“None,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Have they built cities on the moon?” another boy asked hopefully.
“We left some garbage and a flag there in the sixties, but that’s about it.”
“Does Britain still rule the world?”
“Uh … not exactly.”
They seemed disappointed. Sensing an opportunity, Miss Peregrine said, “You see, children? The future isn’t so grand after all. Nothing wrong with the good old here and now!” I got the feeling this was something she often tried to impress upon them, with little success. But it got me wondering: Just how long had they been here, in the “good old here and now?”
“Do you mind if I ask how old you all are?” I said.
“I’m eighty-three,” said Horace.
Olive raised her hand excitedly. “I’ll be seventy-five and a half next week!” I wondered how they kept track of the months and years if the days never changed.
“I’m either one hundred seventeen or one hundred eighteen,” said a heavy-lidded boy named Enoch. He looked no more than thirteen. “I lived in another loop before this one,” he explained.
“I’m nearly eighty-seven,” said Millard with his mouth full of goose drippings, and as he spoke a half-chewed mass quavered in his invisible jaw for all to see. There were groans as people covered their eyes and looked away.
Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids’ eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days—this perpetual deathless summer—had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.
A sudden boom sounded from outside, the second one this evening, but louder and closer than the first, rattling silverware and plates.
“Hurry up and finish, everyone!” Miss Peregrine sang out, and no sooner had she said it than another concussion jolted the house, throwing a framed picture off the wall behind me.
“What is that?” I said.
“It’s those damned Jerries again!” growled Olive, thumping her little fist on the table, clearly in imitation of some ill-tempered adult. Then I heard what sounded like a buzzer going off somewhere far away, and suddenly it occurred to me what was happening. This was the night of September third, 1940, and in a little while a bomb was going to fall from the sky and blow a giant hole in the house. The buzzer was an air-raid siren, sounding from the ridge.
“We have to get out of here,” I said, panic rising in my throat. “We have to go before the bomb hits!”
“He doesn’t know!” giggled Olive. “He thinks we’re going to die!”
“It’s only the changeover,” said Millard with a shrug of his smoking jacket. “No reason to get your knickers in a twist.”
“This happens every night?”
Miss Peregrine nodded. “Every single evening,” she said. Somehow, though, I was not reassured.
“May we go outside and show Jacob?” said Hugh.
“Yes, may we?” Claire begged, suddenly enthused after twenty minutes of sulking. “The changeover is ever so beautiful!”
Miss Peregrine demurred, pointing out that they hadn’t yet finished their dinners, but the children pleaded with her until she relented. “All right, so long as you all wear your masks,” she said.
The children burst out of their seats and ran from the room, leaving poor Olive behind until someone took pity and came to unbelt her from her chair. I ran after them through the house into the wood-paneled foyer, where they each grabbed something from a cabinet before bounding out the door. Miss Peregrine gave me one, too, and I stood turning it over in my hands. It looked like a sagging face of black rubber, with wide glass portholes like eyes that were frozen in shock, and a droopy snout that ended in a perforated canister.
“Go ahead,” said Miss Peregrine. “Put it on.” Then I realized what it was: a gas mask.
I strapped it over my face and followed her out onto the lawn, where the children stood scattered like chess pieces on an unmarked board, anonymous behind their upturned masks, watching billows of black smoke roll across the sky. Treetops burned in the hazy distance. The drone of unseen airplanes seemed to come from everywhere.
Now and then came a muffled blast I could feel in my chest like the thump of a second heart, followed by waves of broiling heat, like someone opening and closing an oven right in front of me. I ducked at each concussion, but the kids never so much as flinched. Instead they sang, their lyrics timed perfectly to the rhythm of the bombs.
Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, RUN!
Bang, bang, BANG goes the farmer’s gun
He’ll get by without his rabbit pie, so
Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, RUN!
Bright tracer bullets scored the heavens just as the song ended. The kids applauded like onlookers at a fireworks display, violent slashes of color reflected in their masks. This nightly assault had become such a regular part of their lives that they’d ceased to think of it as something terrifying—in fact, the photograph I’d seen of it in Miss Peregrine’s album had been labeled Our beautiful display. And in its own morbid way, I suppose it was.
It began to drizzle, as if all that flying metal had riven holes in the clouds. The concussions came less frequently. The attack seemed to be ending.
The children started to leave. I thought we were going back inside, but they passed the front door and headed for another part of the yard.
“Where are we going?” I asked two masked kids.
They said nothing, but seeming to sense my anxiety, they took me gently by the hands and led me along with the others. We rounded the house to the back corner, where everyone was gathering around a giant topiary. This one wasn’t a mythical creature, though, but a man reposing in the grass, one arm supporting him, the other pointing to the sky. It took a moment before I realized that it was a leafy replica of Michelangelo’s fresco of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Considering that it was made from bushes, it was really impressive. You could almost make out the placid expression on Adam’s face, which had two blooming gardenias for eyes.
I saw the wild-haired girl standing nearby. She wore a flower-print dress that had been patched so many times it almost looked like a quilt. I went over to her and, pointing to Adam, said, “Did you make this?”
The girl nodded.
“How?”
She bent down and held one of her palms above the grass. A few seconds later, a hand-shaped section of blades wriggled and stretched and grew until they were brushing the bottom of her palm.
“That,” I said, “is crazy.” Clearly, I was not at my most articulate.
Someone shushed me. The children were all standing silently with their necks craned, pointing at a section of sky. I looked up but could see only clouds of smoke, the flickering orange of fires reflected against them.
Then I heard a single airplane engine cut through the rest. It was close, and getting closer. Panic flooded me. This is the night they were killed. Not just the night, but the moment. Could it be, I wondered, that these children died every evening only to be resurrected by the loop, like some Sisyphean suicide cult, condemned to be blown up and stitched back together for eternity?
Something small and gray parted the clouds and came hurtling toward us. A rock, I thought, but rocks don’t whistle as they fall.