A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “I ain’t an educated man,” said my interrogator. “But one thing I know back to front is our enemies. I know what they look like, how they dress, what they eat for breakfast, their mothers’ names. And these people don’t fit none of their descriptions.”

  “I swear it’s true,” I said. “The ymbrynes had nothing to do with it. Miss Peregrine had nothing to do with it. This girl was in danger and we just wanted to help.”

  My interrogator burst out laughing. “Just wanted to help.” He leaned in so close I could smell his skin, sour like menthol and night sweats. “I seen an ymbryne once. In Schenectady. Old lady, lived in the woods with about twenty kids. They followed her around like little ducks. Slept in the same bed. Followed her to the john.” He shook his head. “Nobody in this world just wants to help. And no wards of no ymbryne ever acted on their own.”

  I felt a swell of bitterness and wounded pride.

  “My grandfather did.” Why keep it a secret? I couldn’t let them think the ymbrynes were making moves against them. Who knew what sort of consequences that could have. “He ran a crew that fought hollowgast and helped peculiars who were in danger. People knew him as Gandy.”

  My interrogator wasn’t laughing anymore. He was writing down everything I said on a little pad.

  “He died earlier this year,” I continued, “and he wanted me to take over for him. At least, I think he did. We got this mission from an associate of his.”

  The interrogator looked up from his pad. “You say one of Gandy’s associates is still alive?”

  The way he was staring at me gave me a chill. I knew then I had made an error.

  “No—” I acted like I was confused. “I meant, we got the mission from a machine,” I lied. “One of those teletype printers? The orders just printed out while I was standing near it, like it knew I was there. But I assumed it was from an old associate of my grandfather’s.” I wanted to bury what I’d said about H, but it was too late.

  The interrogator closed his pad. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said, and he winked and scraped back his chair.

  “We didn’t mean to step on any toes,” I said quickly. “We didn’t know about your territory or laws or anything like that.”

  Keys rattled in the door and it opened. The interrogator smiled.

  “You have a nice day.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later they dragged me in to see Leo. The room was empty but for him, the man holding me, and Leo’s funereal right-hand man, Bill. Leo came at me as soon as I got through the door. Got right up into my face.

  “Your grandfather was a murderer. You knew that, right?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. He was clearly unhinged.

  “Gandy. Or whatever you call him.”

  “His name was Abraham Portman,” I said quietly.

  “Kidnapping. Murder. Man was sick in the head. Look at me.”

  I raised my eyes to meet his. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Bill, get me the file on Gandy.”

  Bill went over to a filing cabinet and starting rifling through it.

  “He was a good man,” I said. “He fought monsters. He saved people.”

  “Yeah, we thought so, too,” said Leo. “Until we found out he was the monster.”

  “Got it right here, Leo,” said Bill.

  Bill walked over with a brown folder in his hand. Leo took it and flipped it open. He turned a page, and something cracked behind his stony expression. “Here,” he said, and then I saw him wince.

  He slapped me hard across the cheek. I stumbled. The man holding me yanked me up again. My head tingled.

  “She was my goddaughter,” said Leo. “Sweet as sugarcane. Eight years old. Agatha.”

  He turned the file so I could see it. Clipped to the page was a photo of a little girl astride a tricycle. A black knot of dread began to well in my stomach.

  “They took her in the night. Gandy and his men. They even had a shadow creature with them. Working for them. It broke the window to her bedroom and pulled her right out—from the second floor. There was a trail of black muck leading right to her bed.”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said. “He would never kidnap a child.”

  “He was seen!” he shouted. “But she wasn’t. Not ever again. And we looked, don’t you know we looked. He either fed her to that thing or killed her himself. If he’d sold her to some other clan, I woulda heard. She woulda got free, reached out.”

  “I’m sorry that happened,” I said. “But I can promise you it wasn’t him.”

  He slapped me again, on the other cheek this time, and the room blurred and my ear started to ring. When my vision cleared, he was staring out the window at a gray afternoon.

  “That’s just one of about ten kidnappings we can pin on him. Ten kids who were taken and never seen again. Blood on his hands. But he’s dead, you say. So I say that’s blood on your hands.”

  He went over to a cart stocked with bottles and poured himself a shot of brown liquor. Downed it in one swallow.

  “Now, where is this associate you say is still alive?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  I decided to come clean about H; I had let the cat out of the bag already, and it’s not as if I had information that would lead them to him. I didn’t even know where he lived.

  Leo’s goon had me by the neck, and I felt his grip tighten.

  “You know. You were taking the girl to him!”

  “No, to a loop. Not to him.”

  “What loop?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “He hadn’t told me yet.”

  Bill cracked his knuckles. “He’s playing dumb, Leo. He thinks you’re a sucker.”

  “It’s fine,” said Leo. “We’ll find him. Nobody hides from me in my city. What I really want to know is, what do you do with them? Your victims?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “We don’t have victims.”

  He grabbed the file off the table where he dropped it, flipped the page, and shoved it in my face. “Here’s one of the kids your grandpa saved. We found him two weeks later. Does he look saved to you? Huh?”

  It was a photo of a dead person. A little boy. Maimed. Horrible.

  He punched me in the stomach. I doubled over, groaning.

  “Is it some kind of sick family business? Is that it?”

  He kicked me and I fell to the floor.

  “Where is she? Where’s Agatha?”

  I was saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” or trying to, while he kicked me twice more, until I could hardly breathe, and my nose was leaking blood all over the floor.

  “Get him up,” Leo said, disgusted. “Goddamn it, now I gotta get the carpet steamed again.”

  I was hauled up by my arms, but my legs wouldn’t take my weight, so I knelt.

  “I was gonna kill Gandy,” said Leo. “I was gonna kill that sick son of a bitch with my own hands.”

  “Gandy’s dead, Leo,” said Bill.

  “Gandy’s dead,” Leo repeated. “Then I guess you’ll have to do, junior. What time is it?”

  “Almost six,” said Bill.

  “We’ll kill him in the morning. Make a thing of it. Invite the troops.”

  “You’re wrong,” I whispered, voice trembling. “You’re wrong about him.”

  “How do you want it, kid? Drowning or shooting?”

  “I can prove it.”

  “How about both?” said Bill.

  “Nice idea, Bill. One time for him, one time for dear old Grandpop. Now get him out of here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That night they turned off the light in my cell for the first time. I lay aching in the thin dark, wishing my body
would disappear, wrestling with my thoughts. I worried for my friends. Were they being beaten, tortured, threatened? I worried for Noor, and what they were planning to do with her. Would she have been better off if I hadn’t tried to help her at all? If I had listened to H and aborted the mission when he told me to?

  Yes. Almost certainly yes.

  I admit, I worried for myself, too. Leo’s goons had been threatening me since I arrived, but for the first time their promise to kill me felt genuine. Leo didn’t need anything from me anymore. He wasn’t trying to get information out of me. He seemed only to want to watch me die.

  And what was all this madness about my grandfather? I didn’t think for a second that any of it could be true—but how could anyone? My one thought was that wights had framed him, staging kidnappings and killings to look as if Abe had committed them, in hopes that Leo’s clan might have killed him and done the wights’ work for them. As for my grandfather being identified at the scenes of some of these crimes (a point Leo had emphasized), the wights were masters of disguise. Maybe one of them had dressed like him, or made a lifelike mask.

  There was a sudden, loud banging at my cell door.

  This was it. They had come for me. They hadn’t even waited until morning.

  The hatch in the door slid open.

  “Portman.”

  It was Leo. I was surprised, but then it made sense—he wanted to pull the trigger himself.

  “Get over here.”

  I got up from the cot and stood before the hatch.

  “The wights framed my grandfather,” I said, not because I thought he’d believe me, but because I needed to say it.

  “Shut your goddamn trap.” He paused to collect himself. “You know this lady?”

  He held a photo up to the hatch. I was so thrown off by this unexpected pivot that it took me a moment to react. It was a snapshot of a dyed-blond diva in white gloves and a feathered hat. She was holding a can of Drano, and she was, it seemed, singing to it.

  “That’s the baroness,” I said, grateful my memory hadn’t gone blank.

  Leo lowered the picture. He observed me for a moment with his brow furrowed. I couldn’t read him at all. Had I passed a test? Or had I said the wrong thing?

  “We made some calls,” he said finally. “Your associates told us you stopped through the Flamingo. Naturally, we were concerned, so we put in a call to our friends down there, to see if you’d left anyone alive. Much to my surprise, not only did you comport yourselves as gentlemen and ladies, you also took care of some business I’d been meaning to handle.”

  I was floored. “Business?”

  “Those idiot road warriors who act like they run things? I’ve been meaning to go to Florida and stomp them. You saved me the trouble.”

  “It was, uh, no problem.” I was trying to sound calm and collected, not like someone who was still half expecting to be killed.

  Leo chuckled and looked at the floor, as if embarrassed. “You might be wondering why a big shot like me cares about some tourist loop. Well, I wouldn’t, except my sister lives there.”

  “The baroness?”

  “Her real name’s Donna. She likes the weather down there.” He shook his head and muttered to himself, “She takes a couple opera lessons . . .”

  “Are you letting me go?”

  “Normally, a good word from my sister would only be enough to get your death sentence commuted. But you got friends in interesting places.”

  “I do?”

  He slapped shut the view-hatch. A key turned in the lock and the door opened. We were standing a few feet apart, nothing now between us. Then he stepped aside, and there, striding down the hall toward me, was Miss Peregrine.

  For a moment I thought I was dreaming. And then she spoke.

  “Jacob. Come out of there at once.”

  She was angry with me, but her face was so etched with the pain of worry and her eyes so wide with relief that I knew she would open her arms when I ran to her—and she did, and I hugged her tight.

  “Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine. I’m so sorry.”

  She patted my back and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Save it for later, Mr. Portman.”

  I turned to Leo. “What about my friends?”

  “Waiting in the loading dock.”

  “And Noor?”

  His expression soured instantly. “Don’t push it, kid. And don’t ever come back here. Helping my sister was your get-out-of-jail-free card. But you only get one.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Leo’s men escorted us down the hallways, through Leo’s club and the kitchen, and out to the loading dock. In the weak light of dawn I saw Emma and Bronwyn waiting, and beside them the white shirt and gray slacks that I knew belonged to Millard. When I saw them whole and standing and unhurt, the shudder of relief I felt was almost like a chill. I hadn’t realized until that moment how dimmed my hopes had become.

  “Oh my bird, thank the birds,” Bronwyn sang, clasping her hands as Miss Peregrine and I approached them.

  “I told you he’d be fine,” Millard said. “Jacob can take care of himself.”

  “Fine?” Emma said, going pale as she looked me over. “What did they do to you?”

  I hadn’t seen a mirror in a while, but between my busted nose and other injuries, I must’ve looked fearful.

  Emma hugged me. For a moment it didn’t matter what had happened between us, it just felt good to have her in my arms again. Then she hugged a little too tight, and pain ricocheted across my cracked ribs. I sucked in my breath and pulled away.

  I assured her I was okay, though my head felt like a balloon that was about to pop. “Where’s Enoch?” I said.

  “In the Acre,” said Millard.

  “Thank God.”

  “He escaped that horrible diner,” said Emma, “then called your house and told Miss P everything that had happened, and they tracked us here.”

  “We owe him our lives,” said Millard. “That’s something I never thought I’d say.”

  “You can catch up on the way back to the Acre,” said someone with a French accent, and I turned to see Miss Cuckoo standing near the exit with another ymbryne. She wore an electric-blue dress with a tall silver collar, and her expression was flat. Neither she nor the other ymbryne betrayed any trace of happiness at seeing us.

  “Come, there is a car waiting.”

  Leo’s men watched as we walked out, their eyes and guns trained on us. I thought again of Noor, and the fact that we were leaving her here, in some form of captivity. I felt awful about it. Not only had we failed the mission, I had probably consigned her to a worse fate than if I’d left her alone entirely.

  The ymbrynes bundled us out of the loading dock and into a big car. It lurched away from the curb before the doors had even closed.

  “Miss Peregrine?” I said.

  She turned slightly, her face in profile. “It would be better,” she said, “if you didn’t speak.”

  We were brought back to Devil’s Acre via a Manhattan loop entrance that connected to the Panloopticon—a route that would have saved my friends and me days of driving and untold trouble if only we’d known about it. I was spared an immediate tongue-lashing because I was injured. Instead, the ymbrynes brought me to a bone-mender named Rafael, who worked out of a tumbledown house on Little Stabbing Street. For the rest of the day and all that night, I lay in a room filled with apothecary bottles while he applied stinging powders and pungent poultices to my wounds. He was no Mother Dust, but I could feel myself beginning to heal.

  I was confined to the bed, mostly sleepless, haunted by failures and doubts and guilt. (If only I had listened to H. If only I had aborted the mission when he’d begged me to.) Haunted by the things Leo had said about my grandfather. Not that I thought they could be true—of course he had been framed
by wights, it’s the only explanation that made any sense—but the simple fact that anyone would fabricate such lies about him made me deeply uncomfortable. I would have to set that right, if I could ever get H to talk to me again. But I was haunted primarily by guilt about Noor. If she had never met me at all, she’d be safer than she was now. Hunted, yes, but at least she’d be free.

  My friends came to see me in the morning. Emma, Millard, Bronwyn. And Enoch, too, who recounted how he had come out of Frankie’s odd trance to find himself dressed in doll’s clothes, which he took off as fast as he could before running away.

  “We think he woke up when I tackled Frankie,” said Emma. “She let go of us all, and that must have broken her hold on Enoch, too.”

  “She’s quite powerful, to be able to influence people remotely that way,” said Millard. “I’ll have to include her in my new book, Who’s Who in Peculiar America.”

  “I can control people remotely, too,” said Enoch. “Provided they’re dead.”

  “It’s too bad, you would have made a cute couple,” I said.

  Enoch leaned over my bed and flicked a bruise on my arm, and I yelped.

  They told me Miss Peregrine hadn’t talked to them yet—not even to reprimand them. She’d hardly said a word to any of us since we’d returned, other than to warn us not to leave the Acre.

  “She’s still too angry,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

  “Me, neither,” said Bronwyn. “Not even the time my brother sank the Cairnholm ferry with all of us aboard.”

  “What if they excommunicate us from peculiardom?” said Emma.

  “You can’t be excommunicated from peculiardom,” Enoch said. “Can you?”

  “This whole thing was such an awful idea,” Bronwyn said miserably.

  “We were doing fine until you got shot with that sleep dart, or whatever it was,” said Enoch.

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “We never would’ve gotten stuck in Frankie’s loop-trap if we hadn’t had to go looking for a hospital!”