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Miss Peregrine wasn’t inside I had a mini heart attack

"My bird!" Bronwyn cried "Where’s ht here," said the conductor, and he pointed above our heads Miss Peregrine was perched on a luggage rack, fast asleep

Bronwyn stuainst the wall, so relieved she nearly fainted "How did she get up there?"

The conductor raised an eyebrow "It’s a very lifelike toy" He turned and went to the door, then stopped and said, "By the here can I get one? My daughter would just love it"

"I’m afraid she’s one of a kind," Bronwyn said, and she took Miss Peregrine down and hugged her to her chest

After all we’d been through over the past few days--not to mention the past few hours--the luxury of the first-class cabin ca table, and wide picture s It looked like a richroom, and we had it all to ourselves

We took turns washing up in the wood-paneled bathroo you like," Enoch said, picking up a telephone that was attached to the aroose liver pâté? I should like all of it Yes, all that you have And toast triangles"

No one said anything about what had happened It was too much, too awful, and for noe just wanted to recover and forget There was so ers left to reckon with

We settled in for the journey Outside, Porth’s squat houses shrank away and Miss Wren’s rayly above the hills While the others drifted into conversations,thereness of 1940 beyond it--1940 being a place that had until recently been merely pocket-sized in my experience, no wider than a tiny island, and a place I could leave any tih the dark belly of Cairnholh, it had become a world, a whole world of marshy forests and s rivers; and of people and things that looked old but weren’t yet, like props and extras in soed but plotless periodby and by and by out mylike a dream without end

I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhyth et that I was more than just a passive viewer, mymore than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here Then, slowly, I rerandfather; the island; the children The pretty, flint-eyed girl next toatop mine

"Am I really here?" I asked her

"Go back to sleep," she said

"Do you think we’ll be all right?"

She kissed me on the tip of my nose

"Go back to sleep"

7

More terrible drea in and out of one another Snippets of horrors fro e; a road streith fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward ht and his ehost I drift down h my front door, into my house I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest

I’m not dead, I say, buton the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out theat a pale afternoon She’s gaunt, wrung out fro I reach out to touch her shoulder, but h it

Then I’le of gray sky

My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging froht?

Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now

Uncle Les: Yeah What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose Which he did

Uncle Jack: I knew it, though That he’d pull so like this one day He had that look, you know? Just a little …