The Turtle Boy: Peregrine's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

Time to find your
feet."
    He did, though it took even
longer to stand than it had to get on his knees, and it left him
staggering, with nausea swirling through him. He was cold, and
quaking, and sweating profusely. More than anything he wanted to
sleep, in his own bed—the only place he could think of that might
end this dreadful nightmare and see him safely back to the sunshine
world: a place where a mother's love was pure and violence was
something that happened to everyone else .
    "Good. Now we can go."
    "Go where?"
    His father rose. "To find your
mother."
    The boy frowned, his legs like jelly,
and the words came out before he thought to stop them. "You're
dead."
    "Yes."
    "How can I see you?"
    "Because you've been made
to."
    Peregrine didn't understand, but
resisted saying so in case it made his father angry. So instead he
asked, "What are we going to do when we find her?"
    His father stood motionless for a
moment. Then he turned and began to walk away. "We're going to set
things right," he called back over his shoulder. "Teach them that
people aren't houses. We're going to kill them."
    The words were so wrong, so
blasphemous, and so terrible that Peregrine knew he should have
felt terror seizing his heart, panic playing his nerves like violin
strings. But he didn't. Instead he felt a disorientating sense
of right ; that
whatever happened once he started on this path would be as it was
supposed to be. And while it scared him, he also realized he had no
choice. He could not stay here, or risk going back to the house
alone.
    Father was here. Father would guide
him.
    On unstable legs, he took a few
tentative steps. Every one shot thunder into his brain and he
narrowed his eyes, willing it away. Still disturbed by the cast of
this new reality, he nevertheless forced himself to quicken his
pace. But as he stepped wide to avoid the tentacles of a pine tree,
he stopped dead, startled to see that there were other people in
the woods, watching him. A legion of people, their pale faces
drawn, shadows leaking from their eyes as if their heads were
pillowcases stained with oil.
    A chill rippled through him. "Who are
they?"
    His father glanced sidelong at him,
and now, in the amber daylight, as an unnaturally slow wind tugged
at the trees and the crowd in the woods looked on, he saw that a
thick dark fissure bisected his father's face, forcing his eyes too
far apart. The eyes themselves were swollen with blood.
    "Dad?"
    "You brought them here, Peregrine,"
his father said. "You led all of us here."
    He walked off, through the trees,
pausing once only to check that his son was following. Peregrine
trailed him at a distance, no longer sure he could trust this
ruined image of the man he'd once known, and as he approached the
watchers, they glared at him, as if he'd done something to draw
their ire. For the rest of the journey, he averted his gaze from
them, and tried to will away the pain that pulsed behind his
eyes.
    He had awakened into a place
he didn't recognize, a place better suited to the fairytales—a
haunted forest. And who knew what else might be hiding in the
coiling dark? But no matter how frightening it was, it still didn't
feel wrong, and as silent tears rolled down his face, he wondered
what he would say when they found his mother; what she would say when she saw
who had brought him to her.
    Worse, he couldn't stop imagining how
it was going to feel to watch her die.
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Here the new world ended.
    Peregrine stood at the entrance to the
woods, the house standing a few feet away looking quiet and
unassuming, as if a madwoman hadn't betrayed and attempted to
murder her child here a few hours before.
    But the boy was not looking at the
house. He stood with his back to it, despite the fear that his
mother might come shrieking out of it, poker raised, to finish what
she'd started. The fear could wait. For now, awe had possessed him,
as he watched the trees shift and bend and tremble in their dark
amber