The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  “Not as fast as we can,” my horse replied in plain, clear English.

  Bronwyn leaned down from her saddle, scooped Addison off the ground with one hand, and pinned him under one arm while the other held the reins.

  “Giddyap!” she cried, Addison howling in fear as their horse shot forward.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Hoofbeats filled the air as monstrous howls echoed behind us. I risked a look back and saw the giant slime creature—Murnau, half as tall as the house—tear the chimney off the roof and throw it at us. It arced through the air and landed in an explosion of bricks, briefly obscuring the scene with a cloud of dust.

  My arms were knotted around Emma’s waist as our horse bucked and rolled beneath us. I squeezed my legs hard against its sides to keep from flying off. Emma held the reins. Not that the horse needed much guiding; it knew the terrain and wanted to escape just as much as we did.

  Our five horses galloped downhill. We rode in a stampeding knot until we reached the woods’ edge and the path narrowed, and our horses were forced into single file. We were at the front of the line, and Julius and Horace were at the rear. Glancing back, I saw Julius take a hand off the reins and hold it up to rake light out of the air. Smart, I thought, leaving a trail of dark to blind our pursuers—but the ride was too rough and he nearly flew off the horse. Horace screamed and pulled him back into the saddle before he could fall.

  I searched the sky for the ymbrynes and caught a glimpse of Miss Petrel’s unmistakable black-tipped wings through the trees. We were on the right track, but I could hear the hollows howling behind us. They were catching up too quickly.

  We raced into a clearing. Ahead the path forked left and right. Because Emma and I were on the lead horse it was our call to make. Above us I heard a screech and looked up to see the two ymbrynes veer left, but just then, to our left at ground level, I heard a hollow’s scream. Left was out of the question.

  “Right!” I yelled, and Emma pulled the reins.

  “Not that way!” shouted the horse.

  Another howl from the left was enough to convince him. We veered down the rightward path, the others following.

  “Have the hollows gotten faster?” Emma said, and my chin dug into her back as I nodded and hung on, and half closed my eyes. If any of the horses stumbled or any of us fell, we’d be hollow food.

  For a minute we seemed to lose them. The woods thinned. We raced out of the trees and into a fallow field, the view opening expansively. To the left was a wide stretch of fields. To the right, distant and clouded by rolling black smoke, was a fleet of trucks and tanks. I knew immediately what lay beyond, because now I could hear the guns.

  “Oh God,” Emma said, “that isn’t—is it?”

  Damn it. The trenches.

  It was 1916 in Miss Tern’s loop, two years earlier than Miss Hawksbill’s. The war had been rewound, and the front had regressed such that we found ourselves behind the British front lines. Again.

  “Left!” I shouted, but was immediately refuted by another cry from overhead: the ymbrynes, urging us straight on. It was a path that would skirt the fighting, but only just. “Never mind! Straight!”

  Then a chorus of blood-curdling howls contradicted me a second time. The hollows were out of the woods now, too, and had drawn even with us, off to our left. Way off to our left, but tacking toward us fast in a tight-packed blur of pinwheeling tongues.

  My horse didn’t need directions. It swerved right and the others followed. The hollows were herding us toward the front. And yes, they had gotten faster. If the hollow I fought in the Acre was version 2.0, these were 2.1. They just kept getting deadlier.

  I heard someone shouting, “Allez, allez!” It was one of the horses, spurring the others on. Somehow, straining and glistening with sweat, they were able to pour on still more speed. The ymbrynes began to screech, alarmed that we were heading for the front, but there was nothing we could do about it, short of hurtling ourselves into an unwinnable fight with the hollows. All things being equal, I would take my chances on the battlefield.

  Over the din of hooves and howls, I heard Julius shout to Horace, “Hold me tight,” and I turned to see him let go of the reins again and raise both arms. He was steadier this time, his knees bent and flexing with the rhythm of the horse. He began to pull the light out of the air, leaving a broad streak of black behind us. I hoped it would give us some cover, enough that we might veer away from the front without the hollows seeing where we’d gone.

  We rode on like that, pulling darkness after us like a cowl. The sound of bombs and machine gun fire grew louder. We passed more trucks and small tanks and clusters of shocked soldiers, who might’ve taken potshots at us if our wake hadn’t left them in darkness.

  “Now—left!” I shouted to Emma, because I hoped there was enough dark behind us to mask a direction change, and because going straight any longer would plow us into no-man’s-land, where anything so strange as a moving carpet of night would surely attract a storm of gunfire.

  Emma and I swerved left, but a moment later our horse screamed and skidded to a rearing stop before a wall of parked tanks, nearly throwing us off its back. The other horses piled up behind us.

  “Back the other way,” Emma cried, but when Julius cleared a little of the black away we saw that two tanks and a troop transport had just collided in the dark to our rear, blocking our escape.

  “More,” Sebbie boomed in her fire-woman voice. “Take all the light!” And together the light-eaters gathered nearly every photon around us, and we were plunged into semidarkness.

  Terrified soldiers shouted out for one another. I could hear the hollows bashing around in the dark, too, not close to us but not nearly far enough away for comfort. For the moment they were confused and blinded, and I guessed that the intense smells of the battlefield—gunpowder and diesel and death—had muddied the peculiar scent trails we’d been leaving for them.

  Then a light bloomed in Noor’s hands, a glow that lit her aquiline features and a small area around us as well.

  “Put it out!” Enoch said. “The hollows will see.”

  “You can’t see far through this,” Julius reassured him. “My dark is thick as pea soup.”

  A young man in uniform stumbled into the cone of Noor’s glow. His eyes were saucers, his mouth trembling as he gazed up at her on horseback. “Am I dead?” he asked. “Is this heaven or hell?”

  “Those hollows won’t be confused for long,” I said, ignoring him. In my gut, the compass points of pain that represented the hollows had stopped wandering and were drifting closer. “They’re starting to catch our scent again.”

  “Then there’s no way out,” Horace cried.

  “There might be,” Noor said. Her eyes went to the nearest tank, a primitive hulk of metal and tread, looming at the edge of her wavering light. She locked eyes with the young soldier. “Can you drive that thing?”

  He tried to speak, couldn’t. Nodded instead.

  “Good.” Noor swung her leg over the saddle and jumped down from the horse. “We need a ride.”

  Enoch gaped. “In that?”

  “That’s a fabulous idea, Noor,” said Emma, and she dismounted, too, then glanced at Enoch. “Unless you’d rather run through no-man’s-land with just Horace’s sweater to stop the bullets.”

  We all got down from our horses.

  “What about us?” said the horse I’d been riding.

  “Wait till we draw the hollows away, then run!” said Noor.

  The young soldier was already climbing into the tank. We ran after him. From the rim of darkness around us, soldiers in gas masks gathered to watch. They must’ve thought they were dreaming.

  “Smallest ones first!” Noor said, boosting Sebbie onto the tank. “Get that door open!”

  The young soldier slid a bolt and threw open the tank’s hatch.r />
  “You sure we’re all going to fit in there?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Shrink if you have to,” said Horace. “There’s no other way.”

  The young soldier helped us in one by one. Noor and I were last, and as Noor was climbing in, the soldier asked her, “Are you angels?”

  “Sure,” she replied, and then we heard the inhuman howl of a hollow. They were close and coming fast. Any color that was left in the soldier’s cheeks drained away. “And those,” she said, “are devils.”

  And the hatch slammed shut over our heads.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Paradoxically, the inside of a WWI-era tank looked like it was designed to kill its occupants just as much as the outside was designed to kill the enemy. Though we were packed in like sardines there was enough room for all of us, but it was hard to breathe through the engine fumes and hard to hear because of the engine roar and hard to see because there were only slits in the armor for visibility.

  The young soldier wedged himself into the driver’s seat. The rest of us compressed ourselves into the tight compartments around him, meant for gunners and shell-loaders, and began shouting contradictory orders.

  “Go back the way we came!”

  “Go wherever the hollows ain’t!”

  “No, follow the ymbrynes!”

  “How? We can’t see them from in here!”

  Finally Bronwyn shouted for quiet and said, “Jacob! Machine gun bullets kill hollows, don’t they?”

  “I think so, if you shoot them in the head. Their chests are armored.”

  “But they won’t destroy a tank?” This was directed to the young man in the driver’s seat.

  Enoch flicked his arm. “Do more than stare. She asked you a question.”

  “Eh, no.” He rapped the hatch above him with his knuckle and it rung dully. “Armor’s too thick.”

  Bronwyn snapped a nod. “So we lead them into a bullet storm. Let the British and Germans kill the hollows for us, then follow the ymbrynes.”

  “That’s absolutely mad,” Julius muttered, and then he shrugged. “You heard the lady,” he barked at the soldier. “Let’s go get shot at.”

  The soldier peered through a slit in the hull. “It’s too dark—can’t see where I’m driving.”

  “Ach, righto,” grumbled Julius. “I’ll spit it back.”

  With help from the soldier, Julius located the loading port of the largest gun barrel and opened it. He pressed his mouth to it, squeezed his eyes closed, and made a noise that sounded like vomiting. Peering through another of the tank’s gaps I could see light shooting out of the tank’s gun to fill the horizon. It must have been an amazing thing to witness, this tank firing sunlight into the sky, and I wished I could’ve seen it from the vantage of the gaping soldiers who surrounded us.

  Now that he could see, the driver was able to quickly get his bearings. He stomped the clutch with his foot and threw the tank into forward gear. We lurched forward with a great squeal of metal.

  Then there was a loud clang—one of the hollows had jumped onto the tank. It drummed uselessly against the hull with its tongues, then let out a piercing howl of frustration.

  The soldier shrank down into his seat. “Cor, what was that?”

  “Just drive, lad!” said Millard, half shouting over the din of the engine.

  The soldier yanked the two parallel levers before him in opposite directions, which was apparently how you steered the thing, and we lurched to avoid something. A second hollowgast leapt atop the tank, while a third tried unsuccessfully to lasso and then pull us to a stop from behind. But their teeth and tongues were little use against our behemoth of iron and steel.

  The soldier’s state of dreamy compliance was beginning to fade, replaced by panic as we approached the front lines, but a steady stream of encouragement from Millard and threats from Enoch kept him pointed toward the battlefield.

  “Put on yer splatter masks and find something to hold on to!” he shouted. He grabbed a scary-looking mask from under his seat and strapped it over his face. It had slitted metal grates covering both eyes and a chain-mail beard that hung down over the lower face and neck. There were identical masks under every seat, and we each put one on. It was heavy and reduced my visibility to almost zero, but I wasn’t about to question its utility.

  The tank pitched forward dramatically, then slammed into something and righted itself. We had crossed the trenches and were plowing into no-man’s-land. There was a brief pause in which all we could hear was the roaring engine and the squeal of the tank’s treads; even the hollows had gone quiet.

  Then the guns woke up. They sounded like rolling thunder as they raked the cratered land toward us, and then a hailstorm of ear-splitting clangs filled my head. None of the bullets entered the tank, but tiny shards of metal were knocked loose and went flying, and I realized what the medieval-looking masks were for.

  I felt one of the hollows die. It didn’t even have time to scream. The others did, though. They were hit, and I felt them scramble from the exposed side of the tank to the sheltered one that faced the British line.

  I shouted at the soldier to turn and drive the other way. I saw a flicker of hesitation on his face, but he was so thoroughly out of his depth that he did as I asked anyway. He pulled the lever on the right toward him while pushing the left one away, and we began to turn a lurching 180 degrees. The storm of gunfire passed from one side of the tank to the other. One of the remaining two hollows didn’t react fast enough and was torn to pieces. The other spider-crawled around to the back of the tank, and then I felt it go underneath us, into the empty space between the treads. It scratched and pounded at the floor of the tank, rattling the metal beneath our feet, desperate for a way in. I wondered if the saliva of these new hollows was acidic enough to eat through steel. Chasing the thought from my mind, I shouted at the soldier to turn back the other way, and he shoved the levers again.

  I stood up, steadying myself against the tank’s violent shudder, and peered through the closest vent. Across the ruined and smoking land I saw a crater filled with tangled barbed wire.

  I told him to drive straight through it.

  “We could get hung up in there!” he said. “Never get out again!”

  The hollow’s scratching turned to a worrying thwang beneath us, and I pictured it peeling away loose panels in the tank’s bodywork.

  “We didn’t come all this way just to die inside a tin can,” Emma shouted. “Do as he says and drive!”

  The soldier jammed down a pedal with his foot. The tank sped up, but it still felt like we were moving in slow-motion. It was hot as the fires of hell in there, the overworked engine making the air shimmer while an accumulation of fumes threatened to choke us.

  Finally, we dipped down into the crater. The hollowgast began to screech as the barbed wire tore it apart. The driver poured on as much speed as he could in hopes of getting us out the other side of the crater, but our left tread bound up, tangled in wire, while the right one kept turning, which spun us in a slow circle. The bullets strafed us again, and then something snapped and we were sprung loose. A moment later the tank tipped upward and we climbed out of the hole.

  There was cheering and fist pumps. And then a mortar shell landed and we were knocked sideways by a giant explosion.

  Everything went black. I don’t know for how long. Maybe a minute or two, maybe just a few seconds, but when I came to, one of those terrifying masks was staring down at me, and I had to suppress a scream.

  It was Emma. “We got hit with a mortar!” she was shouting.

  The tank had flipped onto its side; everything inside was turned ninety degrees.

  The soldier was dead. His mask had slipped off just before the mortar hit, and his face was running with blood. All three hollows were dead now—I could feel it—but if we tried to escape the tank, we w
ould be, too. Even though we’d been hobbled, the gunfire drilling us had hardly slackened at all.

  I looked around, dazed from the blast and the combined voices of all my friends. Horace was tending to Enoch, who had blood flowing out of his coat sleeve. Millard and Bronwyn were frantically digging through her steamer trunk for something. Sebbie was traumatized and sobbing. “I don’t want to die in here!” she wailed.

  Neither did the rest of us. We had to get out of the tank before any more mortar shells landed on it . . . but the moment we popped our heads out of the hatch, we’d be as dead as those hollows.

  “I could eat the light from the sky again,” Julius said.

  “It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Horatio. “They’ll just blanket the air with bullets.”

  There were more suggestions, none of them good. Everyone was starting to panic. Then Millard cried, “Look here, friends!” and we all turned. He and Bronwyn had gotten the steamer trunk open and were carefully lifting out Klaus’s bone clock. I had forgotten all about it. “I have something here that might help us, but then again it might not—”

  “We’ll try anything!” Horace said.

  “It got a bit dinged up, but if it still works—and works the way Klaus said it does . . .” He held up a key ring of fingerbones. “Now, was it the pointer that opens the case, or the index?”

  He was interrupted by an explosion that rocked the tank—another shell had landed close by and left my ears ringing.

  “Just do it, Millard!” Noor shouted.

  He fumbled the keys onto the floor, scrabbled to pick them up again, and inserted one of them into the case. Thankfully, it popped open on the first try. “I don’t know precisely how this is going to work!” he shouted over the din while using another finger to wind the clock, “but whatever the effect, it probably won’t last long . . .”

  He gave it one last hard crank, and the clock’s bony hands began to spin around the face so fast they blurred. Then there was a sudden loud BONG and they both stopped at twelve. As the clock’s chime faded, so too did the incessant hammering of bullets against the tank’s hull. I felt a nauseating drop as if the tank had just fallen off a cliff—a sensation I had come to recognize as a time shift—and then, as if by magic, the world outside went quiet.