A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(90)

“Sure,” I said, starting to get out my wallet.

“Not like that,” he said. “I mean, proof.”

“I think he means proof that we’re peculiar,” said Millard. He lifted a business card holder on the front desk, twirled it in the air, and set it down again. “Invisible here, hello!”

“That’ll do,” the clerk said. “What type of room you want?”

“We don’t care,” Enoch said, “we just want to sleep.” But the clerk was already pulling a laminated binder out from under the desk. He set it down, opened it, and began to list the options.

“Now, of course there’s your standard room—nice, but nothing fancy—but what we’re famous for are the special accommodations we offer our peculiar guests. We have a room for the gravitationally challenged.” He flipped to a picture of a smiling family posing in a room that had all its furniture bolted to the ceiling. “The floaters love it. They can relax, dine, even sleep in total comfort without need of weighted garments or belts.”

He turned to a picture of a girl in bed with a wolf, both of them in nightclothes. “There’s pet-friendly rooms where peculiar animals of most persuasions are welcome, so long as they’re house-trained, under a hundred pounds, and are certified nonlethal.”

He flipped another page to a photo of what looked like a nicely furnished underground bunker. “And we have a special room for our, eh, combustible guests.” He flicked his eyes to Emma. “So they don’t burn down the rest of the property in their sleep.”

Emma looked offended. “I never combust spontaneously. And we don’t have pets, and we don’t float.”

The clerk wasn’t done. “We also have a room filled with nice, loamy soil for guests with roots, or the partially dead—”

“We don’t need any weird rooms!” Enoch snapped. “A regular one is fine!”

“Suit yourself.” The clerk slapped the book shut. “Regular room. Just a few more questions.”

Enoch groaned as the clerk began filling out a form.

“Smoking or nonsmoking?”

“None of us smoke cigarettes,” Bronwyn said.

“I didn’t ask about cigarettes. Do you emit smoke from any part of your body?”

“No.”

“Nonsmoking.” He checked a box on the form. “Singles or doubles?”

“We’d all like to be together in the same room,” said Millard.

“I didn’t ask that,” the clerk said. “Do any of you have doubles? Doppelg?ngers, replicants, mirror brothers. We’ll need an extra deposit and photo ID for each one.”

“None,” I said.

He marked the form. “How many years will you be staying?”

“How many years?”

“. . . will you be staying?”

“Just one night,” said Emma.

“Extra charge for that,” he muttered, marking the form, then looked up. “Right this way.”





He slouched out of the office. We followed him down a dingy exterior hall polluted with traffic noise and into a dim utility room. It was a loop entrance. I realized that going in, this time, so I was ready for the jolt. When we came out, it was nighttime and cold and very quiet. The clerk walked us back down the hall, which was much tidier in this past version of itself. “It’s always nighttime here. Makes it easier for our guests to sleep any time they want.”

He stopped at a room and opened the door for us. “Anything you need, I’m just through the loop closet, at the desk where you found me. Ice is down the hall.”

He walked away and we went inside. The room looked just like the picture in the postcard my grandfather had sent me. There was a large bed, some terrible curtains, a fat orange TV on a stand, and fake knotted-pine wall panels, the patterns all clashing to create a disharmony that felt almost like noise, a constant undertone buzz that was vaguely unsettling. The room had a fold-out sofa and a double-wide cot, too, so everyone had a place to sleep. We settled in, got comfortable, and then Millard and I climbed onto the fold-out sofa to pore over Abe’s logbook.

“Abe and H went on a number of missions which bore some resemblance to ours,” said Millard. “It might be instructive to see how they dealt with their challenges.”

Luckily, Millard had read the entire thing twice during the long road trip, and his memory for details was so sharp that he had an almost instant recall of vast portions of the log. He turned to a mission report from the early 1960s. Abe and H had been tasked with extracting an endangered peculiar child from a county in the Texas Panhandle, but they didn’t know which town the child was in. “And how did they begin their search?” Millard asked, scanning the report. “By blending in with the local populace and talking to people. Before long they heard a traveling carnival was in the area, which, as you know, is just the sort of place peculiars feel comfortable blending in. They caught up with it outside of Amarillo, and found the peculiar child hiding inside a giant cardboard elephant on wheels that traveled with the carnival.” The report included a picture of the elephant, and it was indeed enormous, taller than a house. “Can you believe it?” Millard said, laughing. “A Trojan elephant!”

“So they just asked people?” said Enoch, who had been listening in. “That was their brilliant detective work?”