Read Online Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs - Free Book Online Page A

thought he was choking on his tongue, except there was a rhythm to his sputtering coughs,— puhh, puh-CHAH, puh-puhhh, puh-CHAH —over which Worm began to rap.
    “I likes to get wrecked up down at the Priest Hole / Your dad’s always there ’cause he’s on the dole / My rhymes is tight, yeah I make it look easy / Dylan’s beats are hot like chicken jalfrezi!”
    Dylan stopped. “That don’t even make sense,” he said. “And it’s your dad who’s on the dole.”
    “Oh shit, Dirty D let the beat drop!” Worm started beat-boxing while doing a passable robot, his sneakers twisting holes in the gravel. “Take the mic, D!”
    Dylan seemed embarrassed but let the rhymes fly anyway. “I met a tight bird and her name was Sharon / She was keen on my tracksuit and the trainers I was wearin’ / I showed her the time, like Doctor Who / I thunk up this rhyme while I was in the loo!”
    Worm shook his head. “The loo ?”
    “I wasn’t ready!”
    They turned to me and asked what I thought. Considering that they didn’t even like each other’s rapping, I wasn’t sure what to say.
    “I guess I’m more into music with, like, singing and guitars and stuff.”
    Worm dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “He wouldn’t know a dope rhyme if it bit him in the bollocks,” he muttered.
    Dylan laughed and they exchanged a series of complex, multistage handshake-fist-bump-high-fives.
    “Can we go now?” I said.
    They grumbled and dawdled a while longer, but pretty soon we were on our way, this time with Worm tagging along.
    I took up the rear, trying to figure out what I would say to Miss Peregrine when I met her. I was expecting to be introduced to a proper Welsh lady and sip tea in the parlor and make polite small talk until the time seemed right to break the bad news. I’m Abraham Portman’s grandson , I would say. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he’s been taken from us . Then, once she’d finished quietly dabbing away tears, I would ply her with questions.
    I followed Dylan and Worm along a path that wound through pastures of grazing sheep before a lung-busting ascent up a ridge. At the top hovered an embankment of rolling, snaking fog so dense it was like stepping into another world. It was truly biblical; a fog I could imagine God, in one of his lesser wraths, cursing the Egyptians with. As we descended the other side it only seemed to thicken. The sun faded to a pale white bloom. Moisture clung to everything, beading on my skin and dampening my clothes. The temperature dropped. I lost Worm and Dylan for a moment and then the path flattened and I came upon them just standing, waiting for me.
    “Yank boy!” Dylan called. “This way!”
    I followed obediently. We abandoned the path to plow through a field of marshy grass. Sheep stared at us with big leaky eyes, their wool soggy and tails drooping. A small house appeared out of the mist. It was all boarded up.
    “You sure this is it?” I said. “It looks empty.”
    “Empty? No way, there’s loads of shit in there,” Worm replied.
    “Go on,” said Dylan. “Have a look.”
    I had a feeling it was a trick but stepped up to the door and knocked anyway. It was unlatched and opened a little at my touch. It was too dark to see inside, so I took a step through—and, to my surprise, down —into what looked like a dirt floor but, I quickly realized, was in fact a shin-deep ocean of excrement. This tenantless hovel, so innocent looking from the outside, was really a makeshift sheep stable. Quite literally a shithole.
    “Oh my God!” I squealed in disgust.
    Peals of laughter exploded from outside. I stumbled backward through the door before the smell could knock me unconscious and found the boys doubled over, holding their stomachs.
    “You guys are assholes,” I said, stomping the muck off my boots.
    “Why?” said Worm. “We told you it was full of shit!”
    I got in Dylan’s face. “Are you gonna show me the house or not?”
    “He’s