Untouchable (A Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Story)

Chapter 16 🦔

We walked up the stairs and turned right. The second door on the left was the one we opened. This room looked like a little girl's paradise. The walls were painted a brilliant color and dolls were sitting on a dresser. There were three beds. One of them had been nailed to the floor with belt straps attached to it: obviously Olive's bed. Another had bite marks on the pillow from Claire's backmouth. The last bed with a pattern of the night sky on the covers was definitely Luna's bed.

As I examined the room, Luna bent down and retrieved something from under the bed. It was a brown book with ruined gold lettering that spelled out the word "Fairchild".

"My family's photo album," she explained. "One of the few things that I was able to save from my old house." She opened it to the first page and was shocked by what it contained. The picture was of a pair of boys. One of them had long dark hair, but the other looked strange. His head was completely obscured by a burlap sack that had a creepy, smiling face painted over where his real face would have been. The sack unnerved me, making me afraid to imagine what was underneath it. "Who are they?" I asked.

"I'm sorry," the little girl apologized. "I forgot this was here. This is a picture of my father and uncle when they were children. They were twins by the way."

"Why's one of them wearing a sack?"

"I don't know. My father refused to talk about uncle Eros. All he ever mentioned was that he ran away from home at the age of twelve and was never seen again. It's possible that he might have been peculiar, but that's a story for a different time."

The pale girl flipped to the page that she had originally intended to. There was a black and white photo of a little girl holding a baby. Her hair was in twin tails and she had a glowing bioluminescent aura around her; an aura similar to Luna's, but brighter. Both of the girls were wearing amulets: the elder's charm was a sun and the baby's, a crescent moon.

"That's Solaria," Luna said, wistfully tapping the little girl. "And the baby was me." I looked at the baby, who had pale skin and dark hair. I could see a bit of a resemblance. Luna turned the page again to reveal another picture.

It was of two girls playing. They both looked slightly older in this picture. Solaria still had her twin tails, but the rest of her hair hung loose about her. Luna's dark hair was shoulder length and I almost didn't recognize her. If it hadn't have been for the fact that both girls had glowing auras, I wouldn't know who I was looking at. "This picture was taken two days before she died," Luna sobbed. When I asked her to tell me the whole story, the pale girl took one of the flowers out of her hair, replaced it, and nodded solemnly.

"My family was originally from Salem," she stated in a monotone. "Even though the witch trials ended years before we were born, people accused us, so we moved to England. Solaria and a our parents died when monsters attacked the house. I'm lucky to still be alive, though I was badly injured at the time."

"In your story, you said they were killed by monsters."

Luna nodded and began to fiddle with one of her hairclips. "Hollows," she said with a hint of grief. What was she talking about?

"What's a Hollow?"

The white-haired girl turned to face me. She had dried most of her tears, but her eyes were glassy, as if she could start crying again at any moment. "I'll tell you," said Luna with a sniffle, "but Miss Peregrine won't be happy."

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Luna left the room, but returned minutes later with another photo album, this one from Miss Peregrine's study. "Before I open this, Roxanne," she said to me, "please remember that I might get in trouble for telling you."