If that were true, I thought, it would explain a lot of things, like how people could live the same day over and over for decades without losing their minds. Yes, it was beautiful and life was good, but if every day were exactly alike and if the kids really couldn’t leave, as Miss Peregrine had said, then this place wasn’t just a heaven but a kind of prison, too. It was just so hypnotizingly pleasant that it might take a person years to notice, and by then it would be too late; leaving would be too dangerous.
So it’s not even a decision, really. You stay. It’s only later—years later—that you begin to wonder what might’ve happened if you hadn’t.
*
I must’ve dozed off, because around midmorning I awoke to something nudging my foot. I cracked an eye to discover a little humanoid figure trying to hide inside my shoe, but it had gotten tangled in the laces. It was stiff-limbed and awkward, half a hubcap tall, dressed in army fatigues. I watched it struggle to free itself for a moment and then go rigid, a wind-up toy on its last wind. I untied my shoe to extricate it and then turned it over, looking for the wind-up key, but I couldn’t find one. Up close it was a strange, crude-looking thing, its head a stump of rounded clay, its face a smeared thumbprint.
“Bring him here!” someone called from across the yard. A boy sat waving at me from a tree stump at the edge of the woods.
Lacking any pressing engagements, I picked up the clay soldier and walked over. Arranged around the boy was a whole menagerie of wind-up men, staggering around like damaged robots. As I drew near, the one in my hands jerked to life again, squirming as if he were trying to get away. I put it with the others and wiped shed clay on my pants.
“I’m Enoch,” the boy said. “You must be him.”
“I guess I am,” I replied.
“Sorry if he bothered you,” he said, herding the one I’d returned back to the others. “They get ideas, see. Ain’t properly trained yet. Only made ’em last week.” He spoke with a slight cockney accent. Cadaverous black circles ringed his eyes like a raccoon, and his overalls—the same ones he’d worn in pictures I’d seen—were streaked with clay and dirt. Except for his pudgy face, he might’ve been a chimney sweep out of Oliver Twist.
“You made these?” I asked, impressed. “How?”
“They’re homunculi,” he replied. “Sometimes I put doll heads on ’em, but this time I was in a hurry and didn’t bother.”
“What’s a homunculi?”
“More than one homunculus.” He said it like it was something any idiot would know. “Some people think its homunculuses, but I think that sounds daft, don’t you?”
“Definitely.”
The clay soldier I’d returned began wandering again. With his foot, Enoch nudged it back toward the group. They seemed to be going haywire, colliding with one another like excited atoms. “Fight, you nancies!” he commanded, which is when I realized they weren’t simply bumping into one another, but hitting and kicking. The errant clay man wasn’t interested in fighting, however, and when he began to totter away once more, Enoch snatched him up and snapped off his legs.
“That’s what happens to deserters in my army!” he cried, and tossed the crippled figure into the grass, where it writhed grotesquely as the others fell upon it.
“Do you treat all your toys that way?”
“Why?” he said. “Do you feel sorry for them?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
“No. They wouldn’t be alive at all if it wasn’t for me.”
I laughed, and Enoch scowled at me. “What’s so funny?”
“You made a joke.”
“You are a bit thick, aren’t you?” he said. “Look here.” He grabbed one of the soldiers and stripped off its clothes. Then with both hands he cracked it down the middle and removed from its sticky chest a tiny, convulsing heart. The soldier instantly went limp. Enoch held the heart between his thumb and forefinger for me to see.
“It’s from a mouse,” he explained. “That’s what I can do—take the life of one thing and give it to another, either clay like this or something that used to be alive but ain’t anymore.” He tucked the stilled heart into his overalls. “Soon as I figger out how to train ’em up proper, I’ll have a whole army like this. Only they’ll be massive.” And he raised an arm up over his head to show me just how massive.
“What can you do?” he said.
“Me? Nothing, really. I mean, nothing special like you.”
“Pity,” he replied. “Are you going to come live with us anyway?” He didn’t say it like he wanted me to, exactly; he just seemed curious.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it.” That was a lie, of course. I had thought about it, but mostly in a daydreaming sort of way.
He looked at me suspiciously. “But don’t you want to?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Narrowing his eyes, he nodded slowly, as if he’d just figured me out.
Then he leaned in and said under his breath, “Emma told you about Raid the Village, didn’t she?”
“Raid the what?”
He looked away. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just a game some of us play.”
I got the distinct feeling I was being set up. “She didn’t tell me,” I said.
Enoch scooted toward me on the stump. “I bet she didn’t,” he said. “I bet there’s a lot of things about this place she wouldn’t like you to know.”