Book One: Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (My Remake)

Chapter 9~An Explanation

We followed her through the hall to the staircase. Miss Peregrine needed to climb with both hands holding the railing, one step at a time and refusing help. I still didn't completely trust the staircase and pretty much did the same thing. When we reached the landing we were led to the library.

It was arranged like a small classroom for fifteen. Rows of small desks, a large one at the front, a chalk board cleaned and ready and at the corner a bookshelf lined with picture books and novels. Miss Peregrine pointed to the desks. "Sit." Jacob and I sat side by side, he needed to squeeze through but I seemed to fit perfectly. I laughed when his legs had to be positioned in a strange fashion.

Miss Peregrine wobbled to the front as if she were a teacher and faced us. "Allow me to give you a brief primer. I think you'll find answers to most of your questions contained herein."

"Okay," responded Jacob.

"The composition of the human species is infinitely more divers than most humans suspect," she began. "The real taxonomy of Homo Sapiens is a secret known only to a few, whom you will now be one. At the base, it is a simple dichotomy: there are the coerlfolc, the teeming mass of common people who make up humanity's great bulk, and there is the hidden branch-the crypto-sapiens, if you will-who are called syndrigast, of "peculiar spirit" in the venerable language of my ancestors. As you have no doubt surmised, we here are of the latter type."

I looked at her with a very confused look composed of an eyebrow arched upward and mouth hanging slightly open. Jacob however seemed to understand as he bobbed his head. "but why don't people know about you? Are you the only ones?" he asked.

"There are peculiars all over the world," she replied, "though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were. Those who remain live in hiding, as we do." Her voice changed from a teaching tone to a sorrow filled one. "There was a time when we could mix openly with common folk. In some corners of the world we were regarded as shamans and mystics, consulted in times of trouble. A few cultures have retained this harmonious relationship with our people, though only in places where both modernity and the major religions have failed to gain a foothold, such as the black-magic island of Ambrym in the New Hebrides. But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were malevolent fairies and shale-shifting ghosts."

"How come you didn't just-I don't know-make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?" asked Jacob. I swear, I never get to talk around here.

"If only it had been that simple," she said. "Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and the peculiar parents do not always, or even usually, bare peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?"

I thought about it, our world really is afraid of otherness. I'm already as weird as it is and I wasn't even born that way, it just sort of happened as I grew up. If a kid was born invisible how would everyone react?

"Well, if a normal couple had, like, a kid that could throw fire or turn invisible they would freak out," I said.

"Exactly Miss DeVine. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways. It wasn't so many centuries ago that the parents of peculiar children simply assumed their 'real' sons or daughters had been made off with and replaced with changelings-that is, enchanted and malevolent, not to mention entirely fictitious, lookalikes-which in darker times was considered a license to abandon the poor children, if not kill them outright."