Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

that my fear was irrational—it was probably just those
dumb rapper kids pulling another prank—but my heart
was beating a hundred miles an hour, and some deep
animal instinct commanded me to be silent.
My legs began to go numb. As quietly as I could, I
shifted my weight from one leg to the other to get the
blood flowing again. 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 my head
and a little shower of plaster dust sprinkled down.
Whoever was up there, they knew exactly where I was.
I held my breath.
Then, I heard a girl’s voice say softly, “Abe? Is that
you?”
I thought I’d dreamed it. I waited for the girl to speak
again, but for a long moment there was only the sound
of rain banking off the roof, like a thousand fingers
tapping way off somewhere. Then a lantern glowed to
life above me, and I craned my neck to see a half
dozen kids kneeling around the craggy jaws of broken
floor, peering down.
I recognized them somehow, though I didn’t know
where from. They seemed like faces from a halfremembered
dream. Where had I seen them before
—and how did they know my grandfather’s name?
Then it clicked. Their clothes, strange even for
Wales. Their pale unsmiling faces. The pictures
strewn before me, staring up at me just as the children
stared down. Suddenly I understood.
I’d seen them in the photographs.
The girl who’d spoken stood up to get a better look
at me. In her hands she held a flickering light, which
wasn’t a lantern or a candle but seemed to be a ball
of raw flame, attended by nothing more than her bare
skin. I’d seen her picture not five minutes earlier, and
in it she looked much the same as she did now, even