A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,52

to Caul—Caul in his monstrous form, a hundred feet tall, his arms like tree trunks and his fingers long, grasping roots reaching up toward me.

He was calling my name. Jacob, Jacob, his voice a high and taunting singsong. I see you. I see you there. I seeeeee youuuuuuuu . . .

Waves of putrid air funneled up around me, the smell like burning flesh. I wanted to gag, to escape, but I was paralyzed. I tried to speak, to shout down at him. But no words would come.

There was a skittering sound, like rats were climbing the walls of the pit.

“You’re not real,” I finally managed to say. “I killed you.”

Yes, he said. And now I am everywhere.

The skittering grew louder, until Caul’s fingers crawled over the lip of the pit—ten long and gnarled roots, coming at me, wrapping around my throat.

I’ve got big plans for you, Jacob . . . Big, big plans . . .

I thought my lungs would explode, then felt a sharp pain in my stomach.

I bolted upright, gasping for breath, and clutched my gut. I was awake, at home, on the floor of my bedroom, my sleeping bag twisted around me.

A slash of moonlight divided the room. Enoch and Hugh lay snoring in my bed. The hurt in my stomach was an old and familiar one. It was both pain and a compass needle.

The needle pointed downstairs and outside.

I disentangled myself from the sleeping bag and dashed out of the room and down the stairs. I moved silently, running on my toes. If this was what I thought it was, there wasn’t much my friends could do to help me. They would only get in the way, and I didn’t want to wake them up and cause a panic before I had assessed the situation. Fear only fueled a hollowgast.

Fear made them hungry.

I pulled a knife from the block on my way through the kitchen—not much good against a hollow, but better than nothing—then exited through the garage and outside, nearly tripping over a coiled garden hose as I rounded into the backyard. A hazy trail of ozone rose from the potting shed’s roof. The pocket loop had been used very recently.

And then, as suddenly as the feeling had come upon me, it vanished. The compass needle moved toward the bay, then flipped around completely toward the gulf, then went slack. That had never happened before, and I couldn’t understand it. Could the whole thing have been a false alarm? Could nightmares trigger my peculiar reflex?

Feeling the wet grass between my toes, I glanced down at what I was wearing: ripped sweatpants, an old T-shirt, no shoes, and I thought, This is how Abe died. This, almost exactly. Lured into the dark in his bedclothes, gripping an improvised weapon.

I lowered the knife. Slowly, my hand stopped shaking. I walked the perimeter of my house, back and forth, waiting. No feeling came. Eventually I went back to my room and slipped into the sleeping bag on my floor, but I did not sleep.

* * *

• • •

The next morning I was checking my phone every minute, hoping for a call from H. He hadn’t said when he would be in touch. Emma and I debated telling the others, but decided to wait until we had a mission—and maybe we wouldn’t say anything even then. Maybe the mission would only involve the two of us. Maybe some of our friends wouldn’t want to go, or would be against the whole idea. What if one of them spilled the beans and told Miss Peregrine what we were planning before we had a chance to leave?

After breakfast, I was obligated to take the peculiars out clothes shopping. It seemed like a good way to kill time while I waited, so I tried to throw myself into it and forget about H’s call.

The first batch were Hugh, Claire, Olive, and Horace. I drove them to the mall. Not the mall by my house, where I worried we might encounter someone from my school. I picked the Shaker Pines mall, out by the Interstate. On the way, I pointed out the basic components of modern suburbia—that’s a bank, that’s a hospital, those are condos—because they kept asking what everything was. What seemed utterly banal to me was wondrous to them.

In her loop, Miss Peregrine had worked miracles protecting her wards from physical harm, but in her zeal to keep them safe, she had banned anyone who visited from talking to them