The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  Sharon instructed me to remove the tarp from the crate of explosives. I guess I was expecting some cartoonish pile of dynamite sticks, but the crate was filled mostly with straw packing material, on top of which lay a small bundle of yellow bricks bound together with duct tape. I’d seen enough crappy action movies to know these were plastic explosives. Next to them sat a little remote with a safety latch and a grip trigger—the detonator. The whole thing weighed maybe five pounds, which wasn’t much, but the only one of us still wearing anything with pockets large enough to carry it was Horatio, who hadn’t yet shed his WWI coat, even though it was soaked in blood and missing an arm. I felt only the slightest hesitation as I passed a handful of deadly high explosives to him.

  He noticed. “Do you trust me?” he asked, both our hands holding the five yellow bricks.

  “I do,” I said, and retracted my hand. And I did.

  Horatio tucked the explosives into his inside coat pocket. He paused for a moment, then gave me the detonator. “You keep it.”

  I weighed it in my hand, then slid it into my pants pocket.

  Without the detonator, Sharon explained, the explosives were no more dangerous than a box of matches. “With it, you’d better be at least a hundred feet away before you hit that trigger. In fact, it would be best if you were back on this boat and we were speeding off in the opposite direction.”

  With that, it was time to go. Sharon steered the boat as close to the emergency ladder as he could manage, and then there was nothing to do but climb. Emma went first, grabbing the bottom rung and pulling herself up with ease. Noor followed. I nearly asked her to stay behind on the boat, but I knew what she’d say and decided to save my breath. Horatio used his remaining arm to pull himself up one-handed, and then it was my turn. I gathered what little courage I had left, stood up, and almost fell out of the pitching boat. Sharon caught my arm, tsked, then boosted me by the waist so I could grab a rung and pull myself up, legs pedaling the air. When I’d gotten my feet hooked in and climbed a few rungs, I looked down at Sharon, bobbing in the rough current.

  “I’ll be waiting right here,” he called, white-toothed grin gleaming from his hood. He waved a paperback book. “Take your time. I brought a novel!”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I swung my legs over the railing and dropped onto the deck of the cruise ship, my knees still rubbery from the climb. The first thing I noticed was a festive poster on the wall inviting passengers to a luau. It was splattered rather spectacularly with blood. A single red high-heeled shoe lay abandoned on the deck nearby.

  No matter. We had made it on board without being seen, without falling from the slippery steps, without setting off any alarms. I still had my doubts whether this was really a ship filled with hollowgast; our plan had depended on the hallucinatory near-death visions of a wight who’d only recently been a hollowgast himself, and I half expected to find nothing more than boomer-aged tourists pounding margaritas. But there seemed to be no one on board at all. No one on the narrow promenade the ladder had led us to, no one in the triple hot tub we passed as we snuck along the deck to another set of stairs. It climbed to a catwalk that had a view across the whole main deck, where the garish corkscrew waterslide fed into a giant swimming pool—

  There. Someone was in the pool, floating in the shallow end. In a black cocktail dress. Facedown.

  And someone else, splayed in a lounge chair, limbs twisted as if they’d fallen there from a height. And another, slumped over the open-air tiki bar, blood in a wide smear around them. And then I felt it, a creeping discomfort that spiked as soon as I recognized it, multiplying until it felt like a million needles in my gut. The others saw me wince and knew what it meant.

  “Down!” Emma hissed, pushing our group behind a planter of fake palms. Through their branches we could see a man in black tactical clothes patrolling the deck below. He wore a machine gun strapped across his chest.

  “He’s a wight?” I asked.

  “Mind-controlled normal,” Horatio said. “But there are a few wights on board somewhere, you can be sure, and a turncoat peculiar who’s doing the mind controlling.”

  Emma’s face clouded. “I despise wights as much as the next peculiar—no offense, Horatio—but I hate these traitors with a passion. They should all be strung up by their heels and flayed.”

  “There can be no justice before victory,” said Horatio.

  “Could we please find the hollows and blow them up and get out of here?” said Noor.

  The sensation in my gut sharpened to a directional point. I whispered for the others to follow me. Once the guard had passed, I guided my friends back down the steps. We snuck from hiding spot to hiding spot, and luckily there were many. My inner compass led us through a dining room: a chaos of flipped tables, broken glasses, and vivid dark splashes across the carpet that could have been either food or gore. What had happened on board was becoming clearer: The ship had been commandeered by wights, and the passengers and crew had been fed to the hollows.

  “I’m ready if you need me,” Noor said, pulling a bit of light from the air as we walked.

  “So am I,” Emma said, rubbing her hands together.

  We hurried down a hallway lined with staterooms, through a heavy door marked CREW ONLY, and down a staircase into another hall, this one unadorned and utilitarian. There was a long blank stretch with no doors to duck into, then a quick turn down a short hall that ended at a cage door, toward which my compass pointed unmistakably.

  That was it. The cargo hold.

  “In there,” I said, probably too loud, but before we could reach it the door slid open and a man walked out. He was dressed like a tourist in blood-splotched yellow pants and a Hawaiian shirt. He was drying his hands with a shop towel when he looked up, saw us, and froze.

  His eyes were blank.

  “Hey, what the—”

  Horatio grabbed my arm and pulled me roughly toward him. “Malaaya, eaxl gestealla,” Horatio said, a greeting I didn’t understand but recognized as Old Peculiar. “I found him hiding in one of the kitchens.”

  It was just me and Horatio; Emma and Noor were behind us and had stayed hidden around the corner.

  I tried to act hurt and terrified. The wight relaxed. “I just fed them,” he said, “but they’re insatiable.”

  Horatio said something else in Old Peculiar and both men laughed. Then Horatio dropped my arm and punched the wight in the throat. He gagged and dropped to his knees.

  “STOP!” I heard a voice shout, and we spun to see Noor and Emma being pushed down the hall by two men with guns. My heart kicked into high gear.

  “Get in there!” one of the men yelled, gesturing to the cargo hold door. “Now!”

  Horatio tried to play it off. He said something angry in Old Peculiar, then added in English, “Unless you want to explain to Caul why you fed the Prelate of the Loops to the hollows!”

  It didn’t work. One of the men fired a bullet into the floor. There was nowhere to run, no peculiar trick their guns couldn’t best. Nothing to do but go through the door and let them lock us into the cargo hold with the hollows.

  The man shot the floor near us a second time, and this bullet came close to Noor’s feet and made her scream. We all backed up through the cage door, Horatio included. Now the other man fired a shot, his bullet biting the air just above our heads.

  We retreated into the dark. The men threw the door shut and locked it. Then they pulled a second door down over the cage, this one solid and heavy, and it blocked out the light as it slammed closed.

  It felt like bolts of lightning were shooting through my stomach. We could hear the hollows moving around farther inside the hold. I cursed myself for letting Noor and Emma come with us. Now they would die needlessly, when the only sacrifice required was Horatio and me. And at that moment I would have happily given my life to rid the world of every last
hollow. But no victory was worth Noor’s life, or Emma’s.

  First we smelled them, an enveloping wave of rotten meat stench choking us. Then we heard their teeth crunching through bone, slurping and grunting as they finished whatever meal the Hawaiian-shirted wight had just delivered to them. Then Emma lit a flame and we saw them, all massed together at the other end of an enormous cargo room. They were crouched on a rusted floor with their backs to us, feasting. I looked for any possible exit or escape, but there were none. The floor was a seamless expanse of iron and the walls were ribbed metal curving up to meet a high ceiling. There were no doors but the one we’d come through, nothing at all in there but us, the hollows, and a few metal crates stacked in a corner.

  “Jacob,” Noor whispered. “Please tell me you figured out how to control these—”

  “I didn’t,” I said, feeling terrified and pathetic. “And even if I had, it would only be one at a time. And there are—”

  “Dozens,” Emma hissed. Because she could see them, too. We all could.

  “What do we do now?” Noor whispered. “Use the explosives?”

  “They’re too powerful,” I said. “We’ll all die.”

  “I don’t know that we have a choice,” said Horatio.

  And then one of them spun, locked its black eyes on us, and spat a half-chewed limb from its mouth. It had smelled us. Felt us. And then another hollow turned, and another, and soon they were all staring, their half-finished meal forgotten.

  We weren’t just another morsel. We were peculiar. Our souls were the sustenance hollowgast craved more than anything.

  They started toward us. Unhurried, because it was clear we had nowhere to run.

  “You talk to them . . . ,” said Noor, gripping Horatio by the elbow.

  “I’ll try,” he said. He barked something at them. The hollows shuffled to a confused stop, pausing like a crowd waiting at a don’t walk sign. “At best I can keep them at bay only a short time. My power over them is nothing compared with Jacob’s.”

  “I told you—I don’t have any power over them!” I shouted, frustrated with Horatio but furious at myself. “I don’t know their language!”

  The hollows moaned strangely, then started toward us again, slow and wary.

  “Your connection is deeper than language,” Horatio said. “If you can manage to access it.” He shouted at the hollows again, but this time only some of them stopped.

  “Jacob.” Emma turned to look at me, her expression wooden with fear. “Remember in the wights’ fortress, when you fell into that nest of hollows and came out able to control all of them at once?”

  I shook my head. “That was different. We’d all gotten knocked out by sleep dust . . .”

  She’d extinguished one hand and was using it to dig frantically in her pocket. “This is the last of her—I saved it for an emergency,” she said, fishing out a thumb half wrapped in cotton and thrusting it at me. “Do it again. Just like last time.”

  I hesitated. “But that was different. There are too many of them, and no way to spread the dust—”

  “Yes, there is.” Horatio pushed the explosives into my hand. “Tie that thumb around this brick. Then repeat after me.”

  I knew what he was thinking, and it was madness. The explosives were too strong. This would kill everything in the room, not put us to sleep. But since there was no alternative except waiting to die, my hands obeyed. I took the thumb from Emma, the brick of explosives from Horatio, and bound them together with string. As I worked, Horatio was shouting at the hollows, trying to slow them down. Then he shouted at me, slotting English phrases between the ones in Hollow: “Repeat after me!”

  I tried. He was talking so fast, using words my mind didn’t recognize.

  “You’re thinking too much!” Horatio barked.

  I finished tying the thumb to the explosives, which freed up all my attention. My words started to flow, began to match his. I didn’t know what we were saying, but the doubling of my commands with his seemed to have more effect on the hollows than Horatio’s voice alone.

  While he shouted, he used his shoulder to push Emma, Noor, and me into a tight huddle. Then he snatched the explosives from me, wound his arm back, and threw them as far as he could. I heard the bundle bounce off the back wall and land somewhere in the opposite corner.

  The hollows were close now. A wall of them was shuffling toward us, hungry and slavering, my and Horatio’s shouts the only thing keeping them from tearing us apart that very moment. But I could feel their will gaining strength and Horatio’s beginning to fade.

  Noor pressed into me and Emma. “I love you guys,” Noor said, crying. “You’re like my family. Okay?”

  I was shouting guttural commands at the top of my lungs. But I nodded and hugged her tight, and Emma, who couldn’t put her arms around us without setting us on fire, held her hands away while pressing her back into the little knot we’d formed.

  “We love you, too,” Emma said. “This is going to work, right?”

  “Of course it’s going work,” I said, because I didn’t want despair to be the last thing they felt before dying.

  “HAND ON THE DETONATOR!” Horatio shouted between commands in Hollow.

  I began to understand, slowly, what he was saying. Not stop, or sleep, or get back, but gentle, easy now, slowly. And then, as he turned to face me and pressed himself into our huddle: arms, gentle, give me your arms.

  Horatio reached up his own arm and touched Emma’s, and told her with a look and a nod that it was time to extinguish her flame. She did, plunging the room into dark again, and I felt one of her still-warm hands on my back.

  And then, still echoing Horatio’s every shout, I felt a hollowgast wrap its arms around us, and its tongues. I prayed for a quick death as its noxious breath rolled over us.

  But the hollow didn’t close its jaws, didn’t bite down, didn’t squeeze the breath and life out of us with its encircling tongues.

  Gentle. Come forth. Gentle. Give me your arms.

  And another did, and another, all wrapping their bodies around us. I could feel their hunger like the desperation of a starving man, could feel them dreaming of killing us, cracking open our skulls, draining our souls. But one after another, they merely added themselves to our knot, and after a minute we were ringed around with their open, ragged-breathing mouths, gagging in their hot stink.

  I realized then what Horatio was doing. He was fashioning their armored bodies into a shield. But he was tiring, his voice growing hoarse. I felt a row of teeth dig into my shoulder and start to bite down, and a ripple of sharp pain made me scream, Stop, stop, stop, in this broken Hollow dialect I hardly knew, which was enough to stay his teeth but not to make them retract.

  “NOW?” I shouted to Horatio.

  “Not yet!” he said. Then between commands in Hollow, he said, “Think of yourself as a bridge . . . a conduit . . . a vessel to contain their minds . . .”

  The tongues tightened around us, suddenly and viciously, and I heard Noor gasp and Horatio shriek, along with the sound of breaking bone—and his voice dropped away. I didn’t need light to see that he was badly injured and didn’t need him to tell me what to do.

  I clenched the trigger in my palm. And all went black.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  For a long time there was only darkness, and the sound of rushing water, and the hazy sensation of floating. I had lost myself, though I couldn’t remember how.

  My ears rang, sharp and constant, like feedback from a microphone. That and the dark and the rushing water were all there was, for a long time, until another sound joined them: a girl’s voice.

  Arms tugged at my body. And then someone slapped me, and a constellation of stars flashed in the dark, and with them new sensations:

  I am cold.

  I am almost completely submerged in cold
water.

  My vision began to return. I was in a room filling with rolling water and reeling shadows. I saw a frightened face cowled in strands of wet hair. Her dark eyes flashed in a glimmer of firelight. They widened when she saw me look at her, and she shouted my name. I opened my mouth to reply and swallowed salt water instead.

  My vision came and went. I vomited. I heard my name again, shouted by another. Caught glimpses of a room filled with waves and dim, thrashing forms, and a girl cupping a living flame in her palm.

  Someone was holding me from behind, preventing me from drowning.

  I am here but elsewhere, too:

  I was spidered into a corner, deaf and terrified, my lower half flowing a river of black blood

  I was underwater in pieces, fading

  I was floating on my back in the churning water, two hundred pounds of angry, taut muscle, waiting

  I was all of them at once

  Jacob, can you hear me?

  Yes, I tried to say, but my mind was splintered fifty ways; I couldn’t find the body that my voice lived in

  Jacob, God, please.

  We were in a boat. Trapped in the lightless belly of a ship. In a room filling fast with water.

  Ah. There I am.

  Jacob, we’re going to drown.

  I found my tongue

  I said: No, we’re not.

  I could move my arms. My legs.

  My body.

  And then,

  splintering,

  I can move

  all

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