How It All Goes Down
- Jacob tells Emma that he can see monsters, too, to which Emma replies, "I knew there was something peculiar about you" (9.3). She means it in a nice way.
- Emma says she can't see them at all, which is another reason everyone stays in the loop: Monsters can't enter them.
- She says that Victor left the loop and got killed by a monster. She's sure glad Abe wasn't killed by monsters.
- Yeah, about that… Jacob confesses that Grandpa was killed by monsters.
- Emma takes a moment to be sad before they head back to the shore.
- Hugh and Fiona are waiting on the shore. Something has happened back at the house, and they have to hurry back.
- On the way, Hugh says that one of the Bird's ymbryne friends showed up "yelling blue murder" (9.24).
- Miss Peregrine is taking care of her teacher, Miss Avocet, in the sitting room.
- Jacob is unable to keep himself from asking Miss Peregrine when she was going to tell him that he, too, was peculiar.
- She says she was afraid he'd run away if she told him.
- She goes on to explain that his grandfather moved to America because there were few "hollowgast" (9.58) there, and he lives in relative safety while not fighting them.
- Miss Avocet wakes up, and she tells Miss Peregrine that wights broke into her loop and kidnapped some of her children to lure the adults away: "The children were merely bait" (9.81).
- Misses Bunting, Wren, and Treecreeper have all been abducted.
- Miss Peregrine insists that Jacob spend the night, and he agrees to, but only if she tells him all about the hollowgast.
- All About the Hollowgast:
- Around the turn of the century, a "splinter faction" (9.110) of peculiars broke away to search for immortality; they thought they could achieve it by mastering the time loop.
- The masterminds were Miss Peregrine's two brothers, but she refused to assist them.
- They convinced other ymbrynes to accompany them to Siberia to conduct their experiments, but something went wrong, and there was a huge explosion.
- They survived, but were transformed into terrible creatures: the hollowgast. "Rather than becoming gods, they had transformed themselves into devils" (9.114).
- If a hollowgast, which lives in constant physical torment, gobbles up enough peculiars, it becomes a wight, and can pass for human.
- Wights lack pupils, though (remember Grandpa's "blind" neighbor?).
- Miss Peregrine shows Jacob some creepy photos of white-eyed wights.
- She's concerned that the wights have followed Jacob to the island, and that he'll only be safe with them.
- Jacob doesn't want to leave his parents, but Miss Peregrine tells him that his parents just don't understand.
- He returns to town anyway, wondering if the new ornithologist is a wight in disguise.
- Jacob warns Dad that the ornithologist might be the sheep killer, but Dad thinks he's talking nonsense. See? He just don't understand.