Ariel Portman and the Peculiar Children

Proluoge

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.

Growing up, Grandpa was the most fascinating person I 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-defence and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren't English. I loved hearing about his adventures and skills, and I begged him to tell with stories whenever I saw him. He always did, telling them like secrets that could be trusted only to me.

When I was six, and my twin brother Jacob, or Jake, or J Portman as I call him, I decided that my only chance of having a life at least as half as exciting as Grandpa's, was to become an explorer with J. He encouraged us by spending afternoons at our side, hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home we made our dreams into a somewhat realistic, known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, "Land ho!" and "Prepare a landing party!"

Until our parents shooed us outside. I think they worried that Grandpa would infect us with some incurable dreaminess from which we'd never recover from—that these fantasies were somehow stopping 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'd been born in the wrong century, and we felt cheated.

We felt even more cheated when we realised that most of Grandpa's best stories couldn't possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children's home in Wales. 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?" We'd ask, wide-eyed. It became a sort of routine.

"Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes," he'd say. "And they walked like this!" And he'd shamble after me and J like an old-time movie monster until we ran away laughing.

Every time he described them he'd toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws. It wasn't long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into laboured breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting grey-black tentacles. I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine Grandpa battling them and surviving to tell the tale.

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 together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird—or so the story went. As J got older, though, he began to have doubts.

"What kind of bird?" J asked him one afternoon at age seven, I looked at him as I read just before, across the card table where he was letting J win at Monopoly.

"A big hawk who smoked a pipe," he said. I went back to my book.

"You must think I'm pretty dumb, Grandpa." J said.

"I would never think that about you, Yakob, you too Annabelle."

"My name is Ariel, Grandpa." I never liked being called Annabelle.