A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,104
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?”
“Simple, straightforward detective work,” said Millard. “The best kind.”
“Okay,” I said, “what else did they do?”
“Periodical searches!” he said, weirdly excited. “Here, here.” He turned a lot of pages, then landed on the report he was looking for. “There was a young woman rapidly turning invisible. She was uncontacted and, if my own experiences can be brought to bear, almost certainly terrified. Abe’s goal was to find her before she could disappear altogether, and bring her into the fold of some benevolent peculiar clan—preferably other invisibles. But it would be difficult; the young woman had fled from every prior attempt at contact.”
“And they found her using the newspaper?” I said. “How?”
“They were able to pinpoint her location via headlines in a tabloid. Tabloids can’t always be taken seriously, but once in a while they do contain nuggets of truth. See?” He turned the page, and clipped to the backside of the mission log was a photo of a couple of kids on a beach and a newspaper crumpled in the sand. The headline was blurred but partially readable—something about a nude mystery girl.
“Thanks to this ridiculous article,” Millard continued, “they were able to track her to a beach town in California, and then to a particular beach. Beaches are terrible places to be invisible, because the sand gives your footsteps away, so they were able to corner her long enough to introduce themselves and explain what was happening to her, and she accepted their offer of help.”
“What if there are no newspaper headlines about our subject?” asked Emma. “And nothing so obvious as a carnival in town?”
“What if they’re in a school of three thousand kids who all look peculiar?” said Enoch.
“In such cases, where there’s a known location but no other lead, they would go to the area, blend in, and simply wait for the peculiar to give themselves away somehow.”