Home > The Desolations of Devil's Acre

The Desolations of Devil's Acre
Author: Ransom Riggs

 

For a long time there is only darkness and the sound of distant thunder and the hazy sensation of falling. Beyond that I have no self, no name. No memory. I am aware, dimly, that I used to have these things, but now they are gone and I am nearly nothing. A single photon of failing light circling a hungry void.

   It won’t be long now.

   I’ve lost my soul, I’m afraid, but I can’t remember how. All I can recall are slow, churning cracks of thunder, and within them the syllables of my name, whatever it used to be, drawn out until unrecognizable. That and the dark are all there is, for a long time, until another sound joins the thunder: wind. Then rain, too. There is wind, and thunder, and rain, and falling.

   Something is coming into being, one sensation at a time. I am rising from the trench, escaping the void. My single photon becomes a flashing cluster.

   I feel something rough against my face. I hear the creaking of ropes. The flap of something caught in the wind. Perhaps I am on a boat. Trapped in the lightless belly of some storm-tossed ship.

   One eye blinks open. Forms thrash dimly above me. A row of swinging pendulums. Overwound clocks all out of sync, groaning, gears about to break.

   I blink and the pendulums become bodies dropped from a gallows, kicking and twisting.

   I find I can turn my head. Blurred shapes begin to resolve. Rough green fabric against my face. Above me, the tick-tocking bodies have become a row of storm-blown plants swinging from the rafters in creaky wicker baskets. Behind them, a wall of insect screens shudders and flaps.

   I am lying on a porch. On the rough green floor of a porch.

   I know this porch

   I know this floor

   Farther away, a rain-whipped lawn terminates at a dark wall of genuflecting palms.

   I know that lawn

   I know those palms

   How long have I been here? How many years?

   time is playing tricks again

   I try to move my body, but can only rotate my head. My eyes flick to a card table and two folding chairs. I’m suddenly certain that, if I could persuade my body to rise, I would find a pair of reading glasses on the table. A half-finished game of Monopoly. A mug of steaming, still-hot coffee.

   Someone has just been here. Words have just been spoken. They hang in the air still, returning to me in echoes.

   “What kind of bird?”

   A boy’s voice. My voice.

   “A big hawk who smoked a pipe.” This one gravelly, accented. An old man’s voice.

   “You must think I’m pretty dumb,” the boy replies.

   “I would never think that about you.”

   The boy again: “But why did the monsters want to hurt you?”

   A scrape as the old man pushes back his chair and rises. He’s going to get something he wants to show me, he says. Some pictures.

   how long ago was that

   a minute

   an hour

   I have to get up or he’ll worry. He’ll think I’m playing a trick on him, and he doesn’t like tricks. Once, as a game, I hid from him in the woods, and when he couldn’t find me he got so angry he turned red and yelled bad words. Later, he said it was because he was scared, but he wouldn’t tell me what had scared him.

   It is raining ferociously. This storm is an angry, living thing, and it’s already torn a gash in the screen, which thrashes like a flag in a gale.

   something is wrong with me

   I push up onto my elbow, but that is all I can manage. I notice a strange black mark on the floor. A burned line that tracks around me, tracing the outline of my body.

   I try to push myself up fully to sitting. Dark orbs swim in my vision.

   Then a giant crash. Everything goes blinding white.

   so bright so close so loud

   It sounded like an explosion but it wasn’t; it’s lightning, the strike just outside, so near that the flash and the thunderclap are simultaneous.

   And now I am sitting upright, heart hammering. I hold a trembling hand before my eyes.

   The hand looks weird. It’s too big. The fingers are too long. Black hairs sprout between the knuckles.

   where is the boy am I not the boy? I don’t like tricks

   Tender red lines encircle the wrist.

   handcuffs latched to a porch rail in a storm

   I can see the tabletop and it’s empty.

   There is no coffee cup. There are no glasses.

   he isn’t coming back

   But then, impossibly, he does. He is there, outside, at the edge of the woods. My grandfather. Walking in the tall grass, back bent against the wind, his yellow raincoat vivid against the dark palms and his hood pulled low to shield his eyes from the stinging rain.

   what’s he doing out there why isn’t he coming in

   He stops. Peers down at something in the too-tall grass.

   I raise my hand. Call his name.

   His back straightens, and only then do I realize: He’s all wrong. His frame too narrow. His walk too smooth for an old man with arthritic hips.

   because it isn’t him

   He jogs toward me, toward the house, to the torn and flapping screen.

   the storm didn’t do that

   what kind of monsters?

   hunched and awful with rotting skin and black eyes and squirming

   I am on my feet as he throws open the screen door and fills the threshold.

   “Who are you?” he asks.

   His voice is flat, tense. He pulls back the hood of his raincoat. He is middle-aged, his sharp chin accentuated by a trim red beard, eyes masked behind sunglasses.

   It’s such a foreign experience to be in the presence of another person and standing on two feet that I hardly register the strangeness of his wearing sunglasses in a rainstorm.

   Automatically, I answer.

   “Yakob,” I say, and only after hearing it aloud does it sound wrong.

   “I’m the realtor,” he says, but I know it’s a lie. “I came to board up the windows for the storm.”

   “You’re a little late for that,” I say.

   He enters slowly, as if approaching a skittish animal. The screen door hisses closed. He glances at the burn mark on the floor, then returns his cold gaze to me.

   “You’re him,” he says, fingers grazing the card table as he clomps toward me in heavy black boots. “Jacob Portman.”

   My name. My actual name. Something bubbles up from the trench, from the dark.

   a horrible mouth formed in spiraling clouds, thundering my name

   a girl, raven-haired and beautiful next to me screaming

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