The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  “Or leapfrog somewhere even older and more oscuro,” suggested Perplexus.

  “Yes! We could find somewhere to hide in, say, medieval Spain,” said Horace.

  “Or Italia,” Perplexus mumbled into his shirt collar.

  Emma was shaking her head. “He found us in Miss Tern’s old collapsed loop, and right quick. And there were only a handful of us there. I don’t think ninety-nine peculiars would stay hidden long, no matter where we went.”

  There were nods of reluctant assent.

  “Unless you created a new loop somewhere,” said Olive. “One Caul knows nothing about.”

  “Too many of our wards are loop-trapped,” Miss Wren said. “We have to find an existing loop to hide in, one at least a hundred years old, to keep everyone from aging forward.”

  “If only the damned reset was safe and we could scatter into the present,” said Miss Cuckoo.

  Perplexus’s head sunk still lower. “I am sorry, signore. We truly tried our best.”

  “It isn’t your fault, sir,” said Millard, to which there were more nods of assent.

  Fiona was whispering to Hugh. “She says to hell with safety,” Hugh relayed. “These are desperate times.”

  “We’ll never be that desperate,” said Miss Peregrine. “If the reset reaction goes wrong, not only could our wards be killed, but the resulting loop collapse could flatten a square mile of present-day London. I’d say we’ve done enough to terrify the normals as it is.”

  Fiona scowled.

  I imagined what Enoch would’ve said, if he’d been there and not recuperating in a dormitory bed. “Well then,” I said, crossing my arms, “what?”

  “You still have me.” Noor rose from the couch where we’d been sitting and stepped toward the ymbrynes. “Has everyone forgotten about the prophecy?”

  “No one has forgotten,” said Miss Peregrine. “But you’re the only light-eater left standing, Miss Pradesh, and we still don’t know how best to use you.”

  “We can’t let what happened to Julius and Sebbie happen to you,” Bronwyn said.

  “You’re our ace in the hole,” said Hugh. “Our one shot.”

  Noor’s jaw clenched tight. I could see her biting back some bitter comment. Instead she just sighed and sat down.

  “Then where does that leave us?” I said. “Running for our lives again, and giving up the Panloopticon to Caul.”

  “Just like we said we’d never do,” said Emma.

  “Caul’s ruined us,” Claire said, near tears. “And poisoned the world against us, too.”

  “It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” Miss Peregrine said quietly. “A bitter pill indeed.”

  “And now we’re about to be exiled from the place we’d already been exiled to,” moaned Horace. “Is there no home for us anywhere on the whole cursed earth?”

  Miss Peregrine drew up her chin. “We will find one, Mr. Somnusson. One day we will find a real home. I promise you.”

  “For now,” said Miss Cuckoo, turning to face a loop map they’d pinned to the wall, “we must find another temporary one.”

  “Excuse me,” came a voice from the edge of the room. Horatio was standing politely in the open door. He was scrubbed clean and had changed into a new pair of pants and an oddly summery, wide-collared shirt from one of Bentham’s closets, one sleeve of which hung empty. “I know a place you’ll be safe.”

  Miss Cuckoo planted her hands on her hips. “I am not taking advice from a wight on this matter.”

  “You can trust him,” I said. “He worked for my grandfather’s partner H, and he’s saved our lives I don’t know how many times.”

  Miss Cuckoo glanced skeptically at Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine was gazing out of the library’s high window. Beyond the semi-translucent green shield, Caul’s fingers were curling around the building. He seemed to be wrapping us in a giant hug, and as he did the sound of his wind rose ever higher. The air inside the house had begun to chill.

  “My brother will not be content to wait,” she said. “He will try and drive us out, if he can.” She turned to Horatio. “Please, tell us what you know. And do close the door.”

  Horatio shut the door and crossed the room to stand before the ymbrynes. “My master, Harold Fraker King, spoke once of a special loop in the Everglades swamps of Florida. An old loop that few are aware of. It is a well-protected secret, a place where peculiars have sometimes gone to seek refuge in times of extraordinary persecution. The hollow-hunters had an emergency protocol which involved an evacuation to this loop, and Harold Fraker King told me the directions to it were in Abraham Portman’s home, among his most guarded possessions.”

  “In the bunker,” I said. “He’s got all kinds of books down there.”

  “One’s literally called Emergency Protocols,” Noor said.

  “And this swamp loop, it’s quite old?” asked Miss Wren.

  “Quite,” replied Horatio.

  Noor snapped her fingers. “We can take the pocket loop to Jacob’s backyard.”

  “That’s the one loop Caul isn’t intimately familiar with,” Miss Peregrine said. “Because I made it.”

  “And we connected it to the Panloopticon, not him,” said Miss Wren, who I could tell was warming up to the idea.

  At least it was a workable idea, something that was in short supply. And, I thought, if Caul did manage to follow us there, we could blow him to hell with my grandfather’s home defense system . . . if anything was left of it. It might at least slow him down a little.

  “I’ll destroy the pocket loop as we shut it behind us,” said Miss Peregrine. “So he cannot follow.”

  “He’ll have other ways of reaching Florida,” said Miss Cuckoo.

  “Other ways will take time,” said Miss Wren. “Enough time for us to disappear.”

  “And find ourselves right back where we were in 1908!” Miss Cuckoo shouted. “Refugees again, trembling inside a loop while Caul runs free, poisoning the world against us!”

  “The fickle opinions of normals do not rank high among my worries,” said Miss Peregrine, “when compared to the wrath of my resurrected brother.”

  “We will be refugees,” said Miss Wren, “but we will be alive, Isabel.” She tried to grasp Miss Cuckoo’s arm, but the other ymbryne turned away.

  “I say we stay and fight,” said Miss Cuckoo. “Fleeing now will only postpone a war with Caul, and allow him the chance to grow a new army in the meanwhile.”

  “But it will also allow us the chance to learn how best to fight him,” said Horace. “We’ve hardly had a moment to breathe since he came back, much less study his vulnerabilities.”

  “He’ll never be more vulnerable than he is right now,” Noor said, her eyes glinting. “If you just let me out there . . .”

  “Does he look vulnerable to you?” Horace said, pointing to the window. Caul’s arms and his fingers had now wrapped twice around the building; he was growing into a giant, and I wondered, if he got big enough, whether he might swallow the house whole.

  “You’re not going out there, and that’s final,” Miss Peregrine said, her eyes wide and angry. “Miss Pradesh, you may be our kind’s last hope for salvation, and I cannot allow you to gamble your life away now because passions and fears are running hot—”

  “Running hot indeed!” said Miss Avocet. We turned to see Bettina wheeling her chair through the door. She looked deathly pale, as if the exertion of speaking at full volume was draining her.

  “Esmerelda!” said Miss Wren, surprised. “I thought you were resting!”

  “I’ve been drinking Perplexus’s coffee,” she said. “You know I can’t afford to sleep. None of us can, or even this meager shield we’ve raised may fall.”

  “I defer to you, mistress,” said Miss Cuckoo, bowing at the waist. “What would you have us do?”

  Bettina parked the e
lder ymbryne’s chair by the darkened hearth. Miss Avocet pulled her shawl around her and straightened, painfully, as best she could. “If we run he may still find us. If we stay and fight and lose again, those who survive will be enslaved and forced to do Caul’s evil work.” She fixed each ymbryne with a grave stare. “Our mandate is to keep our wards alive—but not at any cost. Caul wants to make the world a graveyard, and we his executioners. That we cannot allow.”

  “Please,” Noor said. “I know what to do, I have to take his light. And run with it, this time. Sebbie didn’t run, she just stood there . . .”

  “Miss Pradesh, you must calm down,” said Miss Avocet. “I do think Julius and Sebbie had the right idea. Caul’s blue light is almost certainly the key to his resurrected soul. But they were striking at the branches of his power, not the root.”

  “And where’s the root?”

  “Inside the Library of Souls. I imagine that’s where his blue light comes from, and where his cyclonic half-self originates.”

  “But getting there isn’t—”

  “I thought there was a door here,” Noor said.

  “It was destroyed,” said Miss Peregrine.

  “And there our discussion must end,” said Miss Avocet. “We will go to Florida. As soon as the Panloopticon can be repaired and made stable. It sustained some damage earlier today.”

  “And how long will that take?” Emma asked.

  “I’ve just been speaking with Sharon and Miss Blackbird. They tell me it could be several hours. So I suggest everyone who isn’t an ymbryne get some sleep.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Night stole over the Acre. Daylight dimmed from the windows but the green glow of the Quilt never did, casting a sickly pallor over everything. The gaslights had stopped working, no doubt thanks to Caul, so Emma circulated through the rooms and halls lighting candles. Sharon, Perplexus, and most of the ymbrynes were working in the basement to repair the Panloopticon, and we could hear the clanking of their tools through the floor. The wight that had gotten into the house when we’d gone to Miss Tern’s loop had destroyed not only a large section of the lower Panloopticon hallway, reducing many of its doorways to splinters, it had also burst a crucial pipeline connecting the loop rooms to the machinery downstairs. Fixing it was straightforward enough, Sharon said, but the work was painstaking and slow.

  Caul hadn’t moved from outside the house. He was singing some old song in the ancient tongue, had been repeating it over and over again for an hour, his voice audible through the walls and so low in frequency it was almost subliminal. Was it an incantation? Psychological torture? Or had he finally and completely lost his mind? Meanwhile, his fingers had grown so long that he’d now wrapped the building with them ten times over, and the view out most every window was of those overlapping digits, squirming and flexing like a nest of snakes. It seemed that if he couldn’t drive us out, he meant to suffocate us.

  He couldn’t, of course, at least not while the ymbrynes’ miniature Quilt remained intact. It also prevented him from making physical desolations inside the house, but there was another, more insidious kind of desolation he had conjured to torment us with: one of mind. The air in the house grew stale and cold, the atmosphere oppressive. Had it been less intense, and not accompanied by a strange, skin-crawling itch, I would’ve chalked it up to exhaustion and the emotional aftermath of a lost battle. But this felt unnatural, and so palpable you could almost rake it from the air with your fingers. Caul was infecting the house with despair.

  The ymbrynes had given all their wards orders to try and sleep, though in shifts, so there would be enough of us left awake to warn the others in case of sudden emergency. Few of us could do more than rest our eyes. We lay in a makeshift dormitory that had been set up in the small library, a room stuffed with overflow books from Bentham’s main library. The sofas and study desks had been removed and replaced by military-issue cots.

  There were ninety-nine of us in one large room. Some were talking quietly. A few did manage to sleep, or fake it. Others were being looked after by Rafael, who had recruited the American girl Angelica to be his assistant, a small dark cloud trailing them as they dragged a rolling table of poultices and remedies from bed to bed. In the corner, one of Miss Blackbird’s wards picked gently at a banjo and sang, soft and mournful.

  I lay on my back praying for sleep, but my eyes seemed propped open. I stared at rococo angels painted on the ceiling. My thoughts wandered, turned morbid. The angels blurred into an angry, torch-wielding mob. I was dreaming with my eyes open. I dreamed of men in suits with killer smiles and lists of names going door to door. Of camps ringed by razor wire and guard towers. Not the ones my great-grandparents had been condemned to, but new ones, built just for us—for peculiars.

  At the edge of my mind I heard a voice, a voice of infinite calm and reason, saying over and over: Come here. I want to tell you something.

  I bolted upright, gasping, and threw off my thin covers.

  “You okay?” Noor asked from the next cot. “You’ve been tossing.”

  “Had a nightmare,” I mumbled. “Or something.”

  “Did you hear a voice telling you to go outside?” Emma asked, sitting up suddenly in her own bed.

  “I did!” Millard said before I could answer. “Most unsettling.”

  Emma hugged herself. “I thought I was dreaming.”

  “I’m fr-freezing,” Claire said, wrapping herself in sheets and shivering.

  “God, me too,” Noor said, her breath pluming, though it hadn’t been ten seconds earlier. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Caul’s desolating our brains,” said Bronwyn. “Trying to make us give up hope.”

  “Or let him in,” said Hugh. “I hope someone’s guarding the door.”

  “Well, it isn’t going to work,” Olive said bravely.

  Claire’s teeth were chattering. “I hope not.”

  “We just have to hang on until morning,” Olive said, sidling next to Claire and rubbing her arms for warmth. “Then we’ll go to Florida, and no one’s ever cold in Florida.”

  I smiled, something I hadn’t done in what felt like a long time. I loved Olive and her irrepressible optimism. I loved them all.

  “What do you think, Horace?” I turned to my well-dressed friend. He was sitting beside the bed where Julius lay unconscious. I hoped to turn his mind to something happier. “Ready for a beach day?”

  “Somnusson could catch a sunburn in full shade,” said Enoch, mumbling through split lips from his bed. It was the first I’d heard him speak since he’d been hurt, and my heart leapt. “I’d like to know if he’s had any more useful dreams. That one you sleep-narrated to Sharon was a cracker.”

  Horace didn’t say anything. He was staring at me. Or through me, to be more precise.

  “Horace?” I creaked out of bed, every joint in my body complaining, and waved a hand in front of his face. “Did you fall asleep on us?”

  Suddenly he went rigid in his chair. His legs shot out, his mouth opened and closed soundlessly, and then he pointed at me and shouted, “MONSTER!”

  I stumbled back in surprise.

  “CREATURE FROM HELL!”

  Everyone looked shocked. “Horace, knock off that bellowing!” Olive said.

  People were staring. Horace was still shouting. “Beast spat from the gullet of Abaton! Fashioned from a thousand dead souls! It shakes the dirt from its flanks and rises, monster of dust and carrion—”

  Then someone slapped him, hard, and he went silent, eyes wide.

  It was Miss Peregrine, flushed from running and standing above him with her hand ready to slap him again, if need be. “Everything is fine!” she shouted to the room at large. “Mind your business, please!”

  Horace was blinking and rubbing his cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Somnusson.”

 
“Quite all right.” He gave a tiny shake of his head. “Don’t know what got hold of me.” He glanced at me meekly. “I’m very sorry, Jacob.”

  “Maybe you were dreaming about Jacob’s hollows,” said Emma.

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “I’m sure that’s what it was.” But he looked shaken, as if that wasn’t quite the truth.

  Miss Peregrine crouched beside him and put a hand on his knee. “Are you sure, Horace?”

  Horace met her eyes, then nodded.

  “My brother’s mental suggestions can’t hurt you,” Miss Peregrine said. “He can make things unpleasant for us, but he can do nothing to cause us real harm. Remember that.” Someone on the other side of the room woke up screaming—Wreck Donovan, I think it was. Miss Peregrine stood up. She had ninety-nine other peculiars to look after. “This will all be over soon,” she said, and hurried off to see about Wreck.

  Horace started apologizing to me again, but I was feeling strange and irritable and didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I’ll see you guys in a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” Noor asked.

  “For a wander,” I said. “I need to clear my head.”

  She slid her legs out of the cot. “Want company?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, and though I knew I’d hurt her feelings, I needed very badly, in that moment, to be alone.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I wandered halls lit by candles and crawling with shadows, jumping at shapes I mistook for human. There was an itch in my brain, the after-echo of a voice in my head. Not Caul’s—someone else’s.

  Come here.

  That wasn’t the only thing bothering me. Horace’s strange outburst had gotten under my skin. Sometimes his dreams meant nothing, but more often they were loaded with meaning that wasn’t apparent right away. He had called me a monster, and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe I had spent so much time inhabiting the minds of monsters that they had come to inhabit mine, as well. Or maybe I was a monster for bringing us so close to victory, only to fail. Despite all my efforts, despite all our successes in battle, Caul was closer than ever to destroying us. In time he would raise another army of hollows, and he’d make them even stronger, even harder to control, and he would never again make the mistake of bottling them up in a small space. And with us preparing to run, and all his enemies gone, he was about to have all the time he needed.