Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

to shake and tremble like an overcranked motor,
Enoch shouted, “Rise up, dead man. Rise up!”
I saw a flicker of movement. Something had shifted
beneath the ice. I leaned as close as I could stand to,
watching for any sign of life. For a long moment there
was nothing, but then the body wrenched as suddenly
and forcefully as if it had been shocked with a
thousand volts. Emma screamed, and we all jumped
back. When I lowered my arms to look again, Martin’s
head had turned in my direction, one cataracted eye
wheeling crazily before fixing, it seemed, on me.
“He sees you!” Enoch cried.
I leaned in. The dead man smelled of turned earth
and brine and something worse. Ice fell away from his
hand, which rose up to tremble in the air for a
moment, afflicted and blue, before coming to rest on
my arm. I fought the urge to throw it off.
His lips fell apart and his jaw hinged open. I bent
down to hear him, but there was nothing to hear. Of
course there isn’t, I thought, his lungs have burst—
but then a tiny sound leaked out, and I leaned closer,
my ear almost to his freezing lips. I thought, strangely,
of the rain gutter by my house, where if you put your
head to the bars and wait for a break in traffic, you
can just make out the whisper of an underground
stream, buried when the town was first built but still
flowing, imprisoned in a world a permanent night.
The others crowded around, but I was the only one
who could hear the dead man. The first thing he said
was my name.
“Jacob.”
Fear shot through me. “Yes.”
“I was dead.” The words came slowly, dripping like
molasses. He corrected himself. “Am dead.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Can you
remember?”
There was a pause. The wind whistled through the