A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Just trading darkroom tips. Did you know she printed most of the photos in that album herself?”

  It was clearly a lie, and it had come to her so quickly that I was taken by surprise.

  “Then why do you look upset?” I asked.

  “I’m not.”

  “You were asking her about the girl. The one Abe traveled with sometimes.”

  “No,” said Emma. “I don’t care about that.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Her eyes cut away. “Quit giving me the third degree, will you? Here come Bronwyn and Enoch.”

  Millard was with them, too—he had put on clothes and was easy to spot—and June and Fern and Paul, with whom they’d all made fast friends.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I said.

  Emma shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  I nearly lost my temper, but managed to tamp it down. I told myself I would never understand what Emma was feeling, and if I wanted to be with her, I needed to respect that she was going through something and give her space to feel it.

  That made sense. But it didn’t make me feel less hurt.

  We made plans to leave. Paul arrived carrying a metal thermos.

  “Coffee for your trip. So you don’t have to stop.”

  Elmer came by and shook our hands. “If any of you ever need a diviner, you know where to find us.”

  “What an interesting man,” said Millard as he walked away. “Did you know he fought in three wars over seventy years? During the Great War he slept in a loop at the trenches in Verdun so he wouldn’t age forward.”

  Bronwyn and Fern hugged.

  “You’ll write?” said Fern.

  “Even better, we’ll visit,” said Bronwyn.

  “We’d like that.”

  They said goodbye, and Paul walked us back to the edge of town, and our car. Along the way, I showed everyone the pack of matches Miss Annie had given me.

  “An address!” said Millard. “H made it easy on us this time.”

  “I think the tests are over,” I said. “It’s time for the real mission.”

  “We’ll see,” said Emma. “H never seems to get tired of testing us.”

  “You all be careful out there,” Paul said. “And watch yourselves up north. I hear it’s every bit as dangerous.”

  He explained how to get back to the present. There was no returning to 1965—not that we would’ve wanted to—because exiting the back way out of this loop would get us to a spring day in 1930, when the Portal loop was made. Leaving the front way was simple: We had to go out the same way we’d come in—through the fields, and fast.

  We said goodbye to Paul. I made sure everyone was belted in, started the car, and punched the gas. The car shook as I followed my tire tracks back across the bare field, speeding faster and faster even as the terrain grew rougher. Halfway across, just as we reached the spot where we had entered the loop and my tire tracks disappeared, there was a gut-wrenching lurch. Day turned to night. The flat dirt before me turned into a wall of green cornstalks. We crashed through them, flattening row after row as the stalks and green cobs hammered the car. I was about to slam on the brakes when I heard Millard yell, “Keep going or we’ll get stuck!” so I pushed even harder on the gas, and the engine bellowed and somehow the tires found traction, and a few seconds later we broke through the corn and onto a road.

  I stopped. We caught our breaths. I turned on the headlights. The dirt road was paved now, but otherwise the outskirts of Portal looked much the same as in 1965.

  I got out to inspect the damage, and Millard got out to throw up. There was a crack at the top edge of the windshield and shredded cornstalks stuck in the grille and the wheel wells, which I was able to pull out. Other than that, we had made it in one piece.

  “Everyone okay?” I said, poking my head through the window.

  “Millard’s not,” said Emma, and then I heard a retching sound and looked up just in time to see an air-burst of vomit splatter the pavement. I had never seen an invisible person throw up before, and it was something I won’t soon forget.

  As he was voiding his guts, I felt my phone—alive again here in the present—buzz madly in my pocket. 24 missed calls, the screen read. 23 voicemails.

  I knew who they were from without even looking.

  I walked around to the rear of the car and pretended to check something while I surreptitiously listened. The first few messages were mildly concerned. But they got more alarmed and more angry as they went on. The thirteenth went like this: “Mr. Portman, this is your ymbryne speaking. Again. I want you to listen to me very carefully. I am disappointed that you would embark on a journey without informing me. Exceedingly so. But you have no right to take the children with you without my say-so. Return to this house at once. Thank you. All the best.”

  I stopped listening after that. I thought about telling the others, then decided against it. They had all known Miss Peregrine wouldn’t approve; there was no reason to agitate them with the voicemails and risk having them decide to turn back.

  “All right,” said Millard, stumbling back toward the car. “I have finished.”

  I slipped the phone into my pocket. “Sorry you’re not feeling good.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a train we could catch,” he said weakly. “I’m growing a bit weary of automobiles.”

  “The rest of the way will be smooth sailing,” I said. “I promise.”

  He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  It was the present day once more, and the modern highway system made for a quick ride, in the middle of the night, anyway. Fueled by Paul’s thermos of coffee and an 8-track of Dark Side of the Moon I found in the back of the glove box, the miles peeled away fast. Before I knew it, we’d made it through the rest of Georgia and the whole of South Carolina, and we were within striking distance of the town in northern North Carolina written on the matchbook. After the brief flare-up between Emma and me back in Portal, things had cooled to what felt like subzero temperatures. She had chosen to sit in the back, despite how cramped it was, and Enoch was up front next to me.

  I looked up at Emma in the mirror now and then, and when she wasn’t sleeping or staring moodily out the window, she was flipping through Abe’s operations log, reading it by the flickering light of a single pinkie flame. Again, I tried to tell myself that she was going through something. Processing something she’d never been forced to face quite so head-on, because she’d always been far away from Abe, across time, across the sea. But it felt like she was icing me out, punishing me for questioning her. And I didn’t know how much longer I could take it.

  It was three thirty in the morning and my butt was almost completely numb when we finally reached the exit. I followed directions from my phone to the address printed on H’s matchbook. We had no idea what we’d find there. A gas station? A café? Another motel?

  None of the above. It was a fast-food place called 24-HR OK BURGER. It shone palely in the middle of an empty, black parking lot in a deserted shopping center, and true to its name, it was open, and it looked okay. All the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and a sign on the door read DRIVE-THRU OPEN.

  I parked right in front, the only car in the lot. H was not here. No one was here except for one unlucky employee who’d gotten stuck with the graveyard shift. I could see him inside, reading his phone behind the counter.

  “Did the matchbook say what time to meet H?” asked Bronwyn.

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t think he expected us to come at three thirty a.m.”

  “So we’re supposed to just wait here until morning?” said Enoch. “This is idiotic.”

  “Just be patient,” said Millard. “He could arrive at any moment. The middle of the night seems like th
e best time to meet, if you mean to do it in secret.”

  So we waited. The minutes ticked by. The kid inside put down his phone and started sweeping the floor.

  A loud grumbling noise came from the passenger seat, and everyone looked at Enoch.

  “Was that a truck engine?” Millard said.

  “I’m hungry,” said Enoch, looking down at his stomach.

  “Can’t you wait?” said Bronwyn. “What if H comes by but doesn’t see us because we’re in the drive-through, and we miss him?”

  “No, Enoch’s got the right idea,” said Millard. “May I see the matchbook again?”

  I handed it back to him. Millard turned it over in his hands. “It’s more than just an address,” he said. “It’s a clue. Look what’s written.”

  He gave the matchbook to Bronwyn, who read it aloud. “It’s smart to stop here . . . you get more for your money.” She looked up. “So?”

  “So,” said Millard, “I think we’re supposed to buy something.”

  I started the car and pulled around into the drive-through lane. We rolled up to the ordering speaker and its glowing, backlit menu. A very loud, tinny voice crackled, “WELCOME TO TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR OKAY BURGER WHAT CAN I—”

  Bronwyn screamed, and with a lightning-quick reaction, she flung her long arm through the open window and punched the speaker so hard that it unbolted from the ground and fell over, dented and silent.

  “Bronwyn, what the hell!” I shouted. “He was just taking our order!”

  “Sorry.” Bronwyn shrunk down into her seat. “I got scared.”

  “We can’t take you anywhere, can we?” said Enoch.

  Under any normal circumstances I would’ve peeled out and left the scene, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance, so I eased my foot off the brake and rolled slowly around to the pickup window, where the kid in the orange apron was still talking into his headset.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  He spoke very slowly, and his eyes were red and puffy. He looked high.

  “Hey,” I said. “The speaker, uh, isn’t working.”

  He blew out through his mouth, his lips flapping. “Ooooo-kay,” he said, opening his window. “What’ll you have?”

  Millard spoke up. “What’s good here?”

  “What are you doing?” Emma hissed at him.

  The kid scrunched his brow together and peered into the back seat. “Who said that?”

  “I did,” said Millard. “I’m invisible. Sorry, should’ve mentioned that.”

  “Millard!” Bronwyn exclaimed. “You are so daft!”

  But the kid didn’t seem freaked out. “Oh, okay,” he said, nodding highly. “If I were you? Combo two, for sure.”

  “Then please prepare us a combo two,” said Millard.

  “And five hamburgers, please!” Enoch shouted from the back seat. “With everything. And chips.”

  “We don’t have chips,” the guy said.

  “He means french fries,” I said.

  The kid charged me, I paid, and then he went into the kitchen to prepare the food. He came back a few minutes later and handed me a heavy paper bag that was already turning clear from grease stains. I unrolled the top and looked inside. There were a lot of burgers, a huge order of fries, and a wad of napkins. I distributed the food to my friends, and at the bottom of the bag I noticed a small white envelope. It was fancy-looking and sealed with red wax.

  “What’s this?” I said, holding it up to show the others.

  Emma shrugged. “Part of the combo?”

  I drove into the lot, parked, and opened the envelope. I turned on the dome light to read by, and everyone leaned over to look. Inside the envelope was another napkin, but this one had been typed on. With a typewriter. The greasy napkin read:

  Uncontacted subject being hunted, highly threatened.

  Mission: protect and extract.

  Suggest delivery to loop 10044.

  Extreme caution advised.

  That was it. The uncontacted peculiar wasn’t named. It didn’t specify where loop 10044 was. But on the back of the napkin was a set of coordinates.

  “I can read coordinates,” Millard said excitedly. “The line of longitude number is negative, which means it’s well west of the prime meridian—”

  “It’s a high school in Brooklyn, New York,” I said, holding up my phone. “I typed them into the Maps app.”

  Millard harrumphed. “No piece of technology can replace a real cartographer.”

  “We’ve got a mission, and we’ve got a location,” Emma said. “The only thing we don’t have is the name of the peculiar we’re looking for.”

  “Maybe H doesn’t know the name, either,” said Bronwyn, “and finding it out is part of the mission.”

  “Or it’s for security,” said Enoch. “You wouldn’t want to go around naming uncontacted peculiars on napkins that could fall into the hands of, say, a hamburger chef.”

  “I think he’s more than simply a chef,” said Millard. “Say, Jacob, would you mind pulling round to his window again?”

  I started the car, rounded the small building, and drove back into the drive-through lane. When he slid the window open this time, he looked annoyed. “Uhhh. Hi.”

  Millard leaned out the window. “Sorry to trouble you, old boy. If we could just have one of your combo number threes.”

  The kid typed the order onto a greasy keyboard and charged me $10.50. As I was paying, Bronwyn leaned toward the open window and said, “Do you know H? Are you a hollow-hunter? What is this place?”

  He gave me my change, acting as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Hey!” said Bronwyn.

  He turned and went into the kitchen.

  “I don’t think he’s allowed to answer questions like that,” I said.

  After a minute he came back and dropped a greasy paper bag onto the window ledge. It made a solid thud as it landed.

  “You have a great night, now,” he said, and shut the window.

  I picked up the bag, which was unusually heavy, and unrolled the top. Nothing but french fries and onion rings. Not much of a combo, I thought, handing it to Millard as I pulled out of the lot and headed back toward the highway. It was a long way to Brooklyn, and I wanted to get going before the morning rush hour turned the major arteries into parking lots.

  Ten minutes later, as we were flying up I-95, Millard had eaten his way to the bottom of the bag. I heard him laugh and turned my head to look. He pulled out something heavy and egg-shaped.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Combo number three, it would seem. French fries and a hand grenade.” Bronwyn yelped and ducked behind my seat.

  It seemed OK Burger was more than just a message relay station. It was a peculiar weapons depot. I wondered how many of my grandfather’s secret way stations were like this, hiding in plain sight. (I also wondered what prize came with a combo number one.)

  Millard chuckled, rolling the grease-covered grenade from one hand to another. “My, they really do give you more for your money!”

  * * *

  • • •

  I drove, nibbling at my meal with one hand while my friends scarfed theirs. Their teenage bodies, now aging forward for the first time in many years, were sometimes insatiably hungry. After they finished they all fell into a deep sleep—all but Emma, next to me in the passenger seat. She said she didn’t want to sleep if I couldn’t.

  For an hour we hardly spoke. I scanned through radio stations at a low volume while she watched the dark world slide by outside the window. We were halfway through Virginia when a pale gray dawn began to smear the sky. The silence between us felt like a stone forming in my chest. I’d been talking to Emma in my head for the last fifty miles, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “We have to—”

  �
��Jacob, I—”

  Neither of us had said a word in a long time, and then we’d both spoken at once. We snapped our heads to look at each other, surprised at our odd synchronicity.

  “You first,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You.”

  I glanced up at the rearview. Bronwyn and Enoch were fast asleep. Enoch was snoring lightly.

  “You’re not over him.” I hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but I’d held back the words for so long that they’d gotten stuck in my mouth, and I just had to spit them out. “You’re not over him. And it’s not fair to me.”

  She stared at me, shocked, her lips a tight line. Like there was something she was afraid to say.

  “Whenever someone mentions his name,” I said, “you flinch. Ever since we found out one of his hollow-hunter comrades was a girl, your head’s been somewhere else. You’re acting like he cheated on you. And not years and years ago, either.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You couldn’t possibly.”

  My face went hot. All I’d really wanted was an acknowledgment that she’d been acting weird and an apology, but this was going somewhere else. Somewhere worse.

  “I’ve been trying,” I said. “I’ve been telling myself to ignore it, to not be so sensitive, to give you space, that you’re going through this hard, strange thing. But we’ve got to talk about it.”

  “I don’t think you really want to hear what I’m thinking,” she said.

  “If we can’t talk about it, we’re not going to make it.”

  She glanced down briefly. We were passing a factory, twin smokestacks belching smoke into the air. Then she said, “Have you ever loved someone so much it made you sick?”

  “I love you,” I said. “But it doesn’t make me sick.”