The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Miss Hawksbill led us past the smoking craters in her yard, which now numbered three, and into the woods. We headed for the sound of distant guns, which had gone from occasional to regular, trudging toward a war while Noor hummed “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” A clammy blanket of dread settled over me.

  Twice in five minutes Miss Hawksbill stopped at a fork in the path and seemed briefly confused before choosing one. “I normally travel this route by wing,” she said apologetically.

  We began to trade worried glances. Millard unfolded a map from his coat pocket and attempted to read it while walking. “I think we’re about here,” he mumbled, “and the front lines are somewhere over that way . . .”

  The path broke through the trees and followed the edge of a hill. In the distance below us we could see the fighting for the first time. Confused lines of trenches and barbed wire ran like sutures through fields so blown to hell they resembled the surface of the moon. In the middle was no-man’s-land, a rutted cavity of smashed tanks and splintered trees. A shroud of smoke hung thickly over it all.

  “My God,” I heard Bronwyn murmur behind me.

  “This side here, closest to us, is the British and French,” Miss Hawksbill explained as she walked. “The Germans occupy the opposite side. My sister’s loop entrance is over there.” She gestured toward the German side. “In that town.”

  “What town?” Noor asked, squinting into smoky distance.

  A mortar shell landed in no-man’s-land, sending up a fountain of brown mud.

  “See that patch of rubble behind the German lines?”

  “If that was ever a town, it’s not one anymore,” Emma said. “It’s just a big hole in the ground.”

  “This entire countryside’s a hole in the ground,” said Millard.

  Addison began to recite: “‘They sent forth men to battle, but no such men return. And home, to claim their welcome, come ashes in an urn.’”

  “Aeschylus,” Millard said appreciatively, and Addison nodded.

  “Isn’t there some way around the fighting?” asked Horace. “Must we really go straight through?”

  “Not unless you grow wings,” said Miss Hawksbill. “The front lines stretch to the sea, and a hundred miles in the other direction.”

  “You aren’t suggesting we simply walk across no-man’s-land,” Horace said. “We’ll be shot to bits the instant we pop our heads over the berm!”

  Miss Hawksbill stopped. Poked a finger to his chest. “You will not, if you heed me.” She pointed to the trenches below. “At this moment, on this day in history, that pitch of ground there is the deadliest place in the world. From here on you must watch me very closely. Mirror my actions. Tread in my footsteps. Do exactly what I do, and we’ll have a safe crossing. Otherwise”—her eyes traversed each of our faces, searing with intensity—“we won’t.”

  We assured her we would, and we meant it.

  The path sloped downward and soon our view of the front was obscured again behind trees. We descended into a forested valley of ghostly fog, where we joined a dirt road. It was tough to see more than a hundred feet ahead, but Miss Hawksbill walked with such confidence that we never doubted she knew where she was going.

  It occurred to me that, at some point, we must have passed through a membrane and exited Miss Hawksbill’s loop into the outer past—unless Miss Hawksbill’s loop was miles wide, which it almost certainly wasn’t—but the transition from inner loop to outer past had been subtle enough, or had happened while we were distracted enough, that we hadn’t noticed. The change wouldn’t have affected the ymbryne’s timing or her foreknowledge of events; it only meant that after twenty-four hours had passed, Miss Hawksbill’s loop would repeat itself while the bygone world beyond its membrane would tick on into the future—or the later past, or whatever you wanted to call it—if you were still there to experience it.

  Thinking about it was starting to make my head ache, and I was grateful to be spared further contemplation of it when Miss Hawksbill suddenly veered us off the road and behind a tree.

  “Wait,” she said, raising her good arm to hold us back.

  We waited. After a few seconds she furrowed her brow, puzzled, and pulled a watch out of her dress pocket. She tapped it and held it up to her ear.

  “Is something the matter?” Horace asked.

  “Damn thing’s late,” she muttered.

  “What is?”

  That’s when we heard the sound of an approaching engine, and leaning around the tree, I could see the shape of a massive truck gathering in the fog.

  “That troop transport,” she said. “It’s nine seconds late.” She shook her head in frustration.

  “Is that bad?” Noor said, mostly to me.

  “I’m afraid I’ve let my loop shift a tiny bit.” Miss Hawksbill popped open the watch’s case and twiddled its dial as the truck rumbled by. “I haven’t been as diligent with my resets as I used to be . . . Sometimes my wards let me sleep late . . . but I only have to make this slight mathematical compensation . . . Now see here! Pothole!” she sang out, and the truck banged loudly through a hole in the road. She nodded at her watch. “Nine and one-quarter seconds.”

  Millard corralled us in a private huddle. “Not to worry. Everything will happen in exactly the same order she’s used to. Just a bit later than before.”

  The truck disappeared into the fog. Miss Hawksbill snapped shut her watch. “Come on, then.”

  We had, as usual, little choice but to entrust our lives to a person who in the normal world would be considered deeply unwell.

  We continued along the road for a while, then jogged down a footpath. The sound of the guns grew less frequent but louder as we approached the front. The fog began to clear.

  “The battle has mostly moved on from here,” Miss Hawksbill said, “but it’s still quite possible to get your head shot off. Watch. Me. Closely.”

  We passed remnants of fighting. Empty crates that had contained rations and equipment. A splintered wagon. An exhausted medic sitting with his head on his knees near some bodies covered by a tarp. Through a break in some trees, we saw a line of soldiers laboring to dig a new trench in half-frozen ground. A grim thought occurred to me: that would become their home. And, perhaps, their grave.

  Now and then a soldier would pass us trudging in the opposite direction. “Walk as if you belong here, and they won’t bother you,” Miss Hawksbill told us.

  Some gave us curious looks. But she was right: They all had more important things to deal with than an old lady and some kids. All but one soldier paid us no mind. He marched up to Miss Hawksbill with his eyes full of fire. “No women and children!” he shouted, but as he began to turn away, she put a hand on his cheek and swiped a feather under his nose in what was the quickest memory-wipe I had ever seen, and then he stood blinking and befuddled as we continued on our way.

  The path flattened and the woods thinned out. We hugged the edge of a clearing where two soldiers were operating a massive artillery gun. As we were passing, one of them shouted, “Fire in the hole!” and we just had time to clap our hands over our ears before the gun went off. It shook the ground and sent such a shock wave through the air that my vision briefly distorted, but hardly a moment later the gunners were joking and helping one another light cigarettes.

  Miss Hawksbill glanced at us over her shoulder. Addison looked a bit unsteady, but my other friends, who’d lived with bombs dropping near them for most of their lives, seemed as unfazed as the two gunners.

  We walked on.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The road began to sink and then to narrow, its sides rising gradually around us. A scarred sign read CATACOMBES. Two more, in English: CROUCH PERPETUALLY and HELMET AT ALL TIMES.

  Miss Hawksbill stopped us. “Have you got gas masks in those packs of yours?”

>   We did not. “Do we really need them?” Emma asked.

  “Only if you don’t want to go blind,” she said. “But I know where we can get some. Come on.”

  The sides of the road kept rising until they became walls made of sandbags and sawed logs. And then suddenly we were entering the trenches. Their walls continued to narrow until you had to squeeze against the sandbag wall to let someone pass going the other way. The composition of the ground degraded from dirt into mud, a gluey morass that sucked at our feet. Soon we were covered in it from the shins down, and Miss Hawksbill’s dress was one-quarter filth. It amazed me how deftly she navigated here, despite her wildly inappropriate clothes.

  The trench was mostly, but not completely, abandoned. We passed soldiers tucked into nooks and stretched out on benches cut into the wall, sleeping, smoking, and reading. A few looked no older than me or my friends. At least one looked younger, his cheeks smooth but his eyes ancient with pain. No wonder most of them didn’t look twice at me or Enoch or Horace. We could’ve been them. They stared at Emma, though, and Noor most of all, who was not only young and female but brown-skinned.

  Only a skeleton crew of soldiers remained in this section of trench. The big action, Miss Hawksbill told us, was miles away. But that didn’t mean the machine gun nests on either side of no-man’s-land had been abandoned, or that the mortars had stopped falling, or that it would be much easier to cross here than it was a mile down the line. And I still had no idea how Miss Hawksbill was going to get us across that patch of hell in broad daylight.

  I bumped into Noor, who had just collided with Miss Hawksbill’s back. “Wait,” the ymbryne said, her good hand signaling us to stop. “Nine and one-quarter . . . now duck!”

  She waved us down and we all squatted in the mud. A percussive blast shook the ground, and then a fine rain of dirt fell over us. Then she waved us up and we were moving again. We clambered over a mound of smashed wood and a half-collapsed trench wall. I nearly tripped over a man’s leg poking out from the debris.

  “Do not stop!” Miss Hawksbill said loudly, and Bronwyn, who had hung back to dig the man out, gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep walking. “I know it’s all ancient history,” she said, “but I can’t help it, I have feelings.”

  “Do not look at anything but me,” Miss Hawksbill said. “Unless you want all these bygone horrors to live in your memory forever.”

  I did not. I did my best to lock my eyes on Noor’s backpack and the back of Miss Hawksbill’s head and nothing else. We ducked under a series of wooden bridges built across the top of the trench. Miss Hawksbill stopped our line and disappeared through the door of a small, dark bunker. She rummaged noisily, then came out with a stack of gas masks and handed them out.

  “Let’s hope these fit,” she said dubiously.

  It wasn’t the first time an ymbryne had handed me a gas mask; I was reminded of the night I first witnessed a loop reset, cowering in Miss Peregrine’s garden as rain and bombs fell from the sky and she timed her watch to a children’s song.

  “Put them on now?” asked Bronwyn.

  “I’ll tell you,” Miss Hawksbill replied.

  I slid my arm through the straps and let it dangle from my elbow as I walked. A short time later we came to a row of ladders leaned against the sandbags. There were dozens of them, spaced twenty feet apart down the length of the trench. Miss Hawksbill slowed, bending to inspect each one. “We cross . . . here,” she said, stopping decisively by a ladder with a broken rung and a speckling of cigarette butts around it.

  Horace peered down the row of ladders. “You’re sure?”

  She gave him a withering stare. “As sure as any ymbryne can be who’s walked the environs of her loop for a hundred years.” She nodded behind her. “That crossing gets you shot to ribbons.” She nodded the other way. “That one gets you blown to cassoulet. I have seen every potential route attempted, often at the cost of life and limb, so yes, I am sure. Unless you’d rather wait seven hours and twelve minutes for the scout at German watch post seven-B to drink himself into a stupor, though I’ve had complaints about that route, as it involves swimming through a soup of choleric corpsewater and taking refuge for twelve minutes inside the remains of a horse.”

  Horace looked at his boots. “This route will be fine.”

  Addison lifted his paws onto the ladder’s first rung. “Could someone boost me, please?”

  “Not quite yet,” said Miss Hawksbill, reaching down to pat him. “Be ready in four minutes and . . .” She consulted her watch. “Seven seconds. Until then, make yourselves comfortable.”

  A rattle of gunfire somewhere down the trench made me startle.

  “Let’s get cozy,” Enoch said with a snicker. He unshouldered his pack and dropped it in the mud. “Anyone want to give me a shoulder rub?”

  Bronwyn proceeded to, but Enoch flinched away, yelping, “Oww, not so hard!”

  Miss Hawksbill was flicking mud blobs from her dress and readjusting her sling when she looked up as if she’d just remembered something. “Does anyone need a pep talk before we go up and over? I’m not very good at them, but I’ll have a try if it would help . . .”

  Distantly, a man was screaming.

  “I’d like to hear your pep talk,” Bronwyn said.

  Miss Hawksbill cleared her throat. “‘Death comes for us all,’” she began in a loud voice.

  Bronwyn grimaced. “Never mind, I think I’d prefer some quiet.”

  “Suit yourselves,” Miss Hawksbill said with a shrug.

  Enoch straightened one of the stubbed-out cigarettes and held it toward Emma. “Light?”

  Emma made a gagging face. “That’s disgusting, Enoch.”

  Miss Hawksbill walked away to memory-wipe a soldier who’d been staring at us a little too long. As she was coming back, Noor hooked me around the arm. “Come talk to her with me,” she said.

  We intercepted Miss Hawksbill while she was still beyond hearing range of the others. “Could I ask you something?” Noor said in an undertone.

  “You have two minutes, three seconds,” Miss Hawksbill replied.

  Noor leaned in close. “Is there anything else you can tell us about the prophecy? We found out I was one of the seven. And we found out about this meeting place. But . . .”

  Miss Hawksbill looked at Noor expectantly.

  “When we’re all finally together, the seven of us, what do we do?”

  The ymbryne’s eyes narrowed. “You’re one of the seven . . . and you don’t know?”

  Noor shook her head. She’d missed out on so much, not having V in her life. “The ymbryne who was supposed to bring me here died before she could tell me anything.” She didn’t mention the part about resurrecting V’s dead body to prime her for clues.

  “I’m sorry, dear, I don’t have any more information to give you. Bullet!” She pointed to a sandbag just above and to the side of Noor’s head, and with a soft piff! it was struck by a German round. She glanced at her watch, which she’d pinned to her sleeve. “Well. It’s about that time, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Miss Hawksbill insisted we put on our masks. Before strapping on her own, she stood on the ladder’s first rung and said, “The two hundred fifty meters that lie between here and the German line are, in the words of a poet, ‘the abode of madness.’ So please corral your eyes, pin them to the back of the person in front of you, and do not let them roam.” She counted down on her watch. “Nine and one-quarter . . . right!”

  She began to climb. At the top of the ladder she didn’t hesitate, didn’t pause to peer over the breach, but hauled herself over the top. “Up and over!” she cried, out of sight now. “Watch that broken rung!”

  I cut in front of Noor and climbed the ladder after Miss Hawksbill, though Noor objected with a mask-muffled “Hey!” I figured if Miss Hawksbill’s nine-a
nd-a-quarter-second calculations were off a little, it would be better if I took the bullet rather than Noor. Of course, if a bomb landed on us, it wouldn’t matter what order our line was in; we’d all be dead.

  I could hear my friends yelling to psych themselves up as I launched myself over the top of the sandbag wall. The sky reappeared, such as it was, a whorl of shifting smoke framed by walls of barbed wire. I picked myself up and ran in a crouch after Miss Hawksbill, who was yelling, Go, go, go! All I could see was her back and an inky moonscape of mud, haze, and the blackened stumps of trees. This used to be a forest, I thought.

  We clustered together in a tight line and followed Miss Hawksbill at a jogging pace, which was as fast as any of us could go. There was no flat ground anywhere. Every step was a calculation, a potential broken ankle. Shredded wood and shrapnel stippled the ground. Noor banged into my pack as I crouched down to follow Miss Hawksbill through a hole in some barbed wire. Gunfire sliced through the air, but if someone was aiming at us, their aim was way off.

  We’d made it maybe halfway across when Miss Hawksbill held up her good arm. “Now . . . stop!” she shouted, and waved us down. We all dropped to the ground except Enoch, who had turned to stare at something as a patch of smoke cleared. “My God, I could raise such a fearsome army of dead here—”

  I tackled him around the waist and we slammed into the mud.

  “Hey! What are you—”

  A shell landed not far from us. The blast felt like a kick to the head, and the world turned black for a moment. My ears rang as the sky cleared of falling dirt, and before he could thank me, Bronwyn pulled us to our feet again and we were running after Miss Hawksbill. She took sharp, seemingly random turns, cutting left or right for no obvious reason, until a short time after we’d left a certain path, a volley of bullets cut the air or a mortar shell dropped in a place we’d recently been.

  Miss Hawksbill knew every hazard by heart, every minuscule event down to the moment, had committed to memory the timings of a hundred thousand interlocking occurrences. The farther we went, the more I was in awe of her.