A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,65
There were a few other symbols I couldn’t decipher, too.
We don’t make maps, H had said. But if that was one of the hollow-hunters’ laws, Abe had broken it by drawing me this one. And in doing it, he had taken a risk.
The question was, why?
I took the map down carefully, then I scoured the rest of the wall for anything Abe had drawn on. What other bread crumbs had he left for me, hiding in plain sight? I worked myself into a frenzy, taking down anything that had been annotated or added to. I found a few maps that had been drawn from scratch on blank construction paper, but they weren’t labeled and there were no boundary lines around them with shapes I could recognize. There was a AAA map of Maryland and Delaware that had markings on it, so I folded it and stacked it with the Mel-O-Dee map. There were a couple of postcards pinned to the wall from places Abe had traveled through—motels, roadside tourist traps, towns I’d never heard of. Abe only stopped traveling when I was about eleven. Despite my parents’ objections, he used to go on road trips by himself “to visit friends out of state,” and while he never bothered to call my dad to check in, he would always send me postcards from the places he went. I didn’t know if they had any relevance, but I stacked them with the maps, just in case, and slid them all inside a hardcover book. Then I put that in my duffel bag, on top of the changes of clothes I’d packed. Earlier in the day I had gathered up whatever cash I could find around the house, which wasn’t a lot except for the wad my parents kept in a sock in one of their dresser drawers. I wrapped it in a rubber band and packed it into my old plastic Pokémon lunch box with some basic toiletries, including a package of Tums and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, in case we spent any appreciable time near a hollowgast.
I was about to zip the whole thing shut when I thought of something. I knelt down and pulled Abe’s operations log out from under the bed. I picked it up and weighed it in my hand, trying to decide whether to take it. It was fat and heavy and full of sensitive information that H would almost certainly not want me exposing to possible loss or theft. I knew I probably should have locked it in Abe’s bunker for safekeeping. But what if I needed it? It was packed with photos and clues about how Abe and H had done their work. It was a gold mine.
I pulled the clothes and toiletries from the duffel, then took the maps and postcards out of the hardback and tucked them into the back flap of the logbook instead. I shoved the logbook into the bottom of the duffel bag, stacked the clothes and toiletries on top, zipped the bag shut, and test-lifted it with one hand. It was like curling a thirty-pound dumbbell. I dropped it onto the bed. It bounced and rolled onto the floor and made a thud that shook the room.
* * *
• • •
I hardly slept a wink that night. In the morning I rose at dawn and snuck out with Emma. We drove to Abe’s house, threw open the hatch in the floor of his office, and descended into the bunker to see what undiscovered thing lay waiting for us there. I was hoping—as H had implied—that it would be a car with four working doors, but I could not fathom how a car would fit inside a tunnel too small for me to stand up in, or how I would drive it out again, even if one did.
We’d only been looking around my grandfather’s subterranean workshop for a few minutes when we found the handle in the wall. It was partially hidden in a darkened gap between two metal shelves. I reached in and twisted the handle, and a door in the wall opened outward, moving the shelves with it and revealing a new section of tunnel. We ventured in—hunched over once again, as this tunnel was even more claustrophobically low-ceilinged than the other section. Emma lit a flame for light and I propped the door with a metal box filled with freeze-dried “breakfast entree” from one of Abe’s shelves.