Audio book: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The narrator arrives at their grandfather's house to find it in disarray. They search for their grandfather, fearing he may be in danger. They find a flashlight and follow it to the woods where they eventually discover their grandfather injured. He tells the narrator to go to an island for safety and gives them a cryptic message about a bird and a letter. The narrator promises to do as he says. The grandfather's condition worsens and the narrator is left in shock. Ricky, a friend, arrives and they both see a horrifying creature in the woods. The narrator faints and that is the last thing they remember. Even in the fading lights I could tell the house was a disaster. It looked like it had been ransacked by thieves. Couch cushions and chairs were overturned, fridge and freezer doors hung open, their contents melting into sticky puddles on the linoleum. My heart sank. Grandpa Portman had really, finally lost his mind. I called his name, but I heard nothing. I went from room to room, turning on lights and looking anywhere a paranoid old man might hide from monsters. Behind the furniture, in the attic crawlspace, under the workbench in the garage. I even checked the inside of his weapons cabinet, though of course it was locked. The handle ringed by scratches where he tried to pick it open. Out in Illinois, a gallows of unwatered ferns swung browning in the breeze. While on my knees on the astroturfed floor, I peered beneath the rattan benches, afraid what I might discover. I saw a gleam of light from the backyard, and running through the screen door, I found a flashlight abandoned in the grass. It beamed pointed at the woods that etched my grandfather's yard. A scrubby wilderness of palmettos and trash palms that ran for a mile between Cyracle Village and the next subdivision, Century Woods. According to local legend, the woods were crawling with snakes, raccoons, and wild bears. But when I pictured my grandfather out there, lost and raving in nothing but his bathrobe, a black feeling welled up in me. Every other week there was a news story about some geriatric citizen tripping into a retention pond and being devoured by alligators. The worst case scenario wasn't hard to imagine. I shouted for Ricky, and a moment later he came tearing around the side of the house. Right away he noticed something I hadn't. A long, mean-looking slice in the screen door. He let out a low whistle. That's a hell of a cut. Wild Pig could have done it. Or a bobcat, maybe. You should see the claws on them things. A peal of savage barking broke out nearby. We traded a nervous glance. Or a dog, I said. The sound triggered a chain reaction across the neighborhood, and soon barks were coming from every direction. Could be, Ricky said, nodding. I got a .22 in my trunk, you just wait. And he walked off to retrieve it. The barks faded and a chorus of night insects rose up in their place, droning and alien. Sweat trickled down my face. It was dark now. The debris had died, and somehow the air seemed hotter than it had all day. I picked up the flashlight and stepped toward the trees. My grandfather was out there somewhere. I was sure of it. But where? I was no tracker, and neither was Ricky. And yet something seemed to guide me anyway. A quickening in the chest. A whisper in the vicious air. And suddenly I couldn't wait another second. Tromped into the underbrush like a bloodhound sent in a visible trail. It's hard to run in Florida woods, where every square foot is not occupied by trees, is bristling with die-hard pomelo spears, and nets of entangling skunk vine. But I did my best. Calling my grandfather's name and sweeping my flashlight everywhere. He cut a white glint out of the corner of my eye and made a beeline for it. But upon closer inspection, it turned out to be just a bleached and deflated soccer ball I lost years before. I was about to give up and go back for Ricky, when I spied a narrow corridor of freshly stomped palmettos, not far away. I stepped into it and shone my light around. The leaves were splattered with something dark. My throat went dry. Stealing myself, I began to follow the trail. And the farther I went, the more my stomach nodded. As though my body knew what lay ahead and was trying to warn me. And then the trail of the flattened bush widened out. And I saw him. My grandfather lay face down in a bed of creeper. His legs sprawled out and one arm twisted beneath him as if he'd fallen from a great height. I thought surely he was dead. His undershirt was soaked with blood. His pants were torn and one shoe was missing. For a long moment, I just stared. I just stared. The beam of my flashlight shivering across his body. When I could breathe again, I said his name. But he didn't move. I sank to my knees and pressed the flat on my hand against his back. The blood that soaked through was still warm. I could feel him breathing ever so shallowly. I slipped my arms under him and rolled him onto his back. He was alive. Though just barely. His eyes glassy, his face sunken and white. Then I saw the gashes across his midsection and nearly fainted. They were wide and deep and clotted with soil. And the ground where he'd lain was muddy from blood. I tried to pull the rags of his shirt over the wounds without looking at them. And then I heard Ricky shout from the backyard. I'm here! I screamed. And maybe I should have said more. Like danger or blood. But I just couldn't form the words. All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places, humming with machines, and not in heaps on the sudden reeking ground with ants marching over them. Then I saw the leather opener clutched into one of his trembling hands. A leather opener. That was all he had had to defend himself. When I tried to take it from him, he grasped helplessly at the air, so I took his hand and held it. My nail bits and fingers twinned with his. Pale whack with purple veins. I have to move you, I told him, sliding one arm under his back and another under his legs. I began to lift, but he moaned and went rigid, so I stopped. I couldn't bear to hurt him. I couldn't leave him either. And then there was nothing to do but wait. So I gently brushed loose soil from his arms and face and thinning white hair. That's when I noticed his lips moving. His voice was barely audible. Something less than a whisper. I leaned down and put my ear to his lips. He was mumbling, fading in and out of lucidity, shifting between English and Polish. Grandpa, I don't understand, I whispered. I repeated his name until his eyes seemed to focus on me, and then he drew a sharp breath and said, quietly but clearly, Go to the island, Jacob. Here it's not safe. It was the old paranoia. I squeezed his hand and assured him that we were fine. He was going to be fine. That was twice in one day that I had lied to him. I asked him what had happened, what animal had hurt him, but he wasn't listening. Go to the island, he repeated. You'll be safe there, promise me. I will, I promise. What else could I say? I thought I could protect you, he said. I should have told you a long time ago. What, I said, holding back the tears. There's no time, he whispered. Then he raised his head off the ground, trembling with the effort, and breathed into my ear. Find the bird in the loop, on the other side of the old man's grave. September 3rd, 1940. I nodded, but he could see that I didn't understand. With his last bit of strength, he added, Emerson's letter. Tell him what happened, Jacob. With that, he sank back, spent and fading. I told him I loved him, and then I saw him disappearing to himself. A moment later, Ricky crashed out of the underbush. He saw the old man limp in my arms and fell back a step. Oh man, oh Jesus, oh Jesus, he said, rubbing his face with his hands, and as he battled about finding the poles and calling the cops and did you see anything in the woods, the strangest feeling came over me. I let go of my grandfather's body and stood up, every nerve ending tingling with an instinct I didn't know I had. There was something in the woods, all right, I could feel it. There was no moon and no movement in the underbush but our own, and yet somehow I knew, just when to raise my flashlight and just where to aim it, and for an instant in that narrow cut of light, I saw a face, that seems to have been transplanted directly from nightmares of my childhood. It stared back at me, with eyes that swam in dark liquid, through trenches of carbon black flesh, loose in its hunched frame, its mouth hinged open grotesquely, so that a mass of long, E-like tongues could wriggle out. I shouted something, and then it twisted and it was gone. Shaking the brush and drawing Ricky's attention, he raised his .22 and fired. What the hell was that? But he hadn't actually seen it and I couldn't speak to tell him. Frozen in place as I was, my dying flashlight flickering over the blank woods, and then I must have begged out because he was saying, Hey Ed, are you okay or what? And that's the last thing I remember.