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The two weeks following the tantrum, Horace came down with a high fever. His door locked for most of the day, and he had his soups delivered to his bedside by Miss Peregrine. The rare times I went to visit, he looked terrible indeed. His eyes were bleary and boogered, and his daily clothing were confined to tailor-made pyjamas.
"Give me a little more, alright? I feel like utter cow dung," he mumbled. He laid face-down, his head sandwiched between two fat pillows. "All this for something that didn't even happen."
"I can't, Horace. There's this thing called medication overuse headache. Matter of fact, I think you already have it," I said, cross-legged on the foot of his bed with a mortar and pestle. My chore was to crush aspirins and put them in his juice. "What did you dream about anyway?"
"Miss Peregrine having a heart attack," he recalled. "We escaped to the present and the others who'd been in loops before just died."
"Hell. So what you dream of isn't always certain, then?" I asked, to which he muttered a weak yeah. "That's good! You can hurry and heal, now. I'm bored."
"Oh, lovely, I'll go and heal because you're bored," he drawled, "This is why I told you to make friends. Go play with Emma – oh, don't look so horrified — or Victor. Yeah, I'll tell Victor to keep you company."
So, came a new friend. Victor spent his leisure time lounged in the garden, and I tagged along. That marked my newfound appreciation of peculiarities, Fiona's especially.
Of all the others, I favoured Fiona's peculiarity. I wished mine were like hers, something that made life. A skim of her hand and she grew carrots that resembled aubergines, sculpted intricate topiaries of Christian figures, blossomed the most fragrant rosebushes I've had the pleasure to smell. By far, though, her magnum opus was this beech tree, just at the edge of the woods surrounding the home. It stood on a grassy knoll, raining leftover blossoms from spring, each dewy beechnut a rich emerald.
