Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(87)

“Jake?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Be careful, okay?”

I nodded. He closed the door. A moment later I heard him fall into bed.

I sat down and rubbed my face. I didn’t know how to feel.

“Did we help?” Olive asked from her perch on the ceiling.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think so. He’ll just wake up later thinking he dreamed all of you.”

“You could write a letter,” Millard suggested. “Tell him anything you like—it’s not as if he’ll be able to follow us.”

“I did write a letter. But it’s not proof.”

“Ah,” he replied. “Yes, I see your problem.”

“Nice problem to have,” said Olive. “Wish my mum and dad had loved me enough to worry when I left home.”

Emma reached up and squeezed her hand. Then she said, “I might have proof.”

She pulled a small wallet from the waistband of her dress and took out a snapshot. She handed it to me. It was a picture of her and my grandfather when my grandfather was young. All her attention was focused on him, but he seemed elsewhere. It was sad and beautiful and encapsulated what little I knew about their relationship.

“It was taken just before Abe left for the war,” Emma said. “Your dad’ll recognize me, won’t he?”

I smiled at her. “You look like you haven’t aged a day.”

“Marvelous!” said Millard. “There’s your proof.”

“Do you always keep this with you?” I asked, handing it back to her.

“Yes. But I don’t need it anymore.” She went to the table and took my pen and began to write on the back of the photo. “What’s your father’s name?”

“Franklin.”

When she finished writing, she gave it to me. I looked at both sides and then fished my letter from the trash, smoothed it, and left it on the table with the photo.

“Ready to go?” I said.

My friends were standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

“Only if you are,” Emma replied.





We set out for the ridge. At the spot near the crest where I always stopped to see how far I’d come, this time I kept walking. Sometimes it’s better not to look back.

When we reached the cairn, Olive patted the stones like a beloved old pet. “Goodbye, old loop,” she said. “You’ve been such a good loop, and we’ll miss you ever so much.” Emma squeezed her shoulder, and they both crouched down and went inside.

In the rear chamber, Emma held her flame to the wall and showed me something I’d never noticed before: a long list of dates and initials carved into the rocks. “It’s all the other times people have used this loop,” she explained. “All the other days the loop’s been looped.”

Peering at it, I made out a P.M. 3-2-1853 and a J.R.R. 1-4-1797 and a barely-legible X.J. 1580. Near the bottom were some strange markings I couldn’t decipher.

“Runic inscriptions,” Emma said. “Quite ancient.”

Millard searched through the gravel until he found a sharpened stone, and, using another stone as a hammer, he chipped an inscription of his own below the others. It read A.P. 3-9-1940.

“Who’s AP?” asked Olive.

“Alma Peregrine,” said Millard, and then he sighed. “It should be her carving this, not me.”

Olive ran her hand over the rough markings. “Do you think another ymbryne will come along to make a loop here someday?”

“I hope so,” he said. “I dearly hope so.”

*

We buried Victor. Bronwyn lifted his whole bed and carried it outside with Victor still in it, and with all the children assembled on the grass she pulled back the sheets and tucked him in, planting one last kiss on his forehead. We boys lifted the corners of his bed like pallbearers and walked him down into the crater that the bomb had made. Then all of us climbed out but Enoch, who took a clay man from his pocket and laid it gently on the boy’s chest.

“This is my very best man,” he said. “To keep you company.” The clay man sat up and Enoch pushed it back down with his thumb. The man rolled over with one arm under his head and seemed to go to sleep.

When the crater had been filled, Fiona dragged some shrubs and vines over the raw soil and began to grow them. By the time the rest of us had finished packing for the journey, Adam was back in his old spot, only now he was marking Victor’s grave.

Once the children had said goodbye to their house, some taking chips of brick or flowers from the garden as forget-me-nots, we made one last trip across the island: through the smoking charred woods and the flat bog dug with bomb holes, over the ridge and down through the little town hung with peat smoke, where the townspeople lingered on porches and in doorways, so tired and numb with shock that they hardly seemed to notice the small parade of peculiar-looking children passing them by.

We were quiet but excited. The children hadn’t slept, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.