The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  “Perhaps,” Miss Wren said doubtfully. “But we’re dealing with an increasingly disaffected population of peculiars here, and Caul’s message of peculiar supremacy is perniciously attractive to certain people. That’s how he attracted his earliest followers. And remember, some of our number are ex-mercenaries who lived in the Acre while it was under wight control. I doubt they would welcome Caul’s return, but they might not dread it, either. Nor fight very hard to prevent it.”

  “That boy has been Miss Bobolink’s ward for fifty years,” said Miss Peregrine. “He’s no mercenary. It could only have been mind control.”

  She said it like she needed it to be true. Mind control sounded a lot more problematic to me than one bad apple succumbing to Caul’s poisonous rhetoric, but to the ymbrynes, a traitor was infinitely worse. Loyalty was everything; we were supposed to be family.

  Miss Wren shook her head. “Well, we’re questioning him now, so we should know soon enough. Until then, no more all-Acre assemblies. We make too easy a target when we’re all together.” She turned to face me and Noor. “Also, you both must be guarded at all times.”

  Noor’s expression soured. “Is that really necessary?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Miss Peregrine. “Your lives are too valuable, and Caul has just put a bounty on them.”

  “And where there is one assassin, there may be more,” said Miss Wren.

  I sighed. Though I knew they were right, I didn’t relish the thought of being trailed by home guards everywhere we went.

  Just then the door opened, and the guards let in Miss Cuckoo, Emma, Horace, and—announcing himself with a “Hello, it’s me”—Millard. They were in the middle of a heated discussion of their own.

  “But he projected himself right into our midst,” Emma was saying. “If he can do that, he’ll know everything we’re planning!”

  “No, it was as if we were watching him in a film,” said Horace. “We could see him, but he couldn’t see us.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, and then they noticed me and Noor, and rushed over to make a fuss over us. Once we’d assured them we were fine, Horace answered my question.

  “If Caul had spotted Miss P, don’t you think he would have taunted her?”

  “That’s true; he never misses an opportunity,” Miss Peregrine said, and motioned for our friends to be seated.

  “And neither should we,” said Millard, whose nakedness no one seemed to mind at the moment. “We need to dissect every word, every syllable, every visual clue that Caul’s little show just gave us, and use them to form a picture of what he is now.”

  “He’s completely mad is what he is,” said Emma. “Did you hear the voices he was making?”

  “He’s always been mad,” said Miss Cuckoo. “That hasn’t changed.”

  “And it’s never stopped him from achieving his wretched goals,” said Horace.

  Emma turned to face the door. “Where’s Miss Blackbird with Fern?”

  “Can you really make the Acre impenetrable?” Horace said. “And soon?”

  “Yes, we think so,” Miss Peregrine replied, though she sounded less certain now than she had in front of the whole assembled Acre. She seemed about to explain further when Emma said, “Hi, there you are!” and in came Miss Blackbird and Fern, one of the diviners from Portal, her big hat now in her hands. I said hello and she gave a tiny wave, too shaken for pleasantries.

  “Fern’s a guest from America,” Miss Cuckoo said. “Her peculiarity allowed her to make a very useful observation about Caul. Go on, dear.”

  Fern cleared her throat nervously, then hesitated.

  “You’re a diviner,” Emma prompted her. “Start there.”

  “Awful sorry,” Fern said in her soft Southern drawl. “I’m not used to . . . being so proximate to . . . er, in the company of . . .”

  “Ymbrynes,” Emma said. “She’s rarely been around real ymbrynes before.”

  “I’m sure she can speak for herself,” Miss Cuckoo said, and Emma looked chastened.

  Fern cleared her throat again. “I’m a diviner. And the thing I divine is other peculiars. Whether they’re close or far, here or there.”

  “Like my Addison does,” said Miss Wren.

  “Not quite,” said Fern. “Your dog smells peculiarity, but I can see it. Our peculiarities emit a certain kind of energy, you see, which I’m sensitive to.” She looked down shyly, as if embarrassed at having spoken so much. I’d never known her to be timid; she must really have been intimidated by the presence of so many ymbrynes.

  “And what did you observe today?” Miss Cuckoo prodded.

  “In the beginning, when he first appeared, the blue man was real strong. But by the end, just before he turned into birds and disappeared, his energy was weak. He was all worn out.”

  “Fascinating,” said Miss Wren. “So it cost him something to project himself that way.”

  “Which means he is exhaustible,” said Miss Cuckoo.

  “Finite,” Millard added. “Therefore, not quite the god he claims to be.”

  Miss Peregrine grimaced. “Don’t rejoice yet. My brother’s only just been resurrected. I imagine he’s still gathering his strength.” She glanced at our visitor, whose eyes were widening by the second. “Thank you, Fern, that was enormously helpful. Vernon, would you see she gets back to her dormitory safely?”

  “Pleased to meet y’all,” Fern said, curtsying as one of the guards showed her out.

  The moment the door closed, Horace was out of his chair and tugging at Miss Peregrine’s sleeve. “You were saying? About making the Acre impenetrable?”

  Miss Peregrine accompanied him back to his chair and made him sit. “We’ll need three more ymbrynes than we have here to do it. Twelve altogether.”

  “We’ll have them,” said Miss Wren. “I know for a fact Miss Waxwing and Miss Troupial are abandoning their loops to bring their wards here. Safety in numbers, you know. Raise the drawbridge.”

  “And I will recall Miss Merganser from Mozambique today,” said Miss Cuckoo. “She’s freelance, with no wards to concern herself about.”

  “If this can be done,” Miss Wren cautioned. “It’s an untested technique. Untested on such a wide area as an entire loop, anyway.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “It’s a sort of shielding web that’s woven around the loop,” Miss Peregrine explained. “We call it the Quilt.”

  “How soon can you create it?” asked Horace.

  “As soon as the other three ymbrynes arrive,” replied Miss Cuckoo.

  “What about the Panloopticon?” Millard said. “It’ll have to be disconnected, won’t it? It’s like a hundred back doors into this place.”

  “He’s right,” Miss Peregrine said. “It’s a terrible vulnerability.”

  “Close it now!” Horace cried, but then he looked perplexed. “But then we’ll be stuck here . . . under siege with no escape route . . .”

  “We can’t turn it off,” said Miss Wren, her eyes pinning Miss Peregrine. “Not until we find them.”

  “Nor before our three ymbrynes arrive,” Miss Peregrine replied.

  “Them?” Emma said.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Noor said to the ymbrynes. “What about the prophecy? What about the other six?”

  “I’m so glad you mentioned it,” said Miss Wren, turning to Noor with just a hint of a smile. “That’s just the them I was referring to.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it now?” Miss Peregrine sighed.

  It was Miss Avocet and two trainees, a guard announced, and the old ymbryne came wheeling in with Francesca and Sigrid.

  “Your timing is excellent,” said Miss Wren. “We were just discussing the prophecy. Or were about to.”

  “Is there something new?” Horace asked eagerly.<
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  “First things first,” said Miss Avocet, wheeling herself toward Noor and me. “How are you both holding up?”

  She was only looking at Noor, though Noor glanced quickly at me before answering, “We’re all right.”

  “You’ve only just arrived, and there’s been such drama, much of it aimed at you,” she said pityingly. “I’m sorry to say it doesn’t look as if that’s going to change anytime soon.”

  “Thanks for worrying about me, but you don’t have to,” Noor said. “It’s my fault all this is happening, and I’m going fix it. Just . . . tell me how.”

  “My dear, that is utter nonsense,” said Miss Avocet.

  Miss Peregrine looked exasperated. “I keep trying to tell her.”

  “Please,” Noor said sharply. “Stop trying to tell me how to feel, and just tell me what I can do. Tell me what you know about the other six.”

  Miss Avocet sighed. “Yes, all right.” With some effort she wheeled herself to the head of the conference table, proudly refusing Francesca’s help. “The minute I heard Caul had been resurrected, I ordered all my ymbrynes-in-training to scour the Apocryphon in all its various translations for references to the seven. Francesca?”

  Miss Avocet’s star pupil stepped forward. “As you all may remember, there were specific references to Noor’s birth, but little mention of the other six—nothing that might’ve helped us pinpoint their nationality, location, or era. We cannot assume they are all modern children, born recently. The prophecy was written some four hundred years ago, and it’s entirely possible some of the prophesied children may now be very old. We just don’t know.” She allowed herself a dramatic pause. “But we may soon.” She turned expectantly to Sigrid, the owlish girl in round glasses. “Sigrid?”

  The girl blinked rapidly and smoothed her dress, suddenly aware that everyone was looking at her. “Yes, yes. There was a breakthrough about an hour ago.”

  Miss Peregrine seemed surprised. “During the assembly?”

  “Yes. I work part-time in the communications room, in the basement level of Bentham House?”

  “The room with all the radios?” I said, remembering the people I’d seen there wrapped head to toe in wires and antennas.

  “That’s the one. We’ve been monitoring our networks for encoded communications from the wights, and while that hasn’t been fruitful, two days ago we picked up a series of late-night, long-distance loop calls. Or rather, it was the same call, made a series of times to different numbers. It was a young girl’s voice. We have a recording of what was said.” Sigrid’s hand had been hidden behind her back, and now she raised it to her face and read something written on the palm. “‘He’s back. Meet at the meeting place. Fast as fast can be.’”

  Francesca said, “She spoke the same words, in the same order, in each of the calls.”

  “We don’t know who the caller was, or where she was calling from,” said Miss Avocet. “But we know she made six calls to six different loops around the world.”

  “Six?” I said. “Not seven?”

  Miss Peregrine held up a finger as if to say We’ll get to that.

  “Only one was made to America,” Sigrid continued. “While we can’t pinpoint the location of the call with a great deal of accuracy, we know it was to a loop, previously unknown to us, in eastern Pennsylvania.”

  Noor, who had been standing, sat down. “My God.”

  A shiver went through me, the same eerie sensation I got whenever big pieces began falling into place. “They tried to call V,” I said.

  “This happened two days ago?” said Miss Peregrine. “Why are we just hearing about this now?”

  Sigrid shuffled her feet. “We didn’t understand its true importance. But when we learned Caul had returned—”

  “‘He’s back’ is fairly telling,” said Emma.

  Miss Avocet said, “Our communications people think the calls were made to six ymbrynes. We know now that V was one. We also believe that ymbrynes were assigned to protect each of the prophesied children.”

  “Assigned by who?” I said. “Wouldn’t you have known about this, Miss Avocet?”

  “Wasn’t it you who assigned V to protect Noor?” Emma asked.

  “No,” answered Miss Avocet. “I asked V to accompany Noor safely to America so that she might escape the hollows pursuing her here, but that’s all. I had no inkling of the other six, or any knowledge of how important Noor really was.” She shrugged, an oddly casual gesture for such a serious woman. “As we’ve well established, we ymbrynes are not altogether perfect.”

  Miss Peregrine resumed her nervous pacing and lit her curved pipe, which meant her mind was hard at work. “We didn’t know how important she was, but someone else did. They took the catastrophes prophesied in the Apocryphon seriously and made preparations to protect the seven. They were waiting for this. The question is”—her heels clicked as she stopped and blew out a cloud of purple smoke—“who placed the calls?”

  It seemed no one wanted to repeat the words I don’t know again, so everyone was quiet until I asked: “Why did they only make six calls, if there are seven children?”

  “Perhaps because whoever made the calls already had one of the seven in their safekeeping,” said Millard.

  “Or maybe the girl who made the calls was herself one of the seven,” said Miss Avocet.

  Miss Peregrine frowned skeptically, but stopped short of disagreeing out loud with her senior ymbryne.

  “Either way,” said Millard, “surely all that matters now is locating their meeting place, ‘fast as fast can be.’ Sigrid, are we absolutely sure none of those calls was traceable?”

  Sigrid nodded. “But their destinations were. Aside from Pennsylvania, USA, there was a call placed to Slovenia, one to the Andaman Islands off the western coast of Thailand, one to Namibia in southern Africa, one to the Amazon basin in Brazil, and one to the Kelardasht region of northern Iran. But their origin is a mystery. The radio operator said he’d never seen anything like it. He said it was as if the calls came out of the aether.”

  “So the six could be out there, waiting for Noor to join them,” Emma said. “And she could, if only we knew where the meeting place was.”

  “You can be sure it was a secret known only to the six ymbrynes themselves,” Miss Peregrine said. She left a trail of smoke in the air as she crossed to Noor, then perched lightly on the edge of the table beside her. “One of whom we have access to.”

  “You mean . . . V?” I said, a tingle of dread crawling up my neck.

  Noor looked puzzled. “But she’s . . .”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t ask her a few questions,” Miss Peregrine said delicately. “You’re familiar with Mr. O’Connor’s gift?”

  “He can resurrect the dead.” Instead of revulsion, there was a faraway look on Noor’s face. “How long would she be awake for?”

  I realized what she was imagining, and my heart broke a little.

  “Not long,” Miss Peregrine said. “A few minutes at most. But I must warn you, she won’t be the woman you remember.”

  “The whole thing is pretty . . . horrible,” I said, which was a mild word for what it was. To see a person you loved turned into one of Enoch’s meat puppets would be downright scarring.

  “Would you consent to it?” Miss Peregrine said. “If you don’t, we’ll find another way.”

  I saw Miss Wren’s eyebrows rise—what other way?—but she kept silent.

  Finally, Noor said, “Do what you have to do. Even if it’s horrible.”

  Miss Peregrine thanked her and patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll send a team to retrieve her body within the hour.”

  Noor looked up sharply. “I said I want to be part of it.”

  “And I told you it’s a risk we can’t take.” Miss Peregrine looked sternly at me. “Same goes for you, Mr. Portman.”

/>   “What about the hollowgast that’s hanging around?” I said. “He’s pretty banged up, but sometimes an injured hollow can be even more dangerous than—”

  “We were evading hollows long before you arrived,” said Miss Wren.

  I saw Emma wince. Ouch.

  “Don’t feel useless, mon garçon,” said Miss Cuckoo. “We’ll have dangerous things for you to do soon enough.”

  Just hanging around the Acre was dangerous enough on an average day, what with its many natural hazards (Smoking Street’s jets of flame; flesh-eating bacteria in the canals) as well as various malefactors, both normal and peculiar, who lurked in its shadows. But now that Noor and I had nearly been assassinated, the ymbrynes were taking no chances, which was why a pair of guards stuck to us like glue as we walked back to Ditch House, then posted themselves outside the front door.

  Most of our friends were inside, burning off residual stress from the disastrous assembly with household tasks. Emma boiled water for laundry in a big metal tub, and when the clothes were cleaned and wrung out, they were hung beside the coal-burning radiator in the basement; hanging them outside in the Acre’s ashy air would’ve only made them dirty again. When they were dry, Horace starched and ironed them, all the while waxing rhapsodic about the modern miracle that was fabric softener. Obtaining it, he insisted, was one of the few compelling reasons ever to venture into the present day. Olive removed her leaden boots and polished the ceiling with a rag and a feather duster. Fiona tended to the vines, nipping them back where they had begun to invade the interior of the house, which was almost everywhere. Anything Fiona grew, Hugh explained, was forever after attracted to her, and would inch steadily in her direction whenever her back was turned. The rest of us busied ourselves with making beds, mopping floors, cleaning up after the chickens, and sweeping away the ash that drifted into the house every time a door or a window was opened.

  I found the work calming. It helped restore a small sense of normalcy to a world that was teetering precariously. But some of my friends were only growing more jittery. After an hour Hugh threw down the broom he’d been wielding and cried, “I can’t take it anymore!”