A Peculiar Time in 1944 - A Millard Fanfic (Miss Peregrine's Home) #wattys2020

Chapter 72

"Don't tease me. I bite." {Horace Somnusson , pg 353 book 2}

Sergei led them to the room that served as their infirmary. The injured lay in mismatched beds watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were only three patients, a man and two women. The man lay on his side whispering and drooling, one woman stared blankly at the ceiling while the other writhed under the sheets moaning softly. They had no obvious wounds, no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts. Millard wrapped his arm around Aurora as she curled into him, clinging to his jacket.

"What's the matter with them?" Jake asked, "Were they hurt in the raid?"

"No, brought here by Miss Wren." The nurse explained, "She found them abandoned inside a hospital which the wights had converted into some kind of medical laboratory. They were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result."

"We found their old records." The clown said, "They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead."

The nurse took a clipboard from the wall and read off the reports, "This fellow, he's supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages but now he'll only say one word over and over again. That girl there, it says she can fly but I've never seen her so much as lift an inch out of bed. As for the other one, she's meant to be invisible but she's plain as day."

Aurora held Millard tighter trying to shake the image of something so bad happening to him. She'd always wondered what it would be like to see him but she'd rather never know if it came at such a price. Her sweet, kind, intelligent Millard, reduced to nothing but a vegetable staring at the ceiling. His arm around her tightened bringing her so close she could hear his heartbeat.

"Were they tortured?" Emma asked.

"Obviously, they were tortured out of their minds!" the clown shouted, "Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!"

"You could torture me all day long." Millard said and Aurora shuddered, "I'd never forget how to be invisible."

"Show them the scars." The clown told the nurse who approached the motionless woman and pulled back the sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.

"I'd hardly call this evidence of torture." Millard said.

"Then what would you call it?" the nurse replied angrily but Millard ignored her question, letting his arm drop from Aurora as he stepped toward the patients. Aurora knew him well enough to know that he was seeing something that everyone else in the room had overlooked – Millard had that eye for detail.

"Are there more scars, or is this all she has?" he asked.

"Not by a long shot." The nurse said removing the sheet completely revealing scars on the woman's inner thigh, back of her knee, and bottom of her foot. Millard bent and looked at her foot, the sleeve of his jacket moving as he brought his hand to his chin.

"That's odd placement wouldn't you say?"

"What are you getting at Mill?" Emma asked.

"Hush, let him play Sherlock if he wants. I'm rather enjoying this." Enoch said with one of his rare smiles.

"Why don't we cut him in ten places? Then we'll see if he thinks its torture!" snapped the clown.

"Don't you dare touch him!" Aurora shouted and little Bronwyn had to hold her back. The clown only smirked and Aurora remembered the vile suggestion he'd made earlier and let Bronwyn pull her back to the others.