The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  My lungs burned, both from running nonstop and from bad air that had seeped through my mask’s imperfect seal, smoke and death and traces of residual gas. Ahead of us I could see a wall of barbed wire, and beyond that more trenches. The German line.

  Miss Hawksbill guided us to a collapsed trench wall and we slid down into the trench. She was moving almost casually at this point and seemed no more stressed than if she’d been on a moderately strenuous hike. Meanwhile, my heart was clattering in my chest; now that we were in the enemy’s domain, I expected at any moment to get shot at close range by a surprised German soldier. But this section of trenches was even more sparsely populated than the British ones we’d recently left.

  We did have to hide once, Miss Hawksbill shoving us into a bunker while two soldiers passed. Then, another fifty paces or so down the line, she stopped at a junction. “This bit is unpleasant but necessary,” she hissed over her shoulder, and then she picked up a wooden board from the ground, raised it, and five seconds later brought it down on the head of an unhelmeted soldier as he rounded the corner. He slumped to the ground.

  “Good show,” Horace said admiringly.

  Soon we were out of the trenches and past the front line. Miss Hawksbill took off her gas mask and tossed it aside, and the rest of us followed suit. We came into the crumbling town Miss Hawksbill had pointed out from the hilltop. If it had once been a bustling place, it was now little more than a ruin, bombed and sacked and almost entirely deserted. Except for a few skinny dogs rummaging through the wreckage of buildings, we saw no living creatures at all.

  The entrance to Miss Tern’s loop was inside the town zoo. We entered through a still-standing iron gate. We made our way to the bear pit, climbed down into it, and went through a wooden door in the side wall. Inside, we felt a rush of time and gravity. We had crossed over.

  No sooner had the door opened than a bear’s face appeared in the crack. There was a sudden rush backward against the wall to escape it—except by Addison and Miss Hawksbill, who the let bear sniff them.

  “Bonjour, Jacques,” Miss Hawksbill said pleasantly. “J’ai amené des invités pour rendre visite à ma sœur.”

  The bear stepped back from the door to let us pass.

  “Jacques is one of my sister’s grimbears,” Miss Hawksbill explained. “He guards this loop entrance.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Addison said. Jacques growled, and Addison looked offended. “No, I’m not making fun. Some of my best friends are bears.”

  Jacques moved back to let us pass.

  “Not everyone thinks as highly of grims as we ymbrynes do,” said Miss Hawksbill. “Now come on, step lively. No more bombs to watch out for here. You’re all safe in this loop.”

  We climbed out of the bear pit, to the great surprise of some workers peering down from the viewing platform above. The grimbear roared behind us, and Miss Hawksbill shouted goodbye and waved to him, and then we made our way out of the zoo.

  Here, the sun was out, the sky cloudless and smokeless. I couldn’t hear any guns or explosions, a welcome reprieve for my overtaxed nerves. It was 1916 in Miss Tern’s loop, and while the war was close, this town had not yet been overrun. The front lines weren’t far away, though, and the townspeople must have known that the tide could turn against them at any time.

  As we walked out of the zoo and into the town, Addison muttered unhappily about the cages, though most were empty. “Most brutal thing in the world, zoos,” he said. “How would humans like it if we displayed them in cages?”

  “Bentham had a plan for a human zoo,” said Millard. “Normals collected from round the world, penned up in habitats that mimicked the places they’d lived. I read about it in his book.”

  “He wrote a book?” I said.

  “Part of one. I found an unfinished copy in his office. Myron Bentham’s Menagerie of Unextraordinary Children. Part museum catalogue, part encyclopedia, part peculiar history.”

  We walked through the town’s peaceful streets, talking about Bentham’s museum and the morality of zoos both human and animal. I was grateful for any conversation that distracted my mind from the horrors we’d just hiked through. My nerves were still jumping from the ceaseless crash of bombs and guns, my chest still clenched from it, and with every break in our chatter my mind filled with scenes from no-man’s-land. So we kept our mouths moving along with our feet.

  We passed a crowd in the town square that had gathered to watch a strangely somber parade of elephants. There was no calliope music to accompany them, no clowns or acrobats, just a glum pair of trainers to prod them along.

  “They’re being evacuated to England,” Miss Hawksbill told us. “In a few weeks a lot of these townsfolk will wish they’d joined them.”

  We walked on toward the outskirts of town, where Miss Hawksbill pointed out the roof of her sister’s house, peeking up from the trees at the top of a hill. To reach it we climbed a winding forested lane. Animal sculptures made of iron and wood were half hidden in the bushes, and in deeper shadows I thought I could see creatures scurrying to follow us. Peculiar ones, no doubt.

  “I can’t believe we made it,” said Bronwyn. “For a while there I wondered if we would.”

  “Bronwyn, you’ll jinx us!” Emma scolded her.

  “Seriously,” Noor said. “Save it until we actually meet them.”

  “If this gets written up in the Muckraker, we’re going to look like heroes,” Enoch said. “Do you think they’ll print pictures of us? Maybe that vixen Francesca will finally go on a date with me.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell Farish Obwelo how Jacob saved your life on the battlefield,” said Emma. “Francesca will love that.”

  “Oh, shut up. He did not.”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking about publicity,” said Horace. “There won’t be even be a Muckraker, much less any vixens to impress, if Noor can’t manage to—” He caught himself and awkwardly changed tack. “Look at that fascinating sculpture, is it a crane?”

  Noor kicked a stone with her boot. “Thanks, Horace, a little extra pressure is just what I needed.”

  “For what it’s worth, we all believe in you.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “Come now, don’t be defeatist,” said Miss Hawksbill.

  Noor sighed. “It might be easier to believe in myself if I had any idea what was expected of me.”

  “I daresay you’ll find out soon enough. Now, when you meet Miss Tern, please play along; to her it’s still 1916, and she knows nothing of Caul’s death or resurrection, or that her loop will collapse in a week. I’d ask you to please not inform her. She tends to get very upset.” She saw something ahead of us, then brightened and quickened her pace. “Ah, ah, ma chérie!”

  A young woman ran down the driveway toward us, her pretty face lit by a wide smile.

  “Maud! Tu m’as manqué!”

  She seemed to be in her late twenties and wore a fashionable army-green coat with a floppy beret. Miss Tern’s smile faltered as she took in the sight of her sister, who must have looked much older than she remembered, but Miss Hawksbill pulled her into a double-cheek kiss and a hug before she could say anything.

  Enoch gaped. “That’s the old crone’s sister? But she’s so—”

  “Young?” Noor said.

  “This is a collapsed loop, remember,” said Millard. “Miss Hawksbill probably looked equally young when this loop was new.”

  “Dead a week hence,” Enoch said with a sigh. “What a waste of beauty.”

  “She never would have gone for you anyway,” Bronwyn said. “Not to mention she’s an ymbryne, for bird’s sake.”

  “Ymbrynes need love, too. Just because they’re not allowed to marry doesn’t mean—”

  Emma stopped him with a dig of her elbow. “Don’t be revolting.”

  “There’s nothing revolting about love, y
ou Victorian prudes.”

  Miss Tern’s smile had vanished, and she was looking her sister up and down while speaking animatedly in French.

  “She wants to know what happened to Miss Hawksbill’s arm,” Millard whispered. “And why she looks so old.”

  “I’m testing a new disguise from the skin tailor,” said Miss Hawksbill, replying in English for our benefit while giving us a subtle wink. “And my grim rolled over on me in his sleep.” She patted her sister’s arm, then drew her in for another hug. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  The ymbrynes walked toward us arm in arm.

  “My, such a lot of visitors today,” Miss Tern remarked, which got my attention. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “They are on a grand tour of the Continental loops,” Miss Hawksbill answered for us, “and heard about your wonderful menagerie.”

  “It’s a must-see,” Miss Tern said proudly. “Did you know we were partially fictionalized in one of the more recent Tales of the Peculiar?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” said Millard, and then he bowed and introduced himself. “We had to see this famous place for ourselves.”

  “‘The Tale of Pensevus,’” Noor said, to which Miss Tern nodded. “Is Penny here now?”

  Her brow arched. “You know him?”

  “He was mine, for a while, when I was young.”

  She looked impressed. “Well, you must be someone very special. I’m sure he’d love to see you again. He’s in the house with a girl named Sophie, who rarely lets him out of her grip.”

  There was a rustle from the bushes, and a flock of chickens darted across our path. “No, thank you!” Millard yelped, scurrying behind Bronwyn. “Are those the exploding type?”

  “I see you’re familiar with peculiar zoology,” said Miss Tern.

  Addison trotted to the front. “Armageddon chickens only lay eggs early in the morning,” he said, “and only in their coops.” Addison rose up on hind legs and extended a paw. “Addison MacHenry, seventh pup of the seventh pup in an illustrious line of hunting dogs.”

  Miss Tern was clearly delighted. “You’re one of Miss Wren’s.” She shook his paw. “Your mistress is a close friend of mine. I owe her a visit. I hope you’ll feel at home here, though I’m sure my menagerie pales in comparison to that of the great Miss Wren.”

  Addison tried to smile, but looked pained. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” His home, like ours, was lost, along with many of his friends. “Thank you, I’ll pass along your regards.”

  “You said something about visitors?” Noor said, flashing Miss Hawksbill an urgent look.

  “Er, yes,” said Miss Hawksbill, taking her cue, “we’d be curious to meet them, and perhaps freshen up from our journey across the line—”

  “Yes, it’s a most unpleasant trip on foot,” said Miss Tern. “Like passing through the gears of a great meat grinder . . .” She shuddered in a way that seemed distinctly birdlike, then looked perplexed. “My visitors tell me they arrived a few days ago, but strangely I don’t remember it. They were here when I awoke this morning.” She shrugged. Peculiar things happen all the time in loops.

  “Her memory resets every day along with the loop,” Millard whispered to Noor and me.

  “They’ve sequestered themselves in the upstairs parlor,” Miss Tern continued. “They are having some sort of meeting, at which I am evidently not welcome.” She briefly frowned, bothered but trying not to show it. “But you can try to meet them.”

  Miss Hawksbill put a hand on her sister’s back. “Sister, if you’d show us the way.”

  “D’accord,” she said flatly, and I could see in her pinched expression the weight of the strangenesses that were piling up: her unfriendly visitors; her sister’s inexplicable aging; us. But she walked on and asked no more questions, at least not of my friends and me, speaking quietly with Miss Hawksbill in French as we continued up the drive.

  There was so much waiting for us, it was hard not to break into a run. Noor hummed to herself, tension rounding her shoulders and practically crackling the air. And then we came around a bend and the house revealed itself. It was a grand old chateau that, architecturally speaking, had been given the works: triple-peaked roof, beautiful domed entryway, fancy woodwork, a colonnade framing the ground floor. But much of it was hidden beneath a drape of leaves and vines, which made the house look like it was being eaten by the forest.

  “Pardon our appearance,” Miss Tern said. “It’s meant to camouflage the house from bomb-dropping airplanes. I didn’t get a chance to remove it before making the loop, so now we’re stuck with it.”

  “If Miss P had gotten some camouflage, maybe we wouldn’t have had to get soaked standing outdoors every night at our loop reset,” Enoch said sourly.

  “Wouldn’t have been worth the aesthetic trade-off,” Horace remarked, wrinkling his nose at the scene before us. “Our house was much too beautiful.”

  A pair of horses grazing on the front lawn watched with muted interest as we walked past them to the porch. When they were behind us I thought I heard one of them whisper, and the other gave a nickering laugh in reply.

  We followed a trail of grimy hoofprints inside the house. “The animals live downstairs; I live upstairs,” Miss Tern explained. We scooted around a donkey in the foyer and came into a palatial living room that had been turned into a stable. Goats with long horns munched garbage beneath grime-dimmed windows. An intricate parquet floor was mostly hidden under a tide of dirt and straw. Velvet curtains had been torn down and spun into nests for a flock of honking, long-necked birds. A winged monkey leapt onto a grand chandelier, sending it swinging as he howled at us, but after Miss Tern chastised him he dropped to the floor again, tucked his wings away, and rejoined two monkey companions who were having tea around a little table. I understood now why Miss Wren’s loop had mostly been outdoors, just simple structures on a wide hilltop.

  “Everyone’s a bit on edge today,” Miss Tern apologized. “They’re not accustomed to having so many strangers about.”

  “Where are they?” Noor said sharply, her eyes scanning the room.

  “In the drawing room, through that door there . . .” She pointed to a tall door across the room. “I don’t suppose you’d like a tour of the house first, or something to drink—”

  Only Millard had patience and manners enough to politely decline; the rest of us were already walking toward the door, desperate to finally meet the other prophesied kids.

  Miss Tern tried to follow, but Miss Hawksbill held her back. “Let’s sit and talk awhile,” she pleaded, and led her outside.

  The tall door opened onto a smaller room, considerably cleaner and free of animals. Free of people altogether, at first glance, with a great curving staircase leading up to a balcony landing, where daylight streamed down through a glass ceiling.

  “Hello?” I called out. “We’re looking for—”

  Suddenly everything went black, the light stolen from the room so fast that the words stalled in my mouth.

  “What’s happened?” Horace shouted.

  “Someone turned out the damned—” Enoch started to say, then in a clatter I heard him trip and fall.

  “We come in peace!” Bronwyn called.

  Emma sparked her hand-flames, which lit her face, etched with fear. Then a brighter light drew my eyes up to the balcony. The source was a woman who appeared not just to be illuminated by fire, but made of it, and the sight of her made several of us gasp. She was toweringly tall, wore the plate armor of a medieval knight, and in her hands she wielded a huge broadsword, also flaming. We took a collective step backward, but none of us turned and ran.

  “Who are you?” the woman said in a resounding voice. “Why have you come?”

  “We’re the wards of Alma Peregrine,” shouted Emma, attempting to match the woman’s volume.

  “We’re acco
mpanying one of the seven,” said Horace, his voice loud but wavering. “You know, from the prophecy of the—”

  The woman’s flames burned brighter as her voice rang out. “Which of you is the light-eater?”

  The light-eater. They already knew.

  Instinctively my hand shot out to stop Noor, but she shook off my grasp. “I am!” she said, taking a step forward. “Are you one of the seven?”

  “You were meant to come with only an ymbryne. Where is Velya?”

  At the mention of V’s name, Noor stiffened, but quickly recovered. “She died.”

  “Then how did you find this place?”

  “V—Velya gave me a clue, and we followed it here.”

  “Without the ymbryne to vouch for your name, you must prove yourself. Come forward and meet me, if you truly are one of the seven.”

  The fire-woman moved to the staircase and started down it. I grabbed one of Noor’s elbows and Bronwyn hooked the other.

  “It could be a trap,” I said through my teeth.

  “Let her go,” said Horace. “I think this is what needs to happen.”

  We did, reluctantly. Noor met the fire-woman at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment they only stood, tensed and facing each other, and then the woman heaved the sword above her head—it flamed brighter as she raised it, throwing light to the corners of the room.

  “STOP!” I screamed, but it was too late; the sword was already coming down. Noor brought up her hands and caught the blade between them, and in one smooth motion she stole the sword from the woman’s hands, then collapsed it into a ball of light between her palms and shoved it into her mouth.

  The woman stumbled, righted herself, and let her arms fall to her sides. “Very good,” she said, smiling. “Very good indeed.”

  Noor swallowed. Her throat glowed as the sword’s flame traveled toward her stomach. “How did you know I was a light-eater?”

  “Because,” said a young man’s voice from the dark, “we all are.”