“It didn’t go well,” I said. “We got ejected from her loop somehow and woke up on my grandfather’s porch in Florida.”
“By our winged elders,” Bronwyn said quietly. “That’s unbelievable.”
“Quite literally,” Addison agreed. “It violates every known law of loopology. Now let’s go before we ruin the carpet with our wet.” And he nudged us down the hall, washed in the wan gray light of a Devil’s Acre morning.
“You really found her?” Bronwyn asked as we walked.
Noor nodded. Bronwyn seemed to understand that something terrible had happened, but didn’t pry. She cast a worried look in my direction. “I’m really sorry,” she said again.
Passing a window, I looked outside and was met with a strange sight: a dusting of grayish fluff coated the streets, the rooftops, the Acre’s few stunted trees. More fell gently through the air. It was snowing in Devil’s Acre. But the Acre was a loop, and the weather did not change from one day to the next, and so it couldn’t have been snowing.
Bronwyn caught me staring. “Ashes,” she said.
“It’s one of the desolations,” explained Addison. “That’s what Miss Avocet calls them.”
So all was not as we had left it; all was not well.
“When did that start?” I asked.
But then someone was screeching, “Is it them? Is that them?” and two people came racing out of the stairwell.
Emma. Emma and Enoch, running toward us in black raincoats smeared with ash. My heart expanded at the sight of them.
“Jacob! Noor!” Emma was shouting. “Thank the birds, thank the heavenly peculiar birds!”
Again we were wrapped in arms, spun in circles, peppered with questions. “Where the devil have you been?” Emma demanded, her mood flipping between ecstatic and angry. “For a visit to your parents, without leaving so much as a note?!”
“You ruddy idiots, you had us thinking you were dead!” Enoch berated us. “Again!”
“We nearly were,” Noor said.
Emma attacked me with another hug, then shoved me to arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Well? You look like drowned rats.”
“They’ve been through hell,” said Bronwyn.
“We should really talk to Miss Peregrine,” I said apologetically.
Enoch curled his lip. “Why? You didn’t bother telling her you were leaving.”
“She’s in her new office, upstairs,” Emma said, and we started down the hall again.
“They found the hollow-hunter,” Addison blurted, apparently unable to contain himself.
Emma’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Where is she?” Enoch said suspiciously.
“Don’t ask,” muttered Bronwyn.
Emma blanched. She was about to ask me something more when we came to a throng of people lined up in the hall, and we stopped talking as we passed them. They looked like new arrivals, both wide-eyed from the strangeness of their surroundings and dazed from recent loop crossovers, all dressed in clothes from different eras and parts of the world. Some could easily have passed for normals: a young couple who looked like English gentry and had the bored expressions to match; a boy tapping his foot and checking his pocket watch; a glaring baby in an old Victorian baby stroller. Others were so manifestly peculiar they’d have had a difficult time living anywhere outside of a circus sideshow or a loop: a bearded girl and her mother, a man in fancy dress who had a parasitic twin growing out of his chest, a freckled girl who had piercing eyes but lacked a mouth. They were lined up to get their transit papers stamped by one of Sharon’s passport control functionaries.
“New joiners from the outer loops,” Enoch whispered. “The ymbrynes have been inviting all sorts to the Acre, not that we can fit many more. We’re cheek by jowl as it is.” I asked why and he gave an irritable roll of his shoulders. “I’ve no idea why anyone would want to come here. Any other loop would be better than this.”
It made me wonder if the ymbrynes already knew something bad was coming and were gathering the most vulnerable peculiars in the Acre for their protection.
We were nearly past the crowd when I thought I heard my name and looked back, and caught about half of them staring at me. The moment I turned away again I swear I heard the glaring baby say, in a distinctly not-baby voice, “That is Jacob Portman!”
When the throng was behind us Emma finally asked her question. “What happened to V?”
“I promise we’ll tell you everything,” I said, “just as soon as we talk to Miss P.”
Emma sighed. “Tell me this, at least. Did you have something to do with the hail of bones yesterday?” She touched a purpling bruise behind her ear, the sight of which made me wince.
“The what?” Noor said.
“The desolations,” Addison stage-whispered.
“There was a hail of bones yesterday morning,” Bronwyn said matter-of-factly. “Rain of blood last evening.”
“More of a drizzle,” said Emma, shouldering open the stairwell door and holding it for the rest of us. “And now the ashes.”
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Addison said. “That’s Shakespeare.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
On the top floor of Bentham’s house, above the libraries and dormitories and snaking halls of Panloopticon doors, were his attic of peculiar treasures and his office, which in his permanent absence Miss Peregrine had claimed as her own. “She comes here to think,” Bronwyn explained, her voice echoing in the stairwell. “She says it’s the only place in the whole bloody Acre she can get a moment’s peace and quiet.” At the landing she pushed the door open and bellowed down the stairs for Enoch to quit lagging.
We wended our way through rooms containing Bentham’s museum of peculiar objects. When I’d first seen the attic the displays had been hidden under sheets and stowed away in crates, but now the boxes had been pried open and the sheets torn away. The effect of seeing his entire collection at once, uncovered and washed with ghostly, ash-filtered light, was dizzying. If the snaking Panloopticon hallways were the peculiar world’s Grand Central Station, then the attic floors above them were its mixed-up and mothballed Museum of Natural History. Pathways had been cleared by double- and triple-stacking many of the displays, and my gaze tripped from case to case as we shuffled single file through the narrow aisles.
I tried to stay focused on our meeting with Miss Peregrine and how we would break our awful news to her, but the oddities passing inches from my face conspired to distract me. Something rattled inside the shadows of a fancy dollhouse locked inexplicably inside a barred cage. A case filled with glass eyes stared back, shifting in their display rests to follow me as I hurried by. A hum drew my attention to the ceiling, where a ring of small rocks slowly orbited a thick black book that hovered in the air.