Authors: Ransom Riggs
What was that “or maybe,” I wondered?
I looked over the photos she'd included. A few lines of description had been penned on the back of each. The first was a snapshot of two Victorian ladies standing in front of a striped tent beneath a sign that read
CURIOS
. On the back Emma had written:
Miss Bobolink and Miss Loon started a traveling exhibit using some of Bentham's old artefacts. Now that peculiars are freer to travel, they've been doing quite a business. Many of us don't know much about our history â¦
The next was a photo of several adults descending a set of narrow steps to a beach and a rowboat.
There's a very nice loop on the shore of the Caspian Sea
, Emma had written,
and last week Nim and some of the ymbrynes went on a boating trip there. Hugh and Horace and I tagged along but stayed on the shore. We've all had enough of rowboats, thank you
.
The last picture was of conjoined twin girls wearing giant white bows in their raven-black hair. They were seated next to each other, their hands pulling aside a bit of their shirts to reveal a section of shared torso.
Carlotta and Carlita are conjoined
, the back read,
but that isn't what's most peculiar about them. Their bodies produce an adhesive glue that's stronger than concrete when it dries. Enoch sat in some and attached his bottom to a chair for two whole days! He was so mad I thought his head would pop off. I wish you could've been there â¦
I replied right away.
What did you mean by “or maybe”?
Ten days passed and I didn't hear from her. I worried that she felt she'd gone too far in her letter; had violated our just-friends agreement and was stepping back. I wondered if she'd even sign her next letter
Love, Emma
, two little words I had come to depend on. After two weeks, I began to wonder if there would even
be
another letter.
Then the mail stopped coming altogether. I watched obsessively for the mailman, and when he didn't show for four days, I knew something was up. My parents always got tons of catalogs and bills. I mentioned, casually as I could, that it seemed strange we hadn't gotten any mail recently. My father mumbled something about a national holiday and changed the subject. Then I really started to worry.
The mystery was solved during the next morning's session with Dr. Spanger, which, unusually, my parents had been invited to attend. They were tense and ashen-faced, struggling even to make small talk as we sat down. Spanger began with the usual softball questions. How had I been feeling? Any interesting dreams? I knew she was leading up to something big, and finally I couldn't take the suspense.
“Why are my parents here?” I asked. “And why do they look like they just got back from a funeral?”
For the first time ever, Dr. Spanger's permasmile faded. She reached into a folder on her desk and pulled out three envelopes.
They were letters from Emma. All had been opened. “We need to talk about these,” she said.
“We agreed there wouldn't be any secrets,” my dad said. “This is bad, Jake. Very bad.”
My hands started to shake. “Those are private,” I said, struggling to control my voice. “They're addressed to me. You shouldn't have read them.”
What was in those letters? What had my parents seen? It was a disaster, an utter disaster.
“Who is Emma?” said Dr. Spanger. “Who is Miss Peregrine?”
“This isn't fair!” I shouted. “You stole my private letters, and now you're using them to ambush me!”
“Lower your voice!” my dad said. “It's out in the open now, so just be honest, and this will be easier for all of us.”
Dr. Spanger held up a photograph, one Emma must have included in the letters. “Who are these people?”
I leaned forward to look at it. It was a picture of two older ladies in a rocking chair, one cradling the other in her lap like a baby.
“I have no idea,” I said curtly.
“There's writing on the back,” she said. It says: âWe're finding new ways to help those who've had parts of their soul removed. Close contact seems to work miracles. After just a few hours, Miss Hornbill was like a new ymbryne.'Â ”
Eyem-brine
, she pronounced it.
“It's
imm-brinn
,” I corrected her, unable to help myself. “The âi' sounds are flat.”
“I see.” Dr. Spanger set the photo down and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “And what
is
an â¦Â
imm-brinn
?”
In retrospect maybe it was foolish, but at the time I felt cornered, like I had no choice but to tell the truth. They had letters, they had photos, and all my flimsy stories had blown away in the wind.
“They protect us,” I said.
Dr. Spanger glanced at my parents. “All of us?”
“No. Just peculiar children.”
“Peculiar children,” Dr. Spanger repeated slowly. “And you believe you're one of them.”
I stuck out my hand. “I'd like to have my letters now.”
“You'll get them. But first we need to talk, okay?”
I retracted my hand and folded my arms. She was talking to me like I had an IQ of seventy.
“Now, what makes you think you're peculiar?”
“I can see things other people can't.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw my parents going increasingly pale. They were not taking this well.
“In the letters you mention something called a â¦Â Pan â¦Â loopticon? What can you tell me about that?”
“
I
didn't write the letters,” I said. “Emma did.”
“Sure. Let's switch gears, then. Tell me about Emma.”
“Doctor,” my mother interrupted, “I don't think it's a good idea to encourageâ”
“Please, Mrs. Portman.” Dr. Spanger held up a hand. “Jake, tell me about Emma. Is she your girlfriend?”
I saw my dad's eyebrows rise. I'd never had a girlfriend before. Never so much as been on a date.
“She was, I guess. But now we're sort of â¦Â taking a break.”
Dr. Spanger wrote something down, then tapped her pen against her chin. “And when you imagine her, what does she look like?”
I shrank back in my chair. “What do you mean, imagine her?”
“Oh.” Dr. Spanger pursed her lips. She knew she'd messed up. “What I mean is ⦔
“Okay, this has gone on long enough,” my father said. “We know you wrote those letters, Jake.”
I nearly jumped out of the chair. “You think I
what
? That's not even my handwriting!”
My dad took a letter out of his pocketâthe one Emma had left for him. “You wrote
this
, didn't you? It's the same writing.”
“That was Emma, too! Look, her name's right there!” I grabbed for the letter. My dad whipped it out of reach.
“Sometimes we want things so badly, we imagine they're real,” Dr. Spanger said.
“You think I'm crazy!” I shouted.
“We don't use that word in this office,” Dr. Spanger said. “Please calm down, Jake.”
“What about the postmark on the envelopes?” I said, pointing at the letters on Spanger's desk. “They came all the way from London!”
My father sighed. “You took Photoshop last semester at school, Jakey. I might be old, but I know how easy that sort of thing is to fake.”
“And the photos? Did I fake those, too?”
“They're your grandpa's. I'm sure I've seen them before.”
By now my head was spinning. I felt exposed and betrayed and horribly embarrassed. And then I stopped talking, because everything I said seemed only to further convince them I had lost my
mind.
I sat fuming while they talked about me like I wasn't in the room. Dr. Spanger's new diagnosis was that I'd suffered a “radical break with reality,” and that these “peculiars” were part of an elaborate universe of delusions I'd constructed for myself, complete with fantasy girlfriend. Because I was very intelligent, for weeks I'd managed to fool everyone into thinking I was sane, but the letters proved I was far from cured, and could even be a danger to myself. She recommended I be sent to an “in-patient clinic” for “rehabilitation and monitoring” with all due hasteâwhich I understood to be psychiatrist talk for “looney-bin.”
They'd had it all planned out. “It'll just be for a week or two,” my father said. “It's a really nice place, super expensive. Think of it as a little vacation.”
“I want my letters.”
Dr. Spanger tucked them back into her folder. “Sorry, Jake,” she said. “We think it's best if I hold on to them.”
“You lied to me!” I said. Leaping at her desk, I swiped at them, but Spanger was quick and jumped back with the folder in her hand. My dad shouted and grabbed me, and a second later two of my uncles burst through the door. They'd been waiting in the hall the whole time. Bodyguards, in case I made a break for it.
They escorted me out to the parking lot and into the car. My uncles would be living with us for a few days, my mom explained nervously, until a room opened up for me at the clinic.
They were scared to be alone with me. My own parents. Then they'd send me off to a place where I'd be someone else's problem. The
clinic
. Like I was going in to have a hurt elbow bandaged. Call a spade a spade: it was an asylum, expensive though it may be. Not a place I could fake swallowing my meds and spit them out later. Not somewhere I could dupe doctors into believing my stories about fugue states and memory loss. They would dope me with antipsychotics and truth serums until I told them every last thing about
peculiardom, and with that as proof that I was irredeemably insane, they'd have no choice but to lock me in a padded cell and flush the key down a toilet.
I was well and truly screwed.
* * *
For the next several days I was watched like a criminal, a parent or uncle never more than a room-length away. Everyone was waiting for a call from the clinic. It was a popular place, I guess, but the minute there was an open roomâany day nowâI would be bundled off.