Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(92)

Bronwyn, seemingly inexhaustible, rowed the third boat all by herself. Olive sat opposite her but was no help; the tiny girl couldn’t even pull the oars without pushing herself up into the air, where a stray gust of wind might send her flying away like a kite. So Olive shouted encouragement while Bronwyn did the work of two—or of three or four if you took into account all the suitcases and boxes weighing down their boat, which were stuffed with clothes and food and maps and books and a lot of less practical things, too, like several jars of picked reptile hearts sloshing in Enoch’s duffel bag, or the blown-off front doorknob to Miss Peregrine’s house, a memento Hugh had found in the grass on our way down to the boats and decided he couldn’t live without, or the bulky pillow Horace had rescued from the house’s flaming shell—it was his lucky pillow, he said, and the only thing that kept his paralyzing nightmares at bay.

Other items were so precious that the children clung to them even as they rowed. Fiona kept a pot of wormy garden dirt pressed between her knees. Millard had striped his face with a handful of bomb-pulverized brick dust, an odd gesture that seemed part mourning ritual and partly practical: because he was otherwise invisible, it let us know he was there and hadn’t fallen overboard. If what they kept and clung to seemed strange to me at first, part of me sympathized, too: it was all they had left of their home. Just because it was lost and they knew it didn’t mean they knew how to let it go.

After three hours of rowing like galley slaves, distance had shrunk the island to the size of an open hand. It looked nothing like the foreboding, cliff-ringed fortress I had first seen a few weeks ago, but vulnerable; a fragile shard of rock in danger of being washed away by some rogue wave.

“Look!” shouted Enoch, standing up in his boat to point at it. “It’s disappearing!”

A spectral fog had begun to enshroud the island, blanking it from view, and we broke from rowing to watch it fade.

“Farewell, island,” Emma called out. “You were so good to us.”

Horace set his oar down and waved. “Goodbye, house. I shall miss all your rooms and gardens, but most of all I shall miss my bed.”

“So long, loop,” Olive sniffled. “Thank you for keeping us safe all those years.”

“Good years,” said Bronwyn. “The best I’ve known.”

I said a silent goodbye, too, to a place that had changed me forever— and the place that, more than any graveyard, would forever contain the memory, and the mystery, of my grandfather. They were linked inextricably, he and that island, and I wondered, now that they were both gone, if I would ever really understand what had happened to me: what I had become; was becoming. I had come to the island to solve my grandfather’s mystery, and in doing so I had discovered my own. Watching Cairnholm disappear felt like watching the only remaining key to that mystery sink beneath the dark waves. And then the island was simply gone, swallowed up by a mountain of fog.

As if it had never existed.

*

Before long the fog caught up to us. By increments we were blinded, the mainland dimming and the sun fading to a pale white bloom, and we turned circles in the eddying tide until we’d lost all sense of direction. Finally we stopped and put our oars down and waited in the doldrummy quiet, hoping it would pass; there was no use going any further until it did.

“I don’t like this,” Bronwyn said. “If we wait too long it’ll be night, and we’ll have worse things to reckon with than just bad weather.”

Just then, as if it had heard Bronwyn and decided to put us in our place, the weather turned really bad. A strong wind blew up, and within moments our world was transformed. The sea around us whipped into white-capped waves that slapped at our hulls and broke into our boats, sloshing cold water around our feet. Next came rain, hard as little bullets on our skin. Soon we were being tossed around like rubber toys in a bathtub.

“Turn into the waves!” Bronwyn shouted, slicing at the water with her oars. “If they broadside you, you’ll flip for sure!” But most of us were too spent to row in calm water, let alone a boiling sea, and the rest were too scared to even reach for the oars, so instead we grabbed for the gunwales and held on for dear life.

A wall of water plowed straight at us. We climbed the massive wave, our boat turning nearly vertical beneath us. Emma clung to me and I clung to the oarlock; behind us Hugh and Enoch held onto similarly immoveable objects. When we crested the wave it felt like we were on a rollercoaster—my stomach dropped into my legs as we flipped a hundred and eighty degrees to race down the far side, and as we made that violent turn, everything in our boat that wasn’t nailed down—Emma’s map, Hugh’s bag, the red roller suitcase I’d lugged with me since Florida—went flying over our heads and into the water.

There was no time to consider the things we’d lost. We couldn’t even see the other boats. When we’d resumed an even keel, we peered into the maelstrom and screamed our friends’ names. There was a terrible moment of silence, but then we heard voices call back to us, and Millard’s boat appeared out of the mist, all four passengers aboard, waving their arms at us.

“Are you all right?” I shouted.

“Over there!” they called. “Look over there!”

I saw that they weren’t waving hello, but directing our attention to something in the water—the hull of an overturned boat.