Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(69)

Emma shone her flame around as we walked among the troughs, trying to guess which might hold more than just the corpses of fish—but they all looked the same, just lidless coffins of ice. We would have to search every one until we found him.

“Not me,” Bronwyn said, “I don’t want to see him. I don’t like dead things.”

“Neither do I, but we have to,” said Emma. “We’re all in this together.”

Each of us chose a trough and dug into it like a dog excavating a prized bed of flowers, our cupped hands scooping mounds of ice onto the floor. I’d emptied half of one and was losing feeling in my fingers when I heard Bronwyn shriek. I turned to see her stumble away from a trough, her hands across her mouth.

We crowded around to see what she’d uncovered. Jutting from the ice was a frozen, hairy-knuckled hand. “I daresay you found our man,” Enoch said, and through split fingers the rest of us watched as he scraped away more ice, slowly revealing an arm, then a torso, and finally Martin’s entire wrecked body.

It was an awful sight. His limbs were twisted in improbable directions. His trunk had been scissored open and emptied out, ice filling the cavity where his vitals had been. When his face appeared, there was a collective intake of breath. Half was a purple contusion that hung in strips like a shredded mask. The other was just undamaged enough to recognize him by: a jaw stippled with beard, a jig-sawed section of cheek and brow, and one green eye, filmed over and gazing emptily. He wore only boxers and ragged scraps of a terrycloth robe. There was no way he’d walked by himself out to the cliffs at night dressed like that. Someone—or something—had dragged him there.

“He’s pretty far gone,” said Enoch, appraising Martin as a surgeon might assess an all-but-hopeless patient. “I’m telling you now, this might not work.”

“We got to try,” Bronwyn said, stepping bravely to the trough with the rest of us. “We come all this way, we at least got to try.”

Enoch opened his slicker and pulled one of the wrapped hearts from an interior pocket. It looked like a maroon catcher’s mitt folded in on itself. “If he wakes up,” Enoch said, “he ain’t gonna be happy. So just stand back and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

All of us took a generous step back except Enoch, who bellied up to the trough and plunged his arm into the ice that filled Martin’s chest, swirling it around like he was fishing for a can of soda in a cooler. After a moment he seemed to latch onto something, and with his other hand he raised the sheep heart above his head.

A sudden convulsion passed through Enoch’s body and the sheep heart started to beat, spraying out a fine mist of bloody pickling solution. Enoch took fast, shallow breaths. He seemed to be channeling something. I studied Martin’s body for any hint of movement, but he lay still.

Gradually the heart in Enoch’s hand began to slow and shrink, its color fading to a blackish gray, like meat left too long in the freezer. Enoch threw it on the ground and thrust his empty hand at me. I pulled out the heart I’d been keeping in my pocket and gave it to him. He repeated the same process, the heart pumping and sputtering for a while before faltering like the last one. Then he did it a third time, using the heart he’d given to Emma.

Bronwyn’s heart was the only one left—Enoch’s last chance. His face took on a new intensity as he raised it above Martin’s rude coffin, squeezing it like he meant to drive his fingers through. As the heart began to shake and tremble like an overcranked motor, Enoch shouted, “Rise up, dead man. Rise up!”

I saw a flicker of movement. Something had shifted beneath the ice. I leaned as close as I could stand to, watching for any sign of life. For a long moment there was nothing, but then the body wrenched as suddenly and forcefully as if it had been shocked with a thousand volts. Emma screamed, and we all jumped back. When I lowered my arms to look again, Martin’s head had turned in my direction, one cataracted eye wheeling crazily before fixing, it seemed, on me.

“He sees you!” Enoch cried.

I leaned in. The dead man smelled of turned earth and brine and something worse. Ice fell away from his hand, which rose up to tremble in the air for a moment, afflicted and blue, before coming to rest on my arm. I fought the urge to throw it off.

His lips fell apart and his jaw hinged open. I bent down to hear him, but there was nothing to hear. Of course there isn’t, I thought, his lungs have burst—but then a tiny sound leaked out, and I leaned closer, my ear almost to his freezing lips. I thought, strangely, of the rain gutter by my house, where if you put your head to the bars and wait for a break in traffic, you can just make out the whisper of an underground stream, buried when the town was first built but still flowing, imprisoned in a world a permanent night.

The others crowded around, but I was the only one who could hear the dead man. The first thing he said was my name.

“Jacob.”

Fear shot through me. “Yes.”

“I was dead.” The words came slowly, dripping like molasses. He corrected himself. “Am dead.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Can you remember?”

There was a pause. The wind whistled through the gaps in the walls. He said something and I missed it.

“Say it again. Please, Martin.”

“He killed me,” the dead man whispered.

“Who.”