Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The next morning is a beautiful day in the town, but the dense fog still lingers on the path to the children’s home. Jacob trudges once more through the mud and rain; he wonders as he passes the bog how many corpses might lie underneath. By the time he reaches the home, he has been walking through a downpour, and he wrings out his clothes on arrival.

Jacob looks around the ground floor but finds little—the bottom floor has been completely overrun by nature. So, he gingerly climbs the rickety stairs and finds some rooms that seem to be in good shape. There are wooden toys, crayons, dollhouses, and bookshelves with Peter Pan and The Secret Garden. He discovers desks and realizes that this must have been a classroom.

Jacob then goes through another set of doors and realizes that this room must have been Miss Peregrine’s bedroom. He wonders what she was thinking and feeling the night of the bombing. Jacob starts to feel strange, as though he’s being watched, and he wanders into the next room, which has a few small beds in the corner. Somehow, he knows that it was his grandfather’s room. He examines an empty suitcase before sitting on the bed, exhausted.

Thinking about all that his grandfather went through—the nightmares he might have had, the pain of his family’s deaths—Jacob starts to cry. He thinks about the children who died in the house because a pilot simply pushed a button. Jacob thinks about how this affected his own dad, who felt his father didn’t love him. He thinks about his own trauma, a “seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to [him] like some poisonous heirloom.”

When Jacob stops crying, he notices another trunk with a giant padlock on it. He tries a variety of methods to break it, knowing he’ll likely not be able to find a key. Then he has an idea: if he can push the trunk off the staircase landing, it will likely break, and he could get inside without worrying about the padlock. Painstakingly, Jacob shuffles the heavy trunk down the hall before sending it over the landing, causing a tremendous crash and a cloud of dust. But he realizes that the trunk has fallen through the rotting floor to the basement. Jacob can just make out the trunk, which did splinter, sending photographs flying everywhere. But then he realizes he has to go down to the basement to investigate it.

The basement is pitch black and smells like chemicals. Using his phone screen as a flashlight, Jacob sees a wall of shelves with preserved organs: brains, hearts, lungs, and eyes. Jacob panics and staggers away, wondering what kind of place this actually was. Gradually Jacob finds the shattered trunk, and he collects the photos. To him, it looks like an old family album, but the photos have the same odd quality as the ones his grandfather had, like they all came from the same compilation. One is a picture of a girl looking into a reflecting pool with two girls staring back, or a young man whose body is encased in bees.

Jacob remembers what his grandfather said about a boy with bees living inside him and concludes that his grandfather’s pictures came from this same trunk. It means that the photos really had come from the house, but Jacob still wonders whether the fantastic stories could actually be true. Suddenly, there’s a loud crash, and Jacob drops all the photos in shock. As he picks them up, he hears voices and footsteps. He doesn’t make a sound, terrified of who it might be, but something comes loose next to him and rolls away, attracting the voices’ attention.

In the silence, a girl says, “Abe? Is that you?” A light glows above Jacob, and he sees half a dozen kids peering down through the floor: all faces he recognized from the photographs. He looks up at a girl in a white dress who seems to have a ball of fire cradled in her hand. All Jacob can do is stare, knowing that this is what his grandfather sent him to look for. But as he sees the girl’s expression, he can tell that he is not what they are looking for.

Suddenly, the children start to scatter, and by the time Jacob shouts for them to wait and stumbles back upstairs to the ground floor, they have vanished. He runs outside and catches a glimpse of the girl in white running as fast as she can. Jacob chases her through the woods into the open bogland, until she runs straight into the bog. Jacob has no choice but to follow her steps as she disappears into the mist. He tries to call out to her, explaining who he is, but the fog dampens the sound.

The girl’s footprints lead Jacob to a cairn—an ancient tomb for which Cairnholm is named. He climbs into it, finding firmer ground, and continues to follow her footsteps. The tomb stretches into a dark and narrow tunnel, forcing Jacob to walk hunched over like a crab. He calls out to the girl, explaining that he means no harm. He pulls out his phone once more to use as a light and realizes that he’s at the end of the tunnel and that it’s completely empty. She’s not there.

Jacob concludes, dumbfounded, that there probably never was a girl, or other children. He imagined them, conjuring them up from the pictures, and then blacked out. Any other explanation is impossible: the kids died many years ago, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have looked the same now. He imagines Dr. Golan analyzing his reaction. Jacob then turns back, crawling out of the tunnel. He realizes then that he’s seen this exact view before: in a photograph in Martin’s museum. He’s shocked that anyone thought this wasteland was a door to heaven. Tired of the riddles and the games, Jacob decides he wants to go home. He wants to let go of his grandfather’s obsession.

When Jacob emerges from the tunnel, he’s shocked to find that it’s now clear as day, with sunlight and blue sky, and it’s much warmer. He treks back to the town and sees that the ground isn’t muddy at all, but it is covered in a lot of animal excrement. He wonders how he didn’t notice this earlier, but he realizes when he gets back into town that the tractors carting in fish and other goods have been replaced by carts pulled by horses and mules. Jacob also notices that every person is looking at him strangely—though he attributes this to the fact that his lower half is covered in mud.

When Jacob gets inside the Priest Hole and climbs the stairs, the bartender stops him—but it isn’t Kev. Jacob says he’s going up to his room, and the man asks if the place looks like a hotel. Jacob starts to explain, confused, that he and his dad have the rooms upstairs. The man denies knowing anything about it. The men around the pub all stare at Jacob. Seeing his jacket, they remark that he must be in the army—or else he’s a spy. They start to threaten him, and Jacob runs as fast as he can away from the pub.

As Jacob flies down the street, he wonders if he’s losing his mind. He ducks into an alley, where he finds an outhouse to hide in while he collects himself. But when he emerges, someone grabs him by the hair and puts a knife to his throat. To his surprise, it’s the girl. She’s in the same white dress from before, and Jacob realizes that she’s quite pretty. She asks Jacob who he is and what he wants, and he explains that he just wants to talk and ask about the home. His grandfather, Abe Portman, sent him.

At this, the girl is shocked. She insists that he’s lying and asks him to open his eyes. He stares as wide as he can, but she tells him to open his “real eyes.” He assures her that he’s not what she thinks, showing her the letter from Miss Peregrine. She’s furious, telling him she doesn’t want to hear another word. Suddenly, the men from the pub run down the street, shouting, and Jacob explains that the girl isn’t the only one who wants to kill him. She then grabs him by the collar and says he’s her prisoner now, and he agrees to follow her.

The girl leads Jacob through another alley into a small cottage, where there’s no one inside except a dog. The girl keeps her knife out as the men’s voices fade. Jacob looks around the cottage, which seems very old-fashioned. Seeing a calendar on the wall, Jacob realizes that the month listed is September 1940. The first two days on the page have been crossed out: it’s September 3. Jacob is stunned, and then he remembers his grandfather’s last words again: his grandfather told him to go “on the other side of the old man’s grave.” And he had done exactly that, passing through the cairn. At this realization, Jacob blacks out again.

When Jacob wakes, his hands are tied to the cooking range. He keeps his eyes shut as much as possible so he can eavesdrop on a conversation that’s happening. The girl and another person, a young man, are arguing, saying that Jacob must be a wight—that no relative of Abe’s would be as clueless as he is. Just then, the dog comes over to lick Jacob’s face, forcing him to open his eyes. He doesn’t see the other person, but a voice offers him some water and a cup floats towards him. When Jacob accepts the cup, he brushes an invisible hand and is shocked. The boy introduces himself as Millard Nullings and the girl as Emma.

Emma glares at Millard for revealing their names, but just then Emma and Millard realize that men are searching the houses. Millard consults a leather-bound notebook and says that they can leave out the front door in a minute to escape. When dozens of engines seem to sound off, they untie Jacob and lead him to the door. Emma takes Jacob’s arm and tells him to walk calmly out the door, putting the knife in her pocket.

The street outside has tons of townspeople watching overhead as Nazi fighter planes pass by. Jacob and Emma cross the street casually, but one of the men from the pub notices them, and they start to run away. Millard calls out to meet him at the pub in five and a half minutes exactly. When they arrive at the pub, Emma orders a whiskey, and the bartender pours it for her. Then, the bartender recognizes Jacob and starts to attack him, but Emma pours her drink out on the bar and lights it with her hands, creating a wall of flame that the bartender tries desperately to put out.

Emma then pulls Jacob down into the priest hole in the floor; they shuffle into the crawl space and Emma kicks the back wall out, which falls open into a back alley. Millard, still a disembodied voice, greets them. Jacob asks how he knew about the planes, and Millard explains that the same thing happens every day—they’re in a time loop. Emma says Jacob clearly isn’t from their world and that he must be a wight, but Jacob assures her he is not.