How It All Goes Down
- The kids slip out of the wagon and walk through the forest to the house.
- It looks like the complete opposite from when Jacob was just there: "There wasn't a shingle out of place or a broken window" (6.3).
- Emma ties Jacob's hands behind his back, and Millard says that he can't go inside the house with dirty shoes, so Jacob removes his shoes and socks and rolls up his jeans (all with his hands tied behind his back).
- While Emma goes to fetch the headmistress, Jacob observes all the other kids, who are playing a game in the topiary garden.
- One of the girls levitates, and one of the topiary bushes even moves on its own.
- Millard tells Jacob that they're "peculiar" (6.17) and he asks if Jacob is, too.
- "I don't know. I don't think so" (6.18), he says.
- Emma returns, and says the headmistress is ready to see him.
- Jacob recognizes the headmistress immediately: It's Miss Peregrine.
- She recognizes him as Abraham Portman's grandson, and sends Emma and Millard out of the room to talk to Jacob in private.
- Miss Peregrine says she's been watching Jacob—she was that bird in his bedroom.
- She wonders why Abraham never explained anything to Jacob, and Jacob says that he did, but he never really believed him.
- Jacob explains what happens to Grandpa, and she tells him to keep it from the children.
- It's almost dinner, and Miss Peregrine throws open the door; there's Emma, eavesdropping at the keyhole.
- She runs away crying, and Miss Peregrine explains that she and Jacob's grandfather were "admirers, paramours, sweethearts" (6.81), and other synonyms for canoodlers.
- Miss Peregrine leads Jacob to the library and tells him about the difference between the coerlfolc (regular peeps) and the syndrigast or "peculiar spirit" (6.88).
- Miss Peregrine is an ymbrynes, which means she can transform into a bird and create temporal loops.
- She created the loop to keep everyone from dying by a bomb on September 3, 1940.
- She explains that someone must cross the doorway to the loop often to keep it open, or the whole thing becomes unstable. That doesn't sound good.
- With the loop open, they repeat the same day over and over again: "Tomorrow never comes" (6.133). Sounds like a Bond movie.
- Jacob takes a bath and heads to dinner. They give him a change of clothes, which belong to a kid named Victor who "doesn't need them anymore" (6.155). Fingers crossed that's just because he had a growth spurt or became a nudist…
- All the kids pester Jacob with questions about the future, and he tells them that things aren't like The Jetsons or anything—no flying cars or cities on the moon.
- The kids tell him how old they are. They range from seventy-five and a half to one hundred and eighteen years old.
- As dinner comes to an end, the sound of bomber jets hums overhead.
- All the kids put on gas masks and lead Jacob outside.
- They take Jacob to a topiary replica of Michelangelo's Adam and wait for the bombs to fall.
- Jacob kind of doesn't want to blow up, so he ducks and covers.
- But nothing happens.
- When he opens his eyes, the raindrops are frozen in place—and so is the bomb, balancing motionless on Adam's finger.
- Then boom, "perfect whiteness spread out before [Jacob] and swallowed everything" (6.224).
- No, the bomb didn't explode, the loop reset; it's the evening of September 2, 1940.
- Jacob says he needs to head home, so Miss Peregrine has Emma escort him to the cairn.
- On the way, she admits that she knew who Jacob was, because he looks so much like his grandpa. She just didn't want to admit that Abraham was dead.
- Jacob scuttles through the cairn and emerges in his own time.
- He returns to his room at the bar, and his dad wonders why he's wearing someone else's clothes.
- Jacob says he found them in the house, and his were dirty.
- Dad worries that Jacob is getting obsessed with this house, so he calls Dr. Golan, the psychiatrist.
- Dr. Golan says that Jacob should be allowed to continue exploring his Grandpa's past, so Dad backs off a bit.
- Jacob has trouble hearing Dr. Golan, who says he's at the airport picking up his sister.
- Up in his bed, Jacob wonders what it would be like if he decided to stay with Miss Peregrine in the time loops: "What exactly would I be missing?" (6.297), he wonders.