Discovering the Future

Chapter 13- Chapter 5 (Part 2)

Disclaimer: I don't own Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

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I was standing there trying to figure out how the hell she'd managed to slip by when something occurred to me--something so obvious that I felt like a fool for having taken this long to realise it. There never was any girl. I'd imagined her, and the rest of them, too. My brain had conjured them up at the very moment I was looking at their pictures. And the sudden, strange darkness that had preceded their arrival? A blackout.

It was impossible, anyway; those kids had all died a lifetime ago. Even if they hadn't, it was ridiculous to believe they would still look exactly as they had when the photos were taken. Everything had happened so quickly, though, I never had a chance to stop and wonder if I might be chasing a hallucination.

I could already predict Dr. Golan's explanation: That house is such an emotionally loaded place for you, just being inside was enough to trigger a stress reaction. Yeah, he was a psychobabble-spewing prick. But that didn't make him wrong.

"Well, he probably would be wrong this time," Millard said.

I turned back, humiliated. Rather than crab-walking, I let go of the last of my dignity and just crawled on my hands and knees toward the gauzy light coming from the mouth of the tunnel. Looking up, I realised I'd seen this view before: in a photograph in Martin's museum of the place where they'd discovered the bog boy. It was baffling to think that people had once believed this foul-smelling wasteland was a gateway to heaven--and believed it with such conviction that a kid my age was willing to give up his life to get there. What a sad, stupid waste.

I decided then that I wanted to go home. I didn't care about the photos in the basement, and I was sick of riddles and mysteries and last words. Indulging my grandfather's obsession with them had made me worse, not better. It was time to let go.

I unfolded myself from the cramped cairn tunnel and stepped outside only to be blinded by light. Shielding my eyes, I squinted through split fingers at a world I hardly recognised. It was the same bog and the same path and the same everything as before, but for the first time since my arrival it was bathed in cheery yellow sunlight, the sky a candy blue, no trace of that twisting fog that, for me, had come to define this part of the island. It was warm, too, more like the dog days of summer than the breezy beginnings of it. God, the weather changes fast around here, I thought.

Hugh snorted. "That's what you think."

I slogged back to the path, trying to ignore the skin-crawly feeling of bug-mud gooshing into my socks, and headed for town. Strangely, the path wasn't muddy at all--as if it had dried out in just a few minutes--but it had been carpet-bombed with so many grapefruit-size animal turds that I couldn't walk in a straight line. How had I not noticed this earlier? Had I been in some kind of psychotic haze all morning? Was I one now?

I didn't look up from the turdy checkerboard that stretched out before me until I'd crossed the ridge and was coming back into town, which is when I realised where all the mess had come from. Where this morning a battalion of tractors had plied the gravel paths, hauling carts loaded with fish and peat-bricks up and down from the harbour, now those carts were being pulled by horses and mules. The clip-clop of hooves had replaced the growl of engines.

Missing, too, was the ever-present buzz of diesel generators. Had the island run out of gas in the few hours I'd been gone?

"No, silly!" Olive said. "You went through the loop. You're in our time."