Hugh dug something from his pocket and held it up: a peculiar chicken egg. “Plan B,” he said.
Bekhir hobbled to Hugh and shook his hand. “Young man,” he said, “we owe you our lives.”
“What about your peculiar boy?” Millard asked Bekhir.
“He managed to escape with two of my men, thank God. We lost three fine animals today, but no people.” Bekhir bowed to Hugh, and I thought for a moment he might even take Hugh’s hand and kiss it. “You must allow us to repay you!”
Hugh blushed. “There’s no need, I assure you—”
“And no time, either,” said Emma, pushing Hugh out the door.
“We have a train to catch!”
Those of us who hadn’t yet realized Miss Peregrine was gone went pale.
“We’ll take their jeep,” said Millard. “If we’re lucky—and if that wight was correct—we might just be able to catch the train during its stopover in Porthmadog.”
“I know a shortcut,” Bekhir said, and he drew a simple map in the dirt with his shoe.
We thanked the Gyspies. I told Bekhir we were sorry we’d caused them so much trouble, and he unleashed a big, booming laugh and waved us on down the path. “We’ll meet again, syndrigasti,” he said. “I’m certain of it!”
* * *
We squeezed into the wights’ jeep, eight kids packed like sardines into a vehicle built for three. Because I was the only one who’d driven a car before, I took the wheel. I spent way too long figuring out how to start the damn thing—not with a key, it turned out, but by pushing a button on the floor—and then there was the matter of shifting gears; I’d only driven a manual transmission a few times, and always with my dad coaching me from the passenger seat. Despite all that, after a minute or two we were—bumpily, jerkily, somewhat hesitatingly—on our way.
I stomped the accelerator and drove as fast as the overloaded jeep would take us, while Millard shouted directions and everyone else held on for dear life. We reached the town of Porthmadog twenty minutes later, the train’s whistle blowing as we sped down the main street toward the station. We came to a skidding stop by the depot and tumbled out. I didn’t even bother to kill the engine. Racing through the station like cheetahs after a gazelle, we leapt on board the last car of the train just as it was pulling out of the station.
We stood doubled over and panting in the aisle while astonished passengers pretended not to stare. Sweating, dirty, and disheveled—we must’ve been a sight.
“We made it,” Emma gasped. “I can’t believe we made it.”
“I can’t believe I drove stick,” I said.
The conductor appeared. “You’re back,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “I trust you still have your tickets?”
Horace fished them from his pocket in a wad.
“This way to your cabin,” said the conductor.
“Our trunk!” Bronwyn said, clutching at the conductor’s elbow. “Is it still there?”
The conductor pried his arm away. “I tried taking it to lost and found. Couldn’t move the blessed thing an inch.”
We ran from car to car until we reached the first-class cabin, where we found Bronwyn’s trunk sitting just where she’d left it. She rushed to it and threw open the latches, then the lid.
Miss Peregrine wasn’t inside. I had a mini heart attack.
“My bird!” Bronwyn cried. “Where’s my bird?!”
“Calm down, it’s right here,” said the conductor, and he pointed above our heads. Miss Peregrine was perched on a luggage rack, fast asleep.
Bronwyn stumbled back against the wall, so relieved she nearly fainted. “How did she get up there?”
The conductor raised an eyebrow. “It’s a very lifelike toy.” He turned and went to the door, then stopped and said, “By the way, where can I get one? My daughter would just love it.”
“I’m afraid she’s one of a kind,” Bronwyn said, and she took Miss Peregrine down and hugged her to her chest.
* * *
After all we’d been through over the past few days—not to mention the past few hours—the luxury of the first-class cabin came as a shock. Our car had plush leather couches, a dining table, and wide picture windows. It looked like a rich man’s living room, and we had it all to ourselves.
We took turns washing up in the wood-paneled bathroom, then availed ourselves of the dining menu. “Order anything you like,” Enoch said, picking up a telephone that was attached to the arm of a reclining chair. “Hello, do you have goose liver pâté? I should like all of it. Yes, all that you have. And toast triangles.”
No one said anything about what had happened. It was too much, too awful, and for now we just wanted to recover and forget. There was so much else to be done, so many more dangers left to reckon with.
We settled in for the journey. Outside, Porthmadog’s squat houses shrank away and Miss Wren’s mountain came into view, rising grayly above the hills. While the others drifted into conversations, my nose stayed glued to the window, and the endless unfolding thereness of 1940 beyond it—1940 being a place that had until recently been merely pocket-sized in my experience, no wider than a tiny island, and a place I could leave any time I wished by passing through the dark belly of Cairnholm’s cairn. Since leaving the island, though, it had become a world, a whole world of marshy forests and smoke-wreathed towns and valleys crisscrossed with shining rivers; and of people and things that looked old but weren’t yet, like props and extras in some elaborately staged but plotless period movie—all of it flashing by and by and by out my window like a dream without end.
I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhythm hypnotizing me into a hazy state in which it was easy to forget that I was more than just a passive viewer, my window more than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here. Then, slowly, I remembered how I’d come to be part of this: my grandfather; the island; the children. The pretty, flint-eyed girl next to me, her hand resting atop mine.
“Am I really here?” I asked her.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“Do you think we’ll be all right?”
She kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“Go back to sleep.”
More terrible dreams, all mixed up, fading in and out of one another. Snippets of horrors from recent days: the steel eye of a gun barrel staring me down from close range; a road strewn with fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward me across a chasm; that awful, grinning wight and his empty eyes.
Then this: I’m back home again, but I’m a ghost. I drift down my street, through my front door, into my house. I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest.
I’m not dead, I say, but my words don’t make sound.
I find my mother sitting on the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out the window at a pale afternoon. She’s gaunt, wrung out from crying. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but my hand passes right through it.
Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.
My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.
Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?
Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.
Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.
Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …
Uncle Bobby: Screwy.
Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.
Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.
Uncle Bobby: Yeah.
Uncle Jack: …
Uncle Les: …
Uncle Bobby: Buffet?
My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.