itself for food, we grabbed what we could from the checkout lane: chocolate bars, Funyuns, candy.
“Immortal food,” Emma said, noting the expiration date on the back of a bag of Wild Cherry Jim Jams. “How novel.”
We cleared the checkouts and headed for the bathrooms, where everyone ducked inside to change into the clothes they’d bought. As they emerged one by one, it was clear there was more work to be done. They were wearing the most normal clothes from the most normal store there was, but they did not yet look convincingly normal. Maybe they weren’t comfortable, or I was so used to seeing them in their old clothes that the sudden change in their appearance threw me off, but for some reason it looked like they were wearing costumes.
All except Emma. She came out wearing tight black jeans, white Reebok Classics, and a billowy top the color of root beer. She looked beautiful, I thought, as she turned to frown at a mirror.
“I look like a man.”
“You look great. And modern.”
She sighed and lifted the plastic bag into which her old dress had been rudely stuffed. “I miss this already.”
“This fabric is so . . . itchless,” said Bronwyn, pulling at the gray henley shirt we’d bought her. “I can’t get used to it.”
Enoch emerged from the bathroom in thick-soled creeper sneakers, pajama bottoms with flaming skulls emblazoned on each knee, and a T-shirt that read NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME.
Emma shook her head. “That’s the last time you pick out your own clothes.”
There was no time to return anything, so we walked out—somehow attracting even more stares than we did walking in.
As we pushed our cart through the automatic doors, a loud, bleeping alarm sounded.
“What’s that?” Emma yelped.
“We may not have, er, paid for everything,” said Millard.
“What! Why?” I said.
Two guys in blue vests were speed-walking toward us.
“Old habits die hard,” Millard said. “Never mind, run for it!” He grabbed the cart from me and sprinted toward the car with it—and now easily a hundred people were watching the cart apparently steer itself across the pavement, followed by a clutch of weird-looking kids and two loss-prevention agents.
We dove into the car with our bags. I jammed the key into the ignition and twisted it, and the car started with a loud bark that made me cringe. I floored the gas, tore down the aisle of cars and through the two blue-vested agents, who dove in opposite directions to avoid being run over.
“If you’re going to break the law, at least do it with a little panache, Millard,” said Emma. “You’re not even trying!”
“I knew about the cameras,” said Millard. “No one told me about the alarms!”
* * *
• • •
After racing down the interstate for several miles and checking the rearview mirror constantly for police lights, I realized no one was chasing us. Eventually we exited onto a little state road and veered away from the coast toward the heart of Florida. On the Mel-O-Dee map, H’s ring had circled an area in the middle of the state that was crossed by only one major road—the one we were on now. Within that zone was Mermaid Fantasyland. I wasn’t sure if that’s where we would find Flaming Man, but as it was the only thing marked on that section of the map it made sense to start looking there.
“Wait a minute,” said Bronwyn from the back seat. “We’re heading away from the ocean now. Why would mermaids live in a swamp?”
“They aren’t real,” I said. “It’s just a cheesy old tourist trap.”
“Perhaps,” said Millard, “but Mermaid Fantasyland is also listed in Peculiar Planet.” He raised the guide to show it to me, then read from it. “Brand-new syndrigast-friendly attraction features delightful aquatic performances. Time-looped accommodation nearby. Bring the kids!”
“That doesn’t mean the mermaids are peculiar,” said Emma. “It just means there’s a loop in town.”
“Or there used to be,” said Millard. “Remember, this guide is nearly seventy years old. Everything in it should be treated with the highest skepticism.”
We drove on, the sun sinking lower in the sky, the road narrowing from two lanes in each direction to just one. We were entering a part of Florida that felt like a different state altogether. Away from the moneyed coasts there were no chain stores, no shiny new developments. The woods closed in from both sides, and in the occasional gaps there were signs for U-pick strawberry farms, free dirt, and bail bonds.
Instead of cookie-cutter suburbs that spread out for miles, here there were small towns clustered around intersections of roads. The bigger towns had fast food on the outskirts and a few blocks of dying main street in the middle—a venerable old bank, a shuttered movie theater, a storefront church. In every single town that had a stoplight, we caught the light red and had to sit and wait while old people on benches and pedestrians with nothing better to do stared at us like we were the most interesting thing that had ever come through. We came to dread those stoplights. At the third or fourth one, a young guy with a mullet and an open beer yelled, “Halloween’s not till next month!” at us and walked away cackling.
A few miles later, we passed a fading billboard for Mermaid Fantasyland, and a few miles after that, we finally came upon it: a dirt field occupied by a few sad-looking tents, and in the distance, cinder-block houses that might’ve been an office or staff quarters. The entrance was blocked by a closed gate, so I parked along the shoulder of the road, and we walked in. We crossed the field toward the tents. It didn’t seem like anybody was around, but then we heard someone grunting and swearing from around the back of the nearest tent.
“Hello?” I said, leading my friends toward the sound.
Rounding the tent, we came upon two people in clown makeup. One had a frizz of blond hair and was dressed in a mermaid costume, and the other was awkwardly carrying her, toddling backward with his arms linked around her waist, since her legs and feet were encased inside the costume.
“Can’t you read?” the mermaid said, glaring at us. “We’re closed!”
The other clown didn’t say a word or even look in our direction.
“We didn’t see a sign,” I said.
“If you’re closed, why are you in costume?” asked Enoch.
“Costume? What costume?” She wiggled her obviously fake tail and laughed strangely. Then her smile vanished. “Get lost, okay? We’re renovating.” She elbowed the clown carrying her. “George, keep moving.”
The other clown resumed lugging her toward the tent.
“Wait,” said Emma, following them. “We read about you in the guide.”
“We’re not in any guide, honey.”
“Yes, you are,” Emma said. “Peculiar Planet.”
The mermaid’s head snapped toward her. “George, stop.” He stopped. She studied us for a moment, suspicious. “Where’d you get one of those old things?”
“We just . . . found it,” Emma said. “It says there are some things to see here.”
“You don’t say. There are some things to see, for the right kind of people. What kind of people would you say you are?”
“That depends. What kind are you?”
“George, put me down.” He did, and the mermaid balanced on the bend in her tail while leaning against George with one arm. The tail flexed muscularly rather than crinkling like a costume would have. “We’re in show business. But it’s been a while since we’ve had an audience worth performing for.” She gestured to the tent flap. “Would you care to see the show?”
She seemed to have made up her mind that we were peculiar, which made me suspect that she was, too. Her tone had shifted from bitter and prickly to sickly sweet.
“We’re only interested in the fire act,” said Bronwyn.
The mermaid cocked her head. “We don’t have a fire act. Do I look like a fire act?”
“Then who’s the Flaming Man?” said Bronwyn.
“We have something to give him,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
A look of surprise flickered across her face, then was quickly suppressed. “Who sent you?” she said, her fake warmth gone. “Who do you work for?”
I remembered H’s warning not to mention his name. “Nobody,” I said. “We’re here on private business.”
George cupped his hand over the mermaid’s ear and whispered something.
“You’re not from around here, I can see that.” Sweet again. “There’s no flaming anything in our show, but why don’t you stay awhile and enjoy the other parts?”
“We really can’t,” said Emma. “You’re sure you don’t know anything about a flaming man?”
“Sorry, kiddos. But we do have three mermaids, a dancing bear, and George here can juggle pickaxes . . .”
Just then, two people came around the corner of the tent—another man in clown makeup and someone in a bear costume.
“We’ll throw in dinner,” the mermaid was saying, not taking the hint as we backed away. “Dinner and a show, what could beat that?”
“A song!” answered the clown, and he began to grind a box organ that was strapped around his waist, which the bear—who was wearing the most horrible, handmade, skull-like bear mask—took as his cue to start singing. But the words he sang were in some strange language, and his cadence was so slow and his voice so deep that I began to feel immediately sleepy, and I could see from my friends’ nodding heads that the song was having a similar effect on them.
“Sofur thu svid t
hitt,” he sang. “Svartur i augum.”
We started to back away. “We can’t,” I said, the words coming slow and thick. “We . . . have to . . .”
“Best show in town!” the mermaid said, wobbling toward us on her tail.
“Far i fulan pytt,” sang the bear-man. “Fullan af draugum.”
“What’s happening to me?” Bronwyn said dreamily. “My head feels like candy floss.”
“Mine too,” said Millard. And when his voice came suddenly out of the air, the mermaid and the bear and the two clowns all jumped, then looked at us with a new kind of hunger. If there had been any doubt as to our peculiarness before, Millard erased it.
Somehow, we made ourselves run—pushing and pulling one another, stumbling through the field—and though they didn’t try to stop us physically, with their hands and their bodies, getting away felt like an almost impossible task, like breaking free from a hundred giant spiderwebs. Once we made it to the gate, those webs seemed to break, and our speech and our wits returned to us.
We fumbled the car doors open. I started the engine. We shot away, the tires spitting an arc of dirt.
* * *
• • •
“Who were those awful peculiars?” asked Bronwyn. “And what were they doing to us?”
“It felt like they were trying to crawl inside my brain,” said Enoch. “Ugh, I can’t shake the feeling.”
“They must have been why Abe marked the map with a skull and crossbones,” Emma said. “See?” She held up the Mel-O-Dee map that Abe had annotated and showed the others.
“If this place is dangerous, why did H send us here?” Bronwyn asked.
“Maybe it’s a test,” said Millard.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “The question is, did we pass? Or was that just the beginning?”
As if on cue, I glanced at my rearview mirror to see a police car coming up fast behind us.
“Cops!” I said. “Everyone act normal.”