The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  The hollow screamed again, and this time it sounded like a cry of frustration. Emma brightened her flames.

  “Hugh, wait,” she said, squinting into the shadows, “leave Fiona alone!”

  And he did, and Fiona raised her hands and made a motion in the air like she was yanking an invisible chain. All the roots around us curled, then pulled taut with an audible snap—and I could see what she had done.

  The hollow was bound and trussed by hundreds of dangling tree roots. Roots collared it, held fast its arms and legs, wrapped its three tongues, which were all pulled as far as they would go. Fiona made two fists and pulled them apart, and the roots pulled the hollow’s tongues until it squeaked.

  “Fiona, you genius, you miracle!” Emma cried.

  “You might’ve been killed, darling,” Hugh said in an undertone, and though it was clear he wanted to hug her, he appeared to restrain himself for fear of breaking her concentration.

  Fiona inclined her head toward him and whispered something. Hugh translated: “She says the roots are very strong. She says she can pull it to pieces right now if Jacob likes.”

  I said, “Can you keep him like that for a minute, Fee?”

  “She can hold him like that all day if you want.”

  “Good. Before we kill him, there’s something I need to find out.”

  I started carefully toward the hollow, parting vines as I went.

  “Are you going to control its mind?” Emma said, following me from a slight distance. “Make it fight for our side?”

  I was concentrating hard and didn’t reply. If we were going to be facing some new kind of hollow, I couldn’t pass up a chance to safely probe its mind. I approached it slowly, muttering a few words of Hollowspeak to test its reaction. If I could soften it up, pry its thoughts open a bit, then maybe I could better understand what we were dealing with.

  The old familiar stench of rotten garbage came over me in a heavy wave. That hadn’t changed, at least.

  The hollow strained against the roots that held it, dying to wrap one of its tongues around my neck, but the roots held fast.

  Relax, I said in Hollowspeak. Don’t struggle.

  It had no effect. I repeated myself, then tried a few variations on calm down—but it didn’t react at all. Normally, I could feel a hollowgast shy away as I tried to control it. Like it could tell I was scratching around the keyhole of its brain with my lockpick. I knew the hollows’ language as innately as I knew English, but for all this one reacted, I might as well have been speaking Yiddish. What was more, and worse: My failed attempts at contact and control almost seemed to strengthen it.

  What the hell was going on?

  Sleep, I said, still trying. Sleep—but instead it flexed all its muscles at once, straining against the roots that bound it. Behind me I heard Fiona groan. I turned and saw her hunched as if bearing a heavy weight, but then she straightened and tumbled her hands in the air like she was tying a knot. The roots creaked with new tension.

  She had bought me a little more time. Time for a new approach.

  No more words.

  “I’m going in close,” I said loudly. “Hold it tight!”

  “There’s no need for this,” I heard Emma say, but she must have meant it when she said she trusted me, because she didn’t try to stop me. “Please be careful.”

  Even after many encounters with hollows, I still didn’t like getting close to them, even ones I had tamed. Ones I hadn’t were like rabid dogs, and when they were chained and restrained, their desperate need to murder you made the air crackle. Not to mention what it did to my stomach; at this proximity, the compass needle turned into a swinging scythe.

  I stopped an arm’s length away and stared into its leaking eyes. Its breath came in ragged snorts, jaws ratcheted wide by the tension of its three tongues pulled to their limit in opposing directions.

  This hollow was different. Not only was it visible to all, it spoke differently. The feeling it evoked in me was different, a different key, some higher register. It stank differently, inorganically, not like a hot summer landfill but like chemicals, bleach, rat poison, and something worse.

  I spoke to it again—Sleep, sleep you bastard—hoping I might be able to break through at close range, and as I talked I could see muscles pulsing within the dark workings of its throat, like it was trying to reply.

  And then it did. Whether I heard it with my ears or just in my mind, I wasn’t certain, but a voice came to me, low and slithering, unintelligible at first, just a long, sibilant sssssssssss that slowly grew to a vowel (leeeeeeeeee) and finally, and it must have been in my head because it had no lips to make the sound with, eeeeeep.

  Sleep, it said to me.

  It could speak.

  Sleeeeeeee, it droned—just mirroring me, that’s all—but then why did I feel so heavy in the head . . . why were my knees beginning to buckle . . .

  eeeeeeeeeee

  What are you? I tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come. What are you doing to me?

  eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  And just as I felt myself on the verge of collapse, felt my legs going out from under me, the oily musculature of its throat tensed, pulsed, and then opened to admit one more tongue, a fourth, which whipped out and caught me by the neck before I could fall—and now I was hanging with my toes just brushing the ground, unable to breathe.

  I heard Emma say, “Jacob? What’s going on?” but my throat was too constricted to allow a reply, my arms too limp with sleep to wave. I was choking, suffocating, and my friends couldn’t see the tongue tightening, tightening, until I thought my head would pop. My only hope was Fiona, that her connection to the roots might function as an extension of her own body, that she could feel and see through them. How else had she pinioned it so precisely, with three roots around three tongues? So I opened my mouth, though I couldn’t speak, and turned my head as much as I could make it turn, and bit down on a stringy root that had been brushing my face.

  Fiona. Help me. I formed the words with my mouth, my tongue, spoke them to the root.

  “Something’s wrong,” I heard Hugh say. His voice sounded like it was on the other end of a bad phone connection.

  The light from Emma’s flame grew brighter. She was coming.

  “Jacob? Are you okay? Answer me!”

  I tried desperately to speak, to shout stay back, but the words wouldn’t pass my throat. I prayed my silence would be answer enough.

  And then the tongue released me; unslithered from around my neck and darted away. As I collapsed to the ground, it lashed out at Emma, whipping around her wrist and forcing her flaming hand toward her face, but she dodged and clapped it over the tongue. The hollow squealed. I tried to move, to help her, but I was still gasping for air and my body was half numb from whatever the hollow had done to me.

  While Emma fought, I heard Fiona scream—not in pain, I thought, but in effort—and as her shrill cry filled the tunnel every dangling root stiffened and stretched, then contracted suddenly as if they’d reeled back up into the earth above our heads.

  The roots that bound the hollow contracted, too, all at once and with great force.

  It howled. I was spattered with stinging liquid, which I quickly recognized as blood.

  I sat up, dazed. Three severed tongues twisted in the dirt before me like eels. The fourth was burned and useless. The hollow had been torn limb from limb.

  Then my friends were around me. Hugh, Bronwyn, Emma. The guards just behind. Fiona was sitting on the ground, drained of energy. Emma was okay.

  She knelt beside me. “What were you doing? Why take such a risk when we could have just killed it?”

  “I needed to study it,” I replied between gulps of air, “to find out all I could.”

  “And? What did you find out?”

  I shook my head weakly. “I couldn’t get in.”
>
  I wasn’t ready to talk about what had just happened. I struggled to my feet with Bronwyn’s help and went to Fiona, who was panting like she’d just run a race.

  “You saved my life,” I said. It was inadequate thanks but all I could muster.

  She smiled weakly and murmured something.

  “She says you’re even,” Hugh said.

  Bronwyn couldn’t stop apologizing. “If only I’d gotten the harpoon gun in place faster—” But I cut her off and told her that not only was she not at fault, but I was glad for what happened. If she and the guards had managed to eviscerate the hollow right away, I wouldn’t have had the chance to find out about its fourth tongue. Or its most frightening new evolution . . .

  It was in my head.

  It wasn’t anymore; whatever it had done to me had worn off the moment the creature died. Regardless, it was a worrying development, one I decided to keep to myself until I better understood what had happened.

  Miss Peregrine was calling to us from the end of the tunnel. The guards, afraid there might be more enemies lurking in the dark, wouldn’t let her come in after us. Before we left, I reached down and snagged one of the severed tongues, coiled it up like a garden hose, and looped it over my shoulder.

  “Must you?” said Hugh.

  “So I can study it.”

  “Why?” Emma asked. “Do you think there are more like it?”

  “Blimey, could there be?” Bronwyn said.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  But I worried that this one was just the beginning.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Miss Peregrine quickly appraised us, her chin jerking up and down as she looked us over. “Do any of you need to see the bone-mender?”

  We told her we didn’t.

  “I’ll have one examine you anyhow,” she said brusquely.

  She was angry at Fiona and Hugh for having left the house against her orders, a trespass that killing a hollow wasn’t enough to make up for. Besides, a peculiar had been killed, a giant mess had been made, and the peculiar denizens of Devil’s Acre were newly terrified. The ymbrynes had had a great deal of work to do even before our unwelcome guest arrived; now they had even more.

  As we walked back to the house, I told Miss Peregrine some of what I’d learned about this hollowgast. I told her how it had been harder for me to detect, and how it had taken longer for me to pinpoint its location. I told her how the American woman’s bullets had simply flattened against the creature’s chest, and it had been able to pluck them off, unharmed.

  “Caul found a way to armor their skin,” Miss Peregrine said, her face clouding with worry. “It seems these aren’t inferior models after all, but improved ones.”

  “Then why make them visible?” asked Bronwyn.

  “To terrify people,” Miss Peregrine replied.

  “Where do you think Caul was hiding them?” Emma asked.

  “I’m not sure he was,” Miss Peregrine said. “If he’d had hollows like this a week ago, he would’ve used them against us then, or during the Battle of Gravehill. No, this hollow is new. I think Caul’s new powers have enabled him to create an evolved breed of hollow.”

  “Then we can expect more,” Emma said darkly.

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  I told her about the fourth tongue, too, but I didn’t mention the worst part, about the hollow’s influence over me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know.

  Miss Wren’s errand boy, Ulysses Critchley, was waiting by the front steps of the house for Miss Peregrine. “The three ymbrynes have arrived, madam. You officially have a quorum. They’re in the council chamber now, awaiting your arrival.”

  “Thank you, I’ll be along presently,” she said, and turned to us. “I won’t waste any more of my breath imploring you not to leave the house, but I insist you don’t leave the Acre. Jacob, you and Miss Pradesh should prepare for an expedition into the past. We need you to be ready to depart as soon as a suitable route to Miss Tern’s loop is plotted, which could be any hour now.”

  Without waiting for a reply she hooked a finger toward Ulysses and they set off together for the council chamber. The rest of us went inside to get cleaned up, and to tell the others what had happened. In telling the story, I emphasized Fiona’s heroism while downplaying the danger to myself so I wouldn’t be fussed over too much. It took a lot of energy to be fussed over, and to have to reassure other people that I was okay when really my neck hurt and my head ached and I was feeling a little shaky. Knowing how I really felt would make them nervous, and concealing it took energy I didn’t have.

  Noor could tell I wasn’t okay, but she seemed to know instinctively when to push through my reticence and when to let me be, and so when I told her I needed to lie down for a bit, she let me go with just a quick embrace and a kiss on the lips.

  I hurried upstairs to bed—borrowing Horace’s again, as I still didn’t have one of my own—but couldn’t make myself sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, the hollow’s voice would come back to me. What would have happened if it had had longer to do its work? Might it have done more than turn my own commands back on me? How much control might it have gained? I thought of the cockeyed assassin who had lunged at me with a knife and shuddered.

  A new breed. Better, deadlier, impossible to control. And which had somehow turned the power I held over them against me.

  It occurred to me that this one had been sent here not necessarily to kill me. Caul knew by now that I could handle a single hollowgast—even an evolved one. It had been a warning.

  Give up now. Before I send an army of them.

  It was just speculation, and even if it was true, there was nothing I could do about it. The only thing to do was reach the meeting place, find the other six, and send Caul, somehow, back to hell.

  Seven may seal the door.

  My head was only getting foggier, but I couldn’t lie there anymore. I forced myself up.

  Noor and I spent the rest of the day in an anxious orbit between the ministries building, where the ymbrynes were holding their emergency meeting and might emerge any minute to weave their temporal shield around the Acre, and Ditch House, where Millard and Perplexus were puzzling over loop maps at the kitchen table, working out the location of Miss Tern’s loop and every possible route to reach it.

  We’d been told to pack, but how could we when we didn’t know what kind of territory we’d be traveling through? When we were at the house, we tried not to hover over Millard’s shoulder, but failed often enough that Perplexus finally drew a line on the floor with a grease pencil and told us to keep behind it. The only one allowed to cross it was Perplexus’s assistant, Matthieu, a humorless boy who carried a bamboo stick for pointing at maps and who kept his mentor supplied with steaming pots of smoky Russian tea, the only liquid Perplexus would let pass his lips besides espresso.

  The goal, Millard explained while Perplexus took one of his frequent tea breaks, was to plot a quick but safe route to Miss Tern’s loop. Quick meant a day or two, but so far the only one they had discovered involved traveling overland from Mongolia to France via 1917, a perilous, two week journey on horses, camels, and trains. Though Noor and I and whoever journeyed with us would have a reasonable chance of surviving the trip, there was skepticism as to whether Devil’s Acre could survive a siege by Caul and his forces for that long. So the cartographers continued puzzling, and sent us away because our hovering was making them anxious.

  Elsewhere in the Acre, Sharon was overseeing the strengthening of our meager defenses. The hollowgast’s intrusion had convinced everyone that the home guard was far from adequate, and there was no telling how long the ymbrynes would need to create their shield. A second harpoon gun was found and both were positioned near the loop entrance. New barbed-wire fences and guard stations had been built around the prison, and Parkins’s Californios volunteered
to supplement the guards already monitoring our population of wight prisoners, who had been suspiciously quiet the last few days.

  Dozens of peculiars lined up outside the Shrunken Head to volunteer for a new Devil’s Acre Defense Corps, with a surprising number of Americans joining them. Those with combat-relevant abilities were assigned to patrols that would keep watch over the loop entrance as well as Bentham’s house (though the Panloopticon was now officially powered down, doors locked). All privately owned telescopes and binoculars were requisitioned for use by the Defense Corps, to be distributed to sentries who were installed on rooftops and balconies around the Acre. Leonora Hammaker, who could see in the dark and had vision stronger than any telescope, agreed to sit in her window and simply stare down the length of Doleful Street for as many hours a day as she could tolerate.

  Everyone who had a personal firearm was to keep it with them at all times. Many of the Americans already did this, but since the hollowgast’s attack they’d taken their attachment a step further, refusing to unstrap their holsters for meals or trips to the restroom. Earlier in the day, one of Parkins’s Californios had even been discovered napping—snoring loudly, in fact—with two cocked and loaded guns on his lap and an enormous knife gripped in his hand.

  Sharon warned the volunteers that their lives would be at risk, but after this morning’s brush with tragedy, no one was under any illusions to the contrary. Their lives were at risk whether they volunteered or not. A few tried to discourage the youngest peculiars from taking part in the Acre’s defense, but a young boy from Miss Grackle’s theater troupe jumped up on a pillar by the pub and gave an impassioned speech about how all our lives were forfeit if Caul broke through our defenses, and it was a nobler thing to risk death in defense of our loop than to give it up in defeat, which earned him a massive round of applause.