the report available

Standing in a tombdark hallway just inside the door, I stared frozenly at what looked for all the world like skins hanging from hooks. After a queasy moment in which I imagined some twisted cannibal leaping from the shadows with knife in hand, I realized they were only coats rotted to rags and green with age. I shuddered involuntarily and took a deep breath. Id only explored ten feet of the house and was already about to foul my underwear. Keep it together, I told myself, and then slowly moved forward, heart hammering in my chest. Each room was a disaster more incredible than the last. Newspapers gathered in drifts. Scattered toys, evidence of long gone, lay skinned in dust. Creeping mold had turned windowadjacent walls black and furry. Fireplaces were throttled with vines that had descended from the roof and begun to spread across the floors like alien tentacles. The kitchen was a science experiment gone terribly wrongentire shelves of jarred food had exploded from sixty seasons of freezing and thawing, splattering the wall with evillooking stainsand fallen plaster lay so thickly over the dining room floor that for a moment I thought it had snowed indoors. At the end of a lightstarved corridor I tested my weight on a rickety staircase, my boots leaving fresh tracks in layers of dust. The steps groaned as if woken from a long sleep. If anyone was upstairs, theyd been there a very long time.

Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage, and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. I couldnt square my grandfathers idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that hed found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it. There was more left to explore, but suddenly it seemed like a waste of time; it was impossible that anyone could still be living here, even the most misanthropic recluse. I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth. Once Id hopped and tripped and felt my way like a blind man through the woods and fog and reemerged into the world of sun and light, I was surprised to find the sun sinking and the light going red. Somehow the whole day had slipped away. At the pub my dad was waiting for me, a blackasnight beer and his open laptop on the table in front of him. I sat down and swiped his beer before hed had a chance to even look up from typing.

I gathered what scrawny courage I had and waded through waisthigh weeds to the porch, all broken tile and rotting wood, to peek through a cracked window. All I could make out through the smeared glass were the outlines of furniture, so I knocked on the door and stood back to wait in the eerie silence, tracing the shape of Miss Peregrines letter in my pocket. Id taken it along in case I needed to prove who I was, but as a minute ticked by, then two, it seemed less and less likely that I would need it. Climbing down into the yard, I circled the house looking for another way in, taking the measure of the place, but it seemed almost without measure, as though with every corner I turned the house sprouted new balconies and turrets and chimneys. Then I came around back and saw my opportunity: a doorless doorway, bearded with vines, gaping and black; an open mouth just waiting to swallow me. Just looking at it made my skin crawl, but I hadnt come halfway around the world just to run away screaming at the sight of a scary house. I thought of all the horrors Grandpa Portman had faced in his life, and felt my resolve harden. If there was anyone to find inside, I would find them. I mounted the crumbling steps and crossed the threshold.

My grandfather had described it a hundred times, but in his stories the house was always a bright, happy placebig and rambling, yes, but full of light and laughter. What stood before me now was no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virusas if nature itself had waged war against itbut the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

I tried to convince myself that it was possible someone could still live there, rundown as it was. Such things werent unheard of where I came froma fallingdown wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some ancient recluse whod been surviving on ramen and toenail clippings since time immemorial, though no one realizes it until a property appraiser or an overly ambitious census taker barges in to find the poor soul returning to dust in a LaZ. People get too old to care for a place, their family writes them off for one reason or anotherits sad, but it happens. Which meant, like it or not, that I was going to have to knock.

Earn over a-mi llio n by the end of the year