“She’s one of us,” I said.
* * *
We had questions. Lots of questions. As Esme’s tears began to fade, we worked up the courage to ask them.
Did Sam realize she was peculiar?
She knew she was different, she said, but had never heard the term peculiar.
Had she ever lived in a loop?
She had not (“A what?”), which meant she was just as old as she appeared to be. Twelve, she said.
Had no ymbryne ever come to find her?
“Someone came once,” she answered. “There were others like me, but to join them I would’ve had to leave Esme behind.”
“Esme can’t … do anything?” I asked.
“I can count backward from one hundred in a duck voice,” Esme volunteered through her sniffles, and then began to demonstrate, quacking: “One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight …”
Before she could get any further, Esme was interrupted by a siren, this one high-pitched and moving fast in our direction. An ambulance careened into the alley and raced toward us, its headlights blacked out so that only pinpricks of light shone through. It skidded to a stop nearby, cut its siren, and a driver leapt out.
“Is anyone hurt?” the driver said, rushing over to us. He wore a rumpled gray uniform and a dented metal hat, and though he was full of energy, his face looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept in days.
His eyes met the hole in Sam’s chest, and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Cor blimey!”
Sam got to her feet. “It’s nothing, really!” she said. “I’m fine!” And to demonstrate how fine she was, she passed her fist in and out of the hole a few times and did a jumping jack.
The medic fainted.
“Hm,” said Hugh, nudging the fallen man with his foot. “You’d think these chaps would be made of tougher stuff.”
“Since he’s clearly unfit for service, I say we borrow his ambulance,” Enoch said. “There’s no knowing where in the city that pigeon’s leading us. If it’s far, it could take us all night to reach Miss Wren on foot.”
Horace, who’d been sitting on a chunk of wall, sprang to his feet. “That’s a fine idea!” he said.
“It’s a reprehensible idea!” Bronwyn said. “You can’t steal an ambulance—injured persons need it!”
“We’re injured persons,” Horace whined. “We need it!”
“It’s hardly the same thing!”
“Saint Bronwyn!” Enoch said sarcastically. “Are you so concerned with the well-being of normals that you’d risk Miss Peregrine’s life to protect a few of theirs? A thousand of them aren’t worth one of her! Or one of us, for that matter!”
Bronwyn gasped. “What a thing to say in front of …”
Sam stalked toward Enoch with a humorless look on her face.
“Look here, boy,” she said, “if you imply that my sister’s life is worthless again, I will clobber you.”
“Calm down, I wasn’t referring to your sister. I only meant that …”
“I know exactly what you meant. And I’ll clobber you if you say it again.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve offended your delicate sensibilities,” Enoch said, his voice rising in exasperation, “but you’ve never had an ymbryne and you’ve never lived in a loop, and so you couldn’t possibly understand that this—right now—is not real, strictly speaking. It’s the past. The life of every normal in this city has already been lived. Their fates are predetermined, no matter how many ambulances we steal! So it doesn’t bloody matter, you see.”
Looking a bit baffled, Sam said nothing, but continued to give Enoch the evil eye.
“Even so,” said Bronwyn. “It’s not right to make people suffer unnecessarily. We can’t take the ambulance!”
“That’s all well and good, but think of Miss Peregrine!” said Millard. “She can’t have more than a day left.”
Our group seemed evenly divided between stealing the ambulance or going on foot, so we put it to a vote. I myself was against taking it, but mostly because the roads were so pocked with bomb holes that I didn’t know how we’d drive the thing.
Emma took the vote. “Who’s for taking the ambulance?” she said.
A few hands shot up.
“And against?”
Suddenly there was a loud pop from the direction of the ambulance, and we all turned to see Miss Peregrine standing by as one of its rear tires hissed air. Miss Peregrine had voted with her beak—by stabbing it into the ambulance’s tire. Now no one could use it—not us, not injured persons—and there was no point in arguing or delaying any further.
“Well, that simplifies things,” said Millard. “We go on foot.”
“Miss Peregrine!” Bronwyn cried. “How could you?”
Ignoring Bronwyn’s indignation, Miss Peregrine hopped over to Melina, looked up at the pigeon on her shoulder, and screeched. The message was clear: Let’s go already!
What could we do? Time was wasting.
“Come with us,” Emma said to Sam. “If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll be somewhere safe before the night is through.”
“I told you, I won’t leave my sister behind,” Sam replied.
“You’re going to one of those places she can’t enter, aren’t you?”
“I—I don’t know,” Emma stammered. “It’s possible …”
“I don’t care either way,” Sam said coldly. “After what I just saw, I wouldn’t so much as cross the road with you.”
Emma drew back, going a bit pale. In a small voice she asked, “Why?”
“If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can’t muster a bit of compassion for others,” she said, “then there’s no hope for this world.” And she turned away and carried Esme toward the ambulance.
Emma reacted as if she’d been slapped, her cheeks going red. She ran after Sam. “We don’t all think the way Enoch does! And as for our ymbryne, I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did!”
Sam spun to face her. “That was no accident! I’m glad my sister’s not like all of you. Wish to God I wasn’t.”
She turned away again, and this time Emma didn’t follow. With wounded eyes she watched Sam go, then slouched after the others. Somehow the olive branch she’d extended had turned into a snake and bitten her.
Bronwyn peeled off her sweater and set it down on the rubble. “Next time bombs start falling, have your sister wear this,” she called to Sam. “It’ll keep her safer than any bathtub.”
Sam said nothing; didn’t even look. She was bending over the ambulance driver, who was sitting up now and mumbling, “I had the queerest dream …”
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Enoch said to Bronwyn.
“Now you don’t have a sweater.”
“Shut your fat gob,” Bronwyn replied. “If you’d ever done a nice thing for another person, you might understand.”
“I did do something nice for another person,” Enoch said, “and it nearly got us eaten by hollows!”
We mumbled goodbyes that went unreturned and slipped quietly into the shadows. Melina took the pigeon from her shoulder and tossed it skyward. It flew a short distance before a string she’d tied around its foot snapped taut and it hovered, caught in the air, like a dog straining at its lead. “Miss Wren’s this way,” Melina said, nodding in the direction the bird was pulling, and we followed the girl and her pigeon friend down the alley.
I was about to assume hollow-watch, my now-customary position near the head of the group, when something made me glance back at the sisters. I turned in time to see Sam lift Esme into the ambulance, then bend forward to plant a kiss on each of her scraped knees. I wondered what would happen to them. Later, Millard would tell me that the fact that none of them had ever heard of Sam—and someone with such a unique peculiarity would’ve been well known—meant she probably had not survived the war.
The whole episode had really gotten to Emma. I don’t know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearte
d, when we knew ourselves to be—but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. “They don’t understand,” she kept saying.
Then again, I thought, maybe they do.
So it had come to this: everything depended on a pigeon. Whether we would end the night in the womblike safety of an ymbryne’s care or half chewed in the churning black of a hollow’s guts; whether Miss Peregrine would be saved or we’d wander lost through this hellscape until her clock ran out; whether I would live to see my home or my parents again—it all depended on one scrawny, peculiar pigeon.
I walked at the front of the group, feeling for hollows, but it was really the pigeon who led us, tugging on its leash like a bloodhound after a scent. We turned left when the bird flew left, and right when it jerked right, obedient as sheep even when it meant fumbling down streets cratered with ankle-breaking bomb holes or bristling with the bones of dismembered buildings, their jagged iron spear tips lurking dimly in the wavering fire glow, angled at our throats.
Coming down from the terrifying events of that evening, I’d reached a new low of exhaustion. My head tingled strangely. My feet dragged. The rumble of bombs had quieted and the sirens had finally wound down, and I wondered if all that apocalyptic noise had been keeping me awake. Now the smoky air was alive with subtler sounds: water gushing from broken mains, the whine of a trapped dog, hoarse voices moaning for help. Occasionally fellow travelers would materialize out of the dark, wraithlike figures escaped from some lower world, eyes shining with fear and suspicion, clutching random things in their arms—radios, looted silver, a gilt box, a funerary urn. Dead bearing the dead.
We came to a T in the road and stopped, the pigeon deliberating between left and right. The girl murmured encouragements: “Come on, Winnie. There’s a good pigeon. Show us the way.”
Enoch leaned in and whispered, “If you don’t find Miss Wren, I will personally roast you on a spit.”
The bird leapt into the air, urging left.
Melina glowered at Enoch. “You’re an ass,” she said.
“I get results,” he replied.
Eventually we arrived at an underground station. The pigeon led us through its arched entry into a ticket lobby, and I was about to say We’re taking the subway—smart bird, when I realized the lobby was deserted and the ticket booth shuttered. Though it didn’t look like trains would be visiting this station anytime soon, we forged ahead regardless, through an unchained gate, along a hallway lined with peeling notices and chipped white tiles, to a deep staircase where we spiraled down and down into the city’s humming, electric-lit belly.
At each landing, we had to step around sleeping people wrapped in blankets: lone sleepers at first, then groups lying like scattered matchsticks, and then, as we reached bottom, an unbroken human tide that swept across the underground platform—hundreds of people squeezed between a wall and the tracks, curled on the floor, sprawled on benches, sunk into folding chairs. Those who weren’t sleeping rocked babies in their arms, read paperbacks, played cards, prayed. They weren’t waiting for a train; no trains were coming. They were refugees from the bombs, and this was their shelter.
I tried sensing for hollows, but there were too many faces, too many shadows. Luck, if we had any left, would have to sustain us for a while.
Now what?
We needed directions from the pigeon, but it seemed briefly confused—like me, it was probably overwhelmed by the crowd—so we stood and waited, the breaths and snores and mumbles of the sleepers murmuring weirdly around us.
After a minute the pigeon stiffened and flew toward the tracks, then reached the end of its leash and bounced back into Melina’s hand like a yo-yo.
We tiptoed around the bodies to the edge of the platform, then hopped down into the pit where the tracks ran. They disappeared into tunnels on either end of the station. I had a sinking feeling that our future lay somewhere inside one of these dark, gaping mouths.
“Oh, I hope we don’t have to go mucking about in there,” said
Olive.
“Of course we do,” Enoch said. “It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.”
The pigeon bopped rightward. We started down the tracks.
I hopscotched around an oily puddle and a legion of rats scurried away from my feet, sending Olive into Bronwyn’s arms with a shriek. The tunnel yawned before us, black and menacing. It occurred to me that this would be a very bad place to meet a hollowgast. Here there’d be no walls to climb, no houses to shelter in, no tomb lids to close behind us. It was long and straight and lit only by a few red bulbs, glinting feebly at scattered intervals.
I walked faster.
The darkness closed around us.
* * *
When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek with my dad. I was always the hider and he the seeker. I was really good at it, primarily because I, unlike most kids of four or five, had the then-peculiar ability to be extremely quiet for long periods of time, and also because I suffered from absolutely no trace of anything resembling claustrophobia: I could wedge myself into the smallest rear-closet crawl space and stay there for twenty or thirty minutes, not making a sound, having the time of my life.
Which is why you’d think I wouldn’t have a problem with the whole dark, enclosed spaces thing. Or why, at the very least, you’d think a tunnel meant to contain trains and tracks and nothing else would be easier for me to handle than one that was essentially an open cemetery, with all manner of Halloweenish things spilling out along it. And yet, the farther into this tunnel we walked, the more I was overcome by clammy, creeping dread—a feeling entirely apart from the one I sensed hollows with; this was simply a bad feeling. And so I hurried us through as fast as the slowest of us could go, prodding Melina until she barked at me to back off, a steady drip of adrenaline keeping my deep exhaustion at bay.
After a long walk and several Y-shaped tunnel splits, the pigeon led us to a disused section of track where the ties had warped and rotted and pools of stagnant water spanned the floor. The pressure of trains passing in far-off tunnels pushed the air around like breaths in some great creature’s gullet.
Then, way down ahead of us, a pinpoint of light winked into being, small but growing fast. Emma shouted, “Train!” and we split apart and pressed our backs to the walls. I covered my ears, expecting the deafening roar of a train engine at close range, but it never came—all I could hear was a small, high-pitched whine, which I was fairly certain was coming from inside my own head. Just as the light was filling the tunnel, its white glow surrounding us, I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and the light disappeared.
We stumbled away from the walls in a daze. Now the tracks and ties under our feet were new, as if they’d just been laid. The tunnel smelled somewhat less intensely of urine. The bulbs along it had gotten brighter, and instead of giving a steady light, they flickered—because they weren’t electric bulbs at all, but gaslamps.
“What just happened?” I said.
“We crossed into a loop,” said Emma. “But what was that light? I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Every loop entrance has its quirks,” said Millard.
“Anyone know when we are?” I asked.
“I’d guess the latter half of the nineteenth century,” said Millard. “Prior to 1863 there wasn’t an underground system in London at all.”
Then, from behind us, another light appeared—this one accompanied by a gust of hot wind and a thunderous roar. “Train!” Emma shouted again, and this time it really was. We threw ourselves against the walls as it shot past in a cyclone of noise and light and belching smoke. It looked less like a modern subway train than a miniature locomotive. It even had a caboose, where a man with a big black beard and a guttering lantern in his hand gaped at us in surprise as the train strafed away around the next bend.
Hugh’s cap had blown off his head and been crushed. He went to pick
it up, found it shredded, and threw it down again angrily. “I don’t care for this loop,” he said. “We’ve been here all of ten seconds and already it’s trying to kill us. Let’s do what we have to and get gone.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Enoch.
The pigeon guided us on down the track. After ten minutes or so, it stopped, pulling toward what looked like a blank wall. We couldn’t understand why, until I looked up and noticed a partially camouflaged door where the wall met the ceiling, twenty feet overhead. Because there seemed no other way to reach it, Olive took off her shoes and floated up to get a closer look. “There’s a lock on it,” she said. “A combination lock.”
There was also a pigeon-sized hole rusted through the door’s bottom corner, but that was no help to us—we needed the combination.
“Any idea what it could be?” Emma asked, putting the question out to everyone.
She was met with shrugs and blank looks.
“None,” said Millard.
“We’ll have to guess,” she said.
“Perhaps it’s my birthday,” said Enoch. “Try three–twelve–ninety-two.”
“Why would anyone know your birthday?” said Hugh.
Enoch frowned. “Just try it.”
Olive spun the dial back and forth, then tried the lock. “Sorry, Enoch.”
“What about our loop day?” Horace suggested. “Nine–three–forty.”
That didn’t work, either.
“It’s not going to be something easy to guess, like a date,” said Millard. “That would defeat the purpose of having a lock.”
Olive began to try random combinations. We stood by watching, growing more anxious with each failed attempt. Meanwhile, Miss Peregrine slipped quietly from Bronwyn’s coat and hopped over to the pigeon, who was waddling around at the end of its lead, pecking at the ground. When it saw Miss Peregrine, it tried to hop away, but the headmistress followed, making a low, vaguely threatening warble in her throat.
The pigeon flapped its wings and flew up to Melina’s shoulder, out of Miss Peregrine’s reach. Miss Peregrine stood by Melina’s feet, squawking at it. This seemed to make the pigeon extremely nervous.