The bedsprings creaked as he got up and moved toward the door. But before he could leave, Enoch leapt to his feet and cried, “I’ve got it!”

Millard stopped. “Got what?”

Enoch turned to me. “The bloke who may or may not have been eaten by a hollow—do you know where they’re keeping him?”

“At the fishmonger’s.”

He rubbed his hands together. “Then I know how we can be sure.”

“And how’s that?” said Millard.

“We’ll ask him.”

*   *   *

An expeditionary team was assembled. Joining me would be Emma, who flatly refused to let me go alone, Bronwyn, who was loath to anger Miss Peregrine but insisted that we needed her protection, and Enoch, whose plan we were to carry out. Millard, whose invisibility might have come in handy, would have no part of it, and he had to be bribed just to keep from ratting us out.

“If we all go,” Emma reasoned, “the Bird won’t be able to banish Jacob. She’ll have to banish all four of us.”

“But I don’t want to be banished!” said Bronwyn.

“She’d never do it, Wyn. That’s the point. And if we can make it back before lights-out, she may not even realize we were gone.”

I had my doubts about that, but we all agreed it was worth a shot.

It went down like a jailbreak. After dinner, when the house was at its most chaotic and Miss Peregrine at her most distracted, Emma pretended to head for the sitting room and I for the study. We met a few minutes later at the end of the upstairs hallway, where a rectangle of ceiling pulled down to reveal a ladder. Emma climbed it and I followed, pulling it closed after us, and we found ourselves in a tiny, dark attic space. At one end was a vent, easily unscrewed, that led out onto a flat section of roof.

We stepped into the night air to find the others already waiting. Bronwyn gave us each a crushing hug and handed out black rain slickers she’d snagged, which I’d suggested we wear to provide some measure of protection from the storm raging outside the loop. I was about to ask how we were planning to reach the ground when I saw Olive float into view past the edge of the roof.

“Who’s keen for a game of parachute?” she said, smiling broadly. She was barefoot and wore a rope knotted around her waist. Curious what she was attached to, I peeked over the roof to see Fiona, rope in hand, hanging out a window and waving up at me. Apparently, we had accomplices.

“You first,” Enoch barked.

“Me?” I said, backing nervously away from the edge.

“Grab hold of Olive and jump,” Emma said.

“I don’t remember this plan involving me shattering my pelvis.”

“You won’t, dummy, if you just hang on to Olive. It’s great fun. We’ve done it loads of times.” She thought for a moment, “Well, one time.”

There seemed to be no alternative, so I steeled myself and approached the roof’s edge. “Don’t be frightened!” Olive said.

“Easy for you to say,” I replied. “You can’t fall.”

She reached out her arms and bear-hugged me and I hugged her back, and she whispered, “Okay, go.” I closed my eyes and stepped into the void. Instead of the drop I’d feared, we drifted slowly to the ground like a balloon leaking helium.

“That was fun,” Olive said. “Now let go!”

I did, and she went rocketing back up to the roof, saying “Wheeeee!” all the way. The others shushed her and then, one after another, they hugged her and floated down to join me. When we were all together we began sneaking toward the moon-capped woods, Fiona and Olive waving behind us. Maybe it was my imagination, but the breeze-blown topiary creatures seemed to wave at us, too, with Adam nodding a somber farewell.

*   *   *

When we stopped at the bog’s edge to catch our breath, Enoch reached into his bulging coat and handed out packages wrapped in cheesecloth. “Take these,” he said. “I ain’t carryin’ em all.”

“What are they?” asked Bronwyn, undoing the cloth to reveal a hunk of brownish meat with little tubes shunting out of it. “Ugh, it stinks!” she cried, holding it away from her.

“Calm down, it’s only a sheep heart,” he said, thrusting something of roughly the same dimensions into my hands. It stank of formaldehyde and, even through the cloth, felt unpleasantly moist.

“I’ll chuck my guts if I have to carry this,” Bronwyn said.

“I’d like to see that,” Enoch grumbled, sounding offended. “Stash it in your slicker and let’s get on with it.”

We followed the hidden ribbon of solid ground through the bog. I’d been over it so many times now, I’d almost forgotten how dangerous it could be, how many lives it had swallowed over the centuries. Stepping onto the cairn mound, I told everyone to button up their coats.

“What if we see someone?” asked Enoch.

“Just act normal,” I said. “I’ll tell them you’re my friends from America.”

“What if we see a wight?” asked Bronwyn.

“Run.”

“And if Jacob sees a hollow?”

“In that case,” Emma said, “run like the devil’s after you.”

One by one we ducked into the cairn, disappearing from that calm summer night. All was quiet until we reached the end chamber, and then the air pressure dropped and the temperature fell and the storm screamed into full-throated being. We spun toward the sound, rattled, and for a moment just stood listening as it seethed and howled at the mouth of the tunnel. It sounded like a caged animal that had just been shown its dinner. There was nothing to do but offer ourselves up to it.

We fell to our knees and crawled into what seemed like a black hole, the stars lost behind a mountain of thunderheads, whipping rain and freezing wind rifling through our coats, wires of lightning bleaching us bone white and making the dark that followed seem darker still. Emma tried to make a flame but she looked like a broken cigarette lighter, every sparking flick of her wrist hissing out before it could catch, so we shrugged up our coats and ran bent against the gale and the swollen bog that sucked at our legs, navigating as much by memory as by sight.

In the town, rain drummed on every door and window, but everyone stayed locked and shuttered inside their cottages as we ran unnoticed through the flooding streets, past scattered roof tiles torn away by the wind, past a single rain-blinded sheep lost and crying, past a tipped outhouse disgorging itself into the road, to the fishmonger’s shop. The door was locked, but with two thudding kicks Bronwyn flung it in. Drying her hand inside her coat, Emma was finally able to make a flame. As wide-eyed sturgeon stared from glass cases, I led us into the shop, around the counter where Dylan spent his days mumbling curses and scaling fish, through a rust-pocked door. On the other side was a little icehouse, just a lean- to shed floored with dirt and roofed with tin, its walls made from rough-cut planks, rain weeping through where they had shivered apart like bad teeth. Crowding the room were a dozen rectangular troughs raised on saw-horses and filled with ice.

“Which one’s he in?” Enoch asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Emma shone her flame around as we walked among the troughs, trying to guess which might hold more than just the corpses of fish—but they all looked the same, just lidless coffins of ice. We would have to search every one until we found him.

“Not me,” Bronwyn said, “I don’t want to see him. I don’t like dead things.”

“Neither do I, but we have to,” said Emma. “We’re all in this together.”

Each of us chose a trough and dug into it like a dog excavating a prized bed of flowers, our cupped hands scooping mounds of ice onto the floor. I’d emptied half of one and was losing feeling in my fingers when I heard Bronwyn shriek. I turned to see her stumble away from a trough, her hands across her mouth.

We crowded around to see what she’d uncovered. Jutting from the ice was a frozen, hairy-knuckled hand. “I daresay you found our man,” Enoch said, and through split fingers the rest of us watched as he scraped away more ice, slowly revealing an arm, then a torso, and finally Martin’s entire wrecked body.