Library of Souls (8 page)

“But what's it
for
?”

“To see with!” he replied testily.

Sharon pushed the motor harder—possibly just to drown out my questions—and as we picked up speed the bow lifted gently from the water. I took a deep breath, enjoying the sun and wind on my face, and Addison let his tongue hang out as he leaned over the side with his paws, looking as happy as I'd ever seen him.

What a beautiful day to go to Hell.

“So I've been thinking about how you got here,” Emma said. “How you got back to the present.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you think?”

“There's only one explanation that makes any sense—though not bloody much. When we were in the underground tunnels with all
those wights, and we crossed back into the present, the reason you came with us instead of continuing on in eighteen-whatever-it-was, suddenly alone, was that Miss Peregrine was there somehow, nearby, and helped you cross without anyone knowing it.”

“I don't know, Emma, that seems …” I hesitated, not wanting to be harsh. “You think she was hiding in the tunnel?”

“I'm saying it's possible. We've no idea where she was.”

“The wights have her. Caul admitted it!”

“Since when do you believe anything the wights say?”

“You've got me there,” I said. “But since Caul was boasting about having her, I figured he was probably telling the truth.”

“Maybe … or he said it to crush our spirits and make us want to give up. He was trying to convince us to surrender to his soldiers, remember?”

“True,” I said, frowning. My brain was starting to kink from all the possibilities. “Okay. Let's say for the sake of argument that Miss P was with us in the tunnel. Why would she have gone to the trouble of sending me back to the present as a captive of the wights? We were on our way to have our second souls sucked out. I would've been better off stuck in that loop.”

For a moment Emma looked genuinely stumped. Then her face lit up and she said, “Unless you and I are
supposed
to rescue everyone else. Maybe it was all part of her plan.”

“But how could she have known we would escape the wights?”

Emma cast a sidelong glance at Addison. “Maybe she had help,” she whispered.

“Em, this hypothetical chain of events is getting
really
unlikely.” I took a breath, choosing my words carefully. “I know you want to believe Miss Peregrine is out there somewhere, free, watching over us. I do, too …”

“I want that so badly, it hurts,” she said.

“But if she were free, wouldn't she have contacted us somehow? And if
he
were involved,” I said quietly, nodding toward
Addison, “wouldn't he have mentioned it by now?”

“Not if he's sworn to secrecy. Perhaps it's too dangerous to tell anyone, even us. If we knew Miss Peregrine's whereabouts, and someone
knew
we knew, we might break under torture …”

“And he wouldn't?” I said a little too loudly, and the dog looked up at us, his cheeks ballooning and tongue flapping ridiculously as the wind caught them. “Ho, there!” he cried. “I've counted fifty-six fish already, though one or two might've been bits of half-submerged rubbish. What are you two whispering about?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Emma.

“Somehow I doubt that,” he muttered, but his suspicion was quickly overwhelmed by his instincts, and a second later he yelped, “Fish!” and his attention lasered back to the water. “Fish … fish … rubbish … fish …”

Emma laughed darkly. “It's a completely mad idea, I know. But my brain is a hope-making engine.”

“I'm so glad,” I said. “Mine is a worst-case-scenario generator.”

“We need each other, then.”

“Yes. But we already knew that, I think.”

The boat's steady heaving pushed us together and apart, together and apart.

“Sure you wouldn't rather go on the romantic cruise?” Sharon said. “It isn't too late.”

“Very sure,” I said. “We're on a mission.”

“Then I suggest you open the box you're sitting on. You're going to need what's inside when we cross over.”

We opened the bench's hinged top to find a large canvas tarp.

“What's this for?” I said.

“Cowering beneath,” Sharon replied, and he turned the boat down an even narrower canal lined with new, expensive-looking condos. “I've been able to keep you hidden from view thus far, but the protection I can offer doesn't work inside the Acre—and unsavory
characters tend to keep watch for easy prey 'round the entrance. And you are most certainly easy prey.”

“I
knew
you were up to something,” I said. “Not a single tourist so much as glanced at us.”

“It's safer to watch historical atrocities being committed when the participants aren't able to watch you back,” he said. “Can't have my customers being carried off by Viking raiders, can I? Imagine the user reviews!”

We were fast approaching a sort of tunnel—a bridged-over stretch of canal, perhaps a hundred feet long, atop which hulked a building like a warehouse or an old mill. From the far end shone a half circle of blue sky and sparkling water. Between here and there was only darkness. It looked as much like a loop entrance as anyplace I'd seen.

We heaved out the enormous tarp, which filled half the boat. Emma lay down beside me and we wriggled beneath it, drawing the edge up to our chins like bedsheets. As the boat glided beneath the bridge into shadow, Sharon cut the motor and hid it beneath another, smaller tarp. Then he stood and extended a collapsible staff, plunged it into the water until it touched bottom, and began poling us forward in long, silent strokes.

“By the way,” Emma said, “what sort of ‘unsavory characters' are we hiding from? Wights?”

“There's more evil in peculiardom than merely your hated wights,” Sharon said, his voice echoing through the stone tunnel. “An opportunist disguised as a friend can be every bit as dangerous as an outright enemy.”

Emma sighed. “Must you always be so vague?”

“Your heads!” he snapped. “You too, dog.”

Addison snuffled beneath the tarp, and we pulled the edge over our faces. It was black and hot under the fabric, and it smelled overpoweringly of motor oil.

“Are you frightened?” Addison whispered in the dark.

“Not particularly,” said Emma. “Are you, Jacob?”

“So much I might throw up. Addison?”

“Of course not,” the dog said. “Fearfulness isn't a characteristic of my breed.”

But then he snuggled right between Emma and me, and I could feel his whole body trembling.

* * *

Some changeovers are as fast and smooth as superhighways, but this one felt like slamming down a washboard road full of potholes, lurching around a hairpin turn, and then careening off a cliff—all in complete darkness. When it was finally over, my head was dizzy and pounding. I wondered what invisible mechanism made some changeovers harder than others. Maybe the journey was only as rough as the destination, and this one had felt like off-roading into a savage wilderness because that's precisely what we had done.

“We have arrived,” Sharon announced.

“Is everyone okay?” I said, fumbling for Emma's hand.

“We must go back,” Addison groaned. “I've left my kidneys on the other side.”

“Do keep quiet until I find somewhere discreet to deposit you,” Sharon said.

It's amazing how much more acute your hearing becomes the moment you can't use your eyes. As I lay quietly beneath the tarp, I was hypnotized by the sounds of a bygone world blooming around us. At first there was only the splash of Sharon's pole in the water, but soon it was complemented by other noises, all stirring together to paint an elaborate scene in my mind. That steady slap of wood against water belonged, I imagined, to the oars of a passing boat piled high with fish. I pictured the ladies I could hear shouting to one another as leaning from the windows of opposite-facing houses, trading gossip across the canal while tending lines of laundry. Ahead
of us, children whooped with laughter as a dog barked, and distantly I could make out voices singing in time to the rhythm of hammers: “Hark to the clinking of hammers, hark to the driving of nails!” Before long I was imagining plucky chimneysweeps in top hats skipping down streets full of rough charm and people banding together to overcome their lot in life with a wink and a song.

I couldn't help it. All I knew about Victorian slums I'd learned from the campy musical version of
Oliver Twist
. When I was twelve I'd been in a community theater production of it; I was Orphan Number Five, if you must know, and had suffered such terrible stage fright on the night of the show that I faked a stomach flu and watched the whole thing from the wings, in costume, with a barf bucket between my legs.

Anyway, such was the scene in my head when I noticed a small hole in the tarp near my shoulder—chewed by rats, no doubt—and, shifting a little, I found I could peek through it. Within seconds, the happy, musical-inspired landscape I'd imagined melted away like a Salvador Dalí painting. The first horror to greet me were the houses that lined the canal, though calling them houses was generous. Nowhere in their sagging and rotted architecture could be found a single straight line. They slouched like a row of exhausted soldiers who'd fallen asleep at attention; it seemed the only thing keeping them from tipping straight into the water was the tightness with which they were packed—that and the mortar of black-and-green filth that smeared their lower thirds in thick, sludgy strata. On each of their rickety porches a coffinlike box stood on end, but only when I heard a loud grunt issue from one and saw something tumble into the water from beneath it did I realize what they were or that the slapping sounds I'd heard earlier hadn't come from oars but from outhouses, which were contributing to the very filth that held them up.

The women calling to one another from across the canal were leaning from opposite windows, just as I'd imagined, but they
weren't hanging laundry and they certainly weren't trading gossip—at least, not anymore; now they were trading insults and issuing threats. One waved a broken bottle and laughed drunkenly while the other shouted epithets I could barely understand (“Yore nuffink but a stinkin' dollymop 'ood lay wi' the devil 'imself for a farthing!”)—which was ironic, if I took her meaning correctly, because she was herself stripped to the waist and didn't seem to mind who noticed. Both stopped to whistle down at Sharon as we passed, but he ignored them.

Eager to wipe that image from my head, I managed to replace it with something even worse: ahead of us was a gang of kids swinging their feet from a rickety footbridge that spanned the canal. They were dangling a dog above the water by a rope tied around its hind legs, dipping the poor creature underwater and cackling when its desperate barks turned to bubbles. I resisted an urge to kick the tarp away and scream at them. At least Addison couldn't see; if he had, no amount of reasoning would've stopped him from going after them with teeth bared, blowing our cover.

“I see what you're up to,” Sharon muttered at me. “If you want to have a look around just wait, we'll be through the worst of it in a tick.”

“Are you peeking?” Emma whispered, poking me.

“Maybe,” I said, still doing it.

The boatman shushed us. Drawing his pole from the water, he uncapped the handle to expose a short blade, then held it out to sever the boys' rope as we drifted by. The dog splashed into the water and paddled gratefully away, and howling with rage, the boys began to improvise projectiles to throw at us. Sharon pushed on, ignoring them as he had the ladies until a flying apple core missed his head by inches. Then he sighed, turned, and calmly pulled back the hood of his cloak—just enough so that the boys could see him, but I couldn't.

Whatever they saw must've scared them half to death, because
all ran screaming from the bridge, one so fast he tripped and fell into the fetid water. Chuckling to himself, Sharon readjusted his hood before facing forward again.

“What's happened?” Emma said, alarmed. “What was that?”

“A Devil's Acre welcome,” replied Sharon. “Now, if you care to see where we are, you may uncover your faces a bit, and I'll attempt to give you your gold coin's worth of tour-guiding with the time we have left.”

We pulled the edge of the tarp down to our chins, and both Emma and Addison gasped—Emma, I think, at the sight, and Addison, judging from his wrinkled his nose, at the smell. It was unreal, like a stew of raw sewage simmering all around us.

“You get used to it,” Sharon said, reading my puckered face.

Emma gripped my hand and moaned, “Oh, it's
awful
 …”

And it was. Now that I could see it with both eyes, the place looked even more hellish. The foundations of every house were decomposing into mush. Crazy wooden footbridges, some no wider than a board, crisscrossed the canal like a cat's cradle, and its stinking banks were heaped with trash and crawling with spectral forms at work sifting through it. The only colors were shades of black, yellow, and green, the flag of filth and decay, but black most of all. Black stained every surface, smeared every face, and striped the air in columns that rose from chimneys all around us—and, more ominously, from the smokestacks of factories in the distance, which announced themselves on the minute with industrial booms, deep and primal like war drums, so powerful they shook every window yet unbroken.

“This, friends, is Devil's Acre,” Sharon began, his slithering voice just loud enough for us to hear. “Actual population seven thousand two hundred and six, official population zero. The city fathers, in their wisdom, refuse even to acknowledge its existence. The charming body of water in whose current we're currently drifting is called Fever Ditch, and the factory waste, night soil, and
animal carcasses which flow perpetually into it are the source not only of its bewitching odor but also of disease outbreaks so regular you could set your watch to them and so spectacular that this entire area has been dubbed ‘the Capital of Cholera.'