Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

you’d find in any old family album. There were shots of
people cavorting on beaches and smiling on back
porches, vistas from around the island, and lots of
kids, posing in singles and pairs, informal snapshots
and formal portraits taken in front of backdrops, their
subjects clutching dead-eyed dolls, like they’d gone to
Glamour Shots in some creepy turn-of-the-century
shopping mall. But what I found really creepy wasn’t
the zombie dolls or the children’s weird haircuts or
how they never, ever seemed to smile, but that the
more I studied the pictures, the more familiar they
began to seem. They shared a certain nightmarish
quality with my grandfather’s old photos, especially
the ones he’d kept hidden in the bottom of his cigar
box, as if somehow they’d all come from the same
batch.
There was, for instance, a photo of two young
women posed before a not-terribly-convincing painted
backdrop of the ocean. Not so strange in and of itself;
the unsettling thing was how they were posed. Both
had their backs to the camera. Why would you go to
all the trouble and expense of having your picture
taken—portraits were pricey back then—and then turn
your back on the camera? I half-expected to find
another photo in the debris of the same girls facing
forward, revealing grinning skulls for faces.
Other pictures seemed manipulated in much the
same way as some of my grandfather’s had been.
One was of a lone girl in a cemetery staring into a
reflecting pool—but two girls were reflected back. It
reminded me of Grandpa Portman’s photo of the girl
“trapped” in a bottle, only whatever darkroom
technique had been used wasn’t nearly as fakelooking.
Another was of a disconcertingly calm young
man whose upper body appeared to be swarming
with bees. That would be easy enough to fake, right?
Like my grandfather’s picture of the boy lifting what