MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN.

CHAPTER 1

Jake's POV

Most kids have a grandfather who tells embarrassing jokes or who sends them birthday cards signed with their first and last names, like they're afraid you'll forget who they are. My grandpa was nothing like that. If you'd met him, you'd never have thought he was old enough to be anyone's grandparent. His stories were wild, with monsters and secret islands and children who could do things I wasn't sure were even possible. They felt like something out of a dream, or maybe a nightmare, depending on his mood.

When I was little, I loved those stories. They were the best kind of strange—fantastical enough to be fun, real enough to make me wonder. By the time I was old enough to know better, I'd mostly outgrown them. Mostly.

Then the call came. I don't remember what I was doing when I got the news about Grandpa Portman, only that the world seemed to slow down, like a scratched-up record. Suddenly, I was being told things that didn't fit with the man I'd known. They said he'd been rambling about monsters. That they'd found him with wild eyes, terrified, in his own backyard. They didn't know I'd heard those same stories a hundred times before. That I knew how to listen when he talked about the monsters, even if I didn't believe in them anymore.

But here's the thing. Whatever I thought I knew, whatever I'd decided about what was real and what wasn't, it all fell apart when I saw what was waiting for me that night. Something was there in the dark, just beyond what the light would touch. And that was only the beginning. 

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I couldn't get Grandpa's last words out of my head. They were all jumbled, half-mumbled, and they didn't make sense. "Find the bird, Jake. In the loop. On the other side of the old man's grave," he'd gasped, clutching my arm like his life depended on me understanding him. But in that moment, I was more focused on the fact that his hands were freezing, his eyes were wild, and he was staring into the dark like he was seeing something I couldn't.

My parents told me later he was confused, that it was just his old age, his mind slipping. But I knew better. Grandpa was a lot of things—some strange, some funny, and some hard to explain—but he was never confused. Every one of his words had a sharp edge, the kind that felt like truth, even when it sounded like fantasy. That night, though, those words made me feel like the world had cracked open and something was pouring out that I wasn't supposed to see.

For days afterward, I replayed the scene in my head, but the details kept shifting, like a nightmare that changes shape every time you think about it. The cops had found him lying in his yard, scratches down his arms, his shirt torn. They said it was wild animals, but Grandpa Portman had always been able to spot a lie. I figured it was a skill that had to be inherited. I knew there was more to the story than what they told me, and somehow, so did Grandpa.

It didn't help that everyone else had already decided he was just a confused old man. My dad kept shaking his head, muttering about how "this all makes sense now" and "we should have expected this." My mom kept telling me, in that sympathetic way she thought would make it easier, that he was in a better place, and that he'd always had an active imagination. I don't know what bothered me more—how quickly they dismissed him or how quickly they expected me to forget him. But I couldn't. Not with his words still ringing in my head, not with those last, frantic looks he'd given me.

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There was one thing I couldn't ignore. He'd left something for me. Not an ordinary kind of something, like a letter or a box of old photos. It was a mystery, a sort of puzzle that needed solving, and I had a feeling it was the only thing that would make sense of his final words.

That's how I ended up begging my parents to let me visit Grandpa's old house in Cairnholm. They didn't understand, thought it was just my way of "coping," but I couldn't explain what it really was. I didn't have the words to describe it, but it was like some invisible thread was pulling me to that island, the place Grandpa always said was special, with a look in his eye that made me believe it, even if only for a second.