I had trouble sleeping. I woke at odd hours, my mind looping scenes from my time with the peculiars. Though I’d given Emma my address and checked the mailbox several times a day, no letters had arrived from her or the others. The longer I went without hearing from them—two weeks, then three—the more abstract and unreal the whole experience began to seem. Had it really happened? Had it all been a delusion? In dark moments, I wondered. What if I was crazy?
So it was much to my relief when, a month after returning home, a letter finally arrived from Emma. It was short and breezy, just filling me in on the rebuilding process and asking me how things were going. The return address was a post office box in London, which Emma explained was close enough to the Devil’s Acre loop entrance that she could sneak into the present fairly often and check it. I wrote back the same day, and pretty soon we were exchanging two or three letters a week. As home grew more suffocating, those letters became a lifeline.
I couldn’t risk my parents finding one, so every day I stalked the mailman and dashed out to meet him as soon as he appeared at the end of our driveway. I suggested to Emma that we trade e-mails instead, which would have been safer and faster, and I filled several pages attempting to explain what the Internet was and how she might find a public Internet café and create an e-mail address—but it was hopeless; she’d never even used a keyboard. The letters were worth the risk, though, and I came to enjoy communicating by hand. There was something sweet about holding a tangible thing that had been touched and marked upon by someone I loved.
In one letter she included a few snapshots. She wrote:
Dear Jacob, things are finally getting interesting around here again. Remember the people on display in the basement, the ones Bentham said were wax models? Well, he was lying. He kidnapped them from different loops and was using Mother Dust’s powder to keep them in suspended animation. We think he’d been trying to power his machine using different types of peculiars as batteries—but nothing worked until your hollowgast. Anyway, Mother Dust confessed to having known about it, which explains why she was acting so strangely. I think Bentham was blackmailing her somehow, or threatening to hurt Reynaldo if she didn’t help him. Anyway, she’s been helping us wake everyone up and return them to their rightful loops. Isn’t that just pure madness?
We’ve also been using the Panloopticon to explore all sorts of places and meet new people. Miss Peregrine says it’s good for us to see how other peculiars live around the world. I found a camera in the house and brought it along on our last excursion, and I’ve included a few of the photos I took. Bronwyn says I’m already getting good!
I miss you like mad. I know I shouldn’t talk like that … it only makes this harder. But sometimes I can’t help it. Maybe you could come visit soon? I’d like that so much. Or maybe
She’d scratched out or maybe and written: Uh-oh, I hear Sharon calling my name. He’s leaving now and I want to make sure this letter gets into the post today. Write soon! Love, Emma.
What was that “or maybe,” I wondered?
I looked over the photos she’d included. A few lines of description had been penned on the back of each. The first was a snapshot of two Victorian ladies standing in front of a striped tent beneath a sign that read CURIOS. On the back Emma had written: Miss Bobolink and Miss Loon started a traveling exhibit using some of Bentham’s old artefacts. Now that peculiars are freer to travel, they’ve been doing quite a business. Many of us don’t know much about our history …
The next was a photo of several adults descending a set of narrow steps to a beach and a rowboat. There’s a very nice loop on the shore of the Caspian Sea, Emma had written, and last week Nim and some of the ymbrynes went on a boating trip there. Hugh and Horace and I tagged along but stayed on the shore. We’ve all had enough of rowboats, thank you.
The last picture was of conjoined twin girls wearing giant white bows in their raven-black hair. They were seated next to each other, their hands pulling aside a bit of their shirts to reveal a section of shared torso. Carlotta and Carlita are conjoined, the back read, but that isn’t what’s most peculiar about them. Their bodies produce an adhesive glue that’s stronger than concrete when it dries. Enoch sat in some and attached his bottom to a chair for two whole days! He was so mad I thought his head would pop off. I wish you could’ve been there …
I replied right away. What did you mean by “or maybe”?
Ten days passed and I didn’t hear from her. I worried that she felt she’d gone too far in her letter; had violated our just-friends agreement and was stepping back. I wondered if she’d even sign her next letter Love, Emma, two little words I had come to depend on. After two weeks, I began to wonder if there would even be another letter.
Then the mail stopped coming altogether. I watched obsessively for the mailman, and when he didn’t show for four days, I knew something was up. My parents always got tons of catalogs and bills. I mentioned, casually as I could, that it seemed strange we hadn’t gotten any mail recently. My father mumbled something about a national holiday and changed the subject. Then I really started to worry.
The mystery was solved during the next morning’s session with Dr. Spanger, which, unusually, my parents had been invited to attend. They were tense and ashen-faced, struggling even to make small talk as we sat down. Spanger began with the usual softball questions. How had I been feeling? Any interesting dreams? I knew she was leading up to something big, and finally I couldn’t take the suspense.
“Why are my parents here?” I asked. “And why do they look like they just got back from a funeral?”
For the first time ever, Dr. Spanger’s permasmile faded. She reached into a folder on her desk and pulled out three envelopes.
They were letters from Emma. All had been opened. “We need to talk about these,” she said.
“We agreed there wouldn’t be any secrets,” my dad said. “This is bad, Jake. Very bad.”
My hands started to shake. “Those are private,” I said, struggling to control my voice. “They’re addressed to me. You shouldn’t have read them.”
What was in those letters? What had my parents seen? It was a disaster, an utter disaster.
“Who is Emma?” said Dr. Spanger. “Who is Miss Peregrine?”
“This isn’t fair!” I shouted. “You stole my private letters, and now you’re using them to ambush me!”
“Lower your voice!” my dad said. “It’s out in the open now, so just be honest, and this will be easier for all of us.”
Dr. Spanger held up a photograph, one Emma must have included in the letters. “Who are these people?”
I leaned forward to look at it. It was a picture of two older ladies in a rocking chair, one cradling the other in her lap like a baby.
“I have no idea,” I said curtly.
“There’s writing on the back,” she said. It says: ‘We’re finding new ways to help those who’ve had parts of their soul removed. Close contact seems to work miracles. After just a few hours, Miss Hornbill was like a new ymbryne.’ ”
Eyem-brine, she pronounced it.
“It’s imm-brinn,” I corrected her, unable to help myself. “The ‘i’ sounds are flat.”
“I see.” Dr. Spanger set the photo down and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “And what is an … imm-brinn?”
In retrospect maybe it was foolish, but at the time I felt cornered, like I had no choice but to tell the truth. They had letters, they had photos, and all my flimsy stories had blown away in the wind.
“They protect us,” I said.
Dr. Spanger glanced at my parents. “All of us?”
“No. Just peculiar children.”
“Peculiar children,” Dr. Spanger repeated slowly. “And you believe you’re one of them.”
I stuck out my hand. “I’d like to have my letters now.”
“You’ll get them. But first we need to talk, okay?”
I retracted my hand and folded my arms. She was talking to me like I had an IQ o
f seventy.
“Now, what makes you think you’re peculiar?”
“I can see things other people can’t.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw my parents going increasingly pale. They were not taking this well.
“In the letters you mention something called a … Pan … loopticon? What can you tell me about that?”
“I didn’t write the letters,” I said. “Emma did.”
“Sure. Let’s switch gears, then. Tell me about Emma.”
“Doctor,” my mother interrupted, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to encourage—”
“Please, Mrs. Portman.” Dr. Spanger held up a hand. “Jake, tell me about Emma. Is she your girlfriend?”
I saw my dad’s eyebrows rise. I’d never had a girlfriend before. Never so much as been on a date.
“She was, I guess. But now we’re sort of … taking a break.”
Dr. Spanger wrote something down, then tapped her pen against her chin. “And when you imagine her, what does she look like?”
I shrank back in my chair. “What do you mean, imagine her?”
“Oh.” Dr. Spanger pursed her lips. She knew she’d messed up. “What I mean is …”
“Okay, this has gone on long enough,” my father said. “We know you wrote those letters, Jake.”
I nearly jumped out of the chair. “You think I what? That’s not even my handwriting!”
My dad took a letter out of his pocket—the one Emma had left for him. “You wrote this, didn’t you? It’s the same writing.”
“That was Emma, too! Look, her name’s right there!” I grabbed for the letter. My dad whipped it out of reach.
“Sometimes we want things so badly, we imagine they’re real,” Dr. Spanger said.
“You think I’m crazy!” I shouted.
“We don’t use that word in this office,” Dr. Spanger said. “Please calm down, Jake.”
“What about the postmark on the envelopes?” I said, pointing at the letters on Spanger’s desk. “They came all the way from London!”
My father sighed. “You took Photoshop last semester at school, Jakey. I might be old, but I know how easy that sort of thing is to fake.”
“And the photos? Did I fake those, too?”
“They’re your grandpa’s. I’m sure I’ve seen them before.”
By now my head was spinning. I felt exposed and betrayed and horribly embarrassed. And then I stopped talking, because everything I said seemed only to further convince them I had lost my mind.
I sat fuming while they talked about me like I wasn’t in the room. Dr. Spanger’s new diagnosis was that I’d suffered a “radical break with reality,” and that these “peculiars” were part of an elaborate universe of delusions I’d constructed for myself, complete with fantasy girlfriend. Because I was very intelligent, for weeks I’d managed to fool everyone into thinking I was sane, but the letters proved I was far from cured, and could even be a danger to myself. She recommended I be sent to an “in-patient clinic” for “rehabilitation and monitoring” with all due haste—which I understood to be psychiatrist talk for “looney-bin.”
They’d had it all planned out. “It’ll just be for a week or two,” my father said. “It’s a really nice place, super expensive. Think of it as a little vacation.”
“I want my letters.”
Dr. Spanger tucked them back into her folder. “Sorry, Jake,” she said. “We think it’s best if I hold on to them.”
“You lied to me!” I said. Leaping at her desk, I swiped at them, but Spanger was quick and jumped back with the folder in her hand. My dad shouted and grabbed me, and a second later two of my uncles burst through the door. They’d been waiting in the hall the whole time. Bodyguards, in case I made a break for it.
They escorted me out to the parking lot and into the car. My uncles would be living with us for a few days, my mom explained nervously, until a room opened up for me at the clinic.
They were scared to be alone with me. My own parents. Then they’d send me off to a place where I’d be someone else’s problem. The clinic. Like I was going in to have a hurt elbow bandaged. Call a spade a spade: it was an asylum, expensive though it may be. Not a place I could fake swallowing my meds and spit them out later. Not somewhere I could dupe doctors into believing my stories about fugue states and memory loss. They would dope me with antipsychotics and truth serums until I told them every last thing about peculiardom, and with that as proof that I was irredeemably insane, they’d have no choice but to lock me in a padded cell and flush the key down a toilet.
I was well and truly screwed.
* * *
For the next several days I was watched like a criminal, a parent or uncle never more than a room-length away. Everyone was waiting for a call from the clinic. It was a popular place, I guess, but the minute there was an open room—any day now—I would be bundled off.
“We’ll visit every day,” my mom assured me. “It’s just for a few weeks, Jakey, promise.”
Just a few weeks. Yeah, right.
I tried reasoning with them. Begging. I implored them to hire a handwriting expert, so I could prove the letters weren’t mine. When that failed, I reversed myself completely. I admitted to writing the letters (when of course I hadn’t), saying I realized now that I’d invented it all—there were no peculiar children, no ymbrynes, no Emma. This pleased them, but it didn’t change their minds. Later I overheard them whispering to each other and learned that in order to secure me a spot on the waiting list, they’d had to pay for the first week of the clinic—the very expensive clinic—in advance. So there was no backing out.
I considered running away. Snatching the car keys and making a break for it. But inevitably I’d be caught, and then things would be even worse for me.
I fantasized about Emma coming to my rescue. I even wrote a letter telling her what had happened, but I had no way to send it. Even if I could’ve snuck out to the mailbox without being seen, the mailman didn’t come to our house anymore. And if I’d reached her, what would it have mattered? I was stuck in the present, far from a loop. She couldn’t have come anyway.
On the third night, in desperation, I swiped my dad’s phone (I wasn’t allowed one anymore) and used it to send Emma an email. Before I’d realized how hopeless she was with computers, I’d set up an address for her—
[email protected]—but she was so firmly disinterested that I’d never written her there, nor even, I realized, bothered to tell her the password. A message in a bottle thrown into the sea would’ve had a better chance of reaching her, but it was the only chance I had.
The call came the following evening: a room had opened up for me. My bags had been packed and waiting for days. It didn’t matter that it was nine o’clock at night, or that it was a two-hour drive to the clinic—we would go right away.
We piled into the station wagon. My parents sat in front, and I was squashed between my uncles in the back, as if they thought I might try leaping from a moving car. In truth, I might’ve. But as the garage door rumbled open and my dad started the car, what little hope I’d been nurturing began to shrivel. There really was no escaping this. I couldn’t argue my way out of it, nor run from it—unless I managed to run all the way to London, which would’ve required passports and money and all sorts of impossible things. No, I would have to endure this. But peculiars had endured far worse.
We backed out of the garage. My father flipped on the headlights, then the radio. The smooth chatter of a DJ filled the car. The moon was rising behind the palm trees that edged the yard. I lowered my head and shut my eyes, trying to swallow back the dread that was filling me. Maybe I could wish myself elsewhere. Maybe I could disappear.
We began to move, the broken shells that paved our driveway crunching beneath the wheels. My uncles talked across me, something about sports, in an attempt to lighten the mood. I shut out their voices.
I’m not here.
We hadn’t yet left the driveway when the car jerked to a stop. “What t
he heck is this?” I heard my father say.
He honked the horn and my eyes flew open, but what I saw convinced me that I’d succeeded in willing myself into a dream. Standing there before of our car, lined up across the driveway and shining in the glare our headlights, were all my peculiar friends. Emma, Horace, Enoch, Olive, Claire, Hugh, even Millard—and out in front of them, a traveling coat across her shoulders and a carpetbag in her hand, Miss Peregrine.
“What the hell’s going on?” said one of my uncles.
“Yeah, Frank, what the hell is this?” said the other.
“I don’t know,” said my father, and he rolled down his window. “Get out of my driveway!” he shouted.
Miss Peregrine marched to his door. “We will not. Exit the vehicle, please.”
“Who the hell are you?” my dad said.
“Alma LeFay Peregrine, Ymbryne Council leader pro tem and headmistress to these peculiar children. We’ve met before, though I don’t expect you’d remember. Children, say hello.”
As my father’s jaw dropped and my mother began hyperventilating, the children waved, Olive levitated, Claire opened her backmouth, Millard twirled, a suit of clothes without a body, and Emma lit a flame in her hand while walking toward my dad’s open window. “Hello, Frank!” she said. “My name’s Emma. I’m a good friend of your son’s.”
“See?” I said. “I told you they were real!”
“Frank, get us out of here!” my mother screeched, and slapped him on the shoulder.
He’d seemed frozen until then, but now he laid on the horn and jammed his foot on the accelerator, and as shells spit from the back tires, the car lurched forward.
“STOP!” I screamed as we sped toward my friends. They jumped out of the way—all but Bronwyn, who simply planted her feet, stuck out her arms, and caught the front of our car in her hands. We slammed to a stop, the wheels spinning uselessly while my mother and uncles howled in terror.