Discovering the Future

Chapter 12- Chapter 5 (Part 1)

Disclaimer: I don't own Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

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It was an almost-too-perfect morning. Leaving the pub felt like stepping into one of those heavily retouched photos that come loaded as wallpaper on new computers: streets of artfully decrepit cottages stretched into the distance, giving way to green fields sewn together by meandering rock walls, the whole scene topped by scudding white clouds. But beyond all that, above the houses and fields and sheep doddering around like little puffs of cotton candy, I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.

I walked over the ridge and straight into a rain shower. True to form, I had forgotten my rubber boots, and the path was a rapidly deepening ribbon of mud. But getting a little wet seemed vastly preferable to climbing that hill twice in one morning, so I bent my head against the spitting rain and trudged onward.

"That's the spirit!" Victor exclaimed.

Soon I passed the shack, dim outlines of sheep huddled inside against the chill, and the mist-shrouded bog, silent and ghostly. I thought about the twenty-seven-hundred-year-old resident of Cairnholm's museum and wondered how many more like him these fields held, undiscovered, arrested in death; how many more had given up their lives here looking for heaven.

By the time I reached the children's home, what had begun as a drizzle was a full-on-downpour. There was no time to dally in the house's feral yard and reflect upon it's malevolent shape

"Our house isn't malevolent!" Claire and Olive cried.

--the way the doorless doorway seemed to swallow me as I drove through it, the way the hall's rain-bloated floorboards gave a little beneath my shoes. I stood wringing water from my shirt and shaking out my hair, and when I was as dry as I was going to get--which was not very--I began to search. For what, I wasn't sure. A box of letters? My grandfather's name scribbled on a wall? It all seemed so unlikely.

I roved around peeling up mats of old newspaper and looking under chairs and tables. I imagined uncovering some horrible scene--a tangle of skeletons dressed in fire-blackened rags--

Millard rolled his eyes. "I highly doubt you would find our skeletons."

but all I found were rooms that had become more outside than inside, character stripped away by moisture and wind and layers of dirt. The ground floor was hopeless. I went back to the staircase, knowing this time I would have to climb it. The only question was, up or down?

"Down," Enoch answered, smirking again.

One strike against going upstairs was its limited options for quick escape (from squatters or ghouls or whatever else my anxious mind could invent) other than hurling myself from an upper-story window. Downstairs had the same problem, and with the added detractor of being dark, and me without a flashlight. So upstairs it was.

Enoch scoffed. "Wimp."

The steps protested my weight with a symphony of shudders ad creaks, but they held, and what I discovered upstairs--compared to the bombed-out ground floor, at least--was like a time capsule. Arranged along a hallway striped with peeling wallpaper, the rooms were in surprisingly good shape. Though one or two had been invaded by mold where a broken window had let in the rain, the rest were packed with things that seemed only a layer or two of dust away from new: a mildewed shirt tossed casually over the back of a chair, loose change skimming a nightstand. It was easy to believe that everything was just as the children had left it, as if time had stopped the night they died.