Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (21 page)

“That wonky old heap in the forest,” said Pitchfork. “Only a certified idiot would set foot in there. Place is witched, and a deathtrap to boot.”

Knit Cap squinted at me. “In the big house with
who
?”

“Nobody,” I said, and saw Dad give me a funny look.

“Bollocks! I think you was with this one,” said the man holding Worm.

“I never killed any sheep!” cried Worm.

“Shaddap!” the man roared.

“Jake?” said my dad. “What about your friends?”

“Ahh, crap, Dad.”

Knit Cap turned and spat. “Why you little liar. I oughta belt you right here in fronta God and everybody.”

“You stay away from him,” my father said, doing his best Stern Dad voice. Knit Cap swore and took a step toward him, and he and my dad squared off. Before either could throw a punch, a familiar voice said, “Hang on, Dennis, we’ll get this sorted,” and Martin stepped out of the crowd to wedge himself between them. “Just start by telling us whatever your boy told you,” he said to my father.

Dad glared at me. “He said he was going to see friends on the other side.”

“
What
friends?” Pitchfork demanded.

I could see this was only going to get uglier unless I did something drastic. Obviously, I couldn’t tell them about the children—not that they’d believe me anyway—so instead I took a calculated risk.

“It wasn’t anybody,” I said, dropping my eyes in feigned shame. “They’re imaginary.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said his friends were imaginary,” my dad repeated, sounding worried.

The farmers exchanged baffled glances.

“See?” Worm said, a flicker of hope on his face. “Kid’s a bloody psycho! It
had
to be him!”

“I never touched them,” I said, though no one was really listening.

“It weren’t the American,” said the farmer who had Worm. He gave Worm’s shirt a wrench. “This one here, he’s got a history. Few years back I watched him kick a lamb down a cliffside. Wouldn’t of believed it if I hadn’t seen it wi’ me own eyes. After he done it I asked him why. To see if it could fly, he says. He’s a sickie, all right.”

People muttered in disgust. Worm looked uncomfortable but didn’t dispute the story.

“Where’s his fishmongerin’ mate?” said Pitchfork. “If this one was in on it, you can bet the other one was, too.” Someone said they’d seen Dylan by the harbor, and a posse was dispatched to collect him.

“What about a wolf—or a wild dog?” my dad said. “My father was killed by dogs.”

“Only dogs on Cairnholm are sheepdogs,” replied Knit Cap. “And it ain’t exactly in a sheepdog’s nature to go about killin’ sheep.”

I wished my father would give it up and leave while the leaving was good, but he was on the case like Perry Mason. “Just how many sheep are we talking about?” he asked.

“Five,” replied the fourth farmer, a short, sour-faced man who hadn’t spoken until then. “All mine. Killed right in their pen. Poor devils never even had a chance to run.”

“Five sheep. How much blood do you think is in five sheep?”

“A right tubful, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Pitchfork.

“So wouldn’t whoever did this be covered in it?”

The farmers looked at one another. They looked at me, and then at Worm. Then they shrugged and scratched their heads. “Reckon it coulda been foxes,” said Knit Cap.

“A whole pack of foxes, maybe,” said Pitchfork doubtfully, “if the island’s even got that many.”

“I still say the cuts are too clean,” said the one holding Worm. “Had to have been done with a knife.”

“I just don’t believe it,” my dad replied.

“Then come see for yourself,” said Knit Cap. So as the crowd began to disperse, a small group of us followed the farmers out to the scene of the crime. We trudged over a low rise, through a nearby field, to a little brown shed with a rectangular animal pen beyond it. We approached tentatively and peeked through the fence slats.

The violence inside was almost cartoonish, like the work of some mad impressionist who painted only in red. The tramped grass was bathed in blood, as were the pen’s weathered posts and the stiff white bodies of the sheep themselves, flung about in attitudes of sheepish agony. One had tried to climb the fence and got its spindly legs caught between the slats. It hung before me at an odd angle, clam-shelled open from throat to crotch, as if it had been unzipped.

I had to turn away. Others muttered and shook their heads, and someone let out a low whistle. Worm gagged and began to cry, which was seen as a tacit admission of guilt; the criminal who couldn’t face his own crime. He was led away to be locked in Martin’s museum—in what used to be the sacristy and was now the island’s makeshift jail cell—until he could be remanded to police on the mainland.

We left the farmer to ponder his slain sheep and went back to town, plodding across wet hills in the slate-gray dusk. Back in the room, I knew I was in for a Stern Dad talking-to, so I did my best to disarm him before he could start in on me.

“I lied to you, Dad, and I’m sorry.”

“Yeah?” he said sarcastically, trading his wet sweater for a dry one. “That’s big of you. Now which lie are we talking about? I can hardly keep track.”

“The one about meeting friends. There aren’t any other kids on the island. I made it up because I didn’t want you to worry about me being alone over there.”

“Well, I do worry, even if your doctor tells me not to.”

“I know you do.”

“So what about these imaginary friends? Does Golan know about this?”

I shook my head. “That was a lie, too. I just had to get those guys off my back.”

Dad folded his arms, not sure what to believe. “Really.”

“Better to have them think I’m a little eccentric than a sheep killer, right?”

I took a seat at the table. Dad looked down at me for a long moment, and I wasn’t sure if he trusted me or not. Then he went to the sink and splashed water on his face. When he’d toweled off and turned around again, he seemed to have decided it was a lot less trouble to trust me.

“You sure we don’t need to call Dr. Golan again?” he asked. “Have a nice long talk?”

“If you want to. But I’m okay.”

“This is exactly why I didn’t want you hanging out with those rapper guys,” he said, because he needed to close with something sufficiently parental for it to count as a proper talking-to.

“You were right about them, Dad,” I said, though secretly I couldn’t believe either of them was capable of it. Worm and Dylan talked tough, but that was all.

Dad sat down across from me. He looked tired. “I’d still like to know how someone manages to get a sunburn on a day like this.”

Right. The sunburn. “Guess I’m pretty sensitive,” I said.

“You can say that again,” he said dryly.

He let me go, and I went to take a shower and thought about Emma. Then I brushed my teeth and thought about Emma and washed my face and thought about Emma. After that I went to my room and took the apple she’d given me out of my pocket and set it on the nightstand, and then, as if to reassure myself she still existed, I got out my phone and looked through the pictures of her I’d taken that afternoon. I was still looking when I heard my father go to bed in the next room, and still looking when the gennies kicked off and my lamp went out, and when there was no light anywhere but her face on my little screen, I lay there in the dark, still looking.

Chapter Eight

Hoping to duck another lecture, I got up early and set out before Dad was awake. I slipped a note under his door and went to grab Emma’s apple, but it wasn’t on my nightstand where I’d left it. A thorough search of the floor uncovered a lot of dust bunnies and one leathery thing the size of a golf ball. I was starting to wonder if someone had swiped it when I realized that the leathery thing
was
the apple. At some point during the night it had gone profoundly bad, spoiling like I’ve never seen fruit spoil. It looked as though it had spent a year locked in a food dehydrator. When I tried to pick it up it crumbled in my hand like a clump of soil.

Puzzled, I shrugged it off and went out. It was pissing rain but I soon left gray skies behind for the reliable sun of the loop. This time, however, there were no pretty girls waiting for me on the other side of the cairn—or anyone, for that matter. I tried not to be too disappointed, but I was, a little.

As soon as I got to the house I started looking for Emma, but Miss Peregrine intercepted me before I’d even made it past the front hall.

“A word, Mr. Portman,” she said, and led me into the privacy of the kitchen, still fragrant from the rich breakfast I’d missed. I felt like I’d been summoned to the principal’s office.

Miss Peregrine propped herself against the giant cooking range. “Are you enjoying your time with us?” she said.

I told her I was, very much.

“That’s good,” she replied, and then her smile vanished. “I understand you had a pleasant afternoon with some of my wards yesterday. And a lively discussion as well.”

“It was great. They’re all really nice.” I was trying to keep things light, but I could tell she was winding me up for something.

“Tell me,” she said, “how would you describe the nature of your discussion?”

I tried to remember. “I don’t know ... we talked about lots of things. How things are here. How they are where I’m from.”

“Where you’re from.”

“Right.”

“And do you think it’s wise to discuss events in the future with children from the past?”

“Children? Is that really how you think of them?” I regretted saying this even as the words were passing my lips.

“It is how they regard
themselves
as well,” she said testily. “What would you call them?”

Given her mood, it wasn’t a subtlety I was prepared to argue. “Children, I guess.”

“Indeed. Now, as I was saying,” she said, emphasizing her words with little cleaver-chops of her hand on the range, “do you think it’s wise to discuss the future with children from the past?”

I decided to go out on a limb. “No?”

“Ah, but apparently you do! I know this because last night at dinner we were treated by Hugh to a fascinating disquisition on the wonders of twenty-first-century telecommunications technology.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Did you know that when you send a letter in the twenty-first century, it can be received almost instantaneously?”

“I think you’re talking about e-mail.”

“Well, Hugh knew
all
about it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

She unleaned herself from the range and took a limping step toward me. Even though she was a full foot shorter than I was, she still managed to be intimidating.

“As an ymbryne, it is my sworn duty to keep those children safe and above all that means keeping them
here
—in the loop—on this island.”

“Okay.”

“Yours is a world they can never be part of, Mr. Portman. So what’s the use in filling their heads with grand talk about the exotic wonders of the future? Now you’ve got half the children begging for a jet-airplane trip to America and the other half dreaming of the day when they can own a telephone-computer like yours.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“This is their home. I have tried to make it as fine a place as I could. But the plain fact is they cannot leave, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make them want to.”

“But why can’t they?”

She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment and then shook her head. “Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance.” Miss Peregrine, who seemed to be constitutionally incapable of idleness, took a saucepan from the stove top and began scouring it with a steel brush. I wondered if she was ignoring my question or simply weighing how best to dumb down the answer.

When the pan was clean she clapped it back on the stove and said, “They cannot linger in your world, Mr. Portman, because in a short time they would grow old and die.”

“What do you mean, die?”

“I’m not certain how I can be more direct. They’ll die, Jacob.” She spoke tersely, as if wishing to put the topic behind us as quickly as possible. “It may appear to you that we’ve found a way to cheat death, but it’s an illusion. If the children loiter too long on your side of the loop, all the many years from which they have abstained will descend upon them at once, in a matter of hours.”

I pictured a person shriveling up and crumbling to dust like the apple on my nightstand. “That’s awful,” I said with a shudder.

“The few instances of it that I’ve had the misfortune to witness are among the worst memories of my life. And let me assure you, I’ve lived long enough to see some truly dreadful things.”

“Then it’s happened before.”

“To a young girl under my own care, regrettably, a number of years ago. Her name was Charlotte. It was the first and last time I ever took a trip to visit one of my sister ymbrynes. In that brief time Charlotte managed to evade the older children who were minding her and wander out of the loop. It was 1985 or ’86 at that time, I believe. Charlotte was roving blithely about the village by herself when she was discovered by a constable. When she couldn’t explain who she was or where she’d come from—not to his liking, anyhow—the poor girl was shipped off to a child welfare agency on the mainland. It was two days before I could reach her, and by that time she’d aged thirty-five years.”

“I think I’ve seen her picture,” I said. “A grown woman in little girl’s clothes.”

Miss Peregrine nodded somberly. “She never was the same after that. Not right in the head.”

“What happened to her?”

“She lives with Miss Nightjar now. Miss Nightjar and Miss Thrush take all the hard cases.”