A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(46)

Fear made them hungry.

I pulled a knife from the block on my way through the kitchen—not much good against a hollow, but better than nothing—then exited through the garage and outside, nearly tripping over a coiled garden hose as I rounded into the backyard. A hazy trail of ozone rose from the potting shed’s roof. The pocket loop had been used very recently.

And then, as suddenly as the feeling had come upon me, it vanished. The compass needle moved toward the bay, then flipped around completely toward the gulf, then went slack. That had never happened before, and I couldn’t understand it. Could the whole thing have been a false alarm? Could nightmares trigger my peculiar reflex?

Feeling the wet grass between my toes, I glanced down at what I was wearing: ripped sweatpants, an old T-shirt, no shoes, and I thought, This is how Abe died. This, almost exactly. Lured into the dark in his bedclothes, gripping an improvised weapon.

I lowered the knife. Slowly, my hand stopped shaking. I walked the perimeter of my house, back and forth, waiting. No feeling came. Eventually I went back to my room and slipped into the sleeping bag on my floor, but I did not sleep.



* * *



? ? ?

The next morning I was checking my phone every minute, hoping for a call from H. He hadn’t said when he would be in touch. Emma and I debated telling the others, but decided to wait until we had a mission—and maybe we wouldn’t say anything even then. Maybe the mission would only involve the two of us. Maybe some of our friends wouldn’t want to go, or would be against the whole idea. What if one of them spilled the beans and told Miss Peregrine what we were planning before we had a chance to leave?

After breakfast, I was obligated to take the peculiars out clothes shopping. It seemed like a good way to kill time while I waited, so I tried to throw myself into it and forget about H’s call.

The first batch were Hugh, Claire, Olive, and Horace. I drove them to the mall. Not the mall by my house, where I worried we might encounter someone from my school. I picked the Shaker Pines mall, out by the Interstate. On the way, I pointed out the basic components of modern suburbia—that’s a bank, that’s a hospital, those are condos—because they kept asking what everything was. What seemed utterly banal to me was wondrous to them.

In her loop, Miss Peregrine had worked miracles protecting her wards from physical harm, but in her zeal to keep them safe, she had banned anyone who visited from talking to them about the modern world, and that had put them at a disadvantage. They had been too sheltered, and now they were like little Rip van Winkles, waking after a long sleep to a world they didn’t understand. They knew about modern things up to a point—electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, old movies, old music, and other things that were generally known and popular prior to September 3, 1940. After that, their knowledge was spotty and inconsistent. They had spent no more than a few sporadic hours in the present, and those were mostly on Cairnholm, where time had practically stood still even as the calendar changed. Compared to their island, even my small town seemed to move at a million miles per hour, and it occasionally paralyzed them with anxiety.

In the mall’s colossal parking lot, Horace became overwhelmed and refused to get out of the car. “The past is so much less terrifying than the future,” he explained after some coaxing. “Even the most terrible era of the past is at least knowable. It can be studied. The world survived it. But in the present, one never knows when the whole world could come to a terrible, crashing end.”

I tried to reason with him. “The world’s not going to end today. And even if it does, it’ll happen whether or not you go into this mall with us.”

“I know that. But it feels like it will. But perhaps if I just sit here and don’t move, everything will stop moving with me, and nothing bad will happen.”

Just then a car playing loud, bass-heavy music rolled by with its windows down. Horace tensed and squeezed his eyes shut.

“See?” said Claire. “The world goes banging on, even if you just sit. So come inside with us.”

“Oh, bollocks,” he said, and threw the car door open.

As the others applauded his bravery, I made a mental note that Horace might not be the best companion to bring along on our first mission, whatever it was.

Shaker Pines was a classic, as malls went—noisy, antiseptically bright, and layered in baffling cultural references (you try explaining the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. or the As Seen on TV store to someone from the first half of the last century). It was also crowded with teenagers, which was half the point. We weren’t here just to outfit them in modern clothes. I wanted to expose them to normal kids, kids they would be expected to imitate. It was more than a shopping trip; it was an anthropological expedition.

We walked and browsed, the peculiars bunched in a knot around me like explorers in a jungle infamous for tiger attacks. We ate greasy things at the food court and sat watching other teenagers, my friends quietly studying their behavior: their whispers and jokes; their startling bursts of laughter; the way they grouped themselves, tight and clannish, rarely mixing; how they did everything, even ate, without ever letting go of their phones.

“Do they come from very rich families?” Claire asked, leaning into our group over her plastic tray, voice lowered.

“I think they’re just normal teenagers,” I said.

“They don’t work?”