Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #1) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,82
moorings in the heavy chop but none left the harbor; to take one out in such a gale would’ve been suicidal. And because the mainland police couldn’t collect Martin’s body until the seas calmed, the townspeople were left with the nettlesome question of what to do with his body. It was finally decided that the fishmonger, who had the island’s largest stockpile of ice, would keep him cool in the back of his shop, among salmon and cod and other things. Which, like Martin, had been pulled from the sea.
I was under strict instructions from my father not to leave the Priest Hole, but I was also under instructions to report any strange goings-on to Miss Peregrine—and if a suspicious death didn’t qualify, nothing did. So that night I feigned a flulike illness and locked myself in my room, then slipped out the window and climbed down a drainpipe to the ground. No one else was foolish enough to be outside, so I ran straight down the main path without fear of being spotted, the hood of my jacket scrunched tight against the whipping rain.
When I got to the children’s home, Miss Peregrine took one look at me and knew something was wrong. “What’s happened?” she said, her bloodshot eyes ranging over me.
I told her everything, all the sketchy facts and rumors I’d overheard, and she blanched. She hurried me into the sitting room, where in a panic she gathered all the kids she could find and then stomped off to find a few who had ignored her shouts. The rest were left to stand around, anxious and confused.
Emma and Millard cornered me. “What’s she in such a tiff about?” Millard asked.
I quietly told them about Martin. Millard sucked in his breath and Emma crossed her arms, looking worried.
“Is it really that bad?” I said. “I mean, it can’t have been hollows. They only hunt peculiars, right?”
Emma groaned. “Do you want to tell him, or shall I?”
“Hollows vastly prefer peculiars over common folk,” Millard explained, “but they’ll eat just about anything to sustain themselves, so long as it’s fresh and meaty.”
“It’s one of the ways you know there might be a hollow hanging about,” said Emma. “The bodies pile up. That’s why they’re mostly nomads. If they didn’t move from place to place so often, they’d be simple to track down.”
“How often?” I asked, a shiver tracing my spine. “Do they need to eat, I mean?”
“Oh, pretty often,” said Millard. “Arranging the hollows’ meals is what wights spend most of their time doing. They look for peculiars when they can, but a gobsmacking portion of their energy and effort is spent tracking down common victims for the hollows, animal and human, and then hiding the mess.” His tone was academic, as if discussing the breeding patterns of a mildly interesting species of rodent.
“But don’t the wights get caught?” I said. “I mean, if they’re helping murder people, you’d think—”
“Some do,” Emma said. “Wager you’ve heard of a few, if you follow the news. There was one fellow, they found him with human heads in the icebox and gibletty goodies in a stock pot over a low boil, like he was making Christmas dinner. In your time this wouldn’t have been so very long ago.”
I remembered—vaguely—a sensationalized late-night TV special about a cannibalistic serial killer from Milwaukee who’d been apprehended in similarly gruesome circumstances.
“You mean ... Jeffrey Dahmer?”
“I believe that was the gentleman’s name, yes,” said Millard. “Fascinating case. Seems he never lost his taste for the fresh stuff, though he’d not been a hollow for many years.”
“I thought you guys weren’t supposed to know about the future,” I said.
Emma flashed a canny smile. “The bird only keeps good things about the future to herself, but you can bet we hear all the brown-trouser bits.”
Then Miss Peregrine returned, pulling Enoch and Horace behind her by their shirtsleeves. Everyone came to attention.
“We’ve just had word of a new threat,” she announced, giving me an appreciative nod. “A man outside our loop has died under suspicious circumstances. We can’t be certain of the cause or whether it represents a true threat to our security, but we must conduct ourselves as if it did. Until further notice, no one may leave the house, not even to collect vegetables or bring in a goose for the evening meal.”
A collective groan arose, over which Miss Peregrine raised her voice. “This has been a challenging few days for us all. I beg your continued patience.”