Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #1) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,1

being serious. Then again, my grandfather was not known as a teller of jokes. He frowned, reading the doubt on my face.

“Fine, you don’t have to take my word for it,” he said. “I got pictures!” He pushed back his lawn chair and went into the house, leaving me alone on the screened-in lanai. A minute later he came back holding an old cigar box. I leaned in to look as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing snapshots.

The first was a blurry picture of what looked like a suit of clothes with no person in them. Either that or the person didn’t have a head.

“Sure, he’s got a head!” my grandfather said, grinning. “Only you can’t see it.”

“Why not? Is he invisible?”

“Hey, look at the brain on this one!” He raised his eyebrows as if I’d surprised him with my powers of deduction. “Millard, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Hey Abe, I know what you did today,’ and he’d tell you where you’d been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought nobody was looking. Sometimes he’d follow you, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn’t see him—just watching!” He shook his head. “Of all the things, eh?”

He slipped me another photo. Once I’d had a moment to look at it, he said, “So? What do you see?”

“A little girl?”

“And?”

“She’s wearing a crown.”

He tapped the bottom of the picture. “What about her feet?”

I held the snapshot closer. The girl’s feet weren’t touching the ground. But she wasn’t jumping—she seemed to be floating in the air. My jaw fell open.

“She’s flying!”

“Close,” my grandfather said. “She’s levitating. Only she couldn’t control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!”

My eyes were glued to her haunting, doll-like face. “Is it real?”

“Of course it is,” he said gruffly, taking the picture and replacing it with another, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder. “Victor and his sister weren’t so smart,” he said, “but boy were they strong!”

“He doesn’t look strong,” I said, studying the boy’s skinny arms.

“Trust me, he was. I tried to arm-wrestle him once and he just about tore my hand off!”

But the strangest photo was the last one. It was the back of somebody’s head, with a face painted on it.

I stared at the last photo as Grandpa Portman explained. “He had two mouths, see? One in the front and one in the back. That’s why he got so big and fat!”

“But it’s fake,” I said. “The face is just painted on.”

“Sure, the paint’s fake. It was for a circus show. But I’m telling you, he had two mouths. You don’t believe me?”

I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?

“I believe you,” I said.

And I really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because I wanted to, like other kids my age wanted to believe in Santa Claus. We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high, which for me was the day in second grade when Robbie Jensen pantsed me at lunch in front of a table of girls and announced that I believed in fairies. It was just deserts, I suppose, for repeating my grandfather’s stories at school but in those humiliating seconds I foresaw the moniker “fairy boy” trailing me for years and, rightly or not, I resented him for it.

Grandpa Portman picked me up from school that afternoon, as he often did when both my parents were working. I climbed into the passenger seat of his old Pontiac and declared that I didn’t believe in his fairy stories anymore.

“What fairy stories?” he said, peering at me over his glasses.

“You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters.”

He seemed confused. “Who said anything about fairies?”

I told him that a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies, and that I knew his photos and stories were fakes. I expected him to get mad or put up a fight, but instead he just said, “Okay,” and threw the Pontiac into drive. With a stab of his foot on the accelerator we lurched away from the curb. And that was the end of it.

I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he