“What is this place?” I asked.
“It’s a disguising room,” Millard answered, “designed to help visiting peculiars blend in with this loop’s normals.” He pointed out a framed illustration demonstrating how clothes of the period were worn.
“When in Rome!” said Horace, bounding toward a rack of clothes.
Emma asked everyone to change. In addition to helping us blend in, new clothes might also throw off any wights who’d been tracking us. “But keep your sweaters on underneath, in case more trouble finds us.”
Bronwyn and Olive took some plain-looking dresses behind a screen. I traded my ash-coated, sweat-stained pants and jacket for a mismatched but relatively clean suit. Instantly uncomfortable, I wondered how, for so many centuries, people wore such stiff, formal clothes all the time.
Millard put on a sharp-looking outfit and sat down in front of a mirror. “How do I look?” he said.
“Like an invisible boy wearing clothes,” replied Horace.
Millard sighed, lingered in front of the mirror a bit longer, then stripped and disappeared again.
Horace’s initial excitement had already waned. “The selection here is atrocious,” he complained. “If the clothes aren’t moth-eaten, they’re patched with clashing fabric! I am so weary of looking like a street urchin.”
“Street urchins blend,” Emma said from behind her changing screen. “Little gents in top hats do not.” She emerged wearing shiny red flats and a short-sleeved blue dress that fell just below the knee.
“What do you think?” she said, twirling to make the dress billow.
She looked like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, only cuter. I didn’t know how to tell her this in front of everybody, though, so instead I gave her an awkward grin and a thumbs-up.
She laughed. “Like it? Well, that’s too bad,” she said with a coy smile. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb.” Then a pained expression crossed her face, as if she felt guilty for laughing—for having had even a moment of fun, given all that had happened to us and everything yet to be resolved—and she ducked behind the screen again.
I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we’d seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind. But you can’t feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human. But I didn’t know how to say this, either.
When she came out again, she had on a sacklike blouse with ripped sleeves and a broomstick skirt that brushed the top of her feet. (Much more urchin like.) She’d kept the red shoes, though. Emma could never resist a touch of glitter, however small.
“And this?” said Horace, waving a poofy orange wig he’d found.
“How’s this going to help anyone ‘blend in with the normals’?”
“Because it seems we’re going to a carnival,” said Hugh, looking up at a poster on the wall that advertised one.
“Just a moment!” Horace said, joining Hugh beneath the poster. “I’ve heard of this place! It’s an old tourist loop.”
“What’s a tourist loop?” I asked.
“Used to be you could find them all across peculiardom,” Millard explained, “placed strategically at times and locations of historical import. They made up a sort of Grand Tour that was once considered an essential part of any well-bred peculiar’s education. This was many years ago, of course, when it was still relatively safe to travel abroad. I didn’t realize there were any left.”
Then he got quiet, lost in memories of a better time.
When we’d all finished changing, we left our twentieth-century clothes in a heap and followed Emma through another door, out into an alleyway stacked with trash and empty crates. I recognized the sounds of a carnival in the distance: the arrhythmic wheeze of pipe organs, the dull roar of a crowd. Even through my nerves and exhaustion, I felt a jangle of excitement. Once, this was something peculiars had come from far and wide to see. My parents had never even taken me to Disney World.
Emma gave the usual instructions: “Stay together. Watch Jacob and me for signals. Don’t talk to anyone, and look no one in the eye.”
“How will we know where to go?” asked Olive.
“We’ll have to think like ymbrynes,” Emma said. “If you were Miss Wren, where would you be hiding?”
“Anywhere but London?” said Enoch.