Discovering the Future

Chapter 26- Chapter 10 (Part 3)

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

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"He killed me," the dead man whispered.

"Who did?" Olive asked.

"Who."

"My old man."

"You mean Oggie? Your uncle?"

"My old man," he said again. "He got big. And strong, so strong."

"Who did, Martin?"

"His old man did," Claire said. "Listen."

His eye closed, and I feared he was gone for good. I looked at Enoch. He nodded. The heart in his hand was still beating.

Martin's eye flicked beneath its lid. He began to speak again, slowly but evenly, as if reciting something. "For a hundred generations her slept, curled like a fetus in the earth's mysterious womb, digested by roots, fermenting in the dark, summer fruits canned and forgotten in the larder until a farmer's spade bore him out, rough midwife to a strange harvest."

"How...enlightening," Horace said.

Martin paused, his lips trembling, and in the brief silence Emma looked at me and whispered, "What's he saying?"

"I don't know," I said. "But it sounds like a poem."

He continued, his voice wavering but loud enough now that everyone could hear-"Blackly he reposes, tender face the colour of soot, withered limbs like veins of coal, feet limbs of driftwood hung with shrivelled grapes"-and finally I recognised the poem. It was the one he'd written about the bog boy.

"Oh Jacob, I took such good careful care of him!" he said. "Dusted the glass and changed the soil and made him a home-like my own big bruised baby. I took such careful care, but-" He began to shake, and a tear ran down his cheek and froze there. "But he killed me."

"Disguised hollow," Millard stated.

"Good job, Millard," Enoch said. "Never would've figured it out without you."

"Do you mean the bog boy? The Old Man?"

"Send me back," he pleaded. "It hurts." His cold hand kneaded my shoulder, his voice fading again.

I looked to Enoch for help. He tightened his grip on the heart and shook his head. "Quick now, mate," he said.

Then I realised something. Though he was describing the bog boy, it wasn't the bog boy who had killed him. They only become visible to the rest of us when they're eating, Miss Peregrine had told me, which is to say, when it's too late. Martin had seen a hollowgast-at night, in the rain, as it was tearing him to shreds-

Bronwyn shook her head. "What a terrible way to go."

and had mistaken it for his most prized exhibit.

The old fear began to pump, coating my insides with heat. I turned to the others. "A hollowgast did this to him," I said. "It's somewhere on the island."

"Ask him where," said Enoch.

"Martin, where. I need to know where you saw it."