Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“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.

Something occurred to me. Had I ever seen Mr. Barron’s eyes? Not really. He was always wearing these giant, old-man sunglasses that wrapped around his face. The yard man wore sunglasses, too, and a wide- brimmed hat. Had I ever given either of them a hard look? How many other roles in my life had this chameleon played?

“What’s happening?” Emma said. “Who is this man?”

“Shut up!” he snapped. “You’ll get your turn.”

“You’ve been watching me,” I said. “You killed those sheep. You killed Martin.”

“Who, me?” he said innocently. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“But you’re a wight, aren’t you?”

“That’s their word,” he said.

I couldn’t understand it. I hadn’t seen the yard man since my mother replaced him three years ago, and Mr. Barron had vanished from my life after eighth grade. Had they—he—really been following me?

“How’d you know where to find me?”

“Why, Jacob,” he said, his voice changing yet again, “you told me yourself. In confidence, of course.” It was a middle-American accent now, soft and educated. He tipped the flashlight up so that its glow spilled onto his face.

The beard I’d seen him wearing the other day was gone. Now there was no mistaking him.

“Dr. Golan,” I said, my voice a whisper swallowed by the drumming rain.

I thought back to our telephone conversation a few days ago. The noise in the background—he’d said he