A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,123

for now, was obey.

* * *

• • •

On the landing were two young girls on their hands and knees, engaged in what seemed to be a thorough, inch-by-inch examination of the floorboards. When we came into the hall, they stopped what they were doing and looked up at us.

“Have you seen a doll?” the older girl asked. “Frankie lost one of her dolls.”

She seemed to be telling a joke, but she didn’t crack a smile.

“Sorry,” said Noor.

“We ordered a . . . sleep?” said Millard, sounding confused.

“Through there,” said the older girl, nodding to the door behind her.

We stepped past them. “Run,” I thought I heard one hiss, “run while you can.” But when I turned back to look again, they were staring at the floor, having returned to their methodical search. I felt like I was moving through a dream.

Through the door was a small, neat kitchen area. A young boy sat at a table and a man in a bow tie stood over him. There were puzzles and a little tower of stacking blocks on the table, as if the man were giving the boy some kind of examination. When he heard us come in, the man lifted his arm and pointed to the next room. “Through there.” He didn’t even look at us. His attention was locked on the boy. “Sanguis bebimus,” he said. “Corpus edimus.”

“Mater semper certa est,” the boy replied, while staring at nothing. “Mater semper certa est.”

“‘The mother is always certain,’” Millard translated.

The teacher straightened, then banged on the wall. “Keep it down in there!” he shouted—not at us. I couldn’t tell what had upset him until we were nearly out of the room and into the next one, and I heard the singing.

A woozy, tuneless voice moaned, “Happy biiiiiirthday, dear Frankieeeeeee . . . haaaaaapy biiiirthday to youuuuuuu . . .”

I couldn’t make my feet move any faster, though I would have run if they’d have let me. The singer was a man in clown makeup and a bone-white wig. He was seated on a daybed, bellied up to a small cocktail table, and was pouring himself a drink from a bottle. He seemed to be stuck: He would sip from the glass in his hand, splash a bit more from the bottle into the glass, sing a few words, then sip again. When he saw us he raised his glass and said, “Chin-chin! Happy birthday, Frankie!”

“Happy birthday,” I said involuntarily.

The clown seemed to freeze like that, with his glass raised and his mouth open, and from the back of his throat there came a sound like something unwinding, barely intelligible as words:

Let

me

sleeeeeep

“Come in here!” called a shrill voice from the next room.

We came, all in a bunch, into a bedroom crowded with dolls. Every available space was crammed with them. There were dolls on the floor, dolls on the shelves on the walls, dolls overflowing from a big armchair in the corner and from an iron-railed bed. There were so many that I didn’t notice the girl among them—on the bed, half buried in an avalanche of little porcelain faces—until she spoke a second time.

“Siddown!” she barked, and began flinging the dolls off her.

We sat down on the floor, the action automatic. I heard Bronwyn groan; her pain must have been getting worse.

“I didn’t say you could make noise!” the girl said. She wore a cotton nightshirt and yellow corduroy pants that looked like they were from the 1970s or 80s, and when she spoke her upper lip curled into a sneer. “Well? Who are you?”

I felt my tongue unlock and started to answer. “My name is Jacob, and I come from a town in Florida—”

“Bored, bored, bored!” she shouted. She pointed to Emma. “You!”

A jolt went through Emma and she began to speak. “My name is Emma Bloom. I was born in Cornwall and came of age in a loop in Wales and—”

“BORING!” the girl screamed, and pointed at Enoch.

“I’m Enoch O’Connor,” he said, “and we have something in common.”

The girl seemed intrigued. As he spoke she stood up from the bed, where she’d been lying among her dolls, and walked over to him.

“I can make dead things move using the hearts of living things,” Enoch said. “I have to take them apart first, but—”

The girl snapped her fingers, and Enoch’s mouth clapped shut. “You’re nice-looking,” she said, tracing a finger along the line of Enoch’s jaw, “but when you talk it gets ruined.” She smooshed the tip of his nose