A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(29)

“Move slowly, listen out for anything strange, and keep your wits about you,” she said. “We don’t know what’s down here, and it’s possible Abe could have booby-trapped the place.”

We began to move forward, hunched and shuffling. I tried to imagine where we were in relation to the house above us, based on the direction the tunnel was facing. After twenty or thirty feet, we were most likely beneath the living room. After forty, we were leaving the house altogether, and after fifty, I was fairly certain we were under the front yard.

Finally, the tunnel ended at a door. It was heavy-looking, like the hatch behind us, but it was hanging slightly ajar.

“Hello?” I called. At the sound of my voice Bronwyn startled badly.

“Sorry,” I said to her.

“Are you expecting someone?” Millard asked.

“No. But you never know.”

Though I tried not to show it, I was so nervous I was vibrating.

Emma stepped through the door, then stood shining her flame around for a moment. “Looks safe enough,” she said. “But this might be useful . . .”

She reached for the wall, flicked a switch, and a bank of fluorescent lights clinked on inside the room.

“Hey now!” Olive said. “That’s more like it.”

Emma closed her hand to extinguish her flame, and we piled in after her. And then I turned a slow circle, taking everything in. The room was small, maybe twenty feet by fifteen, but I could finally stand up to full height. In the way of my grandfather, it was meticulously organized. Along one wall were four metal beds arranged bunk-style in two stacks, a tight roll of sheets and blankets sealed in plastic at the foot of each. There was a big locker bolted to the wall, which Emma opened to find all kinds of supplies: flashlights, batteries, basic tools, and enough canned and dried food to last several weeks. Beside that was a big blue drum filled with drinking water, and next to that, a strange-looking plastic box, which I recognized from the survivalist magazines I sometimes found in Abe’s garage as a chemical toilet.

“Wow, look at this!” said Bronwyn. She was standing in a corner, her eye pressed against a metal cylinder that protruded down from the ceiling. “I can see outside!”

The cylinder had handles attached at the base and a viewing lens. Bronwyn stepped aside so I could look through it, and I saw a slightly blurred image of the cul-de-sac outside. I grabbed the handles and turned it, and the view rotated until I could see the house, partly obscured by a field of high grass.

“It’s a periscope,” I said. “It must be hidden at the edge of the yard.”

“So he could see them coming,” said Emma.

“What is this place?” said Olive.

“It must be a shelter,” said Bronwyn. “In case of hollowgast attack. See the four beds? So his family could hide, too.”

“It was for more than just waiting out attacks,” said Millard. “It was a receiving station.”

His voice came from the opposite wall, next to a big wooden desk. Its surface was almost entirely taken up by an odd-looking machine made of chrome and green-plated metal—like a cross between an archaic printer and a fax machine, with a keyboard stuck awkwardly to the front.

“This must be how he communicated.”

“With who?” said Bronwyn.

“The other hollow-hunters. See, this is a pneumatic teleprinter.”

“Oh, wow,” said Emma, crossing the small room to look at it. “I remember these. Miss Peregrine used to have one. Whatever happened to it?”

“It was part of a scheme for ymbrynes to communicate with one another without having to leave the safety of their loops,” Millard explained. “It didn’t work, in the end. Too complex, and too vulnerable to interception.”

But I was in a daze, only half listening. I’d been trying to wrap my mind around the fact that all this had been so close to me—quite literally under my feet—for years, and I hadn’t known it. That I had spent afternoons playing in the grass just twenty feet above where I was standing now. It boggled the mind, and it made me wonder: How much more peculiarness had I been exposed to without realizing it? I thought about my grandfather’s friends—the old fellows who would come around to visit now and then, whiling away a few hours chatting with Abe out on the back porch, or in his study.

I knew him back in Poland, my grandfather had said about one such visitor.

A friend from the war, was how he’d described another.

But who were they, really?

“You say this thing was for communicating with other hollow-hunters,” I said. “What do you know about them?”

“About the hunters?” said Emma. “We don’t know much, but that was by design. They were extremely secretive.”

“Do you know how many there were?”

“Not more than a dozen, I suppose,” said Millard. “But that’s just an educated guess.”

“And could they all control hollows?” I asked.

Maybe there were other peculiars like me out there. Maybe I could find them.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Emma. “That’s why Abe was so special.”

“And you, Mr. Jacob,” said Bronwyn.

“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,” said Millard. “Why didn’t Abe seek shelter down here the night the hollowgast came for him?”