Strange Worlds [Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children] Enoch O'Connor

twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY
BIRD WATCHER

My docs seemed to be the only shoes I owned that were holding up to the bog, which upset me immensely since it took months of my savings even to afford them in the first place. I have never seen them crustier than they are now. Despite our immense care, Jacob and I still struggled to walk the bog without dirtying our clothes, and today was no better.

We had been here for little over a week now, and we had started to grow weary of the townsfolk as they watched us leave the town and tread our way across the bog. Though, it was the bird watcher who had shown a couple of days previous that had us on our toes.

Not only was he creepy by the number of layers he wore, but he also wore sunglasses inside and out, even in the middle of the night. We did our best to leave in the morning before he woke, but yesterday he had been watching us. At one point, Jacob had even thought he might have been following us.

Today, he was just in the distance, head facing the sky, though the paranoid side of me had believed that the binoculars at his eyes were not facing the sky at all. Instead, it looked as though they were at an awkward angle for him to be facing us. I shivered as I pushed Jacob to go faster as the man gave me the creeps.

I was dressed in the blue dress that Emma had leant me the first day coming back while Jacob was also dressed in his cute little 40's styled slacks and dress shirt that Millard and Hugh had both leant their respective clothes. The mud seemed to have dried slightly as today was quite sunny compared to the rest of the week prior.

"If I haven't lost weight when we get home, then this wasn't worth it." I breathed out as I almost slipped on a wet patch of mud, catching myself just before I went ass up. I took a couple of deep breaths, muttering curses to myself as I waited until I was sure I wasn't going to fall and took another tentative step forwards.

"If we go home." Jacob sighed.

"Yeah, whatever." I groaned as I oversaw my next couple of steps.

Jacob, the love-struck deer, has gotten the thought into his head that we perhaps would never leave, and as much as I loved the idea, I don't know if we should be doing that to our family... to Ricky. There was also the factor that I just loved my phone slightly too much to give up on it for the rest of my life. First world problems, I know.