A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,85

juice running down our chins and peels flying out the windows. The only ones who got out were Emma and Enoch; they went into the second filling station and returned after a few minutes with three coffees in Styrofoam cups to share among us. After we pulled away, there was an awkward, sullen mood in the car, most of it emanating from Emma. Bronwyn, who was sitting beside her in the back, asked if she was okay, and she said yes in a way that sounded like no, but didn’t elaborate.

The oranges and coffee were enough to sustain me through the rest of the drive, and the drive was tedious. The interstate highway system was not yet complete in 1965, which meant we had to wend our way down bad country roads, through stoplight-infested towns. And because our car attracted a lot of attention to begin with (exotic-looking in 1979, the Aston was positively futuristic in 1965), I had to be careful to drive under the speed limit, despite a constant temptation to stomp my foot down on the gas just to hear that thirsty V8 engine purr. We were stuck in 1965 until we found a loop that could connect us back to the present—preferably, it would be Paul’s loop—and getting to Portal a little faster was definitely not worth the Dukes of Hazzard–style car chase it was likely to provoke.

We finally reached Portal as evening was approaching. It was a nowhere within a nowhere: low hills stippled with cornfields encircled by deep woods; a strangely named town hidden among towns with names nearly as strange—Needmore, Thrift, Hopeulikit, Santa Claus (no kidding)—the weird names acting, I suppose, as a sort of camouflage. The town boundary was marked with a bullet-pocked sign that read WELCOME TO PORTAL, though I didn’t see any town beyond it, just more cornfields.

Millard cleared his throat and turned to Paul. “You said the entrance point . . . changes?”

“It does,” he said. “Now, could you stop here?” Paul said. “I’ll need to fetch my rod.”

I braked and pulled onto the shoulder. Paul got out and walked to the PORTAL sign. He took a small key out of his coat, knelt down and fit it into the base of the wooden signpost, and unlocked a hidden door. From a narrow compartment inside it, he removed what looked like a wooden orb and an armload of oddly shaped sticks.

“What on earth is he up to?” Emma muttered.

Paul attached the larger stick to the orb, connected two smaller sticks, then screwed them both into the top of it. It looked like some bizarre root vegetable that had sprouted a pair of antennae. He started walking back toward the car with the thing held aloft. But before he’d reached us, the rod jerked to the right. He stopped and gripped it with both hands. It began to vibrate, and then it looked like the rod nearly flew away from him. He planted his feet and leaned back, and the rod pointed its antennae somewhere behind us. After a moment the rod stopped vibrating, and he lowered it and walked back to the car.

“It’s juiced up today!” Paul said, laughing. He got in, hung the rod and the upper half of his body out the window, and let the rod point the way as I drove. When it jerked suddenly to the right, Paul cried, “That way!” and I hung a quick right down a dirt road. After about a half mile it pulled sharply to the left, pointing into a field of corn.

“Left!” Paul cried.

I looked at him doubtfully. “Through the field?”

The crop had been harvested and bundled, and what was left were rows of stubble and little pyramids of corn that stretched away over a low hill and out of sight.

“Loop entrance is somewhere over that way,” Paul said, the rod pulling his arm so hard I worried it might dislocate his shoulder.

I gazed across the rough, uneven ground. “I don’t want to mess the car up.”

“Yes, don’t,” said Enoch. “You’ll throw the wheels out of alignment. Or worse.”

“Couldn’t we just walk into the loop?” asked Millard.

“You can’t leave this car outside the loop,” said Paul. “If someone finds it, they’ll know just where to look for the entrance.”

“You said there were no highwaymen around here,” I said.

“There aren’t, usually. But one could be following us.”

“Well, then.” I put the car into gear. “I’ll try to be gentle.”

“Actually,” Paul said, “don’t be. Our loop is such that such