Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(86)

“They are tired, had long journey,” said the folding man. “Give them break.”

The clown waved his finger in the air like a schoolmarm. “Uh-uh. Nobody rides for free. I don’t care if you’re here for an hour or a month, as long as you’re here, you’ve got to be willing to fight. Now, you’re a scrawny-looking bunch, but you’re peculiar, so I know you’ve all got hidden talents. Show me what you can do!”

He got up and moved toward Enoch, one arm extended like he was going to search Enoch’s pockets for his peculiar ability. “You there,” he said. “Do your thing!”

“I’ll need a dead person in order to demonstrate,” Enoch said.

“That could be you, if you so much as lay one finger on me.”

The clown rerouted himself toward Emma. “Then how about you, sweetheart,” he said, and Emma held a particular finger up and made a flame dance atop it like a birthday candle. The clown laughed and said, “Sense of humor! I like that,” and moved on to the blind brothers.

“They’re connected in the head,” said Melina, putting herself between the clown and the brothers. “They can see with their ears, and always know what the other’s thinking.”

The clown clapped his hands. “Finally, something useful! They’ll be our lookouts—put one in the carnival and keep the other here. If anything goes wrong out there, we’ll know right away!”

He pushed past Melina. The brothers shied away from him.

“You can’t separate them!” said Melina. “Joel-and-Peter don’t like being apart.”

“And I don’t like being hunted by invisible corpse beasts,” said the clown, and he began to pry the older brother from the younger. The boys locked arms and moaned loudly, their tongues clicking and eyes rolling wildly in their heads. I was about to intervene when the brothers came apart and let out a doubled scream so loud and piercing I feared my head would break. The dishes on the table shattered, everyone ducked and clapped their hands over their ears, and I thought I could hear, from the frozen floors below, cracks spidering through the ice.

As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.

“See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.

“Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.

With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.

“If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”

“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”

“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”

Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.

“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”

“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.

“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”

The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.

“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”

“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.

“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”

Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”

“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”

Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”

For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.

Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait—no—I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”

“But it is possible,” Horace insisted.