Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (10 page)

*   *   *

Ten minutes later Martin and I were wedged deep in an overstuffed sofa in Oggie’s living room, which was piled high with books and boxes of worn-out shoes and enough lamps to light up Carlsbad Caverns, all but one of them unplugged. Living on a remote island, I was starting to realize, turned people into pack rats. Oggie sat facing us in a threadbare blazer and pajama bottoms, as if he’d been expecting company—just not pants-worthy company—and rocked endlessly in a plastic-covered easy chair as he talked. He seemed happy just to have an audience, and after he’d gone on at length about the weather and Welsh politics and the sorry state of today’s youth, Martin was finally able to steer him around to the attack and the children from the home.

“Sure, I remember them,” he said. “Odd collection of people. We’d see them in town now and again—the children, sometimes their minder-woman, too—buying milk and medicine and what-have-you. You’d say ‘good morning’ and they’d look the other way. Kept to themselves, they did, off in that big house. Lot of talk about what might’ve been going on over there, though no one knew for sure.”

“What kind of talk?”

“Lot of rot. Like I said, no one knew. All I can say is they weren’t your regular sort of orphan children—not like them Barnardo Home kids they got in other places, who you’ll see come into town for parades and things and always have time for a chat. This lot was different. Some of ’em couldn’t even speak the King’s English. Or any English, for that matter.”

“Because they weren’t really orphans,” I said. “They were refugees from other countries. Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia ...”

“Is that what they were, now?” Oggie said, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Funny, I hadn’t heard that.” He seemed offended, like I’d insulted him by pretending to know more about his island than he did. His chair-rocking got faster, more aggressive. If this was the kind of reception my grandpa and the other kids got on Cairnholm, I thought, no wonder they kept to themselves.

Martin cleared his throat. “So, Uncle, the bombing?”

“Oh, keep your hair on. Yes, yes, the goddamned Jerries. Who could forget them?” He launched into a long-winded description of what life on the island was like under threat of German air raids: the blaring sirens; the panicked scrambles for shelter; the volunteer air-raid warden who ran from house to house at night making sure shades had been drawn and streetlights were put out to rob enemy pilots of easy targets. They prepared as best they could but never really thought they’d get hit, given all the ports and factories on the mainland, all much more important targets than Cairnholm’s little gun emplacement. But one night, the bombs began to fall.

“The noise was dreadful,” Oggie said. “It was like giants stamping across the island, and it seemed to go on for ages. They gave us a hell of a pounding, though no one in town was killed, thank heaven. Can’t say the same for our gunner boys—though they gave as good as they got—nor the poor souls at the orphan home. One bomb was all it took. Gave up their lives for Britain, they did. So wherever they was from, God bless ’em for that.”

“Do you remember when it happened?” I asked. “Early in the war or late?”

“I can tell you the exact day,” he said. “It was the third of September, 1940.”

The air seemed to go out of the room. I flashed to my grandfather’s ashen face, his lips just barely moving, uttering those very words.
September third, 1940
.

“Are you—you sure about that? That it was
that day
?”

“I never got to fight,” he said. “Too young by a year. That one night was my whole war. So, yes, I’m sure.”

I felt numb, disconnected. It was too strange. Was someone playing a joke on me, I wondered—a weird, unfunny joke?

“And there weren’t any survivors at all?” Martin asked.

The old man thought for a moment, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “I reckon there were. Just one. A young man, not much older than this boy here.” His rocking stopped as he remembered it. “Walked into town the morning after with not a scratch upon him. Hardly seemed perturbed at all, considering he’d just seen all his mates go to their reward. It was the queerest thing.”

“He was probably in shock,” Martin said.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” replied Oggie. “He spoke only once, to ask my father when the next boat was leaving for the mainland. Said he wanted to take up arms directly and kill the damned monsters who murdered his people.”

Oggie’s story was nearly as far-fetched as the ones Grandpa Portman used to tell, and yet I had no reason to doubt him.

“I knew him,” I said. “He was my grandfather.”

They looked at me, astonished. “Well,” Billy said. “I’ll be blessed.”

I excused myself and stood up. Martin, remarking that I seemed out of sorts, offered to walk me back to the pub, but I declined. I needed to be alone with my thoughts. “Come and see me soon, then,” he said, and I promised I would.

I took the long way back, past the swaying lights of the harbor, the air heavy with brine and with chimney smoke from a hundred hearth fires. I walked to the end of a dock and watched the moon rise over the water, imagining my grandfather standing there on that awful morning after, numb with shock, waiting for a boat that would take him away from all the death he’d endured, to war, and more death. There was no escaping the monsters, not even on this island, no bigger on a map than a grain of sand, protected by mountains of fog and sharp rocks and seething tides. Not anywhere. That was the awful truth my grandfather had tried to protect me from.

In the distance, I heard the generators sputter and spin down, and all the lights along the harbor and in house windows behind me surged for a moment before going dark. I imagined how such a thing might look from an airplane’s height—the whole island suddenly winking out, as if it had never been there at all. A supernova in miniature.

*   *   *

I walked back by moonlight, feeling small. I found my dad in the pub at the same table where he’d been, a half-eaten plate of beef and gravy congealing into grease before him. “Look who’s back,” he said as I sat down. “I saved your dinner for you.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, and told him what I’d learned about Grandpa Portman.

He seemed more angry than surprised. “I can’t believe he never brought this up,” he said. “Not one time.” I could understand his anger: it was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something like that from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it from his son—and for so long.

I tried to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Everything he went through.”

My father nodded. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the full extent of it.”

“Grandpa Portman really knew how to keep a secret, didn’t he?”

“Are you kidding? The man was an emotional Fort Knox.”

“I wonder if it doesn’t explain something, though. Why he acted so distant when you were little.” Dad gave me a sharp look, and I knew I needed to make my point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family. So when you and Aunt Susie came along ...”

“Once bombed, twice shy?”

“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe he wasn’t cheating on Grandma, after all?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this really explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”

“Okay ...”

“It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”

I didn’t know how to respond. How do you say
I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough
to your own dad? I couldn’t, so instead I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

*   *   *

I tossed and turned most of the night. I couldn’t stop thinking about the letters—the one my dad and Aunt Susie had found as kids, from this “other woman,” and the one I’d found a month ago, from Miss Peregrine. The thought that kept me awake was this:
what if they were the same woman?

The postmark on Miss Peregrine’s letter was fifteen years old, but by all accounts she’d been blown into the stratosphere back in 1940. To my mind, that left two possible explanations: either my grandfather had been corresponding with a dead person—admittedly unlikely—or the person who wrote the letter was not, in fact, Miss Peregrine, but someone who was using her identity to disguise her own.

Why would you disguise your identity in a letter? Because you have something to hide. Because you are the other woman.

What if the only thing I had discovered on this trip was that my grandfather was an adulterous liar? In his last breaths, was he trying to tell me about the death of his adopted family—or admit to some tawdry, decades-long affair? Maybe it was both, and the truth was that by the time he was a young man he’d had his family torn apart so many times he no longer knew how to have one, or to be faithful to one.

It was all just guesswork, though. I didn’t know, and there was no one to ask. Anyone who might have had the answer was long dead. In less than twenty-four hours, the whole trip had become pointless.

I fell into an uneasy sleep. At dawn, I woke to the sound of something in my room. Rolling over to see what it was, I bolted upright in bed. A large bird was perched on my dresser, staring me down. It had a sleek head feathered in gray and talons that clacked on the wooden dresser as it sidled back and forth along the edge, as if to get a better look at me. I stared back rigidly, wondering if this could be a dream.

I called out for my dad, and at the sound of my voice the bird launched itself off the dresser. I threw my arm across my face and rolled away, and when I peeked again it was gone, flown out the open window.

My dad stumbled in, bleary-eyed. “What’s going on?”

I showed him the talon marks on the dresser and a feather that had landed on the floor. “God, that’s weird,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “Peregrines almost never come this close to humans.”

I thought maybe I’d heard him wrong. “Did you say
peregrines
?”

He held up the feather. “A peregrine falcon,” he said. “They’re amazing creatures—the fastest birds on earth. They’re like shape-shifters, the way they streamline their bodies in the air.” The name was just a weird coincidence, but it left me with an uncanny feeling I couldn’t shake.

Over breakfast, I began to wonder if I’d given up too easily. Though it was true there was no one left alive whom I could talk to about my grandfather, there was still the house, a lot of it unexplored. If it had ever held answers about my grandfather—in the form of letters, maybe, or a photo album or a diary—they’d probably burned up or rotted away decades ago. But if I left the island without making sure, I knew I’d regret it.

And that is how someone who is unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren’t Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.

Chapter Five

It was an almost-too-perfect morning. Leaving the pub felt like stepping into one of those heavily retouched photos that come loaded as wallpaper on new computers: streets of artfully decrepit cottages stretched into the distance, giving way to green fields sewn together by meandering rock walls, the whole scene topped by scudding white clouds. But beyond all that, above the houses and fields and sheep doddering around like little puffs of cotton candy, I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.

I walked over the ridge and straight into a rain shower. True to form, I had forgotten my rubber boots, and the path was a rapidly deepening ribbon of mud. But getting a little wet seemed vastly preferable to climbing that hill twice in one morning, so I bent my head against the spitting rain and trudged onward. Soon I passed the shack, dim outlines of sheep huddled inside against the chill, and then the mist-shrouded bog, silent and ghostly. I thought about the twenty-seven-hundred-year-old resident of Cairnholm’s museum and wondered how many more like him these fields held, undiscovered, arrested in death; how many more had given up their lives here, looking for heaven.

By the time I reached the children’s home, what had begun as a drizzle was a full-on downpour. There was no time to dally in the house’s feral yard and reflect upon its malevolent shape—the way the doorless doorway seemed to swallow me as I dove through it, the way the hall’s rain-bloated floorboards gave a little beneath my shoes. I stood wringing water from my shirt and shaking out my hair, and when I was as dry as I was going to get—which was not very—I began to search. For what, I wasn’t sure. A box of letters? My grandfather’s name scribbled on a wall? It all seemed so unlikely.

I roved around peeling up mats of old newspaper and looking under chairs and tables. I imagined uncovering some horrible scene—a tangle of skeletons dressed in fire-blackened rags—but all I found were rooms that had become more outside than inside, character stripped away by moisture and wind and layers of dirt. The ground floor was hopeless. I went back to the staircase, knowing this time I would have to climb it. The only question was, up or down? One strike against going upstairs was its limited options for quick escape (from squatters or ghouls or whatever else my anxious mind could invent) other than hurling myself from an upper-story window. Downstairs had the same problem, and with the added detractor of being dark, and me without a flashlight. So upstairs it was.

The steps protested my weight with a symphony of shudders and creaks, but they held, and what I discovered upstairs—compared to the bombed-out ground floor, at least—was like a time capsule. Arranged along a hallway striped with peeling wallpaper, the rooms were in surprisingly good shape. Though one or two had been invaded by mold where a broken window had let in the rain, the rest were packed with things that seemed only a layer or two of dust away from new: a mildewed shirt tossed casually over the back of a chair, loose change skimming a nightstand. It was easy to believe that everything was just as the children had left it, as if time had stopped the night they died.