A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,73

right kind of people. What kind of people would you say you are?”

“That depends. What kind are you?”

“George, put me down.” He did, and the mermaid balanced on the bend in her tail while leaning against George with one arm. The tail flexed muscularly rather than crinkling like a costume would have. “We’re in show business. But it’s been a while since we’ve had an audience worth performing for.” She gestured to the tent flap. “Would you care to see the show?”

She seemed to have made up her mind that we were peculiar, which made me suspect that she was, too. Her tone had shifted from bitter and prickly to sickly sweet.

“We’re only interested in the fire act,” said Bronwyn.

The mermaid cocked her head. “We don’t have a fire act. Do I look like a fire act?”

“Then who’s the Flaming Man?” said Bronwyn.

“We have something to give him,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”

A look of surprise flickered across her face, then was quickly suppressed. “Who sent you?” she said, her fake warmth gone. “Who do you work for?”

I remembered H’s warning not to mention his name. “Nobody,” I said. “We’re here on private business.”

George cupped his hand over the mermaid’s ear and whispered something.

“You’re not from around here, I can see that.” Sweet again. “There’s no flaming anything in our show, but why don’t you stay awhile and enjoy the other parts?”

“We really can’t,” said Emma. “You’re sure you don’t know anything about a flaming man?”

“Sorry, kiddos. But we do have three mermaids, a dancing bear, and George here can juggle pickaxes . . .”

Just then, two people came around the corner of the tent—another man in clown makeup and someone in a bear costume.

“We’ll throw in dinner,” the mermaid was saying, not taking the hint as we backed away. “Dinner and a show, what could beat that?”

“A song!” answered the clown, and he began to grind a box organ that was strapped around his waist, which the bear—who was wearing the most horrible, handmade, skull-like bear mask—took as his cue to start singing. But the words he sang were in some strange language, and his cadence was so slow and his voice so deep that I began to feel immediately sleepy, and I could see from my friends’ nodding heads that the song was having a similar effect on them.

“Sofur thu svid thitt,” he sang. “Svartur i augum.”

We started to back away. “We can’t,” I said, the words coming slow and thick. “We . . . have to . . .”

“Best show in town!” the mermaid said, wobbling toward us on her tail.

“Far i fulan pytt,” sang the bear-man. “Fullan af draugum.”

“What’s happening to me?” Bronwyn said dreamily. “My head feels like candy floss.”

“Mine too,” said Millard. And when his voice came suddenly out of the air, the mermaid and the bear and the two clowns all jumped, then looked at us with a new kind of hunger. If there had been any doubt as to our peculiarness before, Millard erased it.

Somehow, we made ourselves run—pushing and pulling one another, stumbling through the field—and though they didn’t try to stop us physically, with their hands and their bodies, getting away felt like an almost impossible task, like breaking free from a hundred giant spiderwebs. Once we made it to the gate, those webs seemed to break, and our speech and our wits returned to us.

We fumbled the car doors open. I started the engine. We shot away, the tires spitting an arc of dirt.

* * *

• • •

“Who were those awful peculiars?” asked Bronwyn. “And what were they doing to us?”

“It felt like they were trying to crawl inside my brain,” said Enoch. “Ugh, I can’t shake the feeling.”

“They must have been why Abe marked the map with a skull and crossbones,” Emma said. “See?” She held up the Mel-O-Dee map that Abe had annotated and showed the others.

“If this place is dangerous, why did H send us here?” Bronwyn asked.

“Maybe it’s a test,” said Millard.

“I’m sure it is,” I said. “The question is, did we pass? Or was that just the beginning?”

As if on cue, I glanced at my rearview mirror to see a police car coming up fast behind us.

“Cops!” I said. “Everyone act normal.”

“Do you think they know about Millard stealing from that store?” asked Bronwyn.

“No way,” I said. “That was too far back.”

Still, it was clear they were following us. They rode my bumper so hard I thought they might tap it. Then the