Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (9 page)

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” He shrugged. “I gave up trying to understand my father a long time ago.”

“That’s sad. Weren’t you interested?”

“Sure I was. Then, after a while, I wasn’t anymore.”

I could feel the conversation going in a direction I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, but I persisted anyway. “Why not?”

“When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking. Know what I mean?”

He hardly ever talked like this. Maybe it was the beer, or that we were so far from home, or maybe he’d decided I was finally old enough to hear this stuff. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want him to stop.

“But he was your dad. How could you just give up?”

“It wasn’t me who gave up!” he said a little too loudly, then looked down, embarrassed and swirled the beer in his glass. “It’s just that—the truth is, I think your grandpa didn’t know how to be a dad, but he felt like he had to be one anyway, because none of his brothers or sisters survived the war. So he dealt with it by being gone all the time—on hunting trips, business trips, you name it. And even when he
was
around, it was like he wasn’t.”

“Is this about that one Halloween?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know—from the picture.”

It was an old story, and it went like this: It was Halloween. My dad was four or five years old and had never been trick-or-treating, and Grandpa Portman had promised to take him when he got off work. My grandmother had bought my dad this ridiculous pink bunny costume, and he put it on and sat by the driveway waiting for Grandpa Portman to come home from five o’clock until nightfall, but he never did. Grandma was so mad that she took a picture of my dad crying in the street just so she could show my grandfather what a huge asshole he was. Needless to say, that picture has long been an object of legend among members of my family, and a great embarrassment to my father.

“It was a lot more than just one Halloween,” he grumbled. “Really, Jake, you were closer to him than I ever was. I don’t know—there was just something unspoken between the two of you.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Was he jealous of me?

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re my son, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Hurt how?”

He paused. Outside the clouds shifted, the last rays of daylight throwing our shadows against the wall. I got a sick feeling in my stomach, like when your parents are about to tell you they’re splitting up, but you know it before they even open their mouths.

“I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find,” he said finally.

“You mean about the war?”

“No. Your grandpa kept those secrets because they were painful. I understood that. I mean about the traveling, him being gone all the time. What he was really doing. I think—your aunt and I both thought—that there was another woman. Maybe more than one.”

I let it hang between us for a moment. My face tingled strangely. “That’s crazy, Dad.”

“We found a letter once. It was from a woman whose name we didn’t know, addressed to your grandfather.
I love you, I miss you, when are you coming back
, that kind of thing. Seedy, lipstick-on-the-collar type stuff. I’ll never forget it.”

I felt a hot stab of shame, like somehow it was my own crime he was describing. And yet I couldn’t quite believe it.

“We tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Never found another one, either. Guess he was more careful after that.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t look at my father.

“I’m sorry, Jake. This must be hard to hear. I know how much you worshipped him.” He reached out to squeeze my shoulder but I shrugged him off, then scraped back my chair and stood up.

“I don’t
worship
anyone.”

“Okay. I just ... I didn’t want you to be surprised, that’s all.”

I grabbed my jacket and slung it over my shoulder.

“What are you doing? Dinner’s on the way.”

“You’re wrong about him,” I said. “And I’m going to prove it.”

He sighed. It was a letting-go kind of sigh. “Okay. I hope you do.”

I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—
that
was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.

*   *   *

The museum’s doors were open and its lights were on, but no one seemed to be inside. I’d gone there to find the curator, hoping he knew a thing or two about the island’s history and people, and could shed some light on the empty house and the whereabouts of its former inhabitants. Figuring he’d just stepped out for a minute—the crowds weren’t exactly kicking down his door—I wandered into the sanctuary to kill time checking out museum displays.

The exhibits, such as they were, were arranged in big open-fronted cabinets that lined the walls and stood where pews had once been. For the most part they were unspeakably boring, all about life in a traditional fishing village and the enduring mysteries of animal husbandry, but one exhibit stood out from the rest. It was in a place of honor at the front of the room, in a fancy case that rested atop what had been the altar. It lived behind a rope I stepped over and a little warning sign I didn’t bother to read, and its case had polished wooden sides and a Plexiglas top so that you could only see into it from above.

When I looked inside, I think I actually gasped—and for one panicky second thought
monster!
—because I had suddenly and unexpectedly come face-to-face with a blackened corpse. Its shrunken body bore an uncanny resemblance to the creatures that had haunted my dreams, as did the color of its flesh, which was like something that had been spit-roasted over a flame. But when the body failed to come alive and scar my mind forever by breaking the glass and going for my jugular, my initial panic subsided. It was just a museum display, albeit an excessively morbid one.

“I see you’ve met the old man!” called a voice from behind me, and I turned to see the curator striding in my direction. “You handled it pretty well. I’ve seen grown men faint dead away!” He grinned and reached out to shake my hand. “Martin Pagett. Don’t believe I caught your name the other day.”

“Jacob Portman,” I said. “Who’s this, Wales’s most famous murder victim?”

“Ha! Well, he might be that, too, though I never thought of him that way. He’s our island’s senior-most resident, better known in archaeological circles as Cairnholm Man—though to us he’s just the Old Man. More than twenty-seven hundred years old, to be exact, though he was only sixteen when he died. So he’s rather a young old man, really.”

“Twenty-seven
hundred
?” I said, glancing at the dead boy’s face, his delicate features somehow perfectly preserved. “But he looks so ...”

“That’s what happens when you spend your golden years in a place where oxygen and bacteria can’t exist, like the underside of our bog. It’s a regular fountain of youth down there—provided you’re already dead, that is.”

“That’s where you found him? The bog?”

He laughed. “Not me! Turf cutters did, digging for peat by the big stone cairn out there, back in the seventies. He looked so fresh they thought there might be a killer loose on Cairnholm—till the cops had a look at the Stone Age bow in his hand and the noose of human hair round his neck. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

I shuddered. “Sounds like a human sacrifice or something.”

“Exactly. He was done in by a combination of strangulation, drowning, disembowelment, and a blow to the head. Seems rather like overkill, don’t you think?”

“I guess so.”

Martin roared with laughter. “He guesses so!”

“Okay, yeah, it does.”

“Sure it does. But the really fascinating thing, to us modern folk, anyway, is that in all likelihood the boy went to his death willingly. Eagerly, even. His people believed that bogs—and our bog in particular—were entrances to the world of the gods, and so the perfect place to offer up their most precious gift: themselves.”

“That’s insane.”

“I suppose. Though I imagine we’re killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that’ll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain’t a bad choice. It’s not quite water and it’s not quite land—it’s an in-between place.” He bent over the case, studying the figure inside. “Ain’t he beautiful?”

I looked at the body again, throttled and flayed and drowned and somehow made immortal in the process.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Martin straightened, then began to speak in a grandiose tone. “Come, you, and gaze upon the tar man! Blackly he reposes, tender face the color of soot, withered limbs like veins of coal, feet lumps of driftwood hung with shriveled grapes!” He threw his arms out like a hammy stage actor and began to strut around the case. “Come, you, and bear witness to the cruel art of his wounds! Purled and meandering lines drawn by knives; brain and bone exposed by stones; the rope still digging at his throat. First fruit slashed and dumped – seeker of Heaven – old man arrested in youth – I almost love you!”

He took a theatrical bow as I applauded. “Wow,” I said, “did you write that?”

“Guilty!” he replied with a sheepish smile. “I twiddle about with lines of verse now and then, but it’s only a hobby. In any case, thank you for indulging me.”

I wondered what this odd, well-spoken man was doing on Cairnholm, with his pleated slacks and half-baked poems, looking more like a bank manager than someone who lived on a windswept island with one phone and no paved roads.

“Now, I’d be happy to show you the rest of my collection,” he said, escorting me toward the door, “but I’m afraid it’s shutting-up time. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, however—”

“Actually, I was hoping you might know something,” I said, stopping him before he could shoo me out. “It’s about the house I mentioned this morning. I went to see it.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “I thought I’d scared you off it. How’s our haunted mansion faring these days? Still standing?”

I assured him that it was, then got right to the point. “The people that lived there—do you have any idea what happened to them?”

“They’re dead,” he replied. “Happened a long time ago.”

I was surprised—though I probably shouldn’t have been. Miss Peregrine was old. Old people die. But that didn’t mean my search was over. “I’m looking for anyone else who might have lived there, too, not just the headmistress.”

“All dead,” he repeated. “No one’s lived there since the war.”

That took me a moment to process. “What do you mean? What war?”

“When we say ‘the war’ around here, my boy, there’s only one that we mean—the second. It was a German air raid that got ’em, if I’m not mistaken.”

“No, that can’t be right.”

He nodded. “In those days, there was an anti-aircraft gun battery at the far tip of the island, past the wood where the house is. It made Cairnholm a legitimate military target. Not that ‘legitimate’ mattered much to the Germans one way or another, mind you. Anyway, one of the bombs went off track, and, well ...” He shook his head. “Nasty luck.”

“That can’t be right,” I said again, though I was starting to wonder.

“Why don’t you sit down and let me fix you some tea?” he said. “You look a bit off the mark.”

“Just feeling a little light-headed ...”

He led me to a chair in his office and went to make the tea. I tried to collect my thoughts.
Bombed in the war
—that would certainly explain those rooms with blown-out walls. But what about the letter from Miss Peregrine—postmarked Cairnholm—sent just fifteen years ago?

Martin returned, handing me a mug. “There’s a nip of Penderyn in it,” he said. “Secret recipe, you know. Should get you sorted in no time.”

I thanked him and took a sip, realizing too late that the secret ingredient was high-test whiskey. It felt like napalm flushing down my esophagus. “It does have a certain kick,” I admitted, my face going red.

He frowned. “Reckon I ought to fetch your father.”

“No, no, I’ll be fine. But if there’s anything else you can tell me about the attack, I’d be grateful.”

Martin settled into a chair opposite me. “About that, I’m curious. You say your grandfather lived here. He never mentioned it?”

“I’m curious about that, too,” I said. “I guess it must’ve been after his time. Did it happen late in the war or early?”

“I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know. But if you’re keen, I can introduce you to someone who does—my Uncle Oggie. He’s eighty-three, lived here his whole life. Still sharp as a tack.” Martin glanced at his watch. “If we catch him before
Father Ted
comes on the telly, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to tell you anything you like.”