The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  He appeared in a pool of light below the staircase—light that appeared to be emanating from inside his head—then drew a breath and blew out a roomful of daylight. In a few seconds his head returned to a normal shade and the space around us was transformed from night-black to midday, rays of sunshine streaking down through high windows.

  The young man looked about eighteen. He had smooth dark skin and was dressed immaculately in a pinstriped suit, bowler hat, and thin leather gloves, which he was pulling onto his hands as he strode toward us. “My name is Julius,” he said, “and that’s Sebbie.”

  I assumed he meant the fire-woman, but she was shrinking before our eyes, dimming out and collapsing into a ball of scintillating orange light. It flew up the stairs and into the hands of a small, pale girl on the balcony, her arm extended like an outfielder catching a fly ball. It smacked into her palm, and then she smashed it flat with her other hand, stretched it into a rope, slurped it quick into her mouth like spaghetti, and let out a little belch.

  “Hello,” she boomed, and I was shocked to hear the fire-woman’s giant voice coming from a tiny girl of no more than ten. “It’s about time you showed up.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Sorry about the unfriendly welcome,” said the girl, Sebbie, as she descended the stairs. “Had to make sure you were really one of us.” She wore a white flapper dress and a dour expression, spoke with an Eastern European accent, and seemed to hate bright light. Stepping into a pool of sun by a window, she swiped the light away, leaving her face in a dim shadow she would take with her everywhere.

  Julius joined us at the base of the stairs, where we had all gathered. “We were expecting one girl and one ymbryne. Not a party.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Noor.

  “We’ve got time.” Julius crossed his arms. “Are you people hungry?”

  “We really don’t have time,” said Millard. “Where are the others?”

  Sebbie shrugged. “This is all of us, so far. Our ymbrynes dropped us off here a couple of days ago.”

  Emma looked confused. “Dropped you off—and went away?”

  “They worried their presence here might attract too much attention,” Julius explained. “We don’t require babysitting.”

  “There was another boy,” Sebbie said. “But he got bored of waiting around and left.”

  Noor’s eyes bugged. “What do you mean, left?”

  “We need seven to shut the door,” Horace fretted.

  Julius waved a hand. “He’ll be back, I imagine.”

  Noor looked like she was ready to pull out her hair.

  “What about the other three?” I said. “Where are they?”

  “Sophie says they’re on their way,” Sebbie said.

  “You people seem very on edge,” Julius said. “I really think you should come upstairs with us and eat something.”

  I began to wonder whether they had any idea why they’d been called here.

  “How much do you know about the prophecy?” Noor asked them.

  “That there is one, and that’s why we’re here,” Julius replied.

  “Our ymbrynes didn’t tell us much.” Sebbie batted away a ray of light that had strayed across her face. “Do you know what all this is about?”

  They’d been spared the details, their ymbrynes apparently afraid of scaring them. Of course, until recently, the prophecy had been unknown to most, and taken seriously by very few.

  “Have you never heard of Caul?” Emma asked.

  They had, of course. “Why? Does this concern him?” Julius asked.

  “I thought he was dead,” Sebbie said.

  They were starting to look worried.

  We gave them the short version of the bad news. Caul had been trapped in the collapsed Library of Souls, fulfilling a major part of the prophecy. Had been recently resurrected, and was now more powerful than ever.

  “And he has new hollowgast,” I said.

  “And he’s coming for our loop of last refuge, Devil’s Acre,” Horace added. “If he gets control of it, and the Panloopticon, no loop anywhere is safe, not even the most remote ones.”

  Julius nodded pensively. “So it’s down to us, you’re saying.” He still didn’t sound very concerned.

  “It very well might be,” said Millard. “Other than holding him off and hoping he goes away, you seven are the best hope we’ve got.”

  “Except it’s just three of us,” Noor said.

  “The others are coming,” Sebbie insisted. “As for the boy who went walkabout, Sophie and Pensevus said he couldn’t have gone far. They went out to retrieve him a few hours ago.”

  “He had the personality of a warthog anyway,” Julius said.

  Noor was getting jumpy, picking at her hands. “Okay, we can’t control that right now, so whatever,” she said. “But do any of you even know what we’re supposed to do?”

  Julius cocked his head at her. “Do?”

  For a moment she looked like she might scream. “How do we fight Caul? How do we shut the door? None of you have any idea?”

  “Well, the answer seems a little more clear than it did an hour ago,” Millard said.

  “It does?” she said, spinning to face him.

  “Mm-hmm.” He turned to Julius and Sebbie. “The one who came before you—what did he do?”

  Julius said, “He was a light-eater, like us.”

  “Ah!” Millard clapped his hands. “Then I’d wager all seven of you are. So, it’s no stretch to assume that ‘shutting the door’ has something to do with eating light.”

  Noor’s eyes went wide and she nodded slowly.

  “Maybe Caul’s made of light now,” Emma hypothesized. “And you just need to, you know . . .”

  “Eat him?” said Enoch.

  Bronwyn winced. “Gross.”

  “But what about ‘the door?’” I asked.

  “Could be a metaphor,” said Horace. “Prophecy is fifty-one percent poetry, forty-nine percent facts.”

  “I’m fifty-one percent starving,” said Julius. “Pensevus will know what we need to do. When he comes back, we’ll ask him. Now, if you don’t mind, Miss Tern had just set out a lunch for us before you arrived.”

  As we followed the light-eaters upstairs, my mood darkened. I was certain now that bringing down Caul would require more from the seven than simply being together in the same room and holding hands. I’d been part of the peculiar world long enough to understand that things were rarely that easy. It was likely we would have to take all seven with us back to the Acre, and at some point we were going to have to confront our enemy in person, and it would be ugly. And hard. And bloody.

  I was anxious to get on with doing the hard things, not least of which would be getting out of Miss Tern’s loop again. But since it looked like we had no choice but to wait for the other four to arrive, I didn’t mind having some downtime. My nerves were frayed from the journey, my head was heavy with exhaustion, and I realized, as the tantalizing smell of food hit my nose, that I was ravenously hungry.

  Sebbie and Julius showed us to a clean, animal-free sitting room upstairs where a banquet table had been laid with a buffet. We let our heavy packs and coats and Bronwyn’s steamer trunk fall to the floor, then attacked the buffet like wolves.

  We ate and talked. Mostly it was Noor and the two other light-eaters who did the talking. Between mouthfuls of ratatouille mopped up with fresh bread, Noor leaned across the table and peppered Julius and Sebbie with questions. What had their lives been like? When had they manifested their abilities? When had their ymbrynes told them about the prophecy? Were they hunted and chased, like she had been?

  They had been delivered to Miss Tern’s loop the previous day by their ymbrynes, they said, via slower but less dangerous routes than the one we’d taken. I was left to assume that they’d
been able to reach Miss Tern’s loop so quickly because they had traveled here accompanied by their ymbrynes, rather than alone, as we’d been forced to do. Millard confirmed this with a whisper in my ear: there are some temporal shortcuts available to ymbrynes and those who journey with them.

  Their names were Julius Purcell and Sebbie Mayfield. Both were light-eaters, although the precise nature of their abilities varied slightly. “I can project my voice when I want to,” Sebbie said, then, a bit more quietly, “and my light.”

  Julius’s light-eating power was fearsome: He could darken huge spaces in a flash, but couldn’t hold the light he’d gathered inside himself as long as Sebbie or Noor were able to. He thought his parents were from Ghana, but he’d been adopted by an ymbryne at a young age and had moved around a lot, shuffled from loop to loop for most of his life. Most recently he’d lived in China. “The loops there are wonderful, and some are quite ancient,” he enthused. “You know they never had a dark age? While all of Europe was illiterate for five hundred years—even kings!—they were creating the most amazing works of art and literature.” As to his age, he wasn’t sure, exactly. He guessed he was about fifty-six, though he’d probably lost track of some birthdays along the way. What was clear, though, was that for a peculiar, and especially for one of the seven, he’d led a relatively sheltered existence.

  “That’s a lovely suit,” Horace said. “Where did you get it?”

  Julius smiled appreciatively. “I had it made by a tailor in Bamako. Better than can be had on Savile Row, if you ask me.”

  “Absolutely no doubt.” Horace nodded eagerly, then looked down, embarrassed. “You can’t tell from what I’m wearing now, but I’m also a devotee of sartorial, er—”

  “Horace is the best-dressed peculiar I know,” I said.

  “Excepting yourself, I’m sure,” Horace said to Julius, but Julius had turned to talk with Millard, who was asking him some overly technical question about loop geography.

  The conversation turned to Sebbie. She told us she’d spent many years hiding in caves—hiding from the daylight she hated and from villagers who, because she only ventured out at night, had decided she was a vampire. More than one had tried to hammer a wooden stake through her heart. Their persecution only drove her deeper into the caves, where she had subsisted on a diet of bats, moss, and gifts of food left near the cave entrance by the rare benevolent villager.

  She stopped eating those, however, “when one of ’em tried to poison me. That’s when I started developing my light-casting talent. I found I could scare people away with a fiery phantasm and by projecting my voice.” Eventually, word of the light-bending cave girl got around to an ymbryne, Miss Ptarmigan, who found her and took her in. “She was a good woman, gave me a home in her loop on the isle of St. Helena.”

  “It’s a lucky thing Miss Ptarmigan found you before a wight did,” said Emma. “They hunted Noor for years.”

  “Oh no.” Julius gave her a pitying look. “Did they?”

  Noor talked about it but didn’t go into much detail, because the details pained her: She mentioned the street attack that put V in the hospital and made her realize she couldn’t protect Noor anymore; the wights who, years later, began following her after she manifested her power at school, then pursued her with helicopters and SWAT-style troops. She stopped short of describing the battle at Gravehill or Murnau’s treachery or V’s murder. She was eager to turn the questions back on our new friends.

  “What about you?” she asked Julius. “Did the wights ever find you?”

  He shook his head. “There were some close calls, but my ymbryne always kept us two steps ahead of them.”

  I asked them if they’d ever encountered a hollowgast. Both said no.

  “I hear they’re fearsome,” Julius said blithely, his cheek full of bread.

  “Are they ever,” Bronwyn replied.

  “You’ve seen one?” Sebbie asked, eyes widening. “Or been near one, anyway?”

  “Seen them, fought them, killed them . . . you name it,” Enoch said. “We could tell you stories upon stories.”

  “My goodness,” said Julius, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “What lives you’ve led.”

  Sebbie shrugged. “I guess some ymbrynes are better at keeping their wards safe than others.”

  “That’s not fair,” Bronwyn said. “We had the best ymbryne in peculiardom!”

  “I think some peculiars are just lucky,” Horace said tartly.

  Sebbie spread her hands. “If you say so.”

  “Maybe that’s why they’re so calm,” Emma said in my ear. “They’ve never even been close to a hollow!”

  “They’re totally unprepared,” I agreed, forming a huddle with her and Enoch.

  Enoch chuckled. “Think of that. Their ymbrynes kept them too safe.”

  “I’m not hungry anymore,” Bronwyn said, pushing back from the table, though it was clear she was just offended.

  The meal broke up; we’d had our fill, and the conversation was starting to become contentious. I cornered Julius and asked him again when Sophie and Pensevus were coming back with the others. I felt a stab of worry every time I remembered that four of the seven were still unaccounted for. He assured me once more that they would all be here soon, but his patience with me was fraying. That and his casualness made me think they didn’t fully realize what was at stake, which only made me worry more.

  Julius suggested the light-eaters hold a friendly demonstration of their abilities, and that they do it outside, where there were no walls to limit them. I wasn’t sure if he was more interested in showing off or in sizing up Noor; either way, she was game. With nothing better to do but wait and worry, the rest of us tagged along, too, watching from the front yard as the three light-eaters crested the hill beside Miss Tern’s house.

  I already knew what Noor could do, and it was a pleasure to watch her at work. She got a running start and dashed across the hilltop with her arms spread wide, gathering all the light around them, shaping it into a pulsing ball between her hands, then swallowing it in three giant gulps. There was a smattering of polite applause.

  As impressive as Noor was, she was a beginner compared to Julius. He proceeded to tear vast strips of light out of the air from the ground all the way up to the clouds, carving blackest midnight from a sunny midday. I was reluctant to applaud a show-off, but he was one of the most powerful peculiars I’d ever met, and I couldn’t help myself. I shouted and cheered with my friends and Miss Tern’s animals, who had gathered to watch nearby, whinnying and honking and stamping their hooves.

  Then it was Sebbie’s turn. She began by demonstrating how she could steal light from a distance, which even Julius could not do. We watched her take all the light from inside Miss Tern’s house and lift it into the air, the windows going dark while the space above the roof glowed brightly—I imagined all the ways that could be useful in a battle—and then she turned it into a glowing, winged dragon. It flapped into the black-at-noon sky, then did a loop-the-loop and dissipated into scintillating dust, lighting the rooms in Miss Tern’s house again as it settled across the roof. There was more applause, and the light-eaters took a bow.

  Then we heard someone shouting from behind us, and turned to see two people running up the driveway. One was a woman I didn’t recognize. She was pulling a dazed-looking young girl along by the hand. The girl wore tall boots and a stained party dress, and she was holding a large, battered doll under one arm. I could tell the woman was an ymbryne just from the sight of her: her modest dress; her eyes intense as burning coals; and most of all, her hair, which fell down her shoulders all the way to her knees, like a pair of wings at rest.

  Everyone converged on the lawn to intercept them: me and my friends, Miss Tern and Miss Hawksbill, Noor and the light-eaters. The animals honked and whinnied, watching the commotion from a distance.

  “Miss! You’re back!” J
ulius cried, running to the long-haired woman. She hugged him quickly. His face fell. “But where are the others?”

  “My name is Miss Petrel,” said the woman, addressing the group. “I’m Julius’s ymbryne.” She was flighty and perturbed. “We went to retrieve Hadi Akhtar, the light-eater who left here last night. He thought he could navigate on his own, but he didn’t know that the road leading out of town had been mined. He tripped one, and . . .” She pulled a burned sock from her pocket and held it up.

  “Oh my God,” Emma gasped. “He’s dead?”

  Miss Petrel nodded.

  “What about the others?” I said. Not that it mattered—if one was gone there could never be seven.

  The little girl had been holding her doll up to her ear, as if it was whispering to her. Now she lowered it and said, “Penny says we can tell you. My name is Sophie, by the way. I’m the one who made the secret calls to your ymbrynes. Six ymbrynes. All but Miss Greenshank.” She looked at Noor and added, “Velya Greenshank.”

  We hadn’t heard V’s ymbryne name before now. Noor stiffened, then got a faraway look.

  “But only four still had living wards,” Sophie continued.

  “They told us their wards had been dead for years,” said Miss Petrel. “One aged forward. A second was killed by wights. The third was hit by a bus in Buenos Aires in 1978. All very sad.”

  I was reeling. Noor was frozen stiff, like she couldn’t understand what was being said, or couldn’t grapple with it.

  “But you said the others would come,” Sebbie insisted. “You said.”

  “We only learned of their loss upon arriving here,” said Miss Petrel. “And we wanted all of you present before we broke the news,” she said, acknowledging Noor with a nod. “All of you who were left, that is.”

  And then Noor, who had been quietly simmering, blew up. “This is insane! We risked our lives to get here, and there’s only three of us? Jesus Christ, that’s not even half! So what’s the point? What’s the point of any of this? We’ve already lost!”