Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

gaps in the walls. He said something and I missed it.
“Say it again. Please, Martin.”
“He killed me,” the dead man whispered.
“Who.”
“My old man.”
“You mean Oggie? Your uncle?”
“My old man,” he said again. “He got big. And
strong, so strong.”
“Who did, Martin?”
His eye closed, and I feared he was gone for good.
I looked at Enoch. He nodded. The heart in his hand
was still beating.
Martin’s eye flicked beneath its lid. He began to
speak again, slowly but evenly, as if reciting
something. “For a hundred generations he slept,
curled like a fetus in the earth’s mysterious womb,
digested by roots, fermenting in the dark, summer
fruits canned and forgotten in the larder until a
farmer’s spade bore him out, rough midwife to a
strange harvest.”
Martin paused, his lips trembling, and in the brief
silence Emma looked at me and whispered, “What’s
he saying?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it sounds like a poem.”
He continued, his voice wavering but loud enough
now that everyone could hear—“Blackly he reposes,
tender face the color of soot, withered limbs like veins
of coal, feet lumps of driftwood hung with shriveled
grapes”—and finally I recognized the poem. It was the
one he’d written about the bog boy.
“Oh Jacob, I took such good careful care of him!”
he said. “Dusted the glass and changed the soil and
made him a home—like my own big bruised baby. I
took such careful care, but—” He began to shake, and
a tear ran down his cheek and froze there. “But he
killed me.”
“Do you mean the bog boy? The Old Man?”