Discovering the Future

Chapter 15- Chapter 6 (Part 1)

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

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After some discussion, the children and Miss Peregrine had decided to read outside for a while, get some exercise while Miss Peregrine made supper, then finish after supper.

The circle went: Miss Peregrine, Emma, Fiona, Hugh, Millard, Horace, Enoch, Victor, Bronwyn, Olive, Claire, and then back to Miss Peregrine.

"Are you ready to start, children?" Miss Peregrine asked.

They all nodded.

When the last cottages had disappeared behind us, we slipped quietly from the wagon and then crossed the ridge on foot in the direction of the forest. Emma walked on one side of me, silent and brooding,

"Wait," Horace said, glancing at Enoch and smirking. "Since when was Enoch here?"

He rolled his eyes. "Since when did you care where I was?"

never letting go of my arm, while on the other Millard hummed to himself and kicked at stones. I was nervous and baffled and queasily excited all at the same time. Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up with my face in a puddle of drool on the Smart Aid break room table and think, Well, that was strange, and then return to the boring old business of being me.

"For some reason," Millard started, "I don't think that's going to happen."

But I didn't wake up. We just kept walking, the girl who could make fire with her hands and the invisible boy and me. We walked through the woods, where the path was wide and clear as any trail in a national park, then emerged onto a broad expanse of lawn blooming with flowers and striped with neat gardens. We'd reached the house.

I gazed at it in wonder--not because it was awful, but because it was beautiful.

"I told you it was," Claire said.

There wasn't a shingle out of place or a broken window. Turrets and chimneys that had slumped lazily on the house I remembered now pointed confidently toward the sky. The forest that seemed to devour its walls stood at a respectful distance.

I was led down a flagstone path and up a set of freshly painted steps to the porch. Emma no longer seemed to regard me as the threat she once did, but before going inside she tied my hands behind me--I think just for the sake of appearances. She was playing the returning hunter, and I was the captured prey. She was about to take me inside when Millard stopped her.

"Millard!" Emma cried. "This is my moment. Don't stop me!"

Millard smirked. "It's my moment now."

"His shoes are caked with filth," he said. "Can't have him tracking in mud. The Bird'll have an attack." As my captors waited, I stepped out of my shoes one at a time, pressing down on the heels with the opposite foot, wobbling and nearly losing my without my arms to steady me. Emma grabbed me before I could fall, then yanked me impatiently through the door.

We proceeded down a hall I remembered being almost impassably clogged with broken furniture, past the staircase, now gleaming with varnish, curious faces peeking at me through the banisters, through the dining room. The snowfall of plaster was gone; in its place was a long wooden table ringed by chairs. It was the same house I'd explored, but everything had been restored to order.