We washed the dust and dirt off ourselves, grateful to be in a comfortable home after so many hours on the road, and then Paul led us out to a long table that had been set up in a big backyard that was common to several houses. It was a fine day to eat outside, and the smell coming from that table was divine. For seven hundred miles we had had only Al Potts’s stale crullers and some immortal snacks to eat, and I think none of us realized how hungry we were until plates of steaming lamb and potatoes were set before us. We tore hunks from loaves of homemade bread and gulped down mint iced tea, and it was maybe the best food I’d ever tasted. It seemed like half the town had come by for supper, and we were surrounded by all the people we’d met since we’d arrived: June and Fern and Alene; Reggie and his puppy, who scampered around under the table; Hawley, who kept his headphones over one ear the whole meal; and some new faces, as well. Directly across from me was Elmer, a man whose black suit and tie clashed with the apron he wore over it, which was decorated with puckered lips and read KISS THE COOK! Beside him sat a younger man who introduced himself as Joseph.
“This is absolutely delectable,” said Millard, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. No one thought him strange or even stared at his floating napkin; either they were polite, or Millard was not the first invisible person they had shared their table with. “One question, though. How do you cook a seventy-two-hour lamb in a twenty-four-hour loop?”
“They made the loop after the lamb had already been roasting two days,” said Elmer. “That way we can have three-day lamb every day.”
“What a brilliant use of loop-time,” said Millard.
“That was way before I arrived,” he said. “Wish I could take credit for it, but all I do is take it off the spit and carve it up!”
“So, tell us about yourselves,” said Alene. “Who are you people?”
“Don’t be rude,” said June. “They’re Paul’s guests.”
“What? We have a right to know.”
“It’s okay,” said Emma, “I would want to know, too.”
“We’re Miss Peregrine’s wards,” Enoch said through a mouthful of potatoes. “From Wales. You’ve heard of us?”
He said it as if they had, naturally.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Joseph.
“Really?” said Enoch. He looked around the table. “Anybody?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Hm. Well, we’re kind of a big deal.”
“Don’t be conceited, Enoch,” Millard said. “What he means is that we enjoy some small prominence in our own peculiar community, thanks to the role we played in the victory over the wights at the Battle of Devil’s Acre. Especially crucial to our success was Jacob here—”
“Cut it out,” I hissed at him.
“—but you Americans may be more familiar with his grandfather, Abraham Portman?”
More head shakes.
“Sorry,” said Reggie, leaning down to feed his puppy under the table. “Don’t know him.”
“That’s odd,” said Millard. “I thought for certain . . .”
“He probably traveled under a false name,” said Emma. “He could see hollowgast? And . . . influence them?”
“Oh!” Alene said. “Could they mean Mr. Gandy?”
That name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it immediately.
“Did your grandfather have an unusual accent?” asked a younger man sitting beside Elmer.
“Polish,” I said.
“Mm.” He nodded. “And did he sometimes travel with another man or a young lady?”
“A young lady?” said Enoch, raising his eyebrows at Emma.
“That couldn’t have been him,” Emma said, suddenly tense.
June sped away from the table and returned a minute later with a photo album. “I believe we have a picture of him in here.” She flipped through the album’s pages. “We keep this to remember the folks who come and go, and so we know who to trust when someone comes back after a long time gone. We’ve had enemies come posing as friends.”
“The wights are masters of disguise, you know,” said Elmer.
“Oh, we know,” I said.
“Then you should double-check Paul’s photo,” said Alene. “Make sure he is who he says he is.”
Paul looked hurt. “I don’t look the same as I used to?”
“I think he looks better,” said Fern.
“Here.” June wedged between my seat and Emma’s and leaned over the table with the album. “This is Gandy.” She tapped a small black-and-white photo of a man relaxing under a tree. He was speaking to someone out of frame, and I wondered who it was, and what he’d been saying. His face was unlined, his hair black, and he had a sweet-looking dog with him. The dog was wearing a cap. It was my grandfather as I had rarely seen him: approaching middle age but still young, still in his prime. I wished I could have known him then.
Our friends got up from their seats and crowded around to look. Emma’s face was paper-white, haunted. “That’s him,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “That’s Abe.”
“You’re Gandy’s grandson?” Paul said, surprised. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
Partly it was because I hadn’t known Abe used a false identity while working, not just on his car registration (which I now realized was where I’d seen the name Gandy before). But mostly it was H’s rule. “Someone I trust told me not to talk about the hollow-hunters,” I said.
“Not even with other peculiars?” said June.
“Nobody.”
“Can’t imagine why,” said Elmer. “They’re heroes to all of us.”
Now that I saw how people reacted to his name, I thought maybe I’d loosen up on that rule a bit.
“How can we be sure they’re telling the truth about who they are?” said Alene. “I don’t mean offense, but we don’t know these people.”
“I can vouch for them,” said Paul.
“And you’ve known them for, what, a day?”
“They killed two highwaymen and ran another one off!” said Paul. “Helped out the Flamingo Manor peculiars down in Starke.”
Elmer pointed again at my grandfather’s photo. “Can’t you see the resemblance?” he said. “This boy’s the spitting image of Gandy.”
Alene’s eyes darted from me to the photo and back, and by the look on her face, I could tell she agreed. “You say his real name was Abraham?”
I nodded.
“How’s he doing?” said Elmer. “He must be getting on in years. We haven’t seen him in quite a while now.”
“Ah,” said Millard. “He passed away several months ago, unfortunately.”
There was a collective murmur of sorrow.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Joseph.
“What got him?” asked Reggie.
Fern scowled at him. “What a thing to ask!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It was a hollowgast.”
“A fighter to the end,” Elmer said, and raised his glass of tea. “To Abraham.”
The table raised their glasses and chorused, “To Abraham!”
Emma did not join in. “What about the people he traveled with?” she said.
June began to flip pages in the album again. “The fellow with the suits and cigars, that was his associate. He’d been coming through here and helping us for nearly as long as Gandy.” She turned another page and slid her finger across until it came to rest on a portrait of a young H from many years ago. “It’s an old picture,” she said. “But that’s him.”
June was right. The photo was quite old, but it was unmistakably H—he had the same face, the same eyes that seemed to digest you in an instant. He was holding an unlit cigar between his lips. He was a man who had more important things to do than stop for a photo, and was impatient to get back to doing them.
“He was Gandy’s partner,” said Joseph. “Real funny guy. You know what he said to me one time? I had just gotten back from Vietnam, and he came through driving this big old car—”
“What about the girl?” Emma said flatly.
Joseph stopped mid-sentence and suppressed a laugh.
“Uh-oh,” Enoch said, grinning wickedly. “Someone’s on the warpath.”
“The girl,” said Alene. “I remember they called her V. She was a might strange.”
“Real quiet,” said Elmer. “Always watching. At first it seemed like she might’ve been Abe’s protégé, like he meant for her to take over from him one day. But sometimes I got the feeling maybe she was the one really in charge.”
“I heard her say once that she used to be in the circus,” said Joseph.
“I heard she was in the national ballet of Russia,” said Fern.
“I heard she went out west to be a cowgirl,” said Reggie.
“I heard she killed seven people in a bar fight in a loop in Texas and had to run away to South America,” said June.
“She sounds like a con artist,” said Emma.
“Come to think of it,” said Joseph, studying her, “she looked a bit a like you. In fact, first moment I saw you today I thought maybe you were her.”
I half expected fumes to start coming out of Emma’s ears. I leaned over to her and whispered, “I’m sure it’s not what you think.”
She ignored me. “Got a picture of her?”
“Here,” said June, turning to a page she’d marked with her finger.
In her photo, V looked like someone who ate nails for breakfast. Or rode grizzly bears for a living, and had finished doing so just before the photo was taken. She stood with her arms crossed and her chin raised, defiant. And I couldn’t help but agree with Joseph—she did look a bit like Emma. Not that I ever would’ve admitted it out loud.
Emma stared at the photo like she was committing the girl’s face to memory. She said nothing for a moment, then just, “Okay.” I saw her make a conscious effort to swallow whatever she was feeling; I could almost trace the progress of the bile as it descended her throat down into her belly. And then her face cleared, and she smiled a bit too sweetly at June and said, “Thank you very much.”
June clapped the album shut. “Good,” she said, and started back to her seat. “My food’s about to get cold.”
Reggie leaned across the table toward me. “So, Jacob. Did Gandy teach you everything he knew? About hunting hollows and such? You must have stories!”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I grew up thinking I was normal.”
“He didn’t realize he was peculiar until earlier this year,” Millard explained.
“Good gravy,” said Elmer. “You’re getting a real crash course, then.”
“That’s for sure.”
“It’s definitely more crash than course,” said Enoch.
“Did you know your grandfather was one of the first two peculiars I ever met?” said Joseph. He had cleaned his plate and was leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly on its rear legs. “I was uncontacted at the time, living in Clarksville, Mississippi, 1930. Thirteen years old, my parents dead from Spanish flu. I didn’t know the first thing about peculiarness. But I knew something was changing inside me—that was my divining coming in—and soon after that I could feel something hunting me. But before it could get to me, your grandfather and H did. And they brought me here.”
“Gandy and H brought more than one child here, over the years,” said Elmer.
“But why come so far?” Millard asked. “Weren’t there loops closer to where you grew up?”
“Not for diviners,” said Joseph.
I scanned my friends’ faces, and they all seemed to have the same question in mind.
“So, only diviners can live here?” I asked.
“Oh no, no, no, we’re not like that,” said Fern. “We allow any type of peculiar in our loop.” She pointed at a house across the yard. “Smith over there is a wind-shaper. Moss Parker next door to him is a telekinetic, but only for foodstuffs. Which does help when it comes to setting a table.”
“For quite a few years we had a boy who could turn gold into aluminum,” said June, “though it wasn’t a skill much called for.”
“There are some loops that don’t allow outsiders, though,” said Elmer. “They’ll chase you right out.”
“They don’t trust anybody but peculiars like themselves,” said Alene.
“But we’re all peculiar,” said Bronwyn. “Isn’t that alike enough?”
“Seems not,” Reggie said. He tossed a scrap of gristle into the grass, and his puppy went bounding after it.
“Isn’t it against the ymbrynic codes for only one type of peculiar to live together?” said Bronwyn.
“Of course not,” said Enoch. “Remember the sheep-speakers in that Mongolian loop and the town of floaters in North Africa?”
“There are lots of reasons peculiars of one ability might band together,” said Millard. “I know of several invisible communities, for instance.”
“Oh,” said Bronwyn. “I thought it was illegal.”
“Partitionment according to ability is discouraged under the ymbrynic codes, because it can promote clannish thinking and unnecessary conflict,” said Millard. “What’s expressly forbidden are closed loops, in which only one type of peculiar is allowed to live and all others are banned.”
“All due respect,” said Elmer, “but there aren’t many ymbrynes around anymore. Their codes don’t hold much water.”
“But why aren’t there ymbrynes around?” asked Bronwyn. “No one’s been able to explain what happened to them, and it’s really starting to wind me up.”
“It’s just how it’s always been, for as long as any of us can remember,” Reggie said.
“Some of us remember,” said a voice from behind us.
I turned to see the old lady with the eyepatch hobbling toward the table. “You all started without me, I see.”
“Sorry, Miss Annie,” said Fern.
“No respect for your elders,” Miss Annie muttered, but it was clear, as the diviners all stood up from the table to greet her, that she commanded a great deal of respect. We followed their example and stood up, too. Fern darted out and helped Miss Annie to the table, where a seat right at the head had been reserved, and when she reached it she gripped the edge and lowered herself slowly into the chair. Only then did the rest of us sit down again.
“You want to know how things got the way they are.” Her voice had such grit and gravitas, it sounded like it was bubbling up from the depths of a muddy river. “What happened to our ymbrynes.” Miss Annie folded her hands on the table. A hush fell over the group. “They used to be the heart of our society, just like they are yours. The seeds of their downfall were planted a long time back. Back when the British and French and Spanish and native peoples were still fighting over who owned this country. Before it had occurred to anybody to fight over whether or not people should own one another.”
“Miss Annie’s old as the hills,” Fern whispered. “She was probably there.”
“I’m one hundred and sixty-three, give or take,” Miss Annie said, “and still got ears that work, Fern Mayo.”
Fern stared into her potatoes. “Yes, Miss Annie.”
“Some of you aren’t from here”—Miss Annie was looking at my friends—“so maybe you don’t know. But this nation was built with the stolen labor of black people and on the stolen land of native people. A century and a half ago, the southern part of this country was, by itself, one of the richest places in the whole world, and the vast bulk of that wealth was held not in cotton nor gold nor oil, but in the form of enslaved human beings.”
She paused to let her words sink in. Emma looked ill. Bronwyn and Enoch were silent, eyes downcast. I tried to wrap my mind around it. This vast, institutionalized evil, unfathomable in scale, swallowing up one generation after the next. Grandparents and parents and children and children and children. It was unimaginable, overwhelming.
After a moment, Miss Annie went on. “All that money and all that wealth depended on one thing: the ability of one kind of people to subdue and control another kind. So think about what happens when you introduce peculiarness into a system like that.”
“It raises hell,” said Elmer.
“And scares the life out of the people in control,” said Miss Annie. “Imagine. A person slaves all day chopping cotton. That is their life, and their life sentence. Then, one afternoon, from out of nowhere, this person—a young girl—manifests a peculiarness. And now, she can fly.” As she said it, Miss Annie’s eyes rose above the table and her hands spread out wide, and the image was suddenly so clear in my head that I had to wonder if she was describing her own experience. Miss Annie’s gaze fell to Bronwyn. “What do you do if you’re that girl?”
“I fly away,” said Bronwyn. “No—I wait until nighttime, then use my power to help everyone else escape, and then fly away.”
“And what if there was one who could turn day into night? Or a man into a donkey?”
“I’d make it midnight at noon,” said June. “And turn the overseer into an ass.”
“So you see why they were frightened of us,” said Miss Annie, her hands settling back onto the table, her voice lowering. “Our numbers were always small. Peculiarness has always been rare. But they were so terrified of even those few that they paid fortune-tellers and quack doctors and exorcists to try and tell us apart from the normals. They invented lies and folk stories about how peculiars were the spawn of Satan himself. Tried to get us to turn one another in. They’d kill you if you even knew a peculiar. If you even said the word peculiar! And the ones they were most frightened of?”
“Our ymbrynes,” said Paul.
“That’s right,” said Miss Annie. “Our ymbrynes. The ones who made our places of refuge. The places no normal could find, or get into. That made it possible for us to survive. They hated the ymbrynes worse than anything.”
“So these normals knew about ymbrynes?” Emma said. “They knew what they were?”
“They made it their business to know,” said Miss Annie. “Because it was their business. Peculiarness threatened their economy, their way of life, the bottom line of the whole wicked establishment, so the slaveowners plotted against us in ways that may not have occurred to normals in other parts of the world. They formed a secret organization devoted to rooting us out, destroying our loops, but especially to killing our ymbrynes. They were ruthless, tireless, obsessed. So much so that their organization continued to exist even after the Confederacy died, even after Reconstruction ended. And it took a toll on us. When I was growing up in the 1860s, we never had enough ymbrynes. They were always spread thin. Always in danger. We’d have one ymbryne to maintain four or five loops, and you’d hardly ever see her. And then one day it seemed like there were none. Instead, we had demi-ymbrynes and loop-keepers—functionaries and mercenaries, not leaders—and in the absence of ymbrynely influence, peculiars in this country gradually became divided and distrustful of one another.”
Something occurred to me, a flash memory of the diner we’d stopped at in 1965, and I asked, “Were loops segregated back then? By race?”
“Of course they were,” said Miss Annie. “Just because folks were peculiar didn’t mean they weren’t racist. Our loops weren’t some kind of utopia. In a lot of ways they were just a reflection of the society outside them.”
“But they’re not segregated anymore,” said Bronwyn, her eyes flicking to Hawley, the white boy wearing headphones down at the other end of the table, and the older white girl across from him.
“It took a good long time to integrate,” said Miss Annie. “But slowly, we did.”
“Hollowgast don’t care what color you are,” said Elmer. “They just want your soul. That helped bring us all together.”
“What about loops in other parts of the country?” said Enoch. “Do they have ymbrynes?”
“Ymbrynes down south got the first of it and the worst of it,” said Elmer. “But gradually, ymbrynes all over the nation disappeared.”
“Every single one?” said Bronwyn. “There are none left at all?”
“I’ve heard there are still a few,” said Miss Annie. “Some who managed to hide. But they don’t have anything like the power or influence they used to.”
“What about Native Americans?” Millard asked. “Did they have loops?”
“They did. But not many, because by and large they weren’t afraid of peculiarness, and their peculiars weren’t persecuted. Not by their own people, anyway.”
“That brings us to the twentieth century, which I can speak to,” Elmer said. “The Organization started fading away, mainly because there weren’t many ymbrynes left to kill. Normals began to forget us. Instead the loops began fighting one another. For territory, influence, resources.”
“It’s something the ymbrynes would never have allowed to happen,” said Alene.
“We heard a bit about what you folks were going through in Europe with the hollowgast,” said Elmer, “but the monsters mostly kept to your side of the pond. That all changed in the late fifties, when the wights and hollows came in with a vengeance. That put a stop to most of the inter-clan battles, but we could hardly leave our loops for fear of being eaten by these damned shadow monsters.”
“That’s when my grandfather and H started fighting them,” I said.
“Right,” said Elmer.
“So the normals in America,” said Bronwyn. “Do they still know about us?”
“No,” said June. “They haven’t for a long time. And it wasn’t many people who knew about us, even back in the 1800s.”
“No, no, no, Junie, that’s wrong,” Miss Annie said, shaking her head vigorously. “That’s just what they want you to think. Mark my words, there are those who still know. There are still normals who understand our power, who are frightened of us, who seek to control us.”
“What on earth are they frightened of?” asked June.
“Of an idea,” said Miss Annie. “The idea of us peculiars as anything other than divided up and scared of one another. The power that a united peculiardom could wield. It’s as frightening to them today as it was back in the day.” She nodded with a sharp finality, let out a breath, and picked up her fork. “Now if you’ll excuse me. You all have finished eating, but I haven’t taken a single bite.”
Everyone waited for Miss Annie to clear her plate before leaving the table, and then we began to clean up. It was obvious to me that Miss Annie was the one I was supposed to give the package to, so when she got up to leave I offered to help her get to wherever she was heading.
She told me she was going back to her house. I offered her my arm. After the short walk to her house, I gave her the package, which was just big enough to fit in my pocket. She seemed to be expecting it.
“You’re not going to open it?” I asked.
“I know what it is and who it’s from,” she said. “Help me up the stairs.”
We climbed the three steps to her porch, her back at nearly a ninety-degree angle, and when we reached the top she said, “Hold on a moment,” and disappeared into her house.
A few seconds later she returned and put something in my hand.
“He asked me to give you this.”
In my palm she’d placed an old, worn matchbook.
“What’s this?”
“Read it and see.”
On one side was an address—a town in North Carolina—and as if that weren’t straightforward enough, the other side read, It’s SMART to stop here . . . you get MORE for your money!
I tucked it into my pocket.
“When you see him, tell him thank you,” she said. “And then tell him to come here his damn self next time, so I can see his handsome face again. He is missed.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t give up on him. He can be frustrating and pigheaded and a pain in the rear end. But don’t let him convince you he doesn’t need help. He’s been carrying a lot of weight for a lot of years, and he needs you. He needs you all.”
I nodded solemnly and raised my hand to her, and she went inside and shut the door.
I went back to gather my friends. I saw Emma talking close with June and strode across the grass toward them. Before they noticed me, June seemed to be explaining something that didn’t please Emma, and Emma was standing with her arms crossed. Her face was drawn and serious. When she saw me, her expression blanked, and she said a quick goodbye to June and ran to meet me.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Just trading darkroom tips. Did you know she printed most of the photos in that album herself?”
It was clearly a lie, and it had come to her so quickly that I was taken by surprise.
“Then why do you look upset?” I asked.
“I’m not.”
“You were asking her about the girl. The one Abe traveled with sometimes.”
“No,” said Emma. “I don’t care about that.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
Her eyes cut away. “Quit giving me the third degree, will you? Here come Bronwyn and Enoch.”
Millard was with them, too—he had put on clothes and was easy to spot—and June and Fern and Paul, with whom they’d all made fast friends.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said.
Emma shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
I nearly lost my temper, but managed to tamp it down. I told myself I would never understand what Emma was feeling, and if I wanted to be with her, I needed to respect that she was going through something and give her space to feel it.
That made sense. But it didn’t make me feel less hurt.
We made plans to leave. Paul arrived carrying a metal thermos.
“Coffee for your trip. So you don’t have to stop.”
Elmer came by and shook our hands. “If any of you ever need a diviner, you know where to find us.”
“What an interesting man,” said Millard as he walked away. “Did you know he fought in three wars over seventy years? During the Great War he slept in a loop at the trenches in Verdun so he wouldn’t age forward.”
Bronwyn and Fern hugged.
“You’ll write?” said Fern.
“Even better, we’ll visit,” said Bronwyn.
“We’d like that.”
They said goodbye, and Paul walked us back to the edge of town, and our car. Along the way, I showed everyone the pack of matches Miss Annie had given me.
“An address!” said Millard. “H made it easy on us this time.”
“I think the tests are over,” I said. “It’s time for the real mission.”
“We’ll see,” said Emma. “H never seems to get tired of testing us.”
“You all be careful out there,” Paul said. “And watch yourselves up north. I hear it’s every bit as dangerous.”
He explained how to get back to the present. There was no returning to 1965—not that we would’ve wanted to—because exiting the back way out of this loop would get us to a spring day in 1930, when the Portal loop was made. Leaving the front way was simple: We had to go out the same way we’d come in—through the fields, and fast.
We said goodbye to Paul. I made sure everyone was belted in, started the car, and punched the gas. The car shook as I followed my tire tracks back across the bare field, speeding faster and faster even as the terrain grew rougher. Halfway across, just as we reached the spot where we had entered the loop and my tire tracks disappeared, there was a gut-wrenching lurch. Day turned to night. The flat dirt before me turned into a wall of green cornstalks. We crashed through them, flattening row after row as the stalks and green cobs hammered the car. I was about to slam on the brakes when I heard Millard yell, “Keep going or we’ll get stuck!” so I pushed even harder on the gas, and the engine bellowed and somehow the tires found traction, and a few seconds later we broke through the corn and onto a road.
I stopped. We caught our breaths. I turned on the headlights. The dirt road was paved now, but otherwise the outskirts of Portal looked much the same as in 1965.
I got out to inspect the damage, and Millard got out to throw up. There was a crack at the top edge of the windshield and shredded cornstalks stuck in the grille and the wheel wells, which I was able to pull out. Other than that, we had made it in one piece.
“Everyone okay?” I said, poking my head through the window.
“Millard’s not,” said Emma, and then I heard a retching sound and looked up just in time to see an air-burst of vomit splatter the pavement. I had never seen an invisible person throw up before, and it was something I won’t soon forget.
As he was voiding his guts, I felt my phone—alive again here in the present—buzz madly in my pocket. 24 missed calls, the screen read. 23 voicemails.
I knew who they were from without even looking.
I walked around to the rear of the car and pretended to check something while I surreptitiously listened. The first few messages were mildly concerned. But they got more alarmed and more angry as they went on. The thirteenth went like this: “Mr. Portman, this is your ymbryne speaking. Again. I want you to listen to me very carefully. I am disappointed that you would embark on a journey without informing me. Exceedingly so. But you have no right to take the children with you without my say-so. Return to this house at once. Thank you. All the best.”
I stopped listening after that. I thought about telling the others, then decided against it. They had all known Miss Peregrine wouldn’t approve; there was no reason to agitate them with the voicemails and risk having them decide to turn back.
“All right,” said Millard, stumbling back toward the car. “I have finished.”
I slipped the phone into my pocket. “Sorry you’re not feeling good.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a train we could catch,” he said weakly. “I’m growing a bit weary of automobiles.”
“The rest of the way will be smooth sailing,” I said. “I promise.”
He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”