“If only someone hadn’t murdered the pigeon,” Bronwyn said, staring bitterly at Miss Peregrine.
The headmistress stood on the cobblestones looking up at us, but no one wanted to touch her. We had to keep her out of sight, though, so Horace went back into the disguising room and fetched a denim sack. Miss Peregrine wasn’t enthusiastic about this arrangement, but when it became clear that no one was going to pick her up—least of all Bronwyn, who seemed entirely disgusted with her—she climbed inside and let Horace knot the top closed with a strip of leather.
*
We followed the drunken sound of the carnival through a snarl of cramped lanes, where from wooden carts vendors hawked vegetables and dusty sacks of grain and freshly killed rabbits; where children and thin cats skulked and prowled with hungry eyes, and women with proud, dirty faces squatted in the gutter peeling potatoes, building little mountains with the tossed-away skins. Though we tried very hard to slink by unnoticed, every one of them seemed to turn and stare as we passed: the vendors, the children, the women, the cats, the dead, milk-eyed rabbits swinging by their legs.
Even in my new, period-appropriate clothes, I felt transparently out of place. Blending in was as much about performance as about costume, I realized, and my friends and I carried ourselves with none of the slump-shouldered, shifty-eyed attitude that these people did. In the future, if I wanted to disguise myself as effectively as the wights, I’d have to sharpen my acting skills.
The carnival grew louder as we went, and the smells stronger—overcooked meats, roasting nuts, horse manure, human manure, and the smoke from coal fires all mixing together into something so sickly sweet that it thickened the very air. Finally, we reached a wide square where the carnival was in full, rollicking swing, packed with masses of people and brightly colored tents and more activity than my eyes could take in at once. The whole scene was an assault on my senses. There were acrobats and ropedancers and knife-throwers and fire-eaters and street performers of every type. A quack doctor pitched patent medicines from the back of a wagon: “A rare cordial to fortify the innards against infective parasites, unwholesome damps, and malignant effluvia!” Competing for attention on an adjacent stage was a loudmouthed showman in coattails and a large, prehistoric-looking creature whose gray skin hung from its frame in cascading wrinkles. It took me ten full seconds, as we threaded the crowd past the stage, to recognize it as a bear. It had been shaved and tied to a chair and made to wear a woman’s dress, and as its eyes bulged in its head, the showman grinned and pretended to serve it tea, shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen! Presenting the most beautiful lady in all of Wales!”—which earned him a big laugh from the crowd. I half hoped it would break its chains and eat him, right there in front of everyone.
To combat the dizzying effect of all this dreamlike madness, I reached into my pocket to palm the smooth glass of my phone, eyes closed for a moment, and whispered to myself, “I am a time traveler. This is real. I, Jacob Portman, am traveling in time.”
This was astonishing enough. More astonishing, perhaps, was the fact that time travel hadn’t broken my brain; that by some miracle, I had not yet devolved into a gibbering crazy person ranting on a street corner. The human psyche was much more flexible than I’d imagined, capable of expanding to contain all sorts of contradictions and seeming impossibilities. Lucky for me.
“Olive!” Bronwyn shouted. “Get away from there!” I looked up to see her yank Olive away from a clown who had bent down to talk to her. “I’ve told you time and again, never talk to normals!”