by Ransom Riggs
Bronwyn was shaking her head. “Enoch, that sounds like a bad plan.”
“He’s being sarcastic,” said Millard.
“You said you weren’t!” said Bronwyn, looking hurt.
Morning rush hour was beginning to congest the highway. A semi truck merged in front of me and I had to slow down suddenly, and then it belched a cloud of black fumes all over us. Millard and I started coughing. I rolled up my window.
“And where are we supposed to take this peculiar, exactly?” asked Enoch.
Emma unfolded the mission report. “Loop ten thousand forty-four,” she read.
“And where is that?” said Bronwyn.
“We don’t know yet,” Emma replied.
Bronwyn buried her face in her hands. “Oh, this isn’t going to work, is it? And Miss Peregrine’s never going to forgive us, and it will have all been for nothing!”
A moment ago she had been convinced it would be easy, and now she had lost all hope.
“You’re getting overwhelmed,” said Emma. “Big tasks always seem that way if you try and figure out every little piece of them beforehand. We have to take it bit by bit.”
“It’s like that old saying,” said Millard. “About eating a grimbear?”
“That’s revolting,” Bronwyn said into her hands.
“It’s just a metaphor. Nobody actually eats grimbears.”
“I bet someone does,” said Enoch. “Do you think they grill them or just eat them raw?”
“Shut up,” Emma said. “You do it one bite at a time, that’s how. So let’s concentrate on the next bite, and then we’ll worry about the one after that. We’ll find the peculiar. Then we’ll worry about finding the loop. Okay?”
Bronwyn raised her head and peeked at Emma through her fingers. “Can we use a different metaphor?”
Emma laughed. “Sure.”
After a while rush hour began to ease its grip on us. Then we were free of traffic and hurtling toward Philadelphia, and after that New York, and all the unknowns waiting for us there. We sank into silence, contemplating the next bite.
I had done and been through a lot of crazy things that summer, but driving into New York City for the first time ranked among the most intense. It was a stressful blur of honking cars and changing lanes and suffocating tunnels and vertiginous bridges. My friends were shouting at me to watch out for this or that hazard while I white-knuckled the wheel and sweat pooled in the small of my back. Somehow, after countless near-collisions and missed turns, the directions provided by the unflappably bland robot voice from my phone got us to within a block of our destination: J. Edgar Hoover High School. I didn’t know New York geography well at all—I had only been there once, as a young kid, on a trip with my parents—but Hoover High wasn’t near any landmarks I recognized from TV or the movies. This was Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and not even one of the “hipster” neighborhoods of Brooklyn I’d heard about. This was like a dingier, more crowded version of suburbia, with smaller, older houses packed tight together and cars jamming the sides of the streets.
We found the school easily enough. It was an imposing, block-long edifice of brick punctuated now and then by windows, the kind of place that could have been a minimum-security prison or a wastewater treatment plant or any number of institutions, but in this case housed a few thousand impressionable young minds. In other words, it looked a lot like the high school I attended in Florida, and the thought of going in gave me pit sweats.
It was the middle of the afternoon. We parked across the street and sat watching the building from the car, debating our first move.
“So, how’s that detailed plan of ours shaping up?” asked Enoch.
“Perhaps we just go inside and have a look round,” said Millard. “See if anyone catches our eye.”
“Thousands of kids go to this school,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to find the peculiar one just by looking.”
“We don’t know until we’ve tired,” Millard said, and then he yawned. “I mean, tried.”
“I’m tired, too,” said Bronwyn. “My brain feels like mush.”
“Mine too,” I said.
Bronwyn offered me the thermos of coffee Paul had given us—still half full but long since cold—but I couldn’t stomach it. I was both wired and tired, and coffee was just making me jittery. We’d been going nonstop for over twenty-four hours, and I was starting to come apart at the seams.
We heard the school bell ring. Thirty seconds later its front doors flung open and students began to flood outside. In seconds the courtyard was filled with teenagers.
“Here’s our chance,” said Bronwyn. “Any of them look peculiar?”
A boy with a purple mohawk walked by us on the sidewalk, followed by a girl in drop-crotch pants and paisley combat boots and a hundred other kids with their own quirks of style and dress.
“Yeah,” Emma said. “All of them.”
“It’s useless anyway,” said Enoch. “If the person we’re looking for is in danger, then they’re scared, and if they’re scared, they’re going to try and blend in, not stand out.”
“Ah, so we’re looking for someone who seems suspiciously normal,” said Bronwyn. “Too normal.”
“No, you idiot, I meant we’re not going to find them by looking at all. Any other ideas?”
We scanned the masses as they streamed past for another minute, but it was clear that Enoch was right. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
“Maybe we should, I don’t know, ask people,” said Emma.
Enoch laughed. “Yes, excuse me, we were looking for someone with strange powers or abilities? Or perhaps an extra mouth in the back of their head?”
“You know who would know?” I said. “Abe.”
Enoch rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, remember?”
“But he left us a how-to guide. Or the closest thing we’re going to get to one.” I reached under Emma’s legs and pulled Abe’s operations log from the footwell.
“Perhaps you’re onto something,” said Millard. “That’s every mission he and H ran for thirty-five years. They had to have been in situations like this. We’ll just find out what they did.”
“And we’ll come back tomorrow, when we’ve had some rest,” I said. Forget the needle—at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to find the haystack.
“Excellent plan,” said Emma. “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I may start hallucinating.”
“Someone’s coming!” hissed Bronwyn.
I looked out my window to see a trim white man walking toward the car. He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki pants, plastic mirrored sunglasses, and held a walkie-talkie in one hand. He was a classic vice-principal type.
“Names!” he barked.
“Hi there,” I said, calm and friendly.
“What are your names?” he repeated, humorless. “Let me see your driver’s license.”
“We don’t go to school here, so we don’t have to tell you,” said Bronwyn.
Enoch’s face fell into his hands. “You idiot.”
The man bent to peer inside the car and raised his walkie-talkie. “Base, this is perimeter, I’ve got some unknown youths here,” and then he walked around the back of the car and started reading off the license plate number.
I started the car and gave it a little gas at the same time, which made the engine bark loudly enough that the man jumped and stumbled backward. (It was a trick I was coming to depend on.) Before he could regain his footing, I pulled away from the curb.
“He gave me a bad feeling,” said Emma.
“Most vice principals do,” I said.
But then I got a sudden, sharp pain in my stomach. As I turned the corner and drove down the long side of the school, I clenched my jaw and hunched forward, trying to hide it from the others.
I wondered, could
it have been a hollowgast? Was that the danger this uncontacted peculiar was in?
Then the pain subsided, vanishing just as quickly as it had come, and I decided, for the time being, to keep those thoughts to myself.
* * *
• • •
We found a place to rest our heads by looking through the stack of postcards I’d brought from home—the ones Abe had sent me during his later-life travels. I remembered having seen one from the New York area, and when we’d put a few miles between us and the school, I parked the car and looked through the stack to find it. On the picture side was a very dated, exceedingly bland photo of a hotel room, and on the back was the hotel’s name, address, and a short note from Abe to me, postmarked nine years ago.
Looks like I’ll be staying here a few days, just
Outside of NYC. Nice, quiet place, great amenities. I’m seeing
Old friends. If you ever come to New York, I recommend this
Particular hotel. Ask for room 203. Much love, Grandpa
“Notice anything about his note?” Millard said.
“It’s a bit random,” said Emma. “Why did he bother saying what room he stayed in?”
“It’s the simplest code there is. An acrostic.”
“A what?” I said.
“Read the first letter of each line. What does it spell?”
I squinted at it. “L-O-O-P.”
“Oh my wow goodness,” Bronwyn said, leaning forward to look.
“He was leaving you coded messages,” said Millard. “Good old Abe, looking out for you even beyond the grave.”
I shook my head, amazed, turning the postcard over in my hands. “Thanks, Grandpa,” I said quietly.
“But we don’t need to stay in loops,” said Emma. “We’re not running from hollows, we’re not in danger of aging forward, and it could be more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Yes, you do meet some strange people in loops,” said Bronwyn, “and I don’t mean to be antisocial, but I just want to sleep.”
“I think we should give it a try,” said Millard. “We need to find out where loop ten thousand forty-four is, and perhaps someone there will know.”
Enoch sighed. “As long as it’s got a bed. My neck is half broken from trying to sleep in this car.”
I wanted to go, and so I cast the deciding vote. It was mostly out of curiosity, and I liked the feeling that I was following in Abe’s footsteps. So we drove through Brooklyn and crossed a giant, double-decked suspension bridge to Staten Island. Within twenty minutes we had arrived at the place, a motel called The Falls. It was a shabby two-level building with rooms that opened onto a busy street and a sign that boasted TV IN EVERY ROOM.
We went into the office and asked for room 203. The clerk was tall and gangly and had his legs propped up on his desk. He wore a heavy wool sweater even though it was hot outside. He put down the magazine he’d been reading and studied us.
“Why do you want that room?”
“It was highly recommended,” I said.
He took his feet off the desk. “What clan you with?”
“Miss Peregrine’s,” said Bronwyn.
“Never heard of it.”
“Then, none.”
“You must not be from around here.”
“Isn’t that the point of a hotel?” said Emma. “To accommodate people who don’t live nearby?”
“Look, usually we only rent to people who are clan-affiliated, but we’re almost empty, so I’ll make an exception. I’ll just have to see some proof of identification first.”
“Sure,” I said, starting to get out my wallet.
“Not like that,” he said. “I mean, proof.”
“I think he means proof that we’re peculiar,” said Millard. He lifted a business card holder on the front desk, twirled it in the air, and set it down again. “Invisible here, hello!”
“That’ll do,” the clerk said. “What type of room you want?”
“We don’t care,” Enoch said, “we just want to sleep.” But the clerk was already pulling a laminated binder out from under the desk. He set it down, opened it, and began to list the options.
“Now, of course there’s your standard room—nice, but nothing fancy—but what we’re famous for are the special accommodations we offer our peculiar guests. We have a room for the gravitationally challenged.” He flipped to a picture of a smiling family posing in a room that had all its furniture bolted to the ceiling. “The floaters love it. They can relax, dine, even sleep in total comfort without need of weighted garments or belts.”
He turned to a picture of a girl in bed with a wolf, both of them in nightclothes. “There’s pet-friendly rooms where peculiar animals of most persuasions are welcome, so long as they’re house-trained, under a hundred pounds, and are certified nonlethal.”
He flipped another page to a photo of what looked like a nicely furnished underground bunker. “And we have a special room for our, eh, combustible guests.” He flicked his eyes to Emma. “So they don’t burn down the rest of the property in their sleep.”
Emma looked offended. “I never combust spontaneously. And we don’t have pets, and we don’t float.”
The clerk wasn’t done. “We also have a room filled with nice, loamy soil for guests with roots, or the partially dead—”
“We don’t need any weird rooms!” Enoch snapped. “A regular one is fine!”
“Suit yourself.” The clerk slapped the book shut. “Regular room. Just a few more questions.”
Enoch groaned as the clerk began filling out a form.
“Smoking or nonsmoking?”
“None of us smoke cigarettes,” Bronwyn said.
“I didn’t ask about cigarettes. Do you emit smoke from any part of your body?”
“No.”
“Nonsmoking.” He checked a box on the form. “Singles or doubles?”
“We’d all like to be together in the same room,” said Millard.
“I didn’t ask that,” the clerk said. “Do any of you have doubles? Doppelgängers, replicants, mirror brothers. We’ll need an extra deposit and photo ID for each one.”
“None,” I said.
He marked the form. “How many years will you be staying?”
“How many years?”
“. . . will you be staying?”
“Just one night,” said Emma.
“Extra charge for that,” he muttered, marking the form, then looked up. “Right this way.”
He slouched out of the office. We followed him down a dingy exterior hall polluted with traffic noise and into a dim utility room. It was a loop entrance. I realized that going in, this time, so I was ready for the jolt. When we came out, it was nighttime and cold and very quiet. The clerk walked us back down the hall, which was much tidier in this past version of itself. “It’s always nighttime here. Makes it easier for our guests to sleep any time they want.”
He stopped at a room and opened the door for us. “Anything you need, I’m just through the loop closet, at the desk where you found me. Ice is down the hall.”
He walked away and we went inside. The room looked just like the picture in the postcard my grandfather had sent me. There was a large bed, some terrible curtains, a fat orange TV on a stand, and fake knotted-pine wall panels, the patterns all clashing to create a disharmony that felt almost like noise, a constant undertone buzz that was vaguely unsettling. The room had a fold-out sofa and a double-wide cot, too, so everyone had a place to sleep. We settled in, got comfortable, and then Millard and I climbed onto the fold-out sofa to pore over Abe’s logbook.
“Abe and H went on a number of missions which bore some resemblance to ours,” said Millard. “It might be instructive to see how they dealt with their challenges.”
Luckily, Millard had read the entire thing twice during the long road trip, a
nd his memory for details was so sharp that he had an almost instant recall of vast portions of the log. He turned to a mission report from the early 1960s. Abe and H had been tasked with extracting an endangered peculiar child from a county in the Texas Panhandle, but they didn’t know which town the child was in. “And how did they begin their search?” Millard asked, scanning the report. “By blending in with the local populace and talking to people. Before long they heard a traveling carnival was in the area, which, as you know, is just the sort of place peculiars feel comfortable blending in. They caught up with it outside of Amarillo, and found the peculiar child hiding inside a giant cardboard elephant on wheels that traveled with the carnival.” The report included a picture of the elephant, and it was indeed enormous, taller than a house. “Can you believe it?” Millard said, laughing. “A Trojan elephant!”
“So they just asked people?” said Enoch, who had been listening in. “That was their brilliant detective work?”
“Simple, straightforward detective work,” said Millard. “The best kind.”
“Okay,” I said, “what else did they do?”
“Periodical searches!” he said, weirdly excited. “Here, here.” He turned a lot of pages, then landed on the report he was looking for. “There was a young woman rapidly turning invisible. She was uncontacted and, if my own experiences can be brought to bear, almost certainly terrified. Abe’s goal was to find her before she could disappear altogether, and bring her into the fold of some benevolent peculiar clan—preferably other invisibles. But it would be difficult; the young woman had fled from every prior attempt at contact.”
“And they found her using the newspaper?” I said. “How?”
“They were able to pinpoint her location via headlines in a tabloid. Tabloids can’t always be taken seriously, but once in a while they do contain nuggets of truth. See?” He turned the page, and clipped to the backside of the mission log was a photo of a couple of kids on a beach and a newspaper crumpled in the sand. The headline was blurred but partially readable—something about a nude mystery girl.