Samenvatting
Never have I doubted my soundness of mind as often as I did on that first night, when the bird-woman and her wards came to save me from the madhouse. That's where I was going, pinned between beefy uncles in the back seat of my parents' car, when a wall of peculiar children seemed to leap directly from my imagination into the driveway before us, aglow in our high beams like a formation of angels.
We skidded to a stop. A wave of dust erased everything beyond our windshield. Had I conjured their echo, some flickering hologram projected from deep within my brain? Anything seemed more believable than my friends being here, now. Peculiars had a way of making anything seem possible, but a visit from them was one of the few impossibilities of which I could still be certain.
It had been my choice to leave Devil's Acre. To go home again, where my friends couldn't follow. I had hoped that in returning I might sew together the disparate threads of my life: the normal and the peculiar, the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Another impossibility. My grandfather had tried to sew his lives together too and failed, estranged in the end from both his peculiar family and his normal one. In refusing to choose one kind of life over the other, he had doomed himself to lose both-just as I was about to.
I looked up to see a figure moving toward us through the clearing dust.
"Who the hell are you?" my dad said.
"Alma LeFay Peregrine," she replied, "Ymbryne Council leader pro tem and headmistress to these peculiar children. We've met before, though I don't expect you'd remember. Children, say hello."
Thuiswinkel Waarborg