The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  Addison jumped in after her, and with another flash was gone.

  “Go, Mr. Jacob!” Bronwyn yelled, and because I knew she could hold her own against any normal ever born, I did.

  Everything went black, and for the second time in as many hours, I was weightless.

  We tumbled out of the broom closet in a tangle of flailing limbs and sprawled across thick red carpet. I caught an elbow on the chin and felt a wet dog nose swipe my face, then narrowly missed getting punched by Bronwyn as she thrashed free of the pile. “Unhand us, you animal-torturing bastards!” she was shouting, her eyes wild and unfocused, and she pulled back her fist and was about to knock one of us unconscious when Addison tackled her with his forepaws and pushed her backward.

  “Get ahold of yourself, girl, we’re back in the Panloopticon!”

  He licked her face. Bronwyn’s arms went limp at her sides. “We are?” she said meekly. “It all happened so quickly, I lost track of where I was.” She took us in. A smile bloomed across her face. “My goodness. It’s really you.”

  “I’m so happy to see you guys, I can’t even—” Noor started to say, but the rest was muffled by the folds of Bronwyn’s homemade dress.

  “We thought we’d lost you for good this time!” Bronwyn cried, hugging us both. “When you disappeared again without telling anyone we thought for certain you’d been kidnapped!” She stood without letting go, hauling Noor and me up with her. “Horace had a dream you’d gotten your souls sucked out through your feet! And then the desolations began, and—”

  “Bronwyn!” I shouted into the sandpapery fabric of her dress.

  “For heaven’s sake, let them breathe,” said Addison.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Bronwyn said as she released us.

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” I wheezed.

  “So very sorry,” she said. “I get carried away, don’t I?”

  “It’s fine,” Noor said, and she gave Bronwyn a light side-hug as proof there were no hard feelings.

  Addison chided Bronwyn, “Don’t apologize so much, it makes you seem timid.”

  Bronwyn nodded and said “Sorry” again, and Addison clicked his tongue, shook his head, and turned to Noor and me. “Now, where have you been?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” I said.

  “Never mind then, we’ve got to get you to the ymbrynes,” Addison said. “They need to know you’ve been found.”

  Noor asked if they were okay.

  “They’ll be better now that you’re back,” Bronwyn allowed.

  “Everything’s still here?” I cast a wary glance down the hall.

  “Yes . . .” Bronwyn began to look worried.

  “There hasn’t been an attack?” Noor said.

  Addison’s ears pricked up. “An attack? By whom?”

  A tightness that had been building in my chest began to loosen. “Thank God.”

  “There’s been no attack,” Bronwyn said, “though honestly, we’ve been so preoccupied with finding you that we might not have noticed if bombs started falling.”

  “I want to know what you mean by all these strange questions,” Addison said, raising up on his hind legs to squint at me.

  Noor glanced at me, uncertain.

  “Maybe nothing,” I said, rubbing my face. “It’s been a long night. I don’t mean to be mysterious, but I think you’re right, we should talk to Miss Peregrine first.”

  I didn’t want to spread panic. And there was still a small part of me that hoped I was wrong about Caul. That he was still where he belonged, condemned to spend forever trapped in the Library of Souls.

  “At least tell us where you’ve been,” Bronwyn pleaded. “We’ve been working day and night to find you. The ymbrynes have had us patrolling every loop where you two might conceivably have disappeared to. Emma, Enoch, Addison, and me have been on rotating shifts of your house in Florida since yesterday evening.”

  “Even in that tempest!” said Addison. “And then those sadistic, pole-wielding constables surprised us—”

  “Since yesterday?” Noor said. “That can’t be right . . .”

  “How long have we been gone?” I finally thought to ask.

  Addison’s furry brows pinched together. “These are odd questions indeed.”

  “Two days,” said Bronwyn. “Since the afternoon before last.”

  Noor fell back a step. “Two days.”

  That’s how long we were falling, I thought, and for a moment I felt that weightless, bodiless sensation come over me again. Two days.

  “We went to find V,” I said, “that much I can tell you.”

  “And we did,” Noor added, which was more than I wanted to say.

  Bronwyn gasped, but didn’t interrupt.

  “It didn’t go well,” I said. “We got ejected from her loop somehow and woke up on my grandfather’s porch in Florida.”

  “By our winged elders,” Bronwyn said quietly. “That’s unbelievable.”

  “Quite literally,” Addison agreed. “It violates every known law of loopology. Now let’s go before we ruin the carpet with our wet.” And he nudged us down the hall, washed in the wan gray light of a Devil’s Acre morning.

  “You really found her?” Bronwyn asked as we walked.

  Noor nodded. Bronwyn seemed to understand that something terrible had happened, but didn’t pry. She cast a worried look in my direction. “I’m really sorry,” she said again.

  Passing a window, I looked outside and was met with a strange sight: a dusting of grayish fluff coated the streets, the rooftops, the Acre’s few stunted trees. More fell gently through the air. It was snowing in Devil’s Acre. But the Acre was a loop, and the weather did not change from one day to the next, and so it couldn’t have been snowing.

  Bronwyn caught me staring. “Ashes,” she said.

  “It’s one of the desolations,” explained Addison. “That’s what Miss Avocet calls them.”

  So all was not as we had left it; all was not well.

  “When did that start?” I asked.

  But then someone was screeching, “Is it them? Is that them?” and two people came racing out of the stairwell.

  Emma. Emma and Enoch, running toward us in black raincoats smeared with ash. My heart expanded at the sight of them.

  “Jacob! Noor!” Emma was shouting. “Thank the birds, thank the heavenly peculiar birds!”

  Again we were wrapped in arms, spun in circles, peppered with questions. “Where the devil have you been?” Emma demanded, her mood flipping between ecstatic and angry. “For a visit to your parents, without leaving so much as a note?!”

  “You ruddy idiots, you had us thinking you were dead!” Enoch berated us. “Again!”

  “We nearly were,” Noor said.

  Emma attacked me with another hug, then shoved me to arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Well? You look like drowned rats.”

  “They’ve been through hell,” said Bronwyn.

  “We should really talk to Miss Peregrine,” I said apologetically.

  Enoch curled his lip. “Why? You didn’t bother telling her you were leaving.”

  “She’s in her new office, upstairs,” Emma said, and we started down the hall again.

  “They found the hollow-hunter,” Addison blurted, apparently unable to contain himself.

  Emma’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

  “Where is she?” Enoch said suspiciously.

  “Don’t ask,” muttered Bronwyn.

  Emma blanched. She was about to ask me something more when we came to a throng of people lined up in the hall, and we stopped talking as we passed them. They looked like new arrivals, both wide-eyed from the strangeness of their surroundings and dazed from recent loop crossovers, all dressed in clothes from different eras and parts of the world. Some could easily have passed for normal
s: a young couple who looked like English gentry and had the bored expressions to match; a boy tapping his foot and checking his pocket watch; a glaring baby in an old Victorian baby stroller. Others were so manifestly peculiar they’d have had a difficult time living anywhere outside of a circus sideshow or a loop: a bearded girl and her mother, a man in fancy dress who had a parasitic twin growing out of his chest, a freckled girl who had piercing eyes but lacked a mouth. They were lined up to get their transit papers stamped by one of Sharon’s passport control functionaries.

  “New joiners from the outer loops,” Enoch whispered. “The ymbrynes have been inviting all sorts to the Acre, not that we can fit many more. We’re cheek by jowl as it is.” I asked why and he gave an irritable roll of his shoulders. “I’ve no idea why anyone would want to come here. Any other loop would be better than this.”

  It made me wonder if the ymbrynes already knew something bad was coming and were gathering the most vulnerable peculiars in the Acre for their protection.

  We were nearly past the crowd when I thought I heard my name and looked back, and caught about half of them staring at me. The moment I turned away again I swear I heard the glaring baby say, in a distinctly not-baby voice, “That is Jacob Portman!”

  When the throng was behind us Emma finally asked her question. “What happened to V?”

  “I promise we’ll tell you everything,” I said, “just as soon as we talk to Miss P.”

  Emma sighed. “Tell me this, at least. Did you have something to do with the hail of bones yesterday?” She touched a purpling bruise behind her ear, the sight of which made me wince.

  “The what?” Noor said.

  “The desolations,” Addison stage-whispered.

  “There was a hail of bones yesterday morning,” Bronwyn said matter-of-factly. “Rain of blood last evening.”

  “More of a drizzle,” said Emma, shouldering open the stairwell door and holding it for the rest of us. “And now the ashes.”

  “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Addison said. “That’s Shakespeare.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  On the top floor of Bentham’s house, above the libraries and dormitories and snaking halls of Panloopticon doors, were his attic of peculiar treasures and his office, which in his permanent absence Miss Peregrine had claimed as her own. “She comes here to think,” Bronwyn explained, her voice echoing in the stairwell. “She says it’s the only place in the whole bloody Acre she can get a moment’s peace and quiet.” At the landing she pushed the door open and bellowed down the stairs for Enoch to quit lagging.

  We wended our way through rooms containing Bentham’s museum of peculiar objects. When I’d first seen the attic the displays had been hidden under sheets and stowed away in crates, but now the boxes had been pried open and the sheets torn away. The effect of seeing his entire collection at once, uncovered and washed with ghostly, ash-filtered light, was dizzying. If the snaking Panloopticon hallways were the peculiar world’s Grand Central Station, then the attic floors above them were its mixed-up and mothballed Museum of Natural History. Pathways had been cleared by double- and triple-stacking many of the displays, and my gaze tripped from case to case as we shuffled single file through the narrow aisles.

  I tried to stay focused on our meeting with Miss Peregrine and how we would break our awful news to her, but the oddities passing inches from my face conspired to distract me. Something rattled inside the shadows of a fancy dollhouse locked inexplicably inside a barred cage. A case filled with glass eyes stared back, shifting in their display rests to follow me as I hurried by. A hum drew my attention to the ceiling, where a ring of small rocks slowly orbited a thick black book that hovered in the air.

  I turned to Noor and whispered, “You okay?” and she returned a tiny smile and a shrug that said, As I can be. Then she narrowed her eyes at something over my shoulder.

  It was an apparently empty glass box. Above it a sign read THE ULTIMATE AND PENULTIMATE FLATULATIONS OF SIR JOHN SOANE, BUILDER OF THIS HOUSE.

  “What was this Bentham guy’s deal?” Noor said. “Why’d he collect all this crap?”

  “He was an obsessive, clearly,” said Addison. “With far too much time on his hands.”

  “It ain’t crap,” a sharp voice said from across the room, and we all snapped our heads to see Nim appear from a patch of shadow. “Master Bentham’s peculiarium is treasurous and precious and I’d like to you leave at once, if it pleases you—or even if it don’t!”

  He chased us onward, flicking at our heels with a broom.

  As the others laughed about Nim, I wondered about Bentham. Was he just another obsessive nerd who, thanks to the Panloopticon he helped develop, happened to have access to vast swaths of the peculiar universe? Or was he squirreling away evidence of a world he feared his brother might one day obliterate? And if that was something he’d worried over, why hadn’t he done more to stop it?

  Shoved into a corner, I spied the person-sized cases that had once contained people—living ones—paralyzed by some obscure temporal reaction and imprisoned here in a kind of sadistic wax museum. The kernel of pity I’d begun to feel for Bentham evaporated. Granted, in some sense he’d been a prisoner himself, kidnapped and forced against his will to work for the wights. And yes, he hated his brother and worked in various subtle ways to subvert Caul’s aims. But his efforts had not been enough. Noor and I weren’t entirely to blame for Caul’s resurrection. In the years he lived here Bentham must have had opportunities to destroy the Panloopticon or, better yet, kill his brother. But he hadn’t. What might he have achieved for peculiarkind if he’d been toiling alongside his sister for all those years rather than Caul?

  The last of Bentham’s museum rooms had been turned into a photo studio, its walls covered in framed portraits. A cross-eyed photographer was dashing between his camera, a giant black box stamped with the words MINISTRY OF PHONO- AND PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORDS, and his subject, a small girl posing woodenly on a chair. A cluster of nervous kids waited nearby to have their turn, several clutching newly stamped temporal transit papers. The Ministry was documenting them almost as soon as they arrived, which wasn’t the usual procedure. As if they worried there might not be another chance.

  We left the studio and came into a high-ceilinged vestibule. The walls here were so thickly covered in gilt-framed paintings that I could hardly tell where the door to Bentham’s office was, until I heard Miss Peregrine’s voice shouting from the other side of it: “Well then, what the devil are you up to down there? It certainly doesn’t seem like you know what you’re doing!”

  “I think that’s Perplexus she’s slagging off,” Emma said.

  “Yes, obviously the work is important!” Miss Peregrine said. “But you’re going to break Devil’s Acre if you continue failing this way, so either fix it, or find somewhere else to do your blasted experiments!”

  “Maybe we should come back later,” Bronwyn said.

  Enoch shushed us all and cupped his ear against the door—which then flew open. Miss Peregrine stood in the frame, the color high in her cheeks. “You’re back!” she cried, and, flinging out her arms, she engulfed us in a flutter of black fabric. “I thought . . . I thought . . . Well, never mind what I thought. You’re back.”

  I caught a glimpse of Perplexus in the room behind her, but whatever drama we’d interrupted had been all but forgotten.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” I whispered, and her stack of inky hair brushed my cheek as she nodded vigorously in reply. I’d often felt relief at seeing Miss Peregrine but never so much as I did right then, having spent the past several hours trying and failing to imagine the world, and my life, without her. And it struck me, in a way that seemed both obvious and profound, that what I felt for this strange, small woman was love. I clung to her for another moment after Noor disengaged from a nervous hug, both to assure myself she was there and because
I was realizing with some astonishment how frail she seemed through the voluminous folds of her dress. It frightened me how much weight rested on such slight shoulders.

  She let me go and stepped back to take us in. “My goodness, you’re soaked to the bone.”

  “Me and Addison found ’em at Mr. Jacob’s house just ten minutes ago,” said Bronwyn, “and brought ’em straight to you.”

  “Thank you, Bronwyn, you did the right thing.”

  “Oh, you dears, you poor creatures!” called Miss Avocet from inside the room, and I looked past Miss Peregrine to see the elder ymbryne sitting by the window in a wheelchair. She gestured for us to come in, then snapped at two ymbrynes-in-training hovering nearby. “Ladies, fetch some clean towels, fresh clothes, Russian tea, and something hot to eat.”

  They chorused, “Yes, miss,” and dipped their heads. One was named Sigrid, a serious-looking girl with perfectly round glasses, and the other was Francesca, Miss Avocet’s promising favorite. Enoch sighed and turned his head to watch Francesca go as she slipped past us. Then he caught me looking and immediately resumed his usual scowl.

  “We need to talk to you in private,” I said to Miss Peregrine.

  She nodded, and I wondered if she already knew what we’d come to tell her.

  “Private?” Enoch’s scowl deepened. I could see he wanted to argue, but held back; perhaps the memory of her shouting at Perplexus was too fresh.

  “I need you to go round up the others,” Miss Peregrine said to our friends. “Tell them Jacob and Noor have been found. Bring them all back to Ditch House and wait for us there.”

  “Millard and Olive are searching the New York loop,” Emma said, consulting a thin watch on her wrist. “But they should be back any minute.”

  “Go get them now, please,” Miss Peregrine said. “Don’t wait.”

  “Yes, miss.” Emma gave Miss P a look that seemed to beg her not to keep them in the dark too long. “See you soon.”