Discovering the Future

Chapter 16- Chapter 6 (Part 2)

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

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"Just to make sure I understand," I said. "If today is September third, 1940, then tomorrow is...also September third?"

"Well, for a few of the loop's twenty-four hours it's September second, but, yes, it's the third."

"So tomorrow never comes."

"In a manner of speaking."

Outside, a distant clap of what sounded like thunder echoed, and the darkening window rattled in its frame. Miss Peregrine looked up and again drew out her watch.

"I'm afraid that's all the time I have at the moment. I do hope you'll stay for supper."

I said that I would; that my father might be wondering where I was hardly crossed my mind.

"Wow," Enoch said, drawing out the word. "Best kid of the year."

I squeezed out from behind the desk and began following her to the door, but then another question occurred to me, one that had been nagging at me for a long time.

"Was my grandfather really running from the Nazis when he came here?"

"He was," she said. "A number of children came to us during those awful years leading up to the war. There was so much upheaval." She looked pained, as if the memory was still fresh. "I found Abraham at a camp for displaced persons on the mainland. He was a poor, tortured boy, but so strong. I knew at once he belonged with us."

I felt relieved; at least that part of his life was as I had understood it to be. There was one more thing I wanted to ask, though, and I didn't quite know how to put it.

"Was he--my grandfather-was he like..."

"Was he peculiar," Horace finished. "It's not difficult."

"Like us?"

I nodded.

She smiled strangely. "He was like you, Jacob." And she turned and hobbled toward the stairs.

"Way to leave a boy confused." Hugh grinned.

Miss Peregrine insisted that I wash off the bog mud before sitting down to dinner, and asked Emma to run me a bath. I think she hoped that by talking to me a little, Emma would start to feel better. But she wouldn't even look at me. I watched as she ran cold water into the tub and then warmed it with her bare hands, swirling them around until steam rose.

"That is awesome," I said. But she left without saying a word in response.

Once I turned the water thoroughly brown, I towelled off and found a change of clothes hanging from the back of the door--baggy tweed pants, a button-up shirt, and a pair of suspenders that were far too short but that I couldn't figure out how to adjust. I was left with the choice of wearing the pants either around my ankles or hitched up to my bellybutton. I decided the latter was the lesser of evils, so I went downstairs to have what would likely be the strangest meal of my life while dressed like a clown without makeup.

Victor rolled his eyes. "Stop being so dramatic. We're not that scary."

Dinner was a dizzying blur of names and faces, many of them half-remembered from photographs and my grandfather's long-ago descriptions. When I came into the dining room, the kids, who'd been clamouring noisily for seats around the long table, froze and stared at me. I got the feeling they didn't get a lot of dinner guests. Miss Peregrine, already seated at the head of the table, stood up and used the sudden quiet as an opportunity to introduce me.