Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Page 28
“Run.”
“And if Jacob sees a hollow?”
“In that case,” Emma said, “run like the devil’s after you.”
One by one we ducked into the cairn, disappearing from that calm summer night. All was quiet until we reached the end chamber, and then the air pressure dropped and the temperature fell and the storm screamed into full-throated being. We spun toward the sound, rattled, and for a moment just stood listening as it seethed and howled at the mouth of the tunnel. It sounded like a caged animal that had just been shown its dinner. There was nothing to do but offer ourselves up to it.
We fell to our knees and crawled into what seemed like a black hole, the stars lost behind a mountain of thunderheads, whipping rain and freezing wind rifling through our coats, wires of lightning bleaching us bone white and making the dark that followed seem darker still. Emma tried to make a flame but she looked like a broken cigarette lighter, every sparking flick of her wrist hissing out before it could catch, so we shrugged up our coats and ran bent against the gale and the swollen bog that sucked at our legs, navigating as much by memory as by sight.
In the town, rain drummed on every door and window, but everyone stayed locked and shuttered inside their cottages as we ran unnoticed through the flooding streets, past scattered roof tiles torn away by the wind, past a single rain-blinded sheep lost and crying, past a tipped outhouse disgorging itself into the road, to the fishmonger’s shop. The door was locked, but with two thudding kicks Bronwyn flung it in. Drying her hand inside her coat, Emma was finally able to make a flame. As wide-eyed sturgeon stared from glass cases, I led us into the shop, around the counter where Dylan spent his days mumbling curses and scaling fish, through a rust-pocked door. On the other side was a little icehouse, just a lean- to shed floored with dirt and roofed with tin, its walls made from rough-cut planks, rain weeping through where they had shivered apart like bad teeth. Crowding the room were a dozen rectangular troughs raised on saw-horses and filled with ice.
“Which one’s he in?” Enoch asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Emma shone her flame around as we walked among the troughs, trying to guess which might hold more than just the corpses of fish—but they all looked the same, just lidless coffins of ice. We would have to search every one until we found him.
“Not me,” Bronwyn said, “I don’t want to see him. I don’t like dead things.”
“Neither do I, but we have to,” said Emma. “We’re all in this together.”
Each of us chose a trough and dug into it like a dog excavating a prized bed of flowers, our cupped hands scooping mounds of ice onto the floor. I’d emptied half of one and was losing feeling in my fingers when I heard Bronwyn shriek. I turned to see her stumble away from a trough, her hands across her mouth.
We crowded around to see what she’d uncovered. Jutting from the ice was a frozen, hairy-knuckled hand. “I daresay you found our man,” Enoch said, and through split fingers the rest of us watched as he scraped away more ice, slowly revealing an arm, then a torso, and finally Martin’s entire wrecked body.
It was an awful sight. His limbs were twisted in improbable directions. His trunk had been scissored open and emptied out, ice filling the cavity where his vitals had been. When his face appeared, there was a collective intake of breath. Half was a purple contusion that hung in strips like a shredded mask. The other was just undamaged enough to recognize him by: a jaw stippled with beard, a jig-sawed section of cheek and brow, and one green eye, filmed over and gazing emptily. He wore only boxers and ragged scraps of a terrycloth robe. There was no way he’d walked by himself out to the cliffs at night dressed like that. Someone—or something—had dragged him there.
“He’s pretty far gone,” said Enoch, appraising Martin as a surgeon might assess an all-but-hopeless patient. “I’m telling you now, this might not work.”
“We got to try,” Bronwyn said, stepping bravely to the trough with the rest of us. “We come all this way, we at least got to try.”
Enoch opened his slicker and pulled one of the wrapped hearts from an interior pocket. It looked like a maroon catcher’s mitt folded in on itself. “If he wakes up,” Enoch said, “he ain’t gonna be happy. So just stand back and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
All of us took a generous step back except Enoch, who bellied up to the trough and plunged his arm into the ice that filled Martin’s chest, swirling it around like he was fishing for a can of soda in a cooler. After a moment he seemed to latch onto something, and with his other hand he raised the sheep heart above his head.
A sudden convulsion passed through Enoch’s body and the sheep heart started to beat, spraying out a fine mist of bloody pickling solution. Enoch took fast, shallow breaths. He seemed to be channeling something. I studied Martin’s body for any hint of movement, but he lay still.
Gradually the heart in Enoch’s hand began to slow and shrink, its color fading to a blackish gray, like meat left too long in the freezer. Enoch threw it on the ground and thrust his empty hand at me. I pulled out the heart I’d been keeping in my pocket and gave it to him. He repeated the same process, the heart pumping and sputtering for a while before faltering like the last one. Then he did it a third time, using the heart he’d given to Emma.
Bronwyn’s heart was the only one left—Enoch’s last chance. His face took on a new intensity as he raised it above Martin’s rude coffin, squeezing it like he meant to drive his fingers through. As the heart began to shake and tremble like an overcranked motor, Enoch shouted, “Rise up, dead man. Rise up!”
I saw a flicker of movement. Something had shifted beneath the ice. I leaned as close as I could stand to, watching for any sign of life. For a long moment there was nothing, but then the body wrenched as suddenly and forcefully as if it had been shocked with a thousand volts. Emma screamed, and we all jumped back. When I lowered my arms to look again, Martin’s head had turned in my direction, one cataracted eye wheeling crazily before fixing, it seemed, on me.
“He sees you!” Enoch cried.
I leaned in. The dead man smelled of turned earth and brine and something worse. Ice fell away from his hand, which rose up to tremble in the air for a moment, afflicted and blue, before coming to rest on my arm. I fought the urge to throw it off.
His lips fell apart and his jaw hinged open. I bent down to hear him, but there was nothing to hear. Of course there isn’t, I thought, his lungs have burst—but then a tiny sound leaked out, and I leaned closer, my ear almost to his freezing lips. I thought, strangely, of the rain gutter by my house, where if you put your head to the bars and wait for a break in traffic, you can just make out the whisper of an underground stream, buried when the town was first built but still flowing, imprisoned in a world a permanent night.
The others crowded around, but I was the only one who could hear the dead man. The first thing he said was my name.
“Jacob.”
Fear shot through me. “Yes.”
“I was dead.” The words came slowly, dripping like molasses. He corrected himself. “Am dead.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Can you remember?”
There was a pause. The wind whistled through the gaps in the walls. He said something and I missed it.
“Say it again. Please, Martin.”
“He killed me,” the dead man whispered.
“Who.”
“My old man.”
“You mean Oggie? Your uncle?”
“My old man,” he said again. “He got big. And strong, so strong.”
“Who did, Martin?”
His eye closed, and I feared he was gone for good. I looked at Enoch. He nodded. The heart in his hand was still beating.
Martin’s eye flicked beneath its lid. He began to speak again, slowly but evenly, as if reciting something. “For a hundred generations he slept, curled like a fetus in the earth’s mysterious womb, digested by roots, fermenting in the dark, summer fruits canned and forgotten in the larder until a farmer’s spade bore him out, rough midwife to a strange harvest.”
Martin paused, his lips trembling, and in the brief silence Emma looked at me and whispered, “What’s he saying?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it sounds like a poem.”
He continued, his voice wavering but loud enough now that everyone could hear—“Blackly he reposes, tender face the color of soot, withered limbs like veins of coal, feet lumps of driftwood hung with shriveled grapes”—and finally I recognized the poem. It was the one he’d written about the bog boy.
“Oh Jacob, I took such good careful care of him!” he said. “Dusted the glass and changed the soil and made him a home—like my own big bruised baby. I took such careful care, but—” He began to shake, and a tear ran down his cheek and froze there. “But he killed me.”
“Do you mean the bog boy? The Old Man?”
“Send me back,” he pleaded. “It hurts.” His cold hand kneaded my shoulder, his voice fading again.
I looked to Enoch for help. He tightened his grip on the heart and shook his head. “Quick now, mate,” he said.
Then I realized something. Though he was describing the bog boy, it wasn’t the bog boy who had killed him. They only become visible to the rest of us when they’re eating, Miss Peregrine had told me, which is to say, when it’s too late. Martin had seen a hollowgast—at night, in the rain, as it was tearing him to shreds—and had mistaken it for his most prized exhibit.
The old fear began to pump, coating my insides with heat. I turned to the others. “A hollowgast did this to him,” I said. “It’s somewhere on the island.”
“Ask him where,” said Enoch.
“Martin, where. I need to know where you saw it.”
“Please. It hurts.”
“Where did you see it?”
“He came to my door.”
“The old man did?”
His breath hitched strangely. He was hard to look at but I made myself do it, following his eye as it shifted and focused on something behind me.
“No,” he said. “He did.”
And then a light swept over us and a loud voice barked, “Who’s there!”
Emma closed her hand and the flame hissed out, and we all spun to see a man standing in the doorway, holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Enoch yanked his arm out of the ice while Emma and Bronwyn closed ranks around the trough to block Martin from view. “We didn’t mean to break in,” Bronwyn said. “We was just leaving, honest!”
“Stay where you are!” the man shouted. His voice was flat, accentless. I couldn’t see his face through the beam of light, but the layered jackets he wore were an instant giveaway. It was the ornithologist.
“Mister, we ain’t had nothing to eat all day,” Enoch whined, for once sounding like a twelve-year-old. “All we come for was a fish or two, swear!”
“Is that so?” said the man. “Looks like you’ve picked one out. Let’s see what kind.” He waved his flashlight back and forth as if to part us with the beam. “Step aside!”
We did, and he swept the light over Martin’s body, a landscape of garish ruin. “Goodness, that’s an odd-looking fish, isn’t it?” he said, entirely unfazed. “Must be a fresh one. He’s still moving!” The beam came to rest on Martin’s face. His eye rolled back and his lips moved soundlessly, just a reflex as the life Enoch had given him drained away.
“Who are you?” Bronwyn demanded.
“That depends on whom you ask,” the man replied, “and it isn’t nearly as important as the fact that I know who you are.” He pointed the flashlight at each of us and spoke as if quoting some secret dossier. “Emma Bloom, a spark, abandoned at a circus when her parents couldn’t sell her to one. Bronwyn Bruntley, berserker, taster of blood, didn’t know her own strength until the night she snapped her rotten stepfather’s neck. Enoch O’Connor, dead-riser, born to a family of undertakers who couldn’t understand why their clients kept walking away.” I saw each of them shrink away from him. Then he shone the light at me. “And Jacob. Such peculiar company you’re keeping these days.”
“How do you know my name?”
He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice had changed radically. “Did you forget me so quick?” he said in a New England accent. “But then I’m just a poor old bus driver, guess you wouldn’t remember.”
It seemed impossible, but somehow this man was doing a dead-on impression of my middle school bus driver, Mr. Barron. A man so despised, so foul tempered, so robotically inflexible that on the last day of eighth grade we defaced his yearbook picture with staples and left it like an effigy behind his seat. I was just remembering what he used to say as I got off the bus every afternoon when the man before me sang it out:
“End of the line, Portman!”
“Mr. Barron?” I asked doubtfully, struggling see his face through the flashlight beam.
The man laughed and cleared his throat, his accent changing again. “Either him or the yard man,” he said in a deep Florida drawl. “Yon trees need a haircut. Give yah good price!” It was the pitch-perfect voice of the man who for years had maintained my family’s lawn and cleaned our pool.
“How are you doing that?” I said. “How do you know those people?”
“Because I am those people,” he said, his accent flat again. He laughed, relishing my baffled horror.
“And if Jacob sees a hollow?”
“In that case,” Emma said, “run like the devil’s after you.”
One by one we ducked into the cairn, disappearing from that calm summer night. All was quiet until we reached the end chamber, and then the air pressure dropped and the temperature fell and the storm screamed into full-throated being. We spun toward the sound, rattled, and for a moment just stood listening as it seethed and howled at the mouth of the tunnel. It sounded like a caged animal that had just been shown its dinner. There was nothing to do but offer ourselves up to it.
We fell to our knees and crawled into what seemed like a black hole, the stars lost behind a mountain of thunderheads, whipping rain and freezing wind rifling through our coats, wires of lightning bleaching us bone white and making the dark that followed seem darker still. Emma tried to make a flame but she looked like a broken cigarette lighter, every sparking flick of her wrist hissing out before it could catch, so we shrugged up our coats and ran bent against the gale and the swollen bog that sucked at our legs, navigating as much by memory as by sight.
In the town, rain drummed on every door and window, but everyone stayed locked and shuttered inside their cottages as we ran unnoticed through the flooding streets, past scattered roof tiles torn away by the wind, past a single rain-blinded sheep lost and crying, past a tipped outhouse disgorging itself into the road, to the fishmonger’s shop. The door was locked, but with two thudding kicks Bronwyn flung it in. Drying her hand inside her coat, Emma was finally able to make a flame. As wide-eyed sturgeon stared from glass cases, I led us into the shop, around the counter where Dylan spent his days mumbling curses and scaling fish, through a rust-pocked door. On the other side was a little icehouse, just a lean- to shed floored with dirt and roofed with tin, its walls made from rough-cut planks, rain weeping through where they had shivered apart like bad teeth. Crowding the room were a dozen rectangular troughs raised on saw-horses and filled with ice.
“Which one’s he in?” Enoch asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Emma shone her flame around as we walked among the troughs, trying to guess which might hold more than just the corpses of fish—but they all looked the same, just lidless coffins of ice. We would have to search every one until we found him.
“Not me,” Bronwyn said, “I don’t want to see him. I don’t like dead things.”
“Neither do I, but we have to,” said Emma. “We’re all in this together.”
Each of us chose a trough and dug into it like a dog excavating a prized bed of flowers, our cupped hands scooping mounds of ice onto the floor. I’d emptied half of one and was losing feeling in my fingers when I heard Bronwyn shriek. I turned to see her stumble away from a trough, her hands across her mouth.
We crowded around to see what she’d uncovered. Jutting from the ice was a frozen, hairy-knuckled hand. “I daresay you found our man,” Enoch said, and through split fingers the rest of us watched as he scraped away more ice, slowly revealing an arm, then a torso, and finally Martin’s entire wrecked body.
It was an awful sight. His limbs were twisted in improbable directions. His trunk had been scissored open and emptied out, ice filling the cavity where his vitals had been. When his face appeared, there was a collective intake of breath. Half was a purple contusion that hung in strips like a shredded mask. The other was just undamaged enough to recognize him by: a jaw stippled with beard, a jig-sawed section of cheek and brow, and one green eye, filmed over and gazing emptily. He wore only boxers and ragged scraps of a terrycloth robe. There was no way he’d walked by himself out to the cliffs at night dressed like that. Someone—or something—had dragged him there.
“He’s pretty far gone,” said Enoch, appraising Martin as a surgeon might assess an all-but-hopeless patient. “I’m telling you now, this might not work.”
“We got to try,” Bronwyn said, stepping bravely to the trough with the rest of us. “We come all this way, we at least got to try.”
Enoch opened his slicker and pulled one of the wrapped hearts from an interior pocket. It looked like a maroon catcher’s mitt folded in on itself. “If he wakes up,” Enoch said, “he ain’t gonna be happy. So just stand back and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
All of us took a generous step back except Enoch, who bellied up to the trough and plunged his arm into the ice that filled Martin’s chest, swirling it around like he was fishing for a can of soda in a cooler. After a moment he seemed to latch onto something, and with his other hand he raised the sheep heart above his head.
A sudden convulsion passed through Enoch’s body and the sheep heart started to beat, spraying out a fine mist of bloody pickling solution. Enoch took fast, shallow breaths. He seemed to be channeling something. I studied Martin’s body for any hint of movement, but he lay still.
Gradually the heart in Enoch’s hand began to slow and shrink, its color fading to a blackish gray, like meat left too long in the freezer. Enoch threw it on the ground and thrust his empty hand at me. I pulled out the heart I’d been keeping in my pocket and gave it to him. He repeated the same process, the heart pumping and sputtering for a while before faltering like the last one. Then he did it a third time, using the heart he’d given to Emma.
Bronwyn’s heart was the only one left—Enoch’s last chance. His face took on a new intensity as he raised it above Martin’s rude coffin, squeezing it like he meant to drive his fingers through. As the heart began to shake and tremble like an overcranked motor, Enoch shouted, “Rise up, dead man. Rise up!”
I saw a flicker of movement. Something had shifted beneath the ice. I leaned as close as I could stand to, watching for any sign of life. For a long moment there was nothing, but then the body wrenched as suddenly and forcefully as if it had been shocked with a thousand volts. Emma screamed, and we all jumped back. When I lowered my arms to look again, Martin’s head had turned in my direction, one cataracted eye wheeling crazily before fixing, it seemed, on me.
“He sees you!” Enoch cried.
I leaned in. The dead man smelled of turned earth and brine and something worse. Ice fell away from his hand, which rose up to tremble in the air for a moment, afflicted and blue, before coming to rest on my arm. I fought the urge to throw it off.
His lips fell apart and his jaw hinged open. I bent down to hear him, but there was nothing to hear. Of course there isn’t, I thought, his lungs have burst—but then a tiny sound leaked out, and I leaned closer, my ear almost to his freezing lips. I thought, strangely, of the rain gutter by my house, where if you put your head to the bars and wait for a break in traffic, you can just make out the whisper of an underground stream, buried when the town was first built but still flowing, imprisoned in a world a permanent night.
The others crowded around, but I was the only one who could hear the dead man. The first thing he said was my name.
“Jacob.”
Fear shot through me. “Yes.”
“I was dead.” The words came slowly, dripping like molasses. He corrected himself. “Am dead.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Can you remember?”
There was a pause. The wind whistled through the gaps in the walls. He said something and I missed it.
“Say it again. Please, Martin.”
“He killed me,” the dead man whispered.
“Who.”
“My old man.”
“You mean Oggie? Your uncle?”
“My old man,” he said again. “He got big. And strong, so strong.”
“Who did, Martin?”
His eye closed, and I feared he was gone for good. I looked at Enoch. He nodded. The heart in his hand was still beating.
Martin’s eye flicked beneath its lid. He began to speak again, slowly but evenly, as if reciting something. “For a hundred generations he slept, curled like a fetus in the earth’s mysterious womb, digested by roots, fermenting in the dark, summer fruits canned and forgotten in the larder until a farmer’s spade bore him out, rough midwife to a strange harvest.”
Martin paused, his lips trembling, and in the brief silence Emma looked at me and whispered, “What’s he saying?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it sounds like a poem.”
He continued, his voice wavering but loud enough now that everyone could hear—“Blackly he reposes, tender face the color of soot, withered limbs like veins of coal, feet lumps of driftwood hung with shriveled grapes”—and finally I recognized the poem. It was the one he’d written about the bog boy.
“Oh Jacob, I took such good careful care of him!” he said. “Dusted the glass and changed the soil and made him a home—like my own big bruised baby. I took such careful care, but—” He began to shake, and a tear ran down his cheek and froze there. “But he killed me.”
“Do you mean the bog boy? The Old Man?”
“Send me back,” he pleaded. “It hurts.” His cold hand kneaded my shoulder, his voice fading again.
I looked to Enoch for help. He tightened his grip on the heart and shook his head. “Quick now, mate,” he said.
Then I realized something. Though he was describing the bog boy, it wasn’t the bog boy who had killed him. They only become visible to the rest of us when they’re eating, Miss Peregrine had told me, which is to say, when it’s too late. Martin had seen a hollowgast—at night, in the rain, as it was tearing him to shreds—and had mistaken it for his most prized exhibit.
The old fear began to pump, coating my insides with heat. I turned to the others. “A hollowgast did this to him,” I said. “It’s somewhere on the island.”
“Ask him where,” said Enoch.
“Martin, where. I need to know where you saw it.”
“Please. It hurts.”
“Where did you see it?”
“He came to my door.”
“The old man did?”
His breath hitched strangely. He was hard to look at but I made myself do it, following his eye as it shifted and focused on something behind me.
“No,” he said. “He did.”
And then a light swept over us and a loud voice barked, “Who’s there!”
Emma closed her hand and the flame hissed out, and we all spun to see a man standing in the doorway, holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Enoch yanked his arm out of the ice while Emma and Bronwyn closed ranks around the trough to block Martin from view. “We didn’t mean to break in,” Bronwyn said. “We was just leaving, honest!”
“Stay where you are!” the man shouted. His voice was flat, accentless. I couldn’t see his face through the beam of light, but the layered jackets he wore were an instant giveaway. It was the ornithologist.
“Mister, we ain’t had nothing to eat all day,” Enoch whined, for once sounding like a twelve-year-old. “All we come for was a fish or two, swear!”
“Is that so?” said the man. “Looks like you’ve picked one out. Let’s see what kind.” He waved his flashlight back and forth as if to part us with the beam. “Step aside!”
We did, and he swept the light over Martin’s body, a landscape of garish ruin. “Goodness, that’s an odd-looking fish, isn’t it?” he said, entirely unfazed. “Must be a fresh one. He’s still moving!” The beam came to rest on Martin’s face. His eye rolled back and his lips moved soundlessly, just a reflex as the life Enoch had given him drained away.
“Who are you?” Bronwyn demanded.
“That depends on whom you ask,” the man replied, “and it isn’t nearly as important as the fact that I know who you are.” He pointed the flashlight at each of us and spoke as if quoting some secret dossier. “Emma Bloom, a spark, abandoned at a circus when her parents couldn’t sell her to one. Bronwyn Bruntley, berserker, taster of blood, didn’t know her own strength until the night she snapped her rotten stepfather’s neck. Enoch O’Connor, dead-riser, born to a family of undertakers who couldn’t understand why their clients kept walking away.” I saw each of them shrink away from him. Then he shone the light at me. “And Jacob. Such peculiar company you’re keeping these days.”
“How do you know my name?”
He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice had changed radically. “Did you forget me so quick?” he said in a New England accent. “But then I’m just a poor old bus driver, guess you wouldn’t remember.”
It seemed impossible, but somehow this man was doing a dead-on impression of my middle school bus driver, Mr. Barron. A man so despised, so foul tempered, so robotically inflexible that on the last day of eighth grade we defaced his yearbook picture with staples and left it like an effigy behind his seat. I was just remembering what he used to say as I got off the bus every afternoon when the man before me sang it out:
“End of the line, Portman!”
“Mr. Barron?” I asked doubtfully, struggling see his face through the flashlight beam.
The man laughed and cleared his throat, his accent changing again. “Either him or the yard man,” he said in a deep Florida drawl. “Yon trees need a haircut. Give yah good price!” It was the pitch-perfect voice of the man who for years had maintained my family’s lawn and cleaned our pool.
“How are you doing that?” I said. “How do you know those people?”
“Because I am those people,” he said, his accent flat again. He laughed, relishing my baffled horror.
