The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  “Whaddaya want? Go away! I’ll kill ye!”

  “Don’t shoot!” I cried, and I heard Millard drop to the ground while Noor and I flung our arms in the air.

  “It’s me, Klaus, it’s Millard Nullings!”

  He looked down at the ground. “WHAT?”

  “MILLARD NULLINGS!”

  The old man squinted at the empty air from which Millard’s voice had issued, then slowly lowered his blunderbuss.

  “Hell. Why didn’t you tell me you was coming?”

  His every word was delivered at high volume, and his mouth hung open even when he wasn’t speaking. He seemed to be very hard of hearing.

  “Because you shot at the last parrot I sent,” Millard half shouted in reply. “These are my friends, Klaus. The ones I was telling you about?”

  Klaus nodded, then picked up the long gun again, raised it over our heads, and fired off a blast. We threw ourselves to the ground.

  “Jest so’s none of ye’s gets any ideas!” he shouted to the empty windows across the street. When I dared to uncover my head, I saw that the only thing he was aiming at us now was a wide smile, his lips a pale, chapped crescent in the bushy nest of his great white beard. “Don’t fret, she only shoots blanks,” he stage-whispered, then motioned for us to follow him into his workshop. I peered after him. It was pretty dark inside, and all I could make out from where I lay were teetering piles of clutter.

  Noor looked around and hissed, “Millard, where are you? I owe you a slap in the head.”

  “Don’t mind Klaus, he’s mostly harmless,” Millard said from inside the workshop door. “He wouldn’t hurt a maggot . . . He’s just an old-fashioned American.”

  “What does that mean?” I said, helping Noor up.

  “He also happens to be a genius,” Millard said, ignoring me. “He kept half of the un-ymbryned loops in California ticking before the wights’ people tricked him into coming to work for them here.”

  “Well?” Klaus roared from somewhere inside the workshop. “You want to let in every dad-blamed fly in Fever Ditch, or will you come in and drink my whiskey?”

  I got up and helped Noor to her feet.

  “I’m going back to Ditch House,” she said. “If the wights trusted him, how can we?”

  Millard sighed with irritation, then came close and said in a low voice, “He was lured to the Acre and forced to work for the wights. Sharon told me they held Klaus’s wife captive in one of the Panloopticon’s prison loops, which was the only reason he helped them. He lived out here, as far away from them as he could. So far away that he didn’t realize the Acre had been liberated until a month ago, if you can believe it. But he’s a genius, like I said. For some time now I’ve worked at befriending him. Bringing him little gifts, mostly alcoholic, spending hours listening to his interminable stories. And I think he just might be able to help us, if I can pique his interest.”

  We heard a clink of glasses from inside, then something smashed on the floor and Klaus swore.

  “Okay, okay,” Noor said under her breath, “if you really think he can fix the—”

  “Excellent!” Millard sang out, and he nicked V’s device from Noor’s pocket and darted inside.

  “Hey!”

  “Klaus, I’ve got something here I think you’ll find very interesting . . .”

  Noor and I shook our heads at each other. It was hard to be mad at someone so well-meaning, as frustrating as Millard could be sometimes. We stepped inside the shadowy workshop and shut the creaking door behind us.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The inside of Klaus’s workshop looked like a giant clock had exploded its guts onto every available surface. Chairs, tables, whole sections of the floor, and several long workbenches were piled with disassembled gears. There were functioning clocks, too—legions of them—tall grandfather clocks and tiny round tabletop clocks, simple wall clocks and elaborately carved cuckoo clocks. The sound of their pendulums ticking away was maddening and omnipresent.

  Klaus stomped out of a back room with a tray of mismatched mugs and cleared the section of the workbench nearest us with a sweep of his massive arm. “Who likes rye whiskey? Made this batch myself.” He shoved a mug into Noor’s hand, then one into mine, then waved a third in Millard’s general direction until our invisible friend took it from him.

  “Welcome, skol, sláinte, to yer health!” Klaus said, upending his own mug into his mouth. Millard’s glass rose and turned, and a stream of green liquid dribbled out and then disappeared as it passed his lips. Noor shot hers back, then coughed and looked as if she’d been struck across the face. I took a tentative sip—it tasted like fire—and held on to the mug, hoping Klaus wouldn’t notice that the booze he’d poured me was still mostly there.

  “A lot better than the swill they serve at the Shrunken Head, eh?” said Klaus. “And it’ll shine the tarnish off a pocket watch better than any solvent you can buy.” The fiery trickle of alcohol down my throat gave me a flashback to the Priest Hole, that malodorous dive on Cairnholm where my dad and I had stayed. It was unimaginable that it had all happened less than a year ago. That such a short time ago I hadn’t met Millard yet or Emma or Miss Peregrine.

  The boy I’d been then was a stranger to me now. That was another life.

  “This is quite the piece of history you’ve got here,” Klaus said. Millard had handed over the expulsatator and Klaus was bending over to examine it, a magnifying loupe strapped over one eye, which made him look like a myopic cyclops. He flipped the device over in his hands, then used a tiny screwdriver with a head the width of a needle to pop it open. Despite his recent intake of high-proof liquor—or perhaps because of it—his hands were steady.

  “Hmmmmm,” he said, peering through the loupe. “Fascinating.” He flipped away the loupe and snapped his head toward Millard. “Have you shown this to Perplexus Anomalous?”

  “No. Perplexus has no interest in mechanical things. Paper and maps and differential equations, yes, but—”

  “The man’s got sticky fingers,” Klaus said abruptly. “Show him something shiny and you’re not likely to get it back. He toured my shop last week and next thing you know I’m missing a femur from my best and oldest bone clock!”

  I couldn’t see Millard’s expression, but I was sure it was one of disbelief. “I’m quite sure Perplexus had nothing to do with your missing femur, but I’ll inquire about it next time I see him—”

  A sudden cacophony shook the workshop, hundreds of clocks marking the hour all at once. Noor and I held our ears. Klaus had turned his attention back to the expulsatator and hardly seemed to notice.

  It was clear why he was so hard of hearing. He’d been made deaf by his own clocks.

  When the ringing stopped, Klaus said, “You know this doohickey is shot, right? Single use only.”

  “Yes, we know,” said Millard, “but we’re hoping there’s some way it can be refurbished, so that it could be used a second time.”

  His eyes went wide and he let out a giant laugh. “No, no—no way, no how. It’s not possible. I wouldn’t do it even if it were. This is some bad business.”

  “What is?” I said.

  He leaned back on his stool and pointed an accusing finger at the stopwatch. “You know what powers this thing?”

  “Springs?”

  “The dial runs with springs. No, the expulsion reaction.” Now that we were discussing his area of expertise, he sounded less like an ornery old prospector and more like a scientist. “The thing that kicked y’all down the eastern coast of the United States, and forward through time a couple days, in a flash-blink.”

  “I don’t, Klaus,” said Millard. “Why don’t you tell us?”

  He leaned toward us and lowered his voice. “A very hard-to-come-by, ethically dodgy dollop of extracted and concentrated soul. You know, suulie, as the addicts call it.
”

  It was a word I hadn’t heard in a long time and it made my pulse quicken. It was the stuff the wights had extracted from my grandfather. That they’d peddled to weak-willed peculiars, addicting them so they could be controlled.

  “You mean ambrosia?” I said.

  Klaus’s grotesquely magnified eye flashed at me through the loupe. “Aye, that’s the word,” he said and nodded. “It’s why they could never mass-produce these little miracles.” He tapped the expulsatator gently. “The fuel comes too dear.”

  “What if we could get you a vial of it?” Millard asked.

  “How?” he said, cutting his eyes at me. “He a dealer?”

  Noor laughed.

  “No, no, Klaus, we chased them all out of the Acre. Don’t you know who this is?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. And I won’t deal with anyone who deals in suul, either.”

  “He doesn’t,” said Millard, “but if I understand what Jacob’s hinting at, we might be able to get our hands on a vial that was requisitioned from the wights after their stronghold was captured. They had a stockpile, though I believe most of it was destroyed before the battle ended.”

  “I wouldn’t touch the stuff even if you could get it.”

  Millard thought for a moment, then said, “What if we can recover your bone clock femur?”

  Klaus scratched his white beard. “You know the story of that bone clock? It’s a very special piece of peculiar horology.”

  “I don’t,” I said, and glanced in the general direction of Millard, who shook his head.

  “Then I’ll tell you,” Klaus said. He settled his bulk onto a stool and folded his meaty arms. “A long, long time ago, there was a peculiar clockmaker named Miklaus who lived in Prague. He built the clock in the main city square, and it was the most amazing thing anyone had seen. Rival cities all wanted Miklaus to build them a clock just like it, but the Councilors of Prague were jealous men, and to ensure that he would never make another, and that the pride of their city would never be bested, they had him blinded. Well, Miklaus lost his mind, and one night he threw himself into the guts of that great clock and was crushed to death in its gears.”

  “Damn,” whispered Noor.

  “His son was a clockmaker, too, and to honor his father he exhumed Miklaus’s bones and made another clock from them—an even greater clock than the one in Prague, it’s said. Never been to Prague, so I couldn’t tell you. But the clock made from Miklaus’s bones is s’posed to be haunted, and vested with certain peculiar abilities I ain’t quite sussed out yet. It’s been a pet project of mine for years, something I tinker with when I have the time.”

  “How did you come into possession of the clock?” Millard asked.

  “I inherited it. Miklaus was my great-great-uncle and my namesake.” He said it so casually it took a moment to catch his meaning. Klaus sighed, looking a bit defeated. “I tried busting down Perplexus’s office door to get it back, but the guards chased me out, and some muckety-muck told me that if I tried anything like that again, I’d be kicked out of the Acre. I didn’t want to come here in the first place, but . . .” He shrugged, and his shoulders sagged, and for a moment he looked very small despite his hefty frame. “But now it’s home.”

  I wondered what had become of his wife—the one who’d been a prisoner of the wights. But if she wasn’t here now, I didn’t have to ask. His reaction to the idea of using suul for any purpose was telling.

  “If we can get you that bone,” I said, “and bring you a vial of suul, would you reset the expulsatator?”

  “I don’t like it, not one little bit,” he said. His forehead had sprouted droplets of sweat. He drew a dirty rag from his jacket and mopped his brow with it. “Tell me what you need it for.”

  I looked at Noor, who shifted uneasily. “Your call,” I said.

  “It saved our lives once,” she said. “My friends seem to think we might need it to save our lives again.”

  “Noor’s the key to everything, Klaus,” Millard said in an undertone. “Without her, Caul might be unstoppable. So if the worst happens, and he manages to break through the ymbrynes’ defenses—”

  “You need a fail-safe,” Klaus said. Even his stentorian voice had dropped to something like a whisper. “You get me the bone and the suul, and I’ll do my best. But”—he raised a crooked finger in warning—“I make no guarantees. I’ve never touched an expulsatator before today, and you know they ain’t built to be used twice. It could blow up in your face.”

  “If anyone can do it, Klaus, you can,” said Millard. “You’re the best there is.”

  Klaus grinned. “Where’s your hand at, boy?” Millard’s sleeve rose to shake Klaus’s outstretched hand, and then Klaus bent to dig around under the workbench. He emerged holding a bottle of muddy liquid. “Nip for the road?”

  “No, thank you,” said Millard. “Today we need our wits about us.”

  A look of vague dread crossed Noor’s face. “I’ll take one,” she said. Klaus poured more into her mug.

  I leaned close to her. “You sure?”

  A long and brassy bong sounded from the top of the workbench, and an intricate cuckoo clock began to sound the hour, a few minutes late. A small door opened and a platform popped out with a black-robed executioner and a supplicant on his knees. With each toll of the hour the executioner brought down the axe, the victim’s lopped head hinged away from his body, and a spring-loaded spout of red felt shot out from the neck-hole. Noor tipped back the drink as the beheading was replayed ten times over, and then she grimaced and slapped down the mug.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I was starting to worry about Noor. As we hurried through the dark streets of the Acre’s outer ring, she hardly spoke. It might’ve been the home-brewed lighter fluid she’d just consumed, but it seemed more likely that she was lost in her own head, thinking about what we were about to do. How do you ask someone if they’re ready to see a long-lost loved one resurrected? Gently but directly, I decided.

  We were passing through a sunken place where the cobblestones were torn up and the street was carpeted with sodden trash when she stumbled. I caught her arm before she could fall.

  “Face-plant in this stuff and you’ll catch a flesh-eating rash for sure,” I said.

  “Another day in paradise.” She laughed darkly.

  “So, are you ready for this?” I asked, still holding her arm. “When Enoch does this thing, it could be really . . . rough. I’ve seen him do it a few times before, and it’s not pretty.” I thought of Bronwyn’s poor, dead brother, Victor. And Martin, the man who’d run the little museum on Cairnholm, who woke up with half a face, quoting poetry. Scenes that had haunted my dreams ever since.

  Noor shrugged. “I already watched her get murdered. How much worse could this be?”

  “Sometimes you don’t know until it happens.”

  We walked in silence for a little while, and then quietly she said, “Did you ever wish you could talk to your grandfather again?”

  “You mean Enoch’s way?”

  “No, just . . . any way.”

  “For a while after I got here, I thought about it all the time. I wanted to know his opinion on everything. I wanted to tell him what I was doing, show him who I was becoming. I thought he’d be—”

  “Proud.”

  I nodded, slightly embarrassed.

  She wrapped her arm around mine. “I’m absolutely sure he would’ve been.”

  “Thanks. I hope so,” I said, a sudden swell of emotion sneaking up on me. I still missed my grandfather, though it was a low, background kind of ache. But certain memories could sharpen the ache until it became, momentarily, unbearable.

  I took a deep breath. She glued our sides together as we leapt over a wide puddle. The ache dulled, and in its place I felt an overwhelming gratitude for Noor. She could make me
feel so much with just a word or two—because I never doubted she meant them. She was never fake with me, never for a second. She was guileless without being naive. Two more line items on a growing list of things I loved about her. “Anyway,” I said, gathering myself again, “there came a point where I stopped needing that as much. When what he would have thought of me became less important than what I thought of myself. So, as much as I miss him, now I think it’s better that he just . . . stay . . . gone.”

  “I never needed those things from V,” she said. “I was too angry at her for dying. The truth would’ve broken me, if I’d known it back then.”

  “Still. I think it’d be better if you weren’t in the room when it happened.”

  “No. I need to be there.”

  “Why?”

  “What if she’s more than just Enoch’s puppet? What if there’s some part of her that’s actually present? Some spark?”

  “There’s no spark, Noor.” It’s like something out of a horror movie, I thought, though I kept this to myself. “You don’t need those images rattling around your head the rest of your life.”

  She let go of my arm. Retreated inward for a moment. “What if she’s . . . scared?”

  “Scared?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “She won’t even know what happening to her.”

  I wanted Millard to jump in and back me up, but he knew we were having a private conversation and was probably a tactful ten strides ahead of us.

  “I need to be there,” she said forcefully, then cut a glance at me. “And you, too, please.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Thanks.” She tried to smile, I think, but winced instead. “I’ll be fine.” She repeated it like a mantra, armoring herself. “I’ll be fine.”

  Noor, Millard, and I snuck into the house the same way we’d snuck out, through the back alley, up the stilts, and into an open second-floor window. We heard voices in the kitchen and went downstairs to find that Miss Peregrine and the others had already returned. Miss Peregrine was drying her hair with a dish towel while Miss Wren sat at the kitchen table, stroking a sleepy chicken in her lap. Emma was slumped in a chair by the fire, exhausted. Bronwyn stood over the sink, wiping at a stubborn smear of blood on her forearm while Olive doted on her with a first aid kit. They looked just like you might expect people who’d lugged a gory corpse across a storm-racked town to look.