"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs, Prologue–Chapter 4

It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who’d never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him.

I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.

And he’d shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until I ran away laughing.

Every time he described them he’d toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws.

But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.

Shelley was the store manager, and her slumped shoulders and dour expression were as much a part of her uniform as the blue polo shirts we all had to wear.

It was next to impossible for me to get fired from Smart Aid. Any other employee would’ve been out the door a dozen minor infractions ago.

There are three Smart Aids in Englewood, the small, somnolent beach town where I live.

All my campaign of self-sabotage had earned me was an unwinnable feud with Shelley and the deep and abiding resentment of my coworkers—who, let’s face it, were going to resent me anyway, because no matter how many displays I knocked over or customers I short-changed, one day I was going to inherit a sizable chunk of the company, and they were not.

He called me Special Ed because I was in a few gifted classes, which were, technically speaking, part of our school’s special-education curriculum, a subtlety of nomenclature that Ricky found endlessly amusing.

Worst-case scenarios included my grandfather running naked in the street, wielding a hunting rifle, foaming at the mouth on the front lawn, or lying in wait with a blunt object in hand.

The only real landmarks were bizarre and colorful lawn ornaments, of which Circle Village was a veritable open-air museum.

Every other week there was a news story about some geriatric citizen tripping into a retention pond and being devoured by alligators.

I was no tracker, and neither was Ricky. And yet something seemed to guide me anyway—a quickening in the chest; a whisper in the viscous air—and suddenly I couldn’t wait another second.

All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places humming with machines, not in heaps on the sodden reeking ground with ants marching over them, a brass letter opener clutched in one trembling hand.

He was mumbling, fading in and out of lucidity, shifting between English and Polish.

As an attempt to placate me, it was pretty transparent. The biggest giveaway was when he tried to give me the finished sketch.

Ricky was a connoisseur of your-mom jokes, but this was apparently more than he could take.

I discovered Emerson’s soporific qualities the hard way, by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called “Self-Reliance” and having the vending-machine dream for the sixth time that week.

On the advice of Dr. Golan, who thought it would be good for me to “confront the scene of my trauma,” I was enlisted to help my dad and Aunt Susie sort through the detritus.

Inside were the photos I knew so well: the invisible boy, the levitating girl, the boulder lifter, the man with a face painted on the back of his head.

They were brittle and peeling—smaller than I remembered, too—and looking at them now, as an almost adult, it struck me how blatant the fakery was.

Now the truth seemed obvious: his last words had been just another sleight of hand, and his last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.

But my mother was loath to pass up even the flimsiest excuse for a celebration—she once invited friends over for our cockatiel’s birthday—in part because she loved to show off our house.

Wine in hand, she’d herd guests from room to over-furnished room, extolling the genius of the architect and telling war stories about the construction (“It took months to get these sconces from Italy”).

I was following my dad into our suspiciously dark living room as he muttered things like “What a shame we didn’t plan anything for your birthday” and “Oh well, there’s always next year,” when all the lights flooded on to reveal streamers, balloons, and a motley assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins I rarely spoke to—anyone my mother could cajole into attending—and Ricky, whom I was surprised to see lingering near the punch bowl, looking comically out of place in a studded leather jacket.

I hoped, for his sake and mine, that the grueling thirty-six hours we’d braved to get this far—three airplanes, two layovers, shift-napping in grubby train stations, and now this interminable gut-churning ferry ride—would pay off.

Well-fortified with grease, we left the pub and walked through town, dodging tractors and shouting to each other over the din of generators until the streets gave way to fields and the noise faded behind us.

I wasn’t sure how we would reach it, though—the island was slightly bowl shaped, with hills that climbed toward its edges only to drop off at precarious seaside cliffs—but at this particular spot the edge had been rounded off and a path led down to a minor spit of sand along the water.

Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus—as if nature itself had waged war against it—but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

I couldn’t square my grandfather’s idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he’d found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it.

My dad liked to believe I was as popular and adventuresome as he was at my age—a myth it had always seemed easiest to perpetuate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.