Ryan Ross' Home for Peculiar Children

-PROLOUGE-

( M A J O R - S P O I L E R S )
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandmother,
Elena Lee Rush
Growing up, Grandma Elena was the most fascinating person  I knew. She had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horse back, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren't English.  It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who'd never left New Jersey,  and I begged her to regale me with stories whenever I saw her. She always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me.
     When I was six I decided that my  only  chance of having a like half as exciting as Grandma Elena's was to become an explorer. She encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red push pins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye shouting, "Land ho!" And 
"Prepare a landing party!" Until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my Grandmother would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I'd never recover- that these fantasies somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions- so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already beed discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
     I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandma Elena's best stories couldn't possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about her childhood, like how she was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children's home in Wales. When I would ask why she had to leave his parents, her answer was always the same: because monsters were after her. Poland was simply rotten with them, she said.
   "What kind of monsters?" I'd ask, wide eyed. It became a sort of routine. "Awful hunched-over skeletons with no eyes and boney hands" she'd say. "And they walked like this!" And she'd  shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until I ran away laughing.
    Every Time she described them she'd toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like a putrefying dead person; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside of their skinless jaws and they could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws. It wasn't long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of the tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles. I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine my grandmother battling them and surviving to tell he tale.
     More fantastic still were her stories about like in the welsh children's home. It was a enchanted place, she said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the son shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird- or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts.
Soon enough I confronted my grandmother with my doubts, but she stuck to her word and said:
"Fine, you don't have to take my word for it, I got pictures!" She pushed back her lawn chair and went into the house, leaving me alone on the screened in lanai. A minuet later he came back holding an old cigar box as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing Snapshots.
     The first blurry picture of what looked like a suit of clothes with no person in them. Either that or the person didn't have a head.
  "Sure, he's got a head!" My grandmother said, grinning, "Only you can't see it!"
   "Why not? Is he invisible?"
     "Hey, look at the brain on this one!" She raised her eyebrows as if I'd surprised her with my powers of deduction. "Mikey, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he'd say, 'Hey El, I know what you did today' and he'd tell you where you'd been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought nobody was looking. Sometimes he'd follow you, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn't see him-just watching!" She shook her head. "Of all things eh?"
  She slipped me another photo. Once I'd had a moment to look at it, she said,
"So? What do you see?
"A little girl?"
"And?"
"She's wearing a crown"
She tapped the bottom of the picture.
"What about her feet?" I held the snapshot closer. The girl's feet weren't touching the ground. But she wasn't jumping- she seemed to be floating in the air.
My jaw fell open.
"She's flying!"
"Close," my grandmother said. "She's levitating only she couldn't control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!"
   My eyes were glued to her beautiful, doll like face . "Is it real?"
"Of course it is," she said gruffly, taking the picture and replacing it with another, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder. "Ray and his Brother weren't so smart," she said, "but boy were they strong!"
    "He doesn't look strong," I said, studying the boy's skinny arms.
"Trust me, He was. I tried to arm wrestle him once and he just about tore my arm off!"
  "I believe you," I said