Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

upon its malevolent shape—the way the doorless
doorway seemed to swallow me as I dove 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—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? 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.
The steps protested my weight with a symphony of
shudders and 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