Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #3)(15)
The trouble with the merely unwise/deeply stupid line is that you often don’t know which side you’re on until it’s too late. By the time things have settled down enough for you to reflect, the button’s been pushed, the plane’s left the hangar, or in our case, the boat’s left the dock—and as I watched Sharon shove us away from it with his foot, which was bare, and I noticed that his bare foot was not quite human-looking, with toes as long as mini hotdogs and thick yellow nails that curled like claws, I realized with sinking certainty which side of the line we were on, and also that it was too late to do much about it.
Sharon yanked the ignition cord on a dinky outboard motor and it coughed awake in a cloud of blue fumes. Tucking his considerable legs beneath him, he lowered into the puddle of black fabric his cloak made in the boat. He revved the puttering engine, then steered us out of the underjetty, through a forest of looming wood pylons and into warm sunlight. Then we were in a canal, a man-made tributary of the Thames walled on both sides by glassy buildings and bobbing with more boats than a toddler’s tub at bath time—candy-red tugs and wide, flat barges and tour boats whose upper decks teemed with sightseers taking the air. Strangely, none of them trained their cameras at, nor seemed to even notice, the unusual craft that burbled past them, with an angel of death at the tiller, two blood-spattered children in the seat, and a dog in glasses peering over the side. Which was just as well. Had Sharon charmed his boat somehow so that only peculiars could see it? I decided to believe it was so, because there was nowhere to hide in it anyway, should we have needed to.
Looking it over in the full light of day, I noticed that the boat was extremely simple but for an intricately carved figurehead rising from its bow. The carving was shaped like a fat, scaly snake that curved upward in a gentle S, but where a head should’ve been was a giant eyeball, lidless and large as a melon, staring forever out before us.
“What is it?” I asked, running my hand over its polished surface.
“Yew wood,” Sharon called over the motor’s growl.
“I would what?”
“That’s what it’s made from.”
“But what’s it for?”
“To see with!” he replied testily.
Sharon pushed the motor harder—possibly just to drown out my questions—and as we picked up speed the bow lifted gently from the water. I took a deep breath, enjoying the sun and wind on my face, and Addison let his tongue hang out as he leaned over the side with his paws, looking as happy as I’d ever seen him.
What a beautiful day to go to Hell.
“So I’ve been thinking about how you got here,” Emma said. “How you got back to the present.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do you think?”
“There’s only one explanation that makes any sense—though not bloody much. When we were in the underground tunnels with all those wights, and we crossed back into the present, the reason you came with us instead of continuing on in eighteen-whatever-it-was, suddenly alone, was that Miss Peregrine was there somehow, nearby, and helped you cross without anyone knowing it.”
“I don’t know, Emma, that seems …” I hesitated, not wanting to be harsh. “You think she was hiding in the tunnel?”
“I’m saying it’s possible. We’ve no idea where she was.”
“The wights have her. Caul admitted it!”
“Since when do you believe anything the wights say?”
“You’ve got me there,” I said. “But since Caul was boasting about having her, I figured he was probably telling the truth.”
“Maybe … or he said it to crush our spirits and make us want to give up. He was trying to convince us to surrender to his soldiers, remember?”
“True,” I said, frowning. My brain was starting to kink from all the possibilities. “Okay. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Miss P was with us in the tunnel. Why would she have gone to the trouble of sending me back to the present as a captive of the wights? We were on our way to have our second souls sucked out. I would’ve been better off stuck in that loop.”
For a moment Emma looked genuinely stumped. Then her face lit up and she said, “Unless you and I are supposed to rescue everyone else. Maybe it was all part of her plan.”
“But how could she have known we would escape the wights?”
Emma cast a sidelong glance at Addison. “Maybe she had help,” she whispered.
“Em, this hypothetical chain of events is getting really unlikely.” I took a breath, choosing my words carefully. “I know you want to believe Miss Peregrine is out there somewhere, free, watching over us. I do, too …”
“I want that so badly, it hurts,” she said.
“But if she were free, wouldn’t she have contacted us somehow? And if he were involved,” I said quietly, nodding toward Addison, “wouldn’t he have mentioned it by now?”
“Not if he’s sworn to secrecy. Perhaps it’s too dangerous to tell anyone, even us. If we knew Miss Peregrine’s whereabouts, and someone knew we knew, we might break under torture …”
“And he wouldn’t?” I said a little too loudly, and the dog looked up at us, his cheeks ballooning and tongue flapping ridiculously as the wind caught them. “Ho, there!” he cried. “I’ve counted fifty-six fish already, though one or two might’ve been bits of half-submerged rubbish. What are you two whispering about?”