“I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”
“Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature — one that can travel through time loops.”
“It becomes a wight,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”
“But that hollow at the menagerie didn’t become a wight,” said Emma. “It became a hollow that could enter loops.”
“Which makes me wonder if the wights have been tinkering with nature,” said Millard, “vis-à-vis the transference of peculiar souls.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” said Emma. “Can we please, please talk about something else?”
“But where would they even get the souls?” I asked. “And how?”
“That’s it, I’m sitting somewhere else,” Emma said, and she got up to find another seat.
Millard and I rode in silence for a while. I couldn’t stop imagining being strapped to a table while a cabal of evil doctors removed my soul. How would they do it? With a needle? A knife?
To derail this morbid train of thought, I tried changing the subject again. “How did we all get to be peculiar in the first place?” I asked.
“No one’s certain,” Millard answered. “There are legends, though.”
“Like what?”
“Some people believe we’re descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago,” he said. “They were very powerful — and enormous, like the stone giant we found.”
I said, “Why are we so small, then, if we used to be giants?”
“The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller, too.”
“That’s all pretty hard to swallow,” I said. “I feel about as powerful as an ant.”
“Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “The thing I really don’t get is, why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?”
It was a rhetorical question; I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Millard gave me one anyway. “To quote a famous peculiar: ‘At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another mystery.’ ”
“Who said that?”
“We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer, too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago.”
I chuckled. “You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“All the time,” Millard said. “I would’ve liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn’t been born like this.”
“You would’ve been great at it.”
“Thank you,” he said. Then he went quiet, and in the silence I could feel him dreaming it: scenes from a life that might’ve been. After a while he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar, Jacob — it’s the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. But of course I didn’t. My peculiarity had its challenges, but at least I could participate in society.
The door to our compartment slid open. Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face — or rather, his apparent lack of one.
A young woman stood in the door. She wore a uniform and held a box of goods for sale. “Cigarettes?” she asked. “Chocolate?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re an American.”
“Afraid so.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “Hope you’re having a nice trip.
You picked an awkward time to visit Britain.”
I laughed. “So I’ve been told.”
She went out. Millard shifted his body to watch her go. “Pretty,” he said distantly.
It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those few who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl, anyway?
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been looking at him any particular way. “Like what?”
“Like you feel bad for me.”
“I don’t,” I said.
But I did.
Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared. I didn’t see him again for a while.
The hours rolled on, and the children passed them by telling stories. They told stories about famous peculiars and about Miss Peregrine in the strange, exciting, early days of her loop, and eventually they came around to telling their own stories. Some I had heard before — like how Enoch had raised the dead in his father’s funeral parlor, or the way Bronwyn, at the tender age of ten, had snapped her abusive stepfather’s neck without quite meaning to — but others were new to me. For as old as they were, the kids didn’t often lapse into bouts of nostalgia.
Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he dreamed about the sinking of the Lusitania and the next day heard about it on the radio. Hugh, from a young age, had loved honey more than any other food, and at five he’d started eating honeycomb along with it — so ravenously that the first time he accidentally swallowed a bee, he didn’t notice until he felt it buzzing around in his stomach. “The bee didn’t seem to mind a bit,” Hugh said, “so I shrugged and went on eating. Pretty soon I had a whole hive down there.” When the bees needed to pollinate, he’d gone to find a field of blooming flowers, and that’s where he met Fiona, who was sleeping among them.
Hugh told her story, too. Fiona was a refugee from Ireland, he said, where she’d been growing food for the people in her village during the famine of the 1840s — until she was accused of being a witch and chased out. This is something Hugh had gleaned only after years of subtle, nonverbal communication with Fiona, who didn’t speak not because she couldn’t, Hugh said, but “because the things she’d witnessed in the famine were so horrific they stole her voice away.”
Then it was Emma’s turn, but she had no interest in telling her story.
“Why not?” whined Olive. “Come on, tell about when you found out you were peculiar!”
“It’s ancient history,” Emma muttered, “relevant to nothing. And hadn’t we better be thinking about the future instead of the past?”
“Someone’s being a grumplepuss,” said Olive.
Emma got up and left, heading to the back of the car where no one would bother her. I let a minute or two pass so that she wouldn’t feel hounded, then went and sat next to her. She saw me coming and hid behind a newspaper, pretending to read.
“Because I don’t care to discuss it,” she said from behind the paper. “That’s why!”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, but you were going to ask, so I saved you the trouble.”
“Just to make it fair,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about me first.”
She peeked over the top of the paper, slightly intrigued. “But don’t I know everything about you already?”