A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,32

both of you?” she said.

“E-m-m-a?” Enoch said.

I turned toward him. “I swear to God, Enoch . . .”

Bronwyn picked him up and threw him over her shoulder.

“Hey! Put me down!”

“You’re getting a time-out,” said Bronwyn, and she walked him out of the room while he wriggled and complained.

“As I was saying,” said Emma. “Some secret you had between the two of you. Something only you would know.”

I considered it for a moment, then knelt down by the hatch. First, I tried names—mine, Abe’s, Emma’s—but no dice. Then, just for the hell of it, I keyed in the word p-e-c-u-l-i-a-r.

Nope. Way too obvious.

“You know, it might not even be in English,” said Millard. “Abe spoke Polish, too.”

“Maybe you should take the night to think it over,” Emma said.

But now my mind was whirring. Polish. Yes, he spoke it now and then, mostly to himself. He’d never taught me any, except for one word. Tygrysku—a pet name he’d given me. It meant “little tiger.”

I punched it in.

The tumblers inside the lock opened with a clunk.

Holy shit.

* * *

• • •

The door opened to reveal a ladder descending into darkness. I swung my foot onto the first rung.

“Wish me luck,” I said.

“Let me go first,” Emma said. She held out her palm and made a flame.

“It should be me,” I said. “If there’s anything nasty waiting down there, I want to get eaten first.”

“How very chivalrous,” said Millard.

I climbed down ten steps onto a concrete floor. It was cooler than the house above by ten or fifteen degrees. Before me was total darkness. I took out my phone and shone its light around, which was only bright enough to show me the walls—curved, gray concrete. It was a tunnel: claustrophobically tight, so low I had to hunch. My phone light was too puny to see what lay ahead, or how far the tunnel went.

“Well?” Emma called down.

“No monsters!” I shouted. “But I could use more light.”

So much for chivalry.

“Be right there!” said Emma.

“Us too!” I heard Olive say.

It was only then, as I was waiting for my friends to climb down, that it hit me—my grandfather had meant for me to find this place.

Tygrysku. It was a bread crumb in the forest. Just like the postcard from Miss Peregrine that he’d tucked into that volume of Emerson.

Emma reached the bottom and lit a flame in her hand. “Well,” she said, looking at the tunnel ahead. “It’s definitely not a root cellar.”

She winked at me and I grinned back. She seemed cool and collected, but I’m pretty sure it was an act; every nerve in me was jangling.

“May I come down?” Enoch called down from the room above. “Or am I to be punished for having a sense of humor?”

Bronwyn had just reached the bottom of the ladder. “You stay where you are,” she said. “In case anyone comes, we don’t want to be caught down here unawares.”

“In case who comes?” he said.

“Whoever,” said Bronwyn.

We gathered in a cluster with Emma at the front, her flame held out to make a light.

“Move slowly, listen out for anything strange, and keep your wits about you,” she said. “We don’t know what’s down here, and it’s possible Abe could have booby-trapped the place.”

We began to move forward, hunched and shuffling. I tried to imagine where we were in relation to the house above us, based on the direction the tunnel was facing. After twenty or thirty feet, we were most likely beneath the living room. After forty, we were leaving the house altogether, and after fifty, I was fairly certain we were under the front yard.

Finally, the tunnel ended at a door. It was heavy-looking, like the hatch behind us, but it was hanging slightly ajar.

“Hello?” I called. At the sound of my voice Bronwyn startled badly.

“Sorry,” I said to her.

“Are you expecting someone?” Millard asked.

“No. But you never know.”

Though I tried not to show it, I was so nervous I was vibrating.

Emma stepped through the door, then stood shining her flame around for a moment. “Looks safe enough,” she said. “But this might be useful . . .”

She reached for the wall, flicked a switch, and a bank of fluorescent lights clinked on inside the room.

“Hey now!” Olive said. “That’s more like it.”

Emma closed her hand to extinguish her flame, and we piled in after her. And then I turned a slow circle, taking everything in. The room was small, maybe twenty feet by fifteen, but I could finally stand up to full height. In