Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Chapters 7–9

This is a little exhibition we used to tour around the Continent back in the halcyon days.

It was like one of those fast-motion videos of plants blooming, except she seemed to be reeling the flowers up from their loamy bed by invisible strings.

I wanted to ask Miss Peregrine more about my grandfather—a subject I avoided with Emma, who turned morose at any mention of his name—but the headmistress had gone to conduct a lesson in the study for the younger kids.

It seemed like I had plenty of time, though, and the languid pace and midday heat sapped my will to do anything more taxing than wander the grounds in dreamy amazement.

After a decadent lunch of goose sandwiches and chocolate pudding, Emma began to agitate for the older kids to go swimming.

Call me a dandy if you will, but just because the villagers won’t remember what you wear doesn’t give you license to dress like a vagabond!

It promises to be a work unprecedented in the history of academic scholarship.

“Take your picture.”
Her smile disappeared. “I’m not exactly at my most fetching,” she said doubtfully.

Outside the pub, a small crowd was gathered around a quorum of very pissed-off-looking sheep farmers.

Someone said they’d seen Dylan by the harbor, and a posse was dispatched to collect him.

We approached tentatively and peeked through the fence slats.

Worm gagged and began to cry, which was seen as a tacit admission of guilt; the criminal who couldn’t face his own crime.

I know this because last night at dinner we were treated by Hugh to a fascinating disquisition on the wonders of twenty-first-century telecommunications technology.

It may appear to you that we’ve found a way to cheat death, but it’s an illusion.

If the children loiter too long on your side of the loop, all the many years from which they have abstained will descend upon them at once, in a matter of hours.

Charlotte was roving blithely about the village by herself when she was discovered by a constable.

I untied my shoe to extricate it and then turned it over, looking for the wind-up key, but I couldn’t find one.

Arranged around the boy was a whole menagerie of wind-up men, staggering around like damaged robots.

“They’re homunculi,” he replied. “Sometimes I put doll heads on ’em, but this time I was in a hurry and didn’t bother.”

I sauntered into the house and up the stairs like I had business there and didn’t care who knew it.

He wore a rain hat and dark glasses and what appeared to be several jackets layered on top of one another, which made him look both fat and vaguely transient.

I had no choice but to return the favor with a fistful of my own, and pretty soon things devolved into a no-holds-barred sand fight.

We waded out past the rocks where, lashed to a depth marker, was a canoe. We clambered into it and Emma handed me an oar and we both started paddling, headed toward the lighthouse.

I need to breathe. She patted my arm condescendingly and reached for a length of plastic tubing that hung nearby; it was connected to a pipe that ran up the ladder to the surface.

Emma held out a hand and flicked her wrist, but rather than producing a ball of fire her hand glowed a scintillating blue.

Mesmerized, I lost all track of time.

On the way to the house, we gleaned sketchy bits of information from Hugh about what had happened, but mostly we just ran.

Miss Avocet had seemed so indomitable then, but now she looked frail and weak.

But he could never escape his peculiarity. His unique skill, coupled with the prowess he’d honed during the war as a hunter of hollows, made him too valuable.

He was often pressed into service, asked to help eradicate troublesome pockets of hollows.

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about.

For a moment she stared as if about to sink back into her stupor, but then she sat forward, face brightening.

“Have I fallen asleep? How indecorous of me.”

They spoke of eternal youth enjoyed outside the confines of loops, of jumping back and forth from future to past with impunity, suffering none of the ill effects that have always prevented such recklessness—in other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

You’re talking about making yourselves into gods, I said. It can’t be done. And even if it can, it shouldn’t. But they would not be deterred.

Despite warnings, even threats, from the Council, in the summer of 1908 my brothers and several hundred members of this renegade faction—a number of powerful ymbrynes among them, traitors every one—ventured into the Siberian tundra to conduct their hateful experiment.

We expected them to return within a week, tails between their legs, humbled by the immutable nature of nature.

Instead, their comeuppance was far more dramatic: a catastrophic explosion that rattled windows as far as the Azores.

In a cruel twist of irony, they achieved the immortality they’d been seeking.

They tend to adopt personas invisible to society: the gray-suited man on the train; the indigent begging for spare coins; just faces in the crowd.