#the second soul

[am-i-sans]

Do we need to ask kid-by-kid?

Fine. Let's start at the beginning.

Ame.

Tell us about them.

..........

they were....

. . .

who the FUCK throws a baby down a mountain?!

[am-i-sans]

I'm surprised that Ame made it all the way to Asgore in only a week. Everyone else seemed to take quite awhile to die.

.........

She Didnt...

. . .

He Came To Her.

[am-i-sans]

If you really did meet the kids...

What were their names?

........

The First Was Little Ame.

I Remember Their Face So Clearly....

Scared....

[am-i-sans]

We never hear much about those first few years 'after.'

If it's not too painful, will you tell us about them?

....

She Left

I Understand

No More Joy Or Laughter In The Halls

A Grieving Angry Throne

And

And

. . .

Small Footsteps Deep WIthin The Snow

Echoing In The Halls

[dumbledearme]

chapter four

~~ read The Second Soul here ~~

Ten minutes later Martin and Johanna were wedged deep in an overstuffed sofa in Oggie’s living room. Oggie sat facing them in a threadbare blazer and pajama bottoms, and rocked endlessly in a plastic-covered easy chair as he talked. He seemed happy just to have an audience.

“Sure, I remember them,” he said. “Odd collection of people. We’d see them in town now and again, the children, sometimes their minder-woman, too, buying milk and medicine and what-have-you. You’d say ‘good morning’ and they’d look the other way. Kept to themselves, they did, off in that big house. Lot of talk about what might’ve been going on over there, though no one knew for sure.”

“What kind of talk?”

“Lot of rot. Like I said, no one knew. All I can say is they weren’t your regular sort of orphan children, who you’ll see come into town for parades and things and always have time for a chat. This lot was different. Some of ’em couldn’t even speak English.”

“Because they weren’t really orphans,” Johanna said. “They were refugees from other countries. Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia…”

“Is that what they were, now?” Oggie said, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Funny, I hadn’t heard that.” He seemed offended.

Martin cleared his throat. “So, Uncle, the bombing?”

“Oh, yes, yes, the goddamned Jerries. Who could forget them?” He launched into a long-winded description of what life on the island was like under threat of German air raids. They prepared as best they could but never really thought they’d get hit. “The noise was dreadful,” Oggie said. “It was like giants stamping across the island, and it seemed to go on for ages. No one in town was killed, though, thank heaven. Can’t say the same for the poor souls at the orphan home. One bomb was all it took.”

“Do you remember when it happened? Early in the war or late?”

“I can tell you the exact day,” he said. “It was the third of September, 1940.”

The air seemed to go out of the room. Johanna flashed to her grandmother’s ashen face, her lips just barely moving, uttering those very words. September third, 1940.

“Are you... you sure about that?”

“Oh, yes.”

Johanna felt numb, disconnected.

“And there weren’t any survivors at all?” Martin asked.

The old man thought for a moment, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling. “I reckon there were. ” he said, “Just one. A young girl, same age as you, lass. Walked into town the morning after with not a scratch upon her. Hardly seemed perturbed at all, considering she’d just seen all her mates go to their reward. It was the queerest thing.”

“She was probably in shock,” Martin said.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” replied Oggie. “She spoke only once, to ask my father when the next boat was leaving for the mainland.”

“That was my grandmother,” Johanna said.

They looked at her, astonished. “Well,” Oggie said. “I’ll be blessed.”

Johanna excused herself and left. She took the long way back, past the swaying lights of the harbor. She walked to the end of a dock and watched the moon rise over the water, imagining Grandma Alice standing there on that awful morning after, numb with shock, waiting for a boat that would take her away from all the death she’d endured.

In the distance, she heard the generators sputter and spin down, and all the lights went dark.

She walked back by moonlight, feeling small. She found Mom in the pub at the same table where she’d been. “Look who’s back,” she said as Johanna sat down and told her what she’d learned.

“I can’t believe she never brought this up,” Mom said. “Not one time.”

Johanna tried to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Everything she went through.”

Mom nodded. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the full extent of it.”

“She really knew how to keep a secret, didn’t she?” Johanna glanced at her mom. “I wonder if it doesn’t explain why she acted so distant when you were little. She’d already lost her family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here. So when you and Aunt Susie came along…”

“Once bombed, twice shy?”

“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe she wasn’t cheating on Grandpa, after all?”

“I don’t know, Jo. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” She let out a sigh. “But it explains why you were so close. It took her fifty years to get over her fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”

Johanna didn’t know how to respond.

She tossed and turned most of the night. She couldn’t stop thinking about the letters, the one her mom had found as a kid, and the one she’d found from Miss Peregrine.

The postmark on Miss Peregrine’s letter was fifteen years old, but by all accounts she’d been blown into the stratosphere back in 1940.

She couldn’t make sense out of that and there was no one to ask. Anyone who might have had the answer was long dead. In less than twenty-four hours, the whole trip had become pointless.

Johanna fell into an uneasy sleep. At dawn, she woke to the sound of something in the room. Rolling over to see what it was, she bolted upright in bed. A large black bird was perched on her dresser, staring her down. Johanna stared back rigidly, wondering if this could be a dream.

She called out for her mom, and at the sound of her voice the bird launched itself off the dresser and flown out the open window.

Mom stumbled in, bleary-eyed. “What’s going on?” Johanna showed her the talon marks on the dresser and a feather that had landed on the floor. “God, that’s weird,” she said. “Peregrines almost never come this close to humans.”

Johanna thought maybe she’d heard her wrong. “What did you say?”

Mom held up the feather. “A peregrine falcon,” she said. “They’re amazing creatures, the fastest birds on earth.”

Over breakfast, Johanna began to wonder if she’d given up too easily. There was still the house, a lot of it unexplored. If it had ever held answers about her grandmother, they’d probably burned up or rotted away decades ago. But if she left the island without making sure, she’d regret it.

She left the pub and walked straight into a rain shower. She bent her head against the spitting rain and trudged onward. Soon she passed the shack, dim outlines of sheep huddled inside against the chill, and then the mist-shrouded bog, silent and ghostly.

By the time she reached the children’s home, what had begun as a drizzle was a full-on downpour. Johanna stood wringing water from her shirt and shaking out her hair, and when she was as dry as she was going to get, she began to search.

The ground floor was hopeless. She went back to the staircase, knowing this time she would have to climb it. The only question was, up or down? She decided on up.

The steps protested her weight, but they held, and what she discovered upstairs was like a time capsule. The rooms were in surprisingly good shape. It was easy to believe that everything was just as the children had left it, as if time had stopped the night they died.

Johanna went from room to room, examining their contents like an archaeologist. Eventually, she found a room that could only have belonged to Miss Peregrine. Johanna pictured the last time she’d been here. Was she scared? Did she hear the planes coming?

Johanna began to feel jumpy, like she was being watched. She drifted into the next room and, somehow, she knew that it had been Grandma’s Alice room.

Why did you send me here? What was it you needed me to see?

Then she noticed something beneath one of the beds and knelt down to look. It was an old suitcase.

Was this yours?

Johanna pulled it out and fumbled with its tattered leather straps. It opened easily, but except for a family of dead beetles, it was empty.

She felt empty, too. She sat on the bed, her bed, maybe, and for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she closed her eyes and pushed her knuckles in to stop them from hurting, and when she finally released the pressure and opened them again, a miraculous change had come over the room: there was a single ray of sun shining through the window.

In the patch of quickly fading sun that fell across the room, she noticed something she hadn’t before. It was a trunk under the second bed. It was a big old steamer trunk latched with a giant rusting padlock. It couldn’t possibly be empty.

Johanna grabbed it by the sides and pulled. It didn’t move. She pulled again, harder, but it wouldn’t give an inch. She stood up and kicked it a few times, which seemed to jar things loose, and then she managed to move it by pulling on one side at a time, shimmying it forward, until it had come out all the way from under the bed. She briefly considered searching for a key, but a better option was to just break it.

She hunkered down behind the trunk and began pushing it toward the hall. Before long she’d gotten it out of the room and was dragging it, foot by foot, doorway by doorway, toward the landing. When she made it, with one final push, she threw it down the edge.

It fell, tumbling end over end in beautiful balletic slow-motion. There came a tremendous echoing crash that seemed to rattle the whole house and the trunk fell straight through the floor into the basement, leaving a jagged trunk-shaped hole in the floorboards.

Johanna raced downstairs and wriggled up to the edge of the buckled floor on her belly. Fifteen feet below, through a haze of dust and darkness, she saw what remained of the trunk. It had shattered like a giant egg, its pieces all mixed up in a heap of debris and smashed floorboards. Scattered throughout were little pieces of paper. Squinting, she could make out shapes on them, faces, bodies, and that’s when she realized they weren’t letters at all, but photographs. Dozens of them.

Now excited, she descended the creaking stairs and into the dark basement. A weak glimmer of daylight came from the hole she’d made. Johanna picked her way through the wreckage and began to salvage what she could from the pile.

At first glance, the pictures looked like the kind you’d find in any old family album. And the more Johanna studied the pictures, the more familiar they began to seem. She began to remember the stories Grandma Alice used to tell her. Those fantastic stories. That any of them could be true, literally true, seemed unthinkable. And yet, standing there in dusty half-light in that dead house that seemed so alive with ghosts, Johanna thought, maybe...

Suddenly there came a loud crash from somewhere in the house above her, and Johanna startled so badly that all the pictures slipped from her hands.

It’s just the house settling, she told herself, but as she bent down to gather the photos, the crash came again, and in an instant what meager light had shone through the hole in the floor faded away, and Johanna found herself squatting in inky darkness.

She heard footsteps, and then voices. She strained to make out what they were saying, but couldn’t. She tried to get up, as quietly as she could. A tiny piece of something came loose from the pile and rolled away, making a sound that seemed huge in the silence. The voices went quiet. Then a floorboard creaked right over her head and a little shower of plaster dust sprinkled down. Whoever was up there, they knew exactly where she was.

Johanna held her breath.

Then, she heard a boy’s voice say softly, “Alice? Is that you?”

Johanna thought she’d dreamed it. She waited for him to speak again, but for a long moment there was only the sound of rain banking off the roof. Then a lantern glowed to life above her, and she craned her neck to see a half dozen kids kneeling around the craggy jaws of broken floor, peering down.

She recognized them somehow. They seemed like faces from a half-remembered dream. Their clothes, their pale unsmiling faces... They were the kids from the photographs.

The boy who’d spoken stood up to get a better look at her. In his hands he held a flickering light, which seemed to be a ball of raw flame, attended by nothing more than his bare skin. Johanna had seen his picture not five minutes earlier, and in it he looked much the same as he did now.

His expression soured. Whatever he and the others had been expecting to find inside this hole in the floor, Johanna was not it.

A murmur passed among them, and they stood up and quickly scattered. Their sudden movement knocked something loose in her and Johanna found her voice again and shouted for them to wait, but they were already pounding the floorboards toward the door. Johanna tripped through the wreckage and stumbled blindly across the stinking basement to the stairs. But by the time she made it back to the ground floor, they had vanished from the house.

She bolted outside, screaming, “Wait! Stop!” But they were gone.

Johanna scanned the yard, the woods. Something snapped beyond the trees. She wheeled around to look and, through a screen of branches, caught a flash of blurred movement. It was him. Johanna crashed into the woods, sprinting after. The boy took off running down the path.

He kept trying to lose her, cutting from the path into the trackless forest and back. Finally the woods fell away and they broke into open bogland. Johanna sped up and just as she started to catch up, he made a sudden turn and plunged straight into the bog. She followed.

Running became impossible. The ground couldn’t be trusted. The boy, however, seemed to know just where to step, and he pulled farther and farther away, finally disappearing into the mist.

Johanna ended up before a mound of stones. It looked like a big gray igloo, but it was a cairn, a little taller than her, long and narrow with a rectangular opening in one end, like a door, and she saw that the opening was the entrance to a tunnel that burrowed deep inside.

And enter she did.

[dumbledearme]

chapter three

~~ read The Second Soul here ~~

Jet-lagged and exhausted, Johanna and her mom went to sleep early. It wasn’t hard; at ten o’clock, all at once the buzzing generators outside sputtered and died, as did the music from downstairs and the streetlight that had been shining through the window. They were cocooned in silent, blissful darkness, with only the whisper of distant waves to remind them where they were.

For the first time in months, Johanna fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber. She dreamed instead about her grandmother as a girl, about her first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing her life to people who spoke a strange tongue.

When she awoke, sun streaming through the window, she realized it wasn’t just Grandma Alice’s life that Miss Peregrine had saved, but hers, too, and her mother’s. Today, with any luck, Johanna would finally get to thank her.

She went downstairs to find her mom already bellied up to a table, slurping coffee and polishing her fancy binoculars. Just as Johanna sat down, Kev appeared bearing two plates loaded with mystery meat and fried toast.

Over breakfast, they discussed the plan for the day. It was to be a kind of scout, to familiarize themselves with the island. They’d scope out Mom’s bird-watching spots first and then find the children’s home.

They left the pub and walked through town. It was a crisp and blustery day and Johanna felt energized and hopeful. They were heading for a rocky beach where Mom had spotted a bunch of birds from the ferry. They picked their way down to the beach, where what seemed to be an entire civilization of birds were flapping and screeching and fishing in tide pools.

Mom’s eyes widened. “Fascinating,” she muttered. “I’m going to need some time here. Is that all right?”

Johanna had seen that look on her face before, and knew exactly what it meant. “Then I’ll go find the house by myself,” she said.

“Not alone, you aren’t. You promised.”

“I’ll find a person who can take me.”

“Who?”

“Kev will know someone.”

Mom looked out to sea, where a big rusted lighthouse jutted up from a pile of rocks. “Okay,” she said, “but... Just don’t go alone, Jo.”

Kev was out running an errand, and because asking one of his drunken regulars to chaperone seemed like a bad idea, Johanna went into the nearest shop. The door read FISHMONGER. She pushed it open to find herself cowering before a bearded giant in a blood-soaked apron. He left off decapitating fish to glare at her.

“What the hell for?” he growled when she told him where she wanted to go. “Nothing over there but bogland and barmy weather.”

Johanna explained. He frowned at her, then leaned over the counter to cast a doubtful glance at her shoes.

“I s’pose Dylan ain’t too busy to take you,” he said, pointing his cleaver at a kid about her age who was arranging fish in a freezer case, “but you’ll be wantin’ proper footwear. Wouldn’t do to let you go in them trainers... mud’ll suck ’em right off!”

“Oh.”

“Dylan! Fetch the young lady here a pair of Wellingtons!”

The kid groaned and made a big show of slowly closing the freezer case and cleaning his hands before slouching over to a wall of shelves packed with dry goods.

“Just so happens we’ve got some good sturdy boots on offer,” the fishmonger said. “Buy one get none free!” And he burst out laughing.

Johanna fished some money from her pocket and left the shop wearing a pair of rubber boots so large her sneakers fit inside and so heavy it was difficult to keep up with her begrudging guide.

“So, do you go to school on the island?” She asked Dylan, scurrying to catch up.

He muttered the name of a town on the mainland and that was it for conversation.

Johanna was trying to figure out what she would say to Miss Peregrine when she met her. She followed Dylan along a path that wound through pastures of grazing sheep before a lung-busting ascent up a ridge. At the top hovered an embankment of rolling, snaking fog so dense it was like stepping into another world. As they descended the other side it only seemed to thicken. The sun faded to a pale white bloom. The temperature dropped.

They abandoned the path to plow through a field of marshy grass. Sheep stared at them with big leaky eyes, their wool soggy and tails drooping. A small house appeared out of the mist. It was all boarded up.

“You sure this is it?” Johanna said. “It looks empty.”

“Empty? No way, there’s loads of shit in there,” Dylan replied. “Have a look.”

Johanna had a feeling it was a trick but stepped up to the door and knocked anyway. It was unlatched and opened a little at her touch. It was too dark to see inside, so she took a step through... and, to her surprise, down, into what looked like a dirt floor but, she quickly realized, was in fact a shin-deep ocean of excrement.

“Oh my God!” she squealed in disgust.

Laughter exploded from outside. Johanna stumbled backward through the door before the smell could knock her unconscious and found Dylan doubled over, holding his stomach.

“Asshole,” she muttered, stomping the muck off her boots.

“Yo, I told you it was full of shit!”

Johanna got in Dylan’s face. “Are you gonna show me the house or not?”

“You’re serious?”

“Of course I’m serious!”

His smile faded. “I thought you were taking a piss, girl.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Finally Dylan turned and pointed up the path. “If you really want to see it,” he said, “keep going past the bog and through the woods. It’s a big old place. You can’t miss it.”

“What the hell. You’re supposed to go with me!”

Dylan looked away and said, “This is as far as I go.”

“Why?”

“It just is.” And he turned and began to trudge back the way they’d come, receding into the fog.

Johanna weighed her options.

After four seconds of intense deliberation, she kept going.

The vast, lunar bog ended abruptly at a forest of skeletal trees, and for a while the path became so lost beneath fallen trunks and carpets of ivy that navigating it was a matter of faith. Johanna scrambled over a giant trunk slick with moss, and the path took a sharp turn. The trees parted like a curtain and suddenly there it was, cloaked in fog, looming atop a weed-choked hill.

The house.

Grandma Alice had described it a hundred times, but in her stories the house was always a bright, happy place, big and rambling, yes, but full of light and laughter. What stood before Johanna now was no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus, as if nature itself had waged war against it, but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

Johanna gathered what scrawny courage she had and waded through waist-high weeds to the porch, all broken tile and rotting wood, to peek through a cracked window. All she could make out through the smeared glass were the outlines of furniture, so she knocked on the door and stood back to wait in the eerie silence.

Nobody answered it.

Climbing down into the yard, Johanna circled the house looking for another way in, taking the measure of the place, but it seemed almost without measure, as though with every corner she turned the house sprouted new balconies and turrets and chimneys. Then she came around back and saw her opportunity: a doorless doorway, bearded with vines. She mounted the crumbling steps and crossed the threshold.

Standing in a tomb-dark hallway just inside the door, she shuddered involuntarily and took a deep breath. Keep it together, she told herself, and then slowly moved forward, heart hammering in her chest.

Each room was a disaster more incredible than the last. Newspapers gathered in drifts. Scattered toys, evidence of children long gone, lay skinned in dust. Creeping mold had turned window-adjacent walls black and furry. At the end of a light-starved corridor she tested her weight on a rickety staircase. The steps groaned as if woken from a long sleep.

Finally she came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. Johanna stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage, and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. There was more left to explore, but suddenly it seemed like a waste of time; it was impossible that anyone could still be living here.

Johanna left the house feeling like she was further than ever from the truth.

Once she’d hopped and tripped and felt her way like a blind woman through the woods and fog and reemerged into the world of sun and light, she was surprised to find the sun sinking and the light going red. Somehow the whole day had slipped away.

At the pub Mom was waiting for her, an open laptop on the table in front of her. Johanna underwent a brief interrogation about how she’d gotten to the house and who had taken her there, and Johanna conveniently forgot to mention that Worm and Dylan had bailed out a half-mile from their destination.

“So how was the house?”

“Trashed.”

She winced. “Guess it’s been a long time since Mother lived there, huh?”

“Yeah. Or anyone.”

Mom closed the laptop. “I can see you’re disappointed.”

“Well, I didn’t come thousands of miles looking for an empty house.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“Find people to talk to. Someone will know what happened to the kids who used to live there. I figure a few of them must still be alive.”

“Sure. That’s an idea.” She didn’t sound convinced, though. There was an odd pause, and then she said, “So do you feel like you’re starting to get a better handle on who my Mother was, being here?”

Johanna thought about it. “I don’t know. It’s just an island, you know?”

Mom nodded. “Exactly.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” She shrugged. “I gave up trying to understand her a long time ago.”

“Weren’t you interested?”

“Sure I was. Then, after a while, I wasn’t anymore.”

“Why not?”

“When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking. Know what I mean?” She hardly ever talked like this and, for whatever the reason, Johanna didn’t want her to stop.

“But she was your mom. How could you just give up?”

“It wasn’t me who gave up,” she said a little too loudly. “It’s just that... the truth is, I think... she just had too many secrets, Jo. She was never honest with us. And she... She was gone all the time, on hunting trips, business trips, you name it. And even when she was around, it was like she wasn’t. I don’t know, Jo, you were closer to her than I ever was. There was just something unspoken between the two of you.”

Johanna didn’t know how to respond. Was she jealous? “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’m not like her?” It sounded like a question. “I like being honest with you. And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Hurt how?”

Mom paused. “I never dug too deep with my mother because I was afraid of what I’d find,” she said finally.

“About the war?”

“No. Those secrets were painful. I understood that. I mean about the traveling, her being gone all the time. What she was really doing. I think... Susie and I both thought... that there was another man. Maybe more than one.”

Johanna let that hang between them for a moment. Her face tingled strangely. “That’s crazy.”

“We found a letter once. It was from a man whose name we didn’t know. I love you, I miss you, when are you coming back, that kind of thing.”

Johanna felt a hot stab of shame, like somehow it was her own crime. And yet she couldn’t quite believe it.

“We tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Never found another one, either. Guess she was more careful after that.”

Johanna couldn’t look at her mother.

“I’m sorry, Jo. This must be hard to hear. I know how much you worshiped her.” She reached out but Johanna stood up.

“I don’t worship anyone.”

“Okay. I just… I didn’t want you to be surprised, that’s all.”

“You’re wrong about her,” Johanna said. “I’m going to prove it.”

Mom sighed. It was a letting-go kind of sigh. “Okay.”

Johanna slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular.

It was true, of course: she did worship Grandma Alice. There were things about her that Alice needed to be true, and her being an adulterer was not one of them. Her fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life, even after Johanna stopped believing them. And if Grandma Alice wasn’t honorable and good, Johanna wasn’t sure anyone could be.

The museum’s doors were open and its lights were on, so Johanna went there hoping the curator knew a thing or two about the island’s history and people. He grinned and reached out to shake her hand. “Martin Pagett. Don’t believe I caught your name earlier.”

“Johanna Roseberg,” she said.

“Now, I’d be happy to show you the rest of my collection,” he said, escorting her toward the door, “but I’m afraid it’s shutting-up time. If you’d like to come back tomorrow—”

“Actually, I was hoping you might know something,” she said, stopping him. “It’s about the house. I went to see it.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “I thought I’d scared you off it.”

“The people that lived there... do you have any idea what happened to them?”

“They’re dead,” he replied. “Happened a long time ago.”

Johanna blinked surprised. “Oh. Well, I’m looking for anyone else who might have lived there, too, not just the headmistress.”

“All dead,” he repeated. “No one’s lived there since the war.”

“What do you mean? What war?”

“When we say ‘the war’ around here, lass, there’s only one that we mean, the second. It was a German air raid that got ’em, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That can’t be right.”

He nodded. “Cairnholm was a legitimate military target. And one of the bombs went off track, and, well…” He shook his head. “Nasty luck.”

“That can’t be right,” Johanna said again.

“You say your grandmother lived here. She never mentioned it?”

Johanna shook her head. “I guess it must’ve been after her time. Did it happen late in the war or early?”

“I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know. But if you’re keen, I can introduce you to someone who does: my Uncle Oggie. He’s eighty-three, lived here his whole life. Still sharp as a tack.” Martin glanced at his watch. “If we catch him before Father Ted comes on the telly, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to tell you anything you like.”

[dumbledearme]

chapter two

~~ read The Second Soul here ~~

Johanna spent the months following her grandmother’s death cycling through a purgatory of beige waiting rooms and anonymous offices, analyzed and interviewed, talked about just out of earshot, nodding when spoken to, repeating herself, the object of a thousand pitying glances and knitted brows.

She was plagued by wake-up-screaming nightmares so bad that she had to wear a mouth guard to keep from grinding her teeth into nubs as she slept. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing it, that tentacle-mouth horror in the woods. Johanna was convinced that it would soon come for her. Sometimes that sick panicky feeling would flood over her like it did that night and she’d be sure that it was waiting, lurking nearby.

The solution was to stop leaving the house. She refused even to venture into the driveway to collect the morning paper. She slept in a tangle of blankets on the laundry room floor, the only part of the house with no windows and also a door that locked from the inside.

She couldn’t help blaming herself for what had happened. If only she’d believed her grandmother... But Johanna hadn’t believed her, and neither had anyone else, and now Johanna knew how she must’ve felt because no one believed her, either.

Even Ricky, who’d been there, didn’t believe her. He swore up and down that he hadn’t seen any creature in the woods that night. He’d heard barking, though. They both had. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the police concluded that a pack of feral dogs had killed Alice Roseberg.

Johanna tried to convince him giving as much detail as she could, but in the end Ricky just shook his head and muttered something about her needing a brain-shrinker.

“You mean head-shrinker, you loser,” Johanna replied, “and thanks a lot. Nice to know I have your support.”

They were in the living room, Ricky chain-smoking cigarettes with a kind of grim determination. He always seemed vaguely uncomfortable at Johanna’s house because of her parents’ wealth, but this time, she could tell, it wasn’t that making him uneasy, but herself.

“Whatever, I’m just being straight with you,” he said. “Keep talking about monsters and they’re gonna put you away. You’re acting crazy, Jo.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He seemed surprised at how pissed off she sounded. He tried to reach for her, but Johanna slapped his hand away.

“I want you out,” she said.

“Jo-”

“GET OUT!” She shoved him so hard he almost hit his head on the wall behind him. This, apparently, was more than he could take. Johanna yelled at him to leave again, but he was already going.

It was months before she’d see him again.

Eventually, Johanna’s parents did take her to a headshrinker, a quiet, kind woman named Dr. Golan. The calm, affectless way she explained things was almost hypnotizing, and within two sessions she’d convinced Johanna that the creature had been nothing more than the product of her overheated imagination; that the trauma of my grandmother’s death had made her see something that wasn’t really there.

There was even a name for it: acute stress reaction.

But just because Johanna no longer believed the monsters were real didn’t mean she was better. She still suffered from nightmares. She was twitchy and paranoid, bad enough at interacting with other people that her parents hired a tutor so that she only had to go to school on days she felt up to it. They also, finally, let her quit her job.

Dr. Golan’s function seemed mainly to consist of writing prescriptions. The pills were making Johanna fat and stupid, and she was still miserable, getting only three or four hours of sleep a night. So she started lying to Dr. Golan and pretending to be fine.

“So what you’re saying,” Dr. Golan set her pen down, “is that you’re no longer obsessing over your grandmother’s last words? The bird and the loop and the grave?”

Johanna shrugged. “Yes. I’m over it.”

Dr. Golan tented her fingers and pressed them to her chin. “You don’t wish to know what they might mean?”

“I know what they mean. Jack and shit.”

“Johanna. You don’t mean that.”

Truth was: the words had been eating away at Johanna almost as much as the nightmares.

“So that’s it?” Dr. Golan insisted. “Alice’s death was meaningless?”

“Unless you’ve got a better idea,” Johanna said. “Some big theory about what it all means that you’ve haven’t told me. Otherwise…”

“What?”

“Otherwise, this is just a waste of time.”

The doctor sighed. “What your grandmother’s last words meant isn’t my conclusion to draw,” she said. “It’s what you think that matters.”

“That is such psychobabble bullshit,” Johanna spat. “It’s not what I think that matters; it’s what’s true! But I guess we’ll never know, so who cares? Just dope me up and collect the bill.”

She wanted Golan to get mad, to argue, but instead she sat poker faced, drumming the arm of her chair with her pen. “It sounds like you’re giving up,” she said after a moment. “I’m disappointed. You don’t strike me as a quitter.”

“Well, you don’t know me very well.”

Johanna couldn’t have been less in the mood for a party, but she knew her parents wouldn’t let her sweet sixteen pass in a blank. Johanna begged them to skip the party this year because, among other reasons, she couldn’t think of a single person she wanted to invite. Her mother, however, insisted that socializing was therapeutic, although Johanna knew she was only doing it because she loved to show off their house.

So Johanna was “surprised” with balloons, and a motley assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins, anyone her mother could cajole into attending, even Ricky, who looking comically out of place in a studded leather jacket. Johanna was about to go talk to him when her Uncle Bobby grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her into a corner.

“So, your dad tells me you’re really turning the corner with, uh…”

“Acute stress reaction,” she supplied.

“What? Yes. That. It’s good. Real good to hear.” He waved his hand as if putting all that unpleasantness behind them. “So your dad and I were thinking. How’d you like to come up to Tampa this summer, see how the family business works? Crack heads with me at HQ for a while?”

Johanna would’ve rather spent the summer in a Siberian labor camp than live with her uncle and his spoiled kids. She hesitated, trying to think of a graceful way out. “I’m not sure my psychiatrist would think it’s such a great idea right now.”

His bushy eyebrows came together. Nodding vaguely, he said, “Oh, well, sure, of course. We’ll just play it by ear then, how’s that sound?” And then he walked off without waiting for an answer.

When it was time for presents, Johanna decided to start with smallest one. Inside was the key to a luxury sedan. Her first car! Everyone oohed and aahed.

The next present was the digital camera she’d begged her parents for all last summer. “I’m outlining a new bird book," her mom said. “I was thinking maybe you could take the pictures.”

“A new book!” her dad exclaimed. “That’s a phenomenal idea, Franny.”

Aunt Susie stepped forward with a present. “This one is from your grandmother.”

The room went dead quiet, people looking at Aunt Susie as if she’d invoked the name of some evil spirit. Johanna’s dad’s jaw tensed.

Johanna grabbed the present and ripped away the wrapping paper to find an old hardback book, dog-eared and missing its dust jacket. It was The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Johanna stared at it as if trying to read through the cover.

Aunt Susie managed a weak smile and said, “I found it in mom’s desk when we were cleaning out the house. She wrote your name in the front. I think she meant for you to have it, Jo.”

Johanna opened the book. The title page bore an inscription in her grandmother’s shaky handwriting.

To Yehanan and the worlds she has yet to discover.

Johanna stepped back, getting ready to leave, afraid to start crying in front of everyone, and something slipped out from between the pages and fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up. It was a letter.

Emerson. The letter.

She felt the blood drain from her face. Her mother leaned toward her to say something, but Johanna bolted to her room.

The letter was handwritten on fine, unlined paper in looping script so ornate it was almost calligraphy, the black ink varying in tone like that of an old fountain pen. It read:

Dearest Alice, I hope this note finds you safe and in the best of health. It’s been such a long time since we last received word from you! But I write not to admonish, only to let you know that we still think of you often and pray for your well-being. Our brave, beautiful Alice!

Little has change on the island. But quiet and orderly is the way we prefer things! I wonder if we would recognize you after so many years, though I’m certain you’d recognize us -- those few who remain, that is. It would mean a great deal to have a recent picture of you, if you’ve one to send.

Gus misses you terribly. Won’t you write to him?

With respect and admiration, Headmistress Alma LeFay Peregrine.

That had to be what Grandma Alice had meant. A letter, tucked inside Emerson’s book. Johanna studied the envelope for a return address but found only a fading postmark that read Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK.

Cairnholm Is had to be the island Miss Peregrine had mentioned in her letter. Probably the island where Grandma Alice had lived as a child?

Find the bird, she had said. The headmistress’ name was Peregrine. Could the bird be a person? A woman who’d rescued little Alice, the headmistress of the children’s home?

For the first time, Johanna’s grandmother’s last words began to make a strange kind of sense. She wanted Johanna to go to the island and find this woman. But the envelope’s postmark was fifteen years old. Was it possible she was still alive? If not, there might still be people on Cairnholm who could help, people who had known Grandma Alice as a kid. People who knew her secrets.

We, Miss Peregrine had written. Those few who remain.

Turned out that convincing her parents to let her spend part of her summer on a tiny island off the coast of Wales was a fairly easy task. Her mom learned that Cairnholm Island was a super-important bird habitat, and that half the world’s population of some bird she adored lived there.

And if that wasn’t enough, Dr. Golan shocked them all by encouraging Johanna’s parents to let her go.

“It could be important for her,” she told them. “It’s a place that’s been so mythologized by Alice that visiting could only serve to demystify it. Johanna’ll see that it’s just as normal and unmagical as anyplace else, and, by extension, Alice’s fantasies will lose their power.”

After that, things fell into place with astonishing speed. Plane tickets were bought, schedules scheduled, plans laid. And in less than a week, Johanna and her mom were in Europe.

When the captain announced that they were nearly there, Johanna hoped that the grueling thirty-six hours they’d braved to get this far, three airplanes, two layovers, shift-napping in grubby train stations, and now this interminable gut-churning ferry ride, would pay off. Then she saw a towering mountain of rock emerge from the blank canvas before them.

It was the island. Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants. Mom ran around like a kid on Christmas, her eyes glued to the birds wheeling above them. “Jo, look at that!” she cried, pointing to a cluster of airborne specks. “Manx Shearwaters!”

As they drew nearer the cliffs, Johanna began to notice odd shapes lurking underwater. A passing crewman caught her leaning over the rail to stare at them and said, “Never seen a shipwreck before, eh? This whole area’s a nautical graveyard. ”

They passed a wreck that was so near the surface, the outline of its greening carcass so clear, that it looked like it was about to rise out of the water.

“See that one?” he said, pointing at it. “Sunk by a U-boat, she was.”

“There were U-boats around here?”

“Loads. Whole Irish Sea was rotten with German subs. Wager you’d have half a navy on your hands if you could unsink all the ships they torpedoed.”

The ferry docked and they humped their bags into the little town. Upon closer inspection Johanna decided it was, like a lot of things, not as pretty up close as it seemed from a distance. They dragged their stuff through town looking for something called the Priest Home, where they had booked a room. They came upon a church which had, however, been converted into a dingy little museum, not a B&B.

“I reckon you’re after the Priest Hole,” said the curator. “It’s got the only rooms to let on the island.” He proceeded to give them directions.

“Where can we find the old children’s home?” Johanna asked.

“The old what?” he said, squinting at her.

“It was a home for refugee kids?” she said. “During the war? A big house?”

The man chewed his lip and regarded her doubtfully, as if deciding whether to help or to wash his hands of the whole thing. “I don’t know about any refugees,” he said, “but I think I know the place you mean. It’s way up the other side of the island, past the bog and through the woods. Though I wouldn’t go mucking about up there alone, if I was you. Stray too far from the path and that’s the last anyone’ll hear of you.”

“That’s good to know,” her mom said, eyeing Johanna. “Promise me you won’t go by yourself.”

“Yes, fine.”

Mom then thanked the man and they left following his directions. They retraced their steps until they came to a grim-looking statue carved from black stone, a memorial called the Waiting Woman dedicated to islanders lost at sea. The Priest Hole was directly across the street.

They squeezed their bags through the doorway and stood blinking in the sudden gloom of a low-ceilinged pub. Hole was a pretty accurate description of the place: tiny leaded windows admitted just enough light to find the beer tap without tripping over tables and chairs on the way. The bar was half-filled, at whatever hour of the morning it was.

“You must be after the room,” said the man behind the bar, coming out to shake their hands. “I’m Kev and these are the fellas. Say hullo, fellas.”

“Hullo,” they muttered, nodding at their drinks.

Johanna and her mom followed Kev up a narrow staircase to a suite. There were two bedrooms, and a room that tripled as a kitchen, dining room, and living room, meaning that it contained one table, one moth-eaten sofa, and one hotplate. The bathroom worked “most of the time,” according to Kev.

“Oh, and you’ll need these,” he said, fetching a pair of oil lamps from a cabinet. “The generators stop running at ten since petrol’s so bloody expensive to ship out, so either you get to bed early or you learn to love candles and kerosene.” He grinned. “Hope it ain’t too medieval for ya!”

They assured him that it would be just fine, and then he led them downstairs for the finale of the tour. “You’re welcome to take your meals here,” he said, “and I expect you will, on account of there’s nowhere else to eat.” And he leaned back and laughed, long and loud.

Other people laughed too, and someone shouted: “To Cairnholm—may she always be our rock of refuge!”

“To Cairnholm!” the others chorused, and raised their glasses together.

[dumbledearme]

~~ read The Second Soul here ~~

dream cast:

Johanna Roseberg ❅ Sophie Lowe

Syndrigast

Ability to see hollowgasts, hollow speak and hollow manipulation

Gustave Bloom ❅ Charlie Heaton

Syndrigast

Pyrokinesis (can create and/or manipulate fire at will)

Enoch O’Connor ❅ Ben Schnetzer

Syndrigast

Dead-riser (power to give life to inanimate dead things)

Brownyn Bruntley ❅ Saoirse Ronan

Syndrigast

Super strength (strong-arm, which means she can lift heavy objects normally incapable of a human)

Fiona Frauenfeld ❅ Alissa Skovbye

Syndrigast

Agrokinesis (plant manipulation and growth)

Olive Abroholos Elephanta

Syndrigast

Levitation

Claire Densmore

Syndrigast

Backmouth (sharp-toothed mouth on the back of the head)

Millard Nullings

Syndrigast

Invisibility

Horace Somnusson

Syndrigast

prophetic dreams

Hugh Apiston

Syndrigast

Infested with bees, ability to control bees

Alma LeFay Peregrine ❅ Eva Green

Syndrigasti

Ymbryne (protect peculiars, transform into a Peregrine Falcon and manipulate time to create time loops)