Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(36)
“He was lucky in a way. It wasn’t long and drawn-out. No months in a hospital hooked up to machines.” That was ridiculous, of course—his death had been needless, obscene—but I think it made us both feel a little better to say it.
Setting aside her needlework, Miss Peregrine rose and hobbled to the window. Her gait was rigid and awkward, as if one of her legs were shorter than the other.
She looked out at the yard, at the kids playing. “The children mustn’t hear of this,” she said. “Not yet, at least. It would only upset them.”
“Okay. Whatever you think.”
She stood quietly at the glass for a while, her shoulders trembling. When she finally turned to face me again, she was composed and businesslike. “Well, Mr. Portman,” she said briskly, “I think you’ve been adequately interrogated. You must have questions of your own.”
“Only about a thousand.”
She pulled a watch from her pocket and consulted it. “We have some time before supper-hour. I hope that will prove sufficient to enlighten you.”
Miss Peregrine paused and cocked her head. Abruptly, she strode to the sitting room door and threw it open to find Emma crouched on the other side, her face red and streaked with tears. She’d heard everything.
“Miss Bloom! Have you been eavesdropping?”
Emma struggled to her feet, letting out a sob.
“Polite persons do not listen to conversations that were not meant for—” but Emma was already running from the room, and Miss Peregrine cut herself short with a frustrated sigh. “That was most unfortunate. I’m afraid she’s quite sensitive as regards your grandfather.”
“I noticed,” I said. “Why? Were they …?”
“When Abraham left to fight in the war, he took all our hearts with him, but Miss Bloom’s especially. Yes, they were admirers, paramours, sweethearts.”
I began to understand why Emma had been so reluctant to believe me; it would mean, in all likelihood, that I was here to deliver bad news about my grandfather.
Miss Peregrine clapped her hands as if breaking a spell. “Ah, well,” she said, “it can’t be helped.”
I followed her out of the room to the staircase. Miss Peregrine climbed it with grim resolve, holding the banister with both hands to pull herself up one step at a time, refusing any help. When we reached the landing, she led me down the hall to the library. It looked like a real classroom now, with desks arranged in a row and a chalkboard in one corner and books dusted and organized on the shelves. Miss Peregrine pointed to a desk and said, “Sit,” so I squeezed into it. She took her place at the front of the room and faced me.
“Allow me to give you a brief primer. I think you’ll find the answers to most of your questions contained herein.”
“Okay.”
“The composition of the human species is infinitely more diverse than most humans suspect,” she began. “The real taxonomy of Homo sapiens is a secret known to only a few, of whom you will now be one. At base, it is a simple dichotomy: there are the coerlfolc, the teeming mass of common people who make up humanity’s great bulk, and there is the hidden branch—the crypto-sapiens, if you will—who are called syndrigast, or “peculiar spirit” in the venerable language of my ancestors. As you have no doubt surmised, we here are of the latter type.”
I bobbed my head as if I understood, though she’d already lost me. Hoping to slow her down a little, I asked a question.
“But why don’t people know about you? Are you the only ones?”
“There are peculiars all over the world,” she said, “though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were. Those who remain live in hiding, as we do.” She lapsed into a soft regretful voice. “There was a time when we could mix openly with common folk. In some corners of the world we were regarded as shamans and mystics, consulted in times of trouble. A few cultures have retained this harmonious relationship with our people, though only in places where both modernity and the major religions have failed to gain a foothold, such as the black-magic island of Ambrym in the New Hebrides. But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”
“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”
“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually, bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”
“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”
“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways. It wasn’t so many centuries ago that the parents of peculiar children simply assumed that their ‘real’ sons or daughters had been made off with and replaced with changelings—that is, enchanted and malevolent, not to mention entirely fictitious, lookalikes—which in darker times was considered a license to abandon the poor children, if not kill them outright.”