A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(124)

Then I was out on the street, speed-walking down Sixth Avenue on a dim winter day, past a laundry billowing steam onto the sidewalk, past mounds of black snow, past a line of shivering men in threadbare coats and a sign that read HOT MEALS ONE CENT. I reached into my coat’s pocket to find a rudimentary map. It showed the loop’s department store entrance, and a half mile ahead of me, its outer membrane, beyond which lay the present. The map was marked with an instruction to burn after reading, so I tossed it into a flaming barrel around which a group of ragged men were huddled. Starting to shiver myself, I ran.

After a few blocks I could feel the air begin to thin and tremble around me. A short distance later, I passed through the loop membrane, out of 1937 and back into the present. The air warmed and brightened instantly, and the buildings rose to towering heights.

I hailed a cab, gave the driver the address from the matchbook, and ten minutes later we pulled up outside a brick building wrapped in fire escapes. On the street level was a small Chinese restaurant—Hong’s. There were ducks hanging in the window and a fringed red lantern above the door. I paid the cabbie, went inside, and asked a waiter for H. He looked confused, so I showed him the matchbook, and then he nodded and took me outside.

“Number four, around the back,” he said, pointing to an alley. “Tell him rent is coming Wednesday.”

There was a pay phone in the alley—a strangely old-fashioned thing in modern day New York, housed in a box with a door that folded open. The phone box stood between the back entrance to Hong’s, where I could hear food frying and dishes clanking, and a door that led into a run-down apartment building lobby. I pushed it open and came into a room with mailboxes along one wall and two elevators on the other, one marked OUT OF ORDER.

Which floor? I pressed the elevator button, and as it dinged and the door slid open, I felt it—that prick in my gut when a hollow was close. The sensation could mean the hollow was in the building at that moment, or that it had come and gone so many times it had left a lasting trail. The hollow could only belong to H.

I got into the elevator and pressed the top floor button. The door creaked shut. The car began to rise.

As it climbed, I could feel the compass-point pain in my belly shifting—180 degrees straight up at first, then lower the higher I went. When I passed the fourteenth floor, it was nearly a level 90 degrees, so I hit the button for 15.

The car stopped. The door opened. Right away I noticed two things that seemed very wrong. The first was a trail of blood running down the middle of the hall. When I saw it, I looked down at my feet; the trail led to the rear corner of the elevator car, and a rapidly congealing puddle.

My chest began to pound. Someone was hurt, and hurt badly.

The second thing was that halfway down the long hall, there was no light. None at all. It wasn’t simply dim. I couldn’t see the walls, the floor, the ceiling. And my compass was pointing directly into the dark.

It meant Noor was here. Noor was here and something terrible had happened. I was too late.

I sprinted down the hall, following the trail of blood into the darkness. When I could no longer see my feet hitting the floor, I slowed a little and stuck out my arms, letting the pain in my stomach be my guide. I rounded a corner, stumbled over a box someone had left in the hall. After a few more strides into the dark, the compass swung sharply left, toward an apartment door.

It had been left open a crack, and through it I could see, finally, a sliver of light. I shouldered the door open. It was unexpectedly heavy, as if made from reinforced steel. I followed the light down a short hall, through a cramped kitchen piled up with dirty pots, into a den. A dingy warren festooned with potted plants and pervaded by a cloying-sweet smell.

Curled on a sofa in the corner was Noor. Her body filled the room with a soft orange glow. She wasn’t moving.

I ran to her. Her hair was covering her face. I rolled her gently onto her back, squinting against the light that shone from inside her. I pressed two fingers to her neck. Her skin was hot to the touch. After a moment, I found an artery—and a pulse—and I breathed a sigh of relief.

A strange, keening wail sounded from across the room. I spun to look. H lay splayed on his back on an old Persian rug. His hollowgast sat astride him, one muscled tongue lashed around H’s waist and the other two around his wrists. The thing looked like it was about to crack open his skull and eat his brain.

“Get away!” I shouted, and the wailing stopped as the hollow hissed at me.

It was not about to kill him, I realized. Its friend was dying.

It was crying.

I summoned a few words of hollowspeak to shoo the creature away. It hissed at me again, unwound its tongues reluctantly from H’s wrists, and scuttled into the kitchen.

I crouched beside the old man. Blood had soaked through his shirt, his pants, and the carpet beneath him.

“H. It’s Jacob Portman. Can you hear me?”

He sharpened. His eyes fixed on me.

“Damn it, son,” he said, scowling, “you really don’t follow orders for shit.”

“We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

I began to slide my arms underneath him. He groaned in pain, and the hollowgast let out a howl from the kitchen.

“Forget it. I’ve lost too much blood already.”

“You can make it. We just have to—”

He wrenched away from me. “No!” His voice and his arms were so strong that it shocked me, but then he collapsed back to the floor. “Don’t make me sic Horatio on you. The whole neighborhood is crawling with Leo’s guys. If I go out there again, it’ll rain bullets.”