𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐘𝐏𝐒𝐎 | ᴍɪʟʟᴀʀᴅ ɴᴜʟʟɪɴɢꜱ

𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ PROLOGUE!

     I HAD JUST BEGUN TO ACCEPT THAT MY LIFE WAS ORDINARY WHEN EXTRAORDINARY THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN.

     The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split our lives into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved Jacobs grandfather, Abraham Portman.

Growing up, grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person we knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren't English.

It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a pair of kids that never left Florida, and we begged him to regale us with stories whenever we saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could only be entrusted to us.

When Jake and I were six, we decided that our only chance of having a life half as exciting as grandpa Portman's was to become an explorer. He encouraged us by spending afternoons at our side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red push pins and telling us about the fantastic places we would discover one day.

At home, we made our ambitions known by parading around with cardboard tubes held to our eyes shouting, "Land ho!" and "Prepare a landing party!" until our parents shooed us outside. We thought they were worried that our grandfather would affect us with some incurable disease from which we never recover and that these fantasies were somehow inoculating us against more practical ambitions.

So one day our mother sat us down and explained that we couldn't become explorers because everything in the world had already been discovered.

We were born in the wrong century and we felt cheated.

We felt even more cheated when we realized that most of grandpa Portman's best stories can't possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at 12 he was shipped off to a children's home in Whales. When we would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.

"What kind of monsters?" Jake would ask, eyes wide. It became a sort of routine. "Awful, hunched over ones with rotting skin and black eyes," he'd say. "And they'd walk like this!" And he'd shamble after us like an old-time movie monster until we ran away laughing.

Every time he described them he tossed in some new detail: they stink like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for the shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles and looked inside her mouth and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws.

It wasn't long before Jake had trouble falling asleep, his hyperactive imagination transforming the hits of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside of the windows or shadows under the door into giant gray black tentacles. He was scared of the monsters, but thrilled to imagine his grandfather battling them and surviving to tell the tale.

The stories didn't frighten me one bit, which may have been why grandpa Portman made sure to include the most disgusting details for when Jake was asleep.

More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children's home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived there in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird — or, so the story goes. As we got older, though, we began to have our doubts.