^I figured it was fitting.

"I was a happy kid. As happy as an East Londoner could be in the late 1800's. I didn't yet carry any of the traits I do now. As you may know, I had a sister and my mom. My dad was long gone, and had been since right after I was born. I also had an uncle. And right after my fourth birthday, my uncle married my mom and I got three more sisters. No brothers, just sisters."

"Growing up, everybody I met said I looked just like my father. My aunts, my grandmother, my first sister, my mom. But that wasn't a good thing. You see, my uncle never got along with my father so after he died, well, I was a perfect vent." Enoch rolled up one of his shirtsleeves to reveal a half-dozen or more thin little lines. Old scars. "That was from the, the horse whip." He stuttered a little.

"My family was in the undertaking business. A rather gloomy profession, if I do say so myself. I picked it up, and was actually pretty talented. I might've actually enjoyed myself if I didn't have to work with my uncle all day long. I'll save you the boring parts and get to the fun. At seven, it was practically expected of me to cause a little mischief, and I hated my uncle, so he was a good first victim. I started stealing hearts. Hearts from anything I could find. A lot of my stock was from the butcher."

"I had known my peculiarity for about a year until I started messing around with my uncle. It got so frequent that I started using my ability five times or more a week. I was animating faster than they were dying."

"Pretty soon nobody was using the O'Connor business because they were apparently faulty with their claims of who was actually dead. That was when I left town. I was eleven. I didn't feel bad. I didn't feel remorse for what I had done by ruining everything for my family. I don't consider them my family anymore. They weren't kind to me. They didn't stop when my uncle beat me. I half wished growing up my bum of a father would come back and take me away from there. That was my first professional lesson. Never ever trust a normal. They don't know what it's like."

"My first loop was run by a nasty piece of work known as Miss Cowbird. And to get me started, Miss Peregrine's a helluva lot better than she'll ever be. She must've weighed 500 pounds at least and all she wore were brown sack dresses that made her look dumpy." Enoch smiled a bit at this. I took it as a good sign and let out a laugh.

"Before I continue, I'd also like to say I was physically eleven when I went to my first loop. But we'll get to that later."

"Every Saturday morning she'd make us clean the manor from top to bottom. It was a huge house, and it was only me and seven others who lived there, and we had to clean the rooms that weren't even occupied. It took up a lot of my spare time."

"On Sunday's she didn't let us do any work. And I suppose that included making clay men to kill each other. But, honestly, what the hell was I supposed to do all day? I'm Jewish, so obviously Sunday's don't mean anything. Our day is Saturday, and she made us clean the damn house then so I had nothing to do but wander the postage stamp-sized loop she made so she had less upkeep to do. It was just the front yard of the mansion and the house itself."

"Well, that makes me feel good about Cairnholm."

"At this point, there's really nothing bad, right? Of course, my loop was ran by a madwoman who had no respect for my religion. But around my spending about a year there things got worse."

"After a time she thought my accent was rubbish, so she made me do voice drills every day. And of course, they obviously didn't work because I still sound like I came right off the streets of East London. As you can imagine, I'm rather proud of where I hail from so I tried everything I could think of to combat my effects."

I nodded along, silently agreeing.

"I wasn't allowed to use the basement to work, so I just stayed up in my room the entire time. But it was all carpet, and clay sticks to everything. When the Cow, which is what I called her, found out, she locked me in the basement and made me stay there for a week. It wasn't really that bad. I didn't have to talk to her, or any of the other lousy inhabitants of the loop, who never talked to me. They probably thought they were better than me."

"Miss Cowbird realized my spirit wasn't broken, so then she cut down how much food I got. But that's when the wights came."

"Our loop was one of the first ones raided, and probably one of the easiest to raid. We had no defenses and they murdered everyone except me. They seemed to think that someone would come to get me, so they locked me up on guard. I still hadn't gotten to a loop." He continued bitterly.

"Every day was something new and terrible. Because everything was so new and not thought out, I got to meet quite a few up-and-comings. My personal favorite was Miss Peregrine's brother, Jack Bentham. I got to know him for about a week. And that week was the worst of my life. Every day was some new torture." I lent a hand and he took it like a lifeline.

"The first thing they did was what all enemies do to their captives once they get them. Isolation. I didn't know how much time had passed when they let me out. I wouldn't talk, because I had nothing to say. I didn't have any information they wanted, but they thought I did. And they tried to force stuff I didn't have out of me. And I couldn't do anything!" Enoch wiped his eyes angrily.

"They tortured me with anything you could think of. A lot of it was emotional. More isolation. They stuck me in a room full of crazies once. That was scary. I was just a little kid."

"They kept a calendar just outside my cell, and they checked it off day after day. And I never saw the sun in that time. When they told me they were transferring me, I started up a plan. I thought that I could make a run for it and try to find more peculiars, or ymbrynes for that matter. But they caught me before I got outside the gates.

"In that amount of time I had nothing to look forward to. I was drifting by. Then, if by some chance luck would have it, the Peculiar Home Guard found me and busted me out. It wasn't their normal sort of recon, they told me. I stayed with them for about eight months. That's why I like war so much. It just fascinated me. It was them who taught me all my military expertise. I fought a bit. But mainly I just stayed back at whatever base they set up."

"There was one of them who I guess you can say really shaped my life. Everyone called him Colonel Allen, and his main job was kind of to stay back and babysit me while everyone else went off. He looked like he was ninety years old, and had scars all up and down his arms from fighting. And I listened as he proudly told me he had never lived a day within a loop. It was true, he'd set up camp right outside wherever we were staying, because we shifted loop to loop."

"You have great potential, Enoch. He'd tell me that all the time. He really believed I had the power to create a whole army of mechanical men. Automatons. And I believed him. He was my father figure. You know how Emma says Miss Peregrine's her mother, Colonel Allen was my father."

"He told me right from wrong, and how to properly launch grenades, and he even slipped me more hearts when I was running out. I'd go far to say I'd loved him."

"I was walking to his tent one morning when something felt, off. Like someone flipped a switch. Since I was halfway to the tent, I ran in there and was eager to tell him about what just happened. He was still sleeping when I got there. I should've seen the signs, I dealt and saw death every day of my first life. His hands were cold. But my cue was when I started to shake him. He just wouldn't get up. So I called for a doctor. I watched as they examined him and said he was gone. And it was my first time to cry since I was a baby."

"About a year and a half later, Miss Peregrine came and got me, and I met you. I was physically thirteen, mentally someone a lot, lot older. And if you'll excuse me I think it's time I got back to my old room." Enoch stumbled out of his chair and walked to the door. He turned around to look at me as if to say, thanks for listening. And I knew then he'd never tell anyone else his most closely guarded secret. His past.