A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(67)

“Unless H sent us here for no reason,” said Enoch, “other than to test our patience.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Emma said.

Enoch kicked a beach ball that was lying at his feet. It went flying into the pool. “Maybe you’re not used to having tricks played on you, but it’s just the sort of thing Abe would have done—to me, anyway—and this bloke worked for him.”

“With him,” said Emma, who still soured the moment anyone criticized my grandfather.

“Same thing!”

“Just go and fix the car!” she shouted. “That’s the only reason you’re here, isn’t it?”

Enoch looked stung. “Come on, Bronwyn,” he mumbled, “the queen’s giving orders again.”

He and Bronwyn went to the car. Enoch got in, pointed to the garage, and shouted, “MUSH!”

Bronwyn shook her head and sighed. “I’d better get a double helping of supper after all this,” she said, then put her hands on the bumper and started pushing.

“Well, hello, young man. Hello, young lady!”

I turned to see a smiling man striding toward me. He wrapped a big, calloused hand around mine, and we shook. “Adelaide Pollard, very pleased to meet you.” He was a tall black man in a beautiful blue suit and a matching hat. He looked about seventy, but might’ve been older, this being a loop.

“Adelaide,” said Emma, smiling like I’d never seen her smile at a stranger. “That’s not a usual name!”

“Well, I’m not a usual man! What brings you all to our little neck of the swamp?”

“We stopped at a place called Mermaid Fantasyland,” said Millard, and I saw Adelaide’s face cloud. “I think they tried to put a spell on us, or some such thing.”

“We got away,” said Emma, “but then some policemen followed us, and pretty soon after that, our car broke down.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that,” he said. “It’s just sad, people pulling this stuff on their own kind. Just sad.”

“Who are they?” Emma said.

“Nothing but slimy reprobates,” he said. “They try to lure out-of-town peculiars who don’t know better into their little trap, and then they sell ’em to the highwaymen.”

“You mean the cops?” I said.

“Pretend cops. They’re like a gang, you could say. They go up and down the highway, harassing folks, stealing, playing like they own the whole county. Ain’t nothing but thugs and shakedown artists.”

“Used to be we only had those shadow monsters to worry about.” An old white man in a wheelchair came up behind Adelaide. The left leg of his pants was rolled up and pinned, and he held an ashtray in his lap into which he tapped a lit cigar. “I swear, sometimes I miss ’em. Ever since the monsters disappeared, these highwaymen have been running wild. They think they can do whatever they like.” He puffed his cigar through the gap in his missing front teeth. “Al Potts, by the way.” He gave us a little salute. “Mr. Potts to you.”

“I’m just sorry as hell about this, young people,” said Adelaide. “You seem very nice.”

“We are,” said Millard. “But we’ll be all right.”

“‘We are,’ he says!” Adelaide laughed. “I like that.”

Mr. Potts leaned over and spat through his teeth onto the ground. “You laugh too damn much, Adelaide.”

Adelaide ignored him. “It’s a shame,” he said. “This was a nice place once. Nice peculiars like you used to come here to have a good time. Now people just wash up like flotsam and get stuck.”

“I ain’t stuck,” said Mr. Potts. “I’m retired.”

“Sure, Al. Tell yourself that.”

“What happened to the ymbryne who made this loop?” Millard asked. “Why didn’t she stay around to help protect it?”

Adelaide looked at me and whistled. “Ymbryne. When’s the last time you heard that word, Al?”

“Long time ago,” said Mr. Potts.

“I haven’t seen one in . . . oh, forty years,” said Adelaide, his voice softening with nostalgia. “A real one, I mean. Not one of these halfsies who can’t even shape-shift.”

“Where did they all go?” Emma asked.

“There weren’t all that many to begin with,” said Mr. Potts. “I remember back in the fifties, the loop up in Indiana where I lived shared an ymbryne with the next closest loop. Miss Pigeon Hawk. Then one day it seemed like the wights and their shadow creatures were everywhere all of a sudden, and they just hated ymbrynes worse than poison. They tried everything they could to get rid of ’em. Did a pretty good job of it, too.”

“How?” said Emma. “We’d had hollows and wights in Europe since 1908 and they hated our ymbrynes just as much, but most of ours managed to survive.”

“Can’t say I’m an expert on how the wights operate,” said Adelaide. “But I’ll say this: Our ymbrynes were every bit as tough and smart as anyone else’s, if not more. I’d trust an American ymbryne with my life—if I could find one. So it’s not that they lacked mettle.”

“And instead you have a so-called loop-keeper,” said Millard, sounding doubtful.