Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Chapters 10–11

Emma made frequent and passionate arguments as to why I should stay, none of which acknowledged the life I would be abandoning (however meager it seemed), or how the sudden inexplicable disappearance of their only child might affect my parents, or the stifling suffocation that Emma herself had admitted feeling inside the loop.

Olive, claiming she had misplaced her leaden shoes, took to crawling around the ceiling like a fly, dropping grains of rice on people’s heads until they looked up and noticed her, at which point she’d burst into laughter so all-consuming that her levitation would falter and she’d have to grab onto a chandelier or curtain rod just to keep from falling.

Miss Avocet stayed on, emerging from her torpor now and then to wander the halls, calling out forlornly for her poor abandoned wards before slumping into someone’s arms to be taken back to bed.

But whenever they weren’t under direct orders to do something, the children sank heavily into chairs, stared listlessly out locked windows, paged through dog-eared books they’d read a hundred times before, or slept.

The islanders often made gloomy predictions about what Mother Nature had in store for Cairnholm—they were at the mercy of the elements, after all, and pessimistic by default—but this time their worst fears were confirmed.

So that night I feigned a flu-like illness and locked myself in my room, then slipped out the window and climbed down a drainpipe to the ground.

I told her everything, all the sketchy facts and rumors I’d overheard, and she blanched.

Hands shot up around the room, but she rebuffed all questions and marched off to secure the doors.

Inside was a tableau of frustration that might’ve been straight out of Norman Rockwell, if Norman Rockwell had painted people doing hard time in jail.

Each of us chose a trough and dug into it like a dog excavating a prized bed of flowers, our cupped hands scooping mounds of ice onto the floor.

I couldn’t see his face through the beam of light, but the layered jackets he wore were an instant giveaway. It was the ornithologist.

He pointed the flashlight at each of us and spoke as if quoting some secret dossier.

A man so despised, so foul tempered, so robotically inflexible that on the last day of eighth grade we defaced his yearbook picture with staples and left it like an effigy behind his seat.

And if I may anticipate a few more of your questions, yes, I am a licensed therapist—the minds of common people have long
fascinated me—and no, despite the fact that our sessions were predicated on a lie, I don’t think they were a complete waste of time.

A shadow appeared in the doorway behind him, and a moment later we were overcome by a noxious wave of stench.

The four of you together might be enough to finally shift old Malthus out of the debased form he’s been stuck in so long.

That we would be so easy to kill was the only reason we weren’t dead already; like a gourmand about to enjoy a fine meal, there was no reason to rush things.

Just as it was about to lash its trident of tongues at her, she rammed Martin’s ice trough with the full weight of her body and levered her arms under it as it tipped and then heaved it and the whole huge thing, full of ice and fish and Martin’s body, careened through the air and fell upon the hollow with a terrific crash.

I took her hand and we pushed into the house, snaking through a maze of skittish animals that shied from our touch.

And then I could smell it, even more pungent than the house’s other stinks, and I could feel it at the threshold of the room.

I tried hacking at the tongue with my shears, but it was too sinewy and tough, a rope of undulating muscle, and my shears too dull.

“Oh, stuff the modesty!” Emma said proudly. “You killed it.”

We shed our black coats and loped through the grass, doubled-over like commandos, until we came to the path that led to the beach.

“Not before we take care of you,” I said. “Who knows how to make a tourniquet?”

I heard Golan scream a spectacular array of curses, and then something clattered down the stairs, landing nearby.

He was bleeding badly from a cut on the bridge of his nose, rivulets of red streaking his face like tears.

But you’ll only be delaying the inevitable, not to mention making things worse for yourselves. We know how to find you now.

More like me are coming, and I can guarantee the collateral damage they do will make what I did to your friend seem downright charitable.

What’s really insane is how you peculiars hide from the world when you could rule it—succumb to death when you could dominate it—and let the common genetic trash of the human race drive you underground when you could so easily make them your slaves, as they rightly should be!

We tried to paddle against it but had no more luck than flotsam caught in a tidal wave, and then it thudded against our feet and we were rising, too, riding its back.

The landscape was gouged with smoking craters, fresh-turned earth thrown everywhere as if some giant dog had been digging at it.

It was easy now to picture what this place would one day become: that sad and desecrated wreck I had first discovered weeks ago.

“It’s a highly complex and dangerous undertaking, but by leapfrogging from one loop to another—a day fifty years in the past, for instance—then you’ll find you have access to a whole range of loops that have ceased to exist in the last fifty years. Should you have the wherewithal to travel to them, within those you’ll find still other loops, and so on exponentially.”

The rain had finally eased, and the beginning of a blue day was percolating on the horizon.

I wish your mother and I had never let that crackpot therapist talk us into bringing you out here, because it has been an unmitigated disaster!

Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before and After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind—my parents, my town, my once-best-and-only friend—and I realized that leaving wouldn’t be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight.

Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.

Ten peculiar children and one peculiar bird were made to fit in just three stout rowboats, with much being jettisoned and left behind on the dock.

And so Enoch held up Miss Peregrine’s cage and she let out a great screeching cry. We answered with a cry of our own, both a victory yell and a lament, for everything lost and yet to be gained.

It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren—and my own fantastic stories to share.