A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,35

job erasing the last few months of worrying about me from their minds. They didn’t seem concerned that I might have a breakdown or run away again while they were gone. In fact, they didn’t seem to care very much at all. And that was fine. Good riddance, I thought. At least we had the place to ourselves.

Miss Peregrine wasn’t around, either. She’d left the house just after we had and had been gone all day, Horace reported.

“Did she say where she was going?” I asked.

“She only said that we were to meet her at precisely seven fifteen at the potting shed in your backyard.”

“The potting shed.”

“At seven fifteen, precisely.”

That gave me just over an hour of free time.

I snuck up to my room. I put IV by Led Zeppelin on the record player, which is what I listened to whenever I was doing something that required serious concentration. I climbed onto my bed with my grandfather’s logbook, laid it out in front of me, and began to read.

I hadn’t read more than a page when Emma poked her head into the room. I invited her to join me.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had quite enough of Abe Portman for one day.” And she went out.

There were many hundreds of pages in the logbook, spanning a period of decades. Most of the entries followed the format of the one I’d read down in the bunker: light on detail, free from emotion, and often accompanied by a photo or some other piece of visual evidence. It would’ve taken me a week to read every word, so even with an hour on my hands, I could only skim. But it was enough to form a sketchy outline of Abe’s work in America.

He usually worked alone, but not always. Some entries referenced other “operatives,” named only with single letters—F, P, V. But most often, H.

H was the man my father had met, if his partially wiped memory could be trusted. If Abe had trusted H enough to introduce his son to him, he must’ve been important. So who was he? What was the structure of their organization? Who assigned their missions? Every new piece of information spawned a dozen more questions.

In the early days, their work was focused almost exclusively on hunting and killing hollows. But as the years progressed, more and more of the missions involved finding and rescuing peculiar children. Which was admirable, no doubt, but Bronwyn’s question stayed with me: Wasn’t that the ymbrynes’ job? Was there something stopping American ymbrynes from doing it?

Was something wrong with them?

The entries began in 1953 and stopped abruptly in 1985. Why did they stop? Was there another logbook I hadn’t found yet? Had Abe retired in 1985? Or had something changed?

After an hour of reading, I had a few more answers and a lot more new questions. First among them: Was there more work like this to be done? Was there still a group of hollow-hunters out there somewhere, fighting monsters and rescuing peculiars? If so, I wanted very much to find them. I wanted to be part of it, to use my gift to carry on my grandfather’s work here in America. After all, maybe that’s what he wanted! Yes, he’d locked away his secrets, but he’d done it using the name he’d given me as the key. But he’d died too soon to tell me.

First things first. To get answers to my questions, I’d have to find the only person in the world likely to know Abe’s secrets.

I had to find H.

We milled around my backyard, waiting for Miss Peregrine. It was seven twelve, and the light had mostly gone out of the sky. I glanced at the potting shed, a neglected shack made from latticed wood that stood against the oleander hedges. My mother had gone through a gardening phase a few years back, but these days the shed was just a shelter for weeds and spiders.

Then, at precisely seven fifteen, there was a snap of static electricity in the air that we all felt—it made Horace go “Ooooh!” and Claire’s long hair rose and stood on end—and then the shed lit up from the inside. It was a brief, bright flash, the hundreds of holes in its latticed walls turning white before fading to shadow. Then we heard Miss Peregrine’s voice from inside the shed.

“Here we are!” She strode out onto the grass. “Ahh,” she said, taking in a lungful of air. “Yes, I much prefer this weather.” She