Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(17)

Dylan stopped. “That don’t even make sense,” he said. “And it’s your dad who’s on the dole.”

“Oh shit, Dirty D let the beat drop!” Worm started beat-boxing while doing a passable robot, his sneakers twisting holes in the gravel. “Take the mic, D!”

Dylan seemed embarrassed but let the rhymes fly anyway. “I met a tight bird and her name was Sharon / She was keen on my tracksuit and the trainers I was wearin’ I showed her the time, like Doctor Who I thunk up this rhyme while I was in the loo!”

Worm shook his head. “The loo?”

“I wasn’t ready!”

They turned to me and asked what I thought. Considering that they didn’t even like each other’s rapping, I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I guess I’m more into music with, like, singing and guitars and stuff.”

Worm dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “He wouldn’t know a dope rhyme if it bit him in the bollocks,” he muttered.

Dylan laughed and they exchanged a series of complex, multistage handshake-fist-bump-high-fives.

“Can we go now?” I said.

They grumbled and dawdled a while longer, but pretty soon we were on our way, this time with Worm tagging along.

I took up the rear, trying to figure out what I would say to Miss Peregrine when I met her. I was expecting to be introduced to a proper Welsh lady and sip tea in the parlor and make polite small talk until the time seemed right to break the bad news. I’m Abraham Portman’s grandson, I would say. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he’s been taken from us. Then, once she’d finished quietly dabbing away tears, I would ply her with questions.

I followed Dylan and Worm along a path that wound through pastures of grazing sheep before a lung-busting ascent up a ridge. At the top hovered an embankment of rolling, snaking fog so dense it was like stepping into another world. It was truly biblical; a fog I could imagine God, in one of his lesser wraths, cursing the Egyptians with. As we descended the other side it only seemed to thicken. The sun faded to a pale white bloom. Moisture clung to everything, beading on my skin and dampening my clothes. The temperature dropped. I lost Worm and Dylan for a moment and then the path flattened and I came upon them just standing, waiting for me.

“Yank boy!” Dylan called. “This way!”

I followed obediently. We abandoned the path to plow through a field of marshy grass. Sheep stared at us with big leaky eyes, their wool soggy and tails drooping. A small house appeared out of the mist. It was all boarded up.

“You sure this is it?” I said. “It looks empty.”

“Empty? No way, there’s loads of shit in there,” Worm replied.

“Go on,” said Dylan. “Have a look.”

I had a feeling it was a trick but stepped up to the door and knocked anyway. It was unlatched and opened a little at my touch. It was too dark to see inside, so I took a step through—and, to my surprise, down—into what looked like a dirt floor but, I quickly realized, was in fact a shin-deep ocean of excrement. This tenantless hovel, so innocent looking from the outside, was really a makeshift sheep stable. Quite literally a shithole.

“Oh my God!” I squealed in disgust.

Peals of laughter exploded from outside. I stumbled backward through the door before the smell could knock me unconscious and found the boys doubled over, holding their stomachs.

“You guys are assholes,” I said, stomping the muck off my boots.

“Why?” said Worm. “We told you it was full of shit!”

I got in Dylan’s face. “Are you gonna show me the house or not?”

“He’s serious,” said Worm, wiping tears from his eyes.

“Of course I’m serious!”

Dylan’s smile faded. “I thought you were taking the piss, mate.”

“Taking a what?”

“Joking, like.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

The boys exchanged an uneasy look. Dylan whispered something to Worm. Worm whispered something back. Finally Dylan turned and pointed up the path. “If you really want to see it,” he said, “keep going past the bog and through the woods. It’s a big old place. You can’t miss it.”

“What the hell. You’re supposed to go with me!”

Worm looked away and said, “This is as far as we go.”

“Why?”

“It just is.” And they turned and began to trudge back the way we’d come, receding into the fog.

I weighed my options. I could tuck tail and follow my tormenters back to town, or I could go ahead alone and lie to Dad about it.

After four seconds of intense deliberation, I was on my way.

*

A vast, lunar bog stretched away into the mist from either side of the path, just brown grass and tea-colored water as far as I could see, featureless but for the occasional mound of piled-up stones. It ended abruptly at a forest of skeletal trees, branches spindling up like the tips of wet paintbrushes, and for a while the path became so lost beneath fallen trunks and carpets of ivy that navigating it was a matter of faith. I wondered how an elderly person like Miss Peregrine would ever be able to negotiate such an obstacle course. She must get deliveries, I thought, though the path looked like it hadn’t seen a footprint in months, if not years.