A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(106)

We all seemed to agree except Lilly and Emma, but even their objections were starting to fade.

I pushed the door open and ushered everyone inside. It was indeed a restaurant: a small old place with checkered tablecloths and cane-backed chairs and a soda fountain along one wall. Behind the counter stood a waitress in an apron and a paper hat, and she was smiling like she’d been waiting for us all day. We were the only ones there.





“You kids look hungry!” she said, bouncing on her heels.

“Oh, we are,” said Bronwyn.

The waitress didn’t seem to notice the blood on Bronwyn’s shirt. “In fact, you look like you’re downright starving.”

“Yes,” said Enoch, his voice a bit robotic. “Starving.”

“What kind of restaurant is this?” asked Noor. “I thought I smelled paneer.”

“Oh, we’ve got everything,” said Bernice with a small wave of her hand. “Everything you could ever want.”

Had she said her name? How did I know it? My brain felt like mush.

The little voice that wondered if this was a good idea had faded to a whisper. Lilly’s objections, too, had quieted. The last thing I’d heard her say was, “You guys can stay here if you want, but I’m taking your friend to the hospital!” But her efforts to drag Bronwyn out by the elbow hadn’t been very effective. (You can’t drag Bronwyn anywhere she doesn’t want to go.) “We don’t have money,” I said, and the disappointment I felt as I realized I had left our cash in the trunk of the car was so total it felt like I was suddenly in mourning.

“It just so happens we’re having a special promotion today,” said Bernice. “Everything’s on the house.”

“Really?” said Bronwyn.

“That’s right. Your money’s no good here.”

We bellied up to the counter and sat on the fixed, plastic stools, all in a row. There was no menu. We simply told Bernice what we wanted, and she shouted the orders to an unseen line cook in the back. A remarkably short time later, a bell dinged and she began to bring out plate after plate of food. A rooster cooked in wine for Millard. Paneer masala dosas and a mango lassi for Noor. A lamb roast trimmed with mint jelly for Emma. A double cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shake for me. A lobster for Bronwyn, complete with a shell-cracker and a bib with a picture of a lobster on it. A steaming Korean bibimbap with an egg cracked over it for Lilly. It was a more eclectic array than I’d thought possible in any restaurant—much less a greasy old diner with only one person working the kitchen—but the part of my brain that was objecting to all this had gotten very quiet: Don’t eat that.

You should leave.

This is a bad idea.

Stop now before it’s

too late.

I don’t remember eating my double cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shake. But the next thing I knew, the shake was drained, there were only greasy crumbs left on my plate, and my head was heavy, so heavy.

“Oh, honey!” Bernice trotted out from behind the counter, a hand to her chest. “You look beat!”

And I was. I really was.

“I’m so, so, so tired,” I heard Emma say, and a murmur of agreement rippled through my friends.

“Why don’t you head on upstairs and catch a little sleep?”

“We have to go,” said Noor. She was trying to get up from her counter stool, but couldn’t seem to work up the momentum.

“Do you?” said Bernice. “I don’t think you do.”

“Jacob,” Emma whispered in my ear.

She sounded drunk.

“We gotta go.”

“I know.”

We had been hypnotized somehow. I knew it. It was like what the Mermaid Fantasyland peculiars had tried to do to us—but this time we had taken the bait.

“We’ve got rooms upstairs with beds all made for you. Just through here . . .”

Now that she’d said it, I found that I could make myself stand. In fact, we were all standing. And Bernice was pushing us toward the exit—a strange tunnel of hallway painted with red and white candy stripes.

We let ourselves be pushed. The hallway seemed to elongate as we approached it. I heard a scuffle and turned to see Bernice barring Lilly’s way with her arm.

“Hey,” I said vaguely. “Be nice to her.”

Lilly was speaking. I saw her mouth moving, her throat constricting with the effort, but her voice did not (or could not) reach my ears.

“We’ll be back soon, Lil, just wait here,” Noor said.

Of course, Lilly wouldn’t have been able to join us even if she had been allowed to walk down the hall. Around the halfway point I felt the rush in my head and the drop in my stomach, and whump, the loop took us.

Lilly was no longer behind us, and up ahead the candy-striped hallway now had an endpoint: a staircase.

“It’s just upstairs!” Bernice’s voice echoed, though she was nowhere to be seen.

We dragged ourselves slowly up, one step at a time, and as we mounted the landing I felt the last of my willpower dissipate. We were at the mercy of whatever siren was luring us along, and all we could seem to do, for now, was obey.



* * *



? ? ?

On the landing were two young girls on their hands and knees, engaged in what seemed to be a thorough, inch-by-inch examination of the floorboards. When we came into the hall, they stopped what they were doing and looked up at us.