Tales of the Peculiar (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #0.5) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,44

promised he would do as she said, and the next day she died. Fergus buried her in the churchyard, threw his few possessions into a sack, and began his long walk to the sea. He walked for six days with one shoe and no food. He was starving, and all the people in the towns he passed along the way were starving, too. Some towns had been abandoned altogether, the farmers gone to seek better fortunes and fuller stomachs in America.

Finally, he reached the seaside, and a little town called Skelligeen where none of the houses looked empty and none of the people looked hungry. This he took as a sign that he’d come to the right place: if the people of Skelligeen were still around and well-fed, the fishing must be very good. Which was a lucky thing, because he didn’t think he could go much longer without eating. He asked a man where he might find a fishing pole or a net, but the man told him he wouldn’t find any such thing in Skelligeen. “We don’t fish here,” the man said. He seemed oddly proud of it, as if being a fisherman were something shameful.

“If you don’t fish,” Fergus said, “then how do you live?” Fergus hadn’t noticed any signs of industry in his ramble around the town: no pens of livestock, no crops other than the same rotting potatoes he saw everywhere in Ireland.

“Our business is salvage,” the man replied, and did not elaborate.

Fergus asked the man if he had anything to eat. “I’ll work for it,” he offered.

“What work could you possibly do?” the man said, looking the boy up and down. “I could use someone who can lift heavy boxes, but you’re scrawny as a bird. I’ll bet you don’t weigh seventy pounds!”

“I may not be able to lift heavy boxes, but I can do something no one else can.”

“And what’s that?” said the man.

Fergus was about to tell him when he remembered the promise he’d made to his mother, and he muttered something vague and scurried away.

He decided to make a fishing line from the lace of his shoe and try to catch something. He stopped a plump-looking lady and asked her where he might find a good fishing spot.

“You needn’t bother,” the lady said. “All you’ll catch from shore are poisonous puffer fish.”

Fergus tried anyway, using a bit of stale bread for bait. He fished all day, but caught nothing—not even a poisonous puffer fish. Desperate, his stomach in terrible pain, he asked a man walking along the beach if someone might have a boat he could borrow.

“Then I could go a bit farther out to sea,” said Fergus, “where perhaps the fish are more plentiful.”

“You’ll never make it,” the man said. “The current will dash you to bits on the rocks!”

“Not me,” Fergus said.

The man looked at him skeptically, about to turn his back. Fergus really didn’t want to break his promise, but it was beginning to look like he’d starve to death unless he told someone about his talent. So he said, “I can control the current.”

“Ha!” the man replied. “I’ve heard some whoppers in my time, but that tops them all.”

“If I can prove it, will you give me something to eat?”

“Sure,” the man said, amused. “I’ll throw you a banquet!”

So the man and Fergus went down to the shoreline, where the tide was going out for the day. Fergus huffed and grunted and gritted his teeth, and with a great deal of effort he was able to bring the tide back in, the water rising from their ankles up to their knees in just a few minutes. The man was astounded, and very excited by what he’d seen. He brought Fergus back to his house and threw him a lavish banquet, just as he’d promised. He invited all his neighbors, and while Fergus stuffed himself, his host told the townspeople how Fergus had brought in the tide.

They were very excited. Strangely excited. Almost too excited.

They began to crowd around him.

“Show us your tide-pulling trick!” a woman shouted at him.

“The boy needs his strength,” the host said. “Let him eat first!”

When Fergus couldn’t force himself to take another bite, he looked up from his plate and around the room. Stacked in every corner were crates and boxes, each filled to the top with different things: bottles of wine in one box, dried spices in another, rolls of fabric in another. To one side of Fergus’s chair was a crate