In Dreams - Chapter 3 - chushane - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2024)

Chapter Text

Enoch must admit, Caul did a nice job with the place. Spacious. A palace, no less. Very dark, very gloomy. Though Enoch could go with less mould. The sheer wetness of the place guaranteed some of them would catch a cold soon.
He couldn’t tell if that was intentional or not, mostly because Caul and his minions were unorganised. It was their second day of imprisonment, and no one seemed to have made up their mind on whether to kill them or use them as bait. To maim them or keep them unharmed. The only thing they had taken to doing was dressing Millard in some rags and covering him in a tar that trailed anywhere he walked. For all the master genius Caul presented himself to be, he was obviously at a loss. Enoch almost wanted to give him suggestions.

They could talk between bars freely, though Hugh didn’t talk at all, still weighed down by Fiona's disappearance. Claire and Olive were frightened, naturally. Browyn tried to comfort them, saying, “Miss Emma and Mr Jacob will come get us, they will. Quick as crickets, too.”
Enoch had enough of a mind not to make fun of the duo in front of scared children. He didn’t need them wailing, disrupting his focused examination of their surroundings, scanning for any semblance of an escape.

Though, he should’ve known that peace and quiet would be too much to ask for the moment he got placed in the same cell as Horace. From being kidnapped to being manhandled, the conditions, the future, Horace never failed to complain about SOMETHING. And Enoch had damn near run out of witty comebacks to throw at him.
Only, on the morning of their third day, Horace was uncharacteristically quiet. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, Enoch didn’t question it. Instead, he laid back and tried to use his new abundance of free time to sleep. Except he couldn’t. Horace’s silence was itching at the back of his mind, making it impossible for him to think of anything else. Getting increasingly annoyed at how much he was considering trusting intuition telling him something bad was coming.

An hour later, he thought maybe he should’ve said something, though saying something wouldn’t have done him any good. No amount of talking would have prevented a handful of guards from lining their hallway and taking them one by one to Caul’s office.

First, it was Olive and Claire. Bronwyn was inconsolable, crying out and yelling at the guards who had to threaten her with the girls’ lives to get her to calm down. Even then, she stood taut like a bow string, waiting. When the girls came back, they were perfectly fine. Claire was a bit grumpy, but Olive was downright cheerful. Questions rang out immediately. The guards prevented talking, but not before Olive could blurt out, “He gave us sweets!”
This inspired Bronwyn to check their mouths as if she could sniff out some sort of poison, but they seemed fine. The group looked at each other, confused.
Hugh was next. He came back, jaw set as if deep in thought but absolutely no emotion showing on his face. He sat up in his and Millard’s cell, zoning out at a dot on the wall.
Then went Millard. When he stepped out of the office, the way he slammed his feet betrayed his frustration.

Enoch sat with his brow furrowed, looking intently at the door. Guessing by the state of his comrades, it was a simple conversation but one that was clearly meant to inspire a level of discomfort. Then, it was his turn. He couldn’t say he was anxious, but Horace’s rocking back and forth for the past couple of hours put him on edge just enough.

He was allowed to enter the office with hands unrestricted, which immediately clued him into the game they were playing. Caul was being hospitable . The man in question was lounging in his chair, lazily exhaling tobacco as the smoke enveloped his head, making him nought but a silhouette. Barely lifting a finger, he pointed over to a tray.

“Refreshments?”

Without even looking at the abundancy still left on the plate, Enoch could tell how Millard and Hugh took this offer. That is, they didn’t. They had made a defiant statement on how they stand with Miss Peregrine by refusing any and all pleasantries Caul had tried to entice them with.
In Enoch’s opinion it was a childish act of defiance that only really comes off as bratty, serving no real purpose. So, he reached out for a caramel and popped it into his mouth.

“Cheers,” Enoch said simply.

Caul smiled, satisfied. “I do apologise for the rude way you’ve been accommodated. But you must understand my caution, for your friends are so loyal to my sister. Some delicate business is conducted in this place. We simply cannot afford a ruckus.”

“Mmhr,” Enoch hummed in acknowledgement, continuing to eat off of the platter.

“Such a shame, too. You lot are very talented young individuals. I admit it was a rather nasty trick for me to impersonate my sister. But I am grateful. For it gave me the privilege of witnessing your peculiarity in action. As well as your teamwork. Though the latter might need some work, I couldn't help but notice some of your group is keener to follow the rules than others.Blindly, that is. You aren’t one of them, are you? You think for yourself. You question the decisions made. Very bright. Very, very bright.”

Enoch slouched in the chair across from Caul, responding lazily, “May I be frank with you?”

“Please.”

“You’re a decent read of character. I enjoy flattery, and it would have worked to get me on your side, if only I hadn’t already made up my mind about despising you.” Enoch chatted as casually as having tea with a friend, “Same goes for whatever tactic you use on the others. We know far too much about you to ever be persuaded by sweet words.”

“I find that hard to believe. You’re not well acquainted with me at all. For if you were, you would know I wish for nothing more than the prosperity of all peculiardom. Don’t all of you wish to live in comfort? In pride? Rather than hide in loops. Hide behind the wings of your precious ymbrynes?”

“That’s going to be a tough act to sell. Say, wasn’t it your failed experiment that led to generations of peculiars depending on loops to stay alive? Hiding from monsters you sicked on the world?”

“Brainwashed.” Caul snapped, snatching the tray from Enoch, who thought the gesture was amusingly childish. “The things those birdbrains preach to keep their power. The power they held long before I was born. So restrictive. So primitive. I am willing to take risks to make us great. Make us important.”

Caul took a long drag of his cigar to calm down. Enoch continued calmly as if the most emotionally unstable man on Earth didn’t just stage a tantrum in front of him, “Even so, they will always gather behind the woman who protected them. And you’d be a fool to threaten them, too. As long as she's alive, her children will be loyal to her. And if you kill or maim her, you make her a martyr. And that just makes things worse for you tenfold.”

Enoch fixed his gaze intensely on the emotions that transpired on Caul's face. The anger shifted into sadness, his frown so deep it looked unnatural. Like stretched dough, he looked on the verge of tears. Enoch found himself, as he very rarely does, unsettled.
“Your fellows are right to label you brutally honest. I’d hoped we could be friends, but no matter. I propose a compromise. I will step into the role of employee. You work for me, and in exchange, I give you a hot meal and your life. Much like a real job in that way. Of course, to encourage team spirit - you will work all for one and one for all! If someone lags behind, everyone faces the consequence!”
He was flailing his cigar around, speaking of what is most likely going to be the most horrid work with a jolly disposition, not unlike Olive before a new craft project.
Caul smiled, “Yes, yes. Quite good, that’s what we’ll do. Now, Enoch, is it? You always tell it like it is, do you not? So tell me then, which one of your friends would be most interesting to play with?”

***

Bronwyn was asked to do the heavy lifting. Through tears, she admitted that some of the “heavy lifting” involved barely conscious peculiars who needed to be moved from one operation room to the other. Even though she was so upset she could barely describe it, Enoch managed to glean that a large portion of this place was “experimentation” rooms filled to the brim with peculiars. It left him fuming, wanting to burn the whole place down. Instead, he was left seething in his cell.

They rarely called on Hugh, but when they did, he described being “fed” bees that were strange. He’d called them unnatural and said they’d die off within the day.

Claire was on lockdown in a separate cell after she almost bit the hand off of some moron who had tried to take a tooth out of her second mouth.

Olive and Millard were often taken together. From what they described, the “scientists” would test hypotheses of how their peculiarities reacted in different conditions. They were particularly interested in how Millard developed a high tolerance for cold over the years.

As for Enoch, on his first day getting called on, they just wanted to see how he worked. They gave him hearts and dead animals, and observed.
Then, slowly, they tasked him with “reviving” dead peculiars. The poor bastards had limbs haphazardly sewn back on them, markings and scars that suggested they’d died in ways Enoch couldn't even imagine. He tried not to look at their features too deeply. He’d swallow the lump in his throat and begin his impersonal, cold work.
He hated it. He hadn’t managed to evade death for this long, only for it to be screaming in his face in the form of mangled people whose only transgression was existing in Cow-l’s path.
Enoch did what he was asked with no embellishments. The bare minimum, he would downplay how much he was capable of by only allowing the dead to scream incomprehensibly. His only solace was taking any opportunity to inconvenience his captors in any way possible. He had the very convenient excuse of being simply unable to revive a human being more than once every few days (he greatly exaggerated how long it takes him to recover), meaning they spaced out his visits more than they did the others. Days after work, he’d spend face down on the floor, which he found more comfortable than the beds. He’d wallow in lightheadedness, high-pitched ringing in his ears making him unable and unwilling to speak to anyone.

They’d only take two people on any given day. Enoch supposed that it was inconvenient to transport them all at once. Except Horace, who was a constant.

Each time, he would come back after half the day already passed and collapse on the bed. He barely spoke a word and, if not interrupted, would sleep until the next time they came to get him. Enoch presumed it was because the drugs were still affecting his system, but this meant he could go days without eating if unattended. Enoch had taken to shaking him awake and keeping him under intense watch until he finished what little food the guards gave them. It became such a regular part of their routine that Horace stopped thanking him. However, that could also be attributed to the man growing delirious. On one of the first days, while he still spoke in full sentences, he’d said that Caul was interrogating him on his visions, only to get frustrated when Horace would not give him exactly what he wanted.

Now, he said nothing about what happened, but the effect it had on his body was obvious. He shook violently, feverish. Enoch did his best to keep him in stable condition, he’d prefer it if all of them got out of there

Except, he felt utterly disconnected from what he was doing. His mind was on the practicality of it all. What he needed to do to get the work over with. What he needed to do to keep Horace alive. He’d spend the days trying to route out some sort of escape. But there was a thick fog between him and whatever was going on in his mind. He couldn’t even reach his rage long enough to feel it, going through the motions numb. Until one day.

He got called in again. He walked into the operation room expecting to work on more dead bodies.
Instead, he was faced with the most appalling thing he’d ever seen. A man torn in half, strips of skin and flesh connected only by threads, with his intestines suspended in the air between his torso and his legs. Somehow, by some cruel fate, he was breathing.
Enoch froze. Then, he looked around to see Caul standing there, an expectant look on his face. Hesitantly, he approached the table. He wanted to ask what he was doing there. That person is clearly still alive. Except, looking at him…he wasn’t so sure.

He never got his answer anyway.

All he knew was that he kept seizing that man's heart, used his peculiarity to animate it as if he was dead, while they made ambrosia out of what little was left of him. The worst part was that, for a split second, it worked. This man was so on the brink of death that Enoch had necrotic control over him while he was still living. If it could be called that.
Not that it mattered. Because the man died a few seconds later. Enoch stood there, blankly watching as Caul talked to two other men about how “It didn’t work” while swirling around a part of this man's soul in a bottle. He remembered they were going to sell it to some other peculiar just to get a quick boost.
They left him with the knowledge that this experiment would be repeated. He barely heard them, ears ringing and head pounding as they shoved him back into the cell. Something about him was just fundamentally changed, and he didn’t understand what. His mind had not left the operation room, plagued him with the moment the man lost his life. It made him itch with discomfort that he couldn’t do anything. That he, a man interconnected with death, held this man's life in his hands and couldn’t help it either way.

For a brief moment, he wished for nothing more but to be back in the basem*nt of that godforsaken orphanage, twiddling his thumbs as… as…

Horace wasn’t back yet. Enoch had nothing to occupy him. Trying to stop the images from today from flashing behind his eyelids, he ate the food on his tray. Only to notice his hands trembling as they brought the stale bread up to his mouth. As if his usual nausea after work on a human wasn’t enough, this experience had to have an unwanted emotional effect on him as well.
Dealing with dead people was a hassle. Puppets were fun. Animals were easy. People were as difficult in death as they were in life. He’d do it to make a point, to animate a person and for someone to hear their screams, so Enoch should go, “See? There is no god. All there is after this is horrifying suffering.”
Except not even Enoch knew. They never answer what happens after they die. They get too upset. “Endless suffering” was just Enoch filling in the blanks from context clues. He knew one thing: whatever the afterlife was like, it was so much worse to bring them back.

Back in the old house, when everyone snapped at him for his “attitude”, when no one could take a joke, he’d want to revive Victor just to speak to him. He couldn’t, as his old friend became more and more incomprehensible each time he was reanimated. He had to savour those moments for special occasions. So, instead, he went and revived some of the farm animals. Pigs were his favourite. When alive, they would walk uncoordinated and be off-putting but wouldn't scream. They would calmly allow themselves to be pet and just start walking with no sense of self-preservation.
Begrudgingly, Enoch admitted that some part of that brought comfort to him. The ability to hold life and death in his hands, even for a minute. Maybe Enoch was just being selfish, putting the dead in pain just to quench his own boredom. But he’s found that good company slips through one’s hands like sand down an hourglass. He supposed that if anything, the loop provided him with a false sense of security that he would never find out what happens after ...well, after.

He didn’t sleep. The silence of the cot next to him was deafening. Time was difficult to track in this place. There were no windows in any of the rooms they went to. So, after a mysterious amount of time, the screeching of the doors, signifying Horace’s return, crashed through his skull. Nevertheless, he got up, expecting a swaying Horace to seek him out, as usual.

Except when the guard let go of his arm, Horace folded like a rag doll. Surprised, Enoch jumped to drag him to a lying position. He put his hands on either side of Horace’s face.

“Oi! D’you hear me? Hello?” After no response, he lightly slapped Horace, whose only response was his head shifting slightly to the side. To say he looked unwell was an understatement. He was covered in a coat of sweat that mixed with the blood seeping out of his temples. Enoch’s hand slid from his face to his neck, checking his pulse. The rhythm would change every few seconds, the beating so rapid it was concerning.
Enoch did what he could to cool him down, tilting his head up to give him some water and waiting with his hand on Horace’s wrist until the beating became somewhat regular. He cleaned the blood from his temples and noticed it looked like they had dug at his flesh with a needle. Bruises on his wrists and ankles suggested he was restrained. Then he shook him to consciousness and held him up as Horace, slow as a slug, ate his food.Enoch asked him questions, mostly to keep him conscious. Horace spoke slowly, having trouble forming syllables.

“He’s trying to make a projector,” he slurred when Enoch asked what the wounds were from. “Put something there. It’s supposed to…extract the memory or…or something.”

Enoch stared at his…at Horace. Momentarily, he remembered calling him a coward in Miss Wren’s loop. Only to find out Horace had knitted sweaters out of peculiar wool, anticipating the moment it would save their lives. He recalled being annoyed at Horace’s fearfulness. Now, looking at him, he realised he’d failed to consider that Horace was afraid because he’d see things like this in the future. That his painstaking knitting and worry and complaining were directed towards the same purpose the endless screaming of reanimated corpses did. A warning. Or pleading. Maybe both.

Over the next few days, whatever contraption Caul invented took a terrible toll on Horace. Each time Enoch would catch him, he’d be colder and colder. His heartbeat fluctuated from rapid to far too slow. He would convulse randomly and wake up, only to cry and spasm in pain.
Without thinking about it, Enoch found himself at his side almost constantly. Almost unintentionally, it came as easy as lying about Horace’s whereabouts all those years ago. Trying to get him to cough or breathe when his heartbeat quickened, to move when it was too slow. Concern became paranoia, as he would start hearing gasps of pain when they weren’t uttered. He would pace around only to check Horace’s pulse every few minutes. Each action was accompanied by the uncomfortable feeling that Horace might slip out of his grasp at any moment. He pushed the thought down, annoyed that it ever manifested, but that only left him thinking of Victor, the orphanage, his first loop, his parents, Abe. So, instead, he focused his attention fully on Horace. Horace, who was becoming thinner. To say Enoch couldn't recognise him would have been a lie. It was all too easy to remember what he looked like focused on his work. All too easy to hear the laughter and light-hearted protesting within the groans of pain.

Annoyed at his own reflexes, he got tired of jolting at every sound he thought was Horace. So, he took the sheets from their cots and laid them out on the floor next to one another. When Horace stirred, he felt it. When he needed help, he was right there. Still, he kept him at arm's length away. The same as when they slept in the forest, the same as always. Horace might not be in the right state of mind, but his peculiarity attached itself to people he made contact with like a magnet. He took up enough of Enoch’s mind as it was. There was no need for him to take the memories of his past. Or his future. He avoided that breach of privacy for both of them.

And then they called on him again. In the operation room, when the half-dead, half-alive screamed in his face, it became that much harder to continue being impersonal.
It was an older woman this time. Her wrinkles betrayed her years, as did her screams betray her wish to live. Or her plead to rest. He was painfully aware that he did not know which she’d rather want. Things have been piling up for him. He felt it in the tension of his muscles. The rage that has been bubbling under the surface for the past couple of weeks finally breaking through the fog, he was so overwhelmed with the emotion that he was paralysed. He paused his work and under the watchful eye of his captors- lost control. With his peculiarity no longer forcing her heart to act as a vessel, she opened her eyes. Enoch didn’t know if he imagined it or not, but in them, he saw her choose her fate.
A second later, she was dead.
A chorus of frustrated groans erupted throughout the room. People grumbled about how he was useless and how this was leading nowhere. Horrified by his lack of control, he stood catatonic. Staring at the woman he failed in a room he could not get out of, he was struck with incredible fear.
The audience of his little show was upset at him. The guards already hated him. In their eyes, he’d disappointed them. And there he was, standing, unmoving. The combined frustration of all the people in that room who expected something from him resulted in him being dragged by the leg to his cell.He threw up his arms to shield his face from getting grated against the floor, in turn sacrificing much of his sleeves and elbow skin. Lying on the prison floor, he blinked back the tears until his body stopped intensely burning from the wounds left on his arms and torso.

This time, they didn’t bother letting him wash his hands. His surgical gloves were still on, and the gore of the procedure was still everywhere on him. Death surrounded him, and not in a way that let him hold the cards. His organised jars of hearts he knew and cared for weren’t there. No pigs surrounded him. Nothing, nothing recognisable, nothing comforting. He felt the most disturbing thing of all - like a normal person. Scared he was going to die in this place, disgusted by the blood on him.

When Horace came back and crumbled onto the floor, Enoch’s movement toward him was as slow as moving through molasses. He took off his gloves, wiping the blood with his own tattered shirt. Except, when he stretched Horace out on their shared cloth, his movement became frantic and rushed within seconds.

An enormous gash on Horace's leg had made it swell to the point of being double its size. The rest of his body reacted by launching him into a horrible fever. Enoch got to work on cleaning the wound with what little supplies he could gather, careful to relieve any pressure off it. Horace was so incredibly quiet that Enoch was convinced he was unconscious.
As is the nature of his peculiarity, Enoch had touched many dead in his life. And Horace? Horace was a corpse. Cold, stiff, skin clammy, lips ashen. For what seemed like the first time in his life, the concept of the person he was touching being dead was horrifying. Enoch tensed so hard his muscles ached, and with shaking hands he went to check Horace’s pulse point.

And found nothing.

As if lightning had struck him, his heart seized and shrivelled up, making him instinctively flinch away. Dread washed over him like a bucket of cold water. Too stunned to utter a thing, Enoch rubbed his hands against his face, barely feeling it as his whole body went numb.
Hot, steaming fear clouding his judgement, he was at a loss. Going to Horace’s leg before realising it's useless, reaching for his chest only to recognise seizing his heart would require admitting his death, going to cup his face before realising it's too much. Too sentimental.

An agonising grief stuffed his lungs, suffocating him. So much was already gone. So many people, so many loops, so much of his life. Could he not have one thing? Could he not have continued to sit in the godforsaken basem*nt, twiddling his thumbs as Horace patiently kept him company?
Tears crashed like waves in his eyes, he let out a frustrated, wet groan trying to choke them down. Looking for something to do with his hands, he clutched the front of Horace’s shirt, almost as if to shake him awake before all the fight left him, and he hunched over, his forehead falling on Horace’s collarbone.
He breathed deeply, trying to calm his trembling breath, his hold on Horace so tight you’d think he was holding on for dear life.

Only for Horace to murmur something incomprehensible. It starled Enoch, raising his head enough to see Horace’s lips still trembling. Confused and exhausted, he laid his head on his chest, right above his heart, and heard a faint - but very much there - heartbeat. In his haste, he hadn't checked the pulse correctly. He placed his hand wrong, that’s all. Horace was alive. Too tired to move, too tired to feel embarrassment, Enoch let out a sigh of relief, his eyes closing. Within moments, he fell asleep, there on Horace’s heart, letting it anchor him.

When he woke up, the two of them were still there. Enoch peeled himself away from the other, aware that Hugh and Millard likely saw him cling to Horace from where they stood. Polite as always, neither of them mentioned anything.

Enoch waited until their food arrived, then shook Horace awake, making him eat both portions.For entirely selfish reasons, Enoch kept Horace awake even after that, rubbing the back of his neck to keep him from wandering.

“What happened there?” he pointed to Horace’s leg.

It took Horace a few minutes to get his voice working. Enoch waited patiently.

“The machine malfunctioned. Almost blew up,” he answered.

At least tell me Caul got caught in the blast, too.”

Against all odds, Horace’s lips twitched into a ghost of a smile. “Seems to be a pattern for him.”
The timing of the joke was off, his voice was groggy, and the man seemed barely present. Yet depitenit all, Enoch feelt some form of comfort.

Horace drifted in and out of consciousness. When his fever got worse, he’d startle awake retching, Enoch going to distract him immediately.

“No. You are not throwing that up. It’s the only food I managed to get you to eat.”

“Sorry.” Horace coughed out.

“Save that for if you do throw up.”

“No, not for that.” Horace gasped, falling back on Enoch’s chest. “I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.”

Enoch raised an eyebrow at him.

“In dreams. About you, I saw…I saw what happened with-” he trailed off, either because of embarrassment or because he physically couldn’t talk anymore.

Enoch stares at the boy beneath him, eyes glazed over, covered in sweat, dying. And he laughed. Because it really is funny to be on the verge of cognizance and still care.

“Whiny as always, huh?” Enoch cooed, pushing some loose strands of sweat-soaked hair from Horace’s forehead.

Horace’s eyes were sunken, betraying that some part of him would forever be left in the rooms he came from. But in that moment, he looked at Enoch with such unfiltered, unrestrained emotion—the strongest and most overwhelming one of all: trust.

For one more night, Enoch slept close to Horace’s heart. And then Jacob and Emma went rushing down the hallway, on their way to confront Caul. They made it out alive.

In Dreams - Chapter 3 - chushane - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2024)

Chapter Text

References