Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #1) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,91

ridge, sheets of water streaming over our feet, making the path treacherous.

Enoch slipped and fell. We hauled him up and ran on. As we were about to crest the ridge, Bronwyn’s feet went out from under her, too, and she slid down twenty feet before she could stop herself. Emma and I ran back to help, and as we took her arms I turned to look behind us, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature. But there was only inky, swirling rain. My talent for spotting hollows wasn’t much good without light to see them by. But then, as we made it back to the top, chests heaving, a long flash of lightning lit up the night and I turned and saw it. It was off below us a ways but climbing fast, its muscular tongues punching into the mud and propelling it up the ridge like a spider.

“Go!” I shouted, and we all bolted down the far side, the four of us sliding on our butts until we hit level ground and could run again.

There was another flash of lightning. It was even closer than before. At this rate there was no way we’d be able to outrun it. Our only hope was to outmaneuver it.

“If it catches us, it’ll kill us all,” I shouted, “but if we split up, it’ll have to choose. I’ll lead it around the long way and try to lose it in the bog. The rest of you get to the loop as quick you can!”

“You’re mad!” shouted Emma. “If anyone stays behind it should be me! I can fight it with fire!”

“Not in this rain,” I said, “and not if you can’t see it!”

“I won’t let you kill yourself!” she shouted.

There was no time to argue, so Bronwyn and Enoch ran ahead while Emma and I veered off the path, hoping the creature would follow, and it did. It was close enough now that I didn’t need a lightning flash to know where it was; the twist in my gut was enough.

We ran arm in arm, tripping through a field rent with furrows and ditches, falling and catching each other in an epileptic dance. I was scanning the ground for rocks to use as weapons when, out of the darkness ahead, there appeared a structure—a small sagging shack with broken windows and missing doors, which in my panic I failed to recognize.

“We have to hide!” I said between gasping breaths.

Please let this creature be stupid, I prayed as we sprinted toward the house, please, please let it be stupid. We made a wide arc, hoping to enter it unseen.

“Wait!” Emma cried as we rounded the back of it. She pulled one of Enoch’s cheesecloths from her coat and quickly tied it around a stone plucked from the ground, making a kind of slingshot. She cradled it in her hands until it caught fire and then hurled it away from us. It landed in the boggy distance, glowing weakly in the dark.

“Misdirection,” she explained, and we turned and committed ourselves to the shack’s concealing gloom.

* * *

We slipped through a door that was hanging off its hinges and stepped down into a sea of dark, aromatic muck. As our feet sank with a nauseating squelch, I realized where we were.

“What is this?” Emma whispered, and then a sudden exhalation of animal breath made us both jump. The house was crowded with sheep taking shelter from the unfriendly night, just as we were. As our eyes adjusted, we caught the dull gleam of theirs staring back at us—dozens and dozens of them.

“It’s what I think it is, isn’t it,” she said, lifting one foot gingerly.

“Don’t think about it,” I replied. “Come on, we need to get away from this door.”

I took her hand and we pushed into the house, snaking through a maze of skittish animals that shied from our touch. We threaded a narrow hall and came into a room with one high window and a door that was still in its frame and closed against the night, which was more than could be said for the other rooms. Squeezing into the far corner, we knelt down to wait and listen, hidden behind a wall of nervous sheep.

We tried not to sit too deeply in the muck but there was really no helping it. After a minute of staring blindly into the dark, I began to make out shapes in the room. There were crates and boxes stacked in one corner, and along