Library of Souls Page 5

  Inside the brochure were illustrations of smiling tourists enjoying the sights he’d described. The final page was a photo of one of Sharon’s guests posing with a gang of surly pirates wielding knives and guns.

  “Peculiars do this stuff for fun?” I marveled.

  “This is a waste of time,” Emma whispered, checking behind us anxiously. “I’ll bet he’s just running out the clock until the next patrol of wights arrives.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Just wait …”

  Sharon was plowing on as if he hadn’t heard us. “… and you can see all the lunatics’ heads arranged on pikes as we float beneath London Bridge! Lastly, there’s our most requested excursion, which is a personal favorite of mine. But oh—never mind,” he said coyly, waving his hand, “come to think of it, I doubt you’d be interested in Devil’s Acre.”

  “Why not?” Emma said. “Too nice and pleasant?”

  “Actually, it’s rather a rough spot. Certainly no place for children …”

  Emma stamped her foot and shook the whole rotting dock. “That’s where our friends were taken, isn’t it?” she shouted. “Isn’t it!”

  “Don’t lose your temper, miss. Your safety is my highest concern.”

  “Quit winding us up and tell us what’s there!”

  “Well, if you insist …” Sharon made a sound like he was slipping into a warm bath and began rubbing his leathery hands together, as if just thinking about it brought him pleasure. “Nasty things,” he said. “Dreadful things. Vile things. Anything you like, so long as what you like is nasty, dreadful, and vile. I’ve often dreamed of hanging up my oar pole and retiring there one day, perhaps to run the little abattoir on Oozing Street …”

  “What name did you call it again?” said Addison.

  “Devil’s Acre,” the boatman said wistfully.

  Addison shuddered from tip to tail. “I know it,” he said gravely. “It’s a terrible place—the most depraved and dangerous slum in the whole long history of London. I’ve heard stories of peculiar animals brought there in cages and made to fight in blood-sport games. Grimbears pitted against emu-raffes, chimpnoceri against flaming-goats … parents against their own children! Forced to maim and kill one another for the entertainment of a few sick peculiars.”

  “Disgusting,” Emma said. “What peculiar would participate in such a thing?”

  Addison shook his head ruefully. “Outlaws … mercenaries … exiles …”

  “But there are no outlaws in peculiardom!” said Emma. “Any peculiar convicted of a crime is brought by the home guard to a punishment loop!”

  “How little you know of your own world,” the boatman said.

  “Criminals can’t be jailed if they’re never caught,” Addison explained. “Not if they escape to a loop like that first—lawless, ungovernable.”

  “It sounds like Hell,” I said. “Why would anyone go there voluntarily?”

  “What’s Hell for some,” said the boatman, “is paradise for others. It’s the last truly free place. Somewhere you can buy anything, sell anything …” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Or hide anything.”

  “Like kidnapped ymbrynes and peculiar children?” I said. “Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “I said nothing of the sort,” shrugged the boatman, busying himself with a rat plucked from the hem of his cloak. “Shoo there, Percy, Daddy’s working.”

  While he placed the rat gently aside, I gathered Emma and Addison in a tight huddle. “What do you think?” I whispered. “Could this … devil place … really be where our friends were taken?”

  “Well, they have to be keeping their prisoners inside a loop, and a pretty old one,” said Emma. “Otherwise most of us would age forward and die after a day or two …”

  “But what do the wights care if we die?” I said. “They just want to steal our souls.”

  “Maybe, but they can’t let the ymbrynes die. They need them to re-create the 1908 event. Remember the wights’ crazy plan?”

  “All that stuff Golan was raving about. Immortality and ruling the world …”

  “Yeah. So they’ve been kidnapping ymbrynes for months and need a place to hold them where they won’t turn into dried fruit leather, right? Which means a pretty old loop. Eighty, a hundred years at least. And if Devil’s Acre is really a lawless jungle of depravity …”

  “It is,” said Addison.

  “… then it sounds like a perfect spot for wights to secret away their captives.”

  “Right in the heart of peculiar London, too,” said Addison. “Right under everyone’s noses. Clever little blighters …”

  “Guess that settles it,” I said.

  Emma stepped smartly toward Sharon. “We’ll take three tickets to that disgusting, horrible place you described, please.”

  “Be very, very certain that’s what you want,” said the boatman. “Innocent lambs like yourselves don’t always return from Devil’s Acre.”

  “We’re sure,” I said.

  “Very good, then. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Only thing is, we don’t have three gold pieces,” said Emma.

  “Is that right?” Sharon tented his long fingers and let out a sigh that smelled like an opened tomb. “Normally I insist on payment up front, but I’m feeling generous this morning. I find your plucky optimism charming. You can owe me.” And then he laughed, as if he knew we’d never live to repay him, and stepping aside he raised a cloaked arm toward his boat.

  “Welcome aboard, children.”

  Sharon made a big show of plucking six wriggling rats from his boat before we boarded—as if a pestilence-free journey were a luxury afforded only to Very Important Peculiars—and then he offered Emma his arm and helped her step from the dock. We were seated three abreast on a simple wooden bench. While Sharon was busy untying the mooring rope, I wondered whether trusting him was merely unwise or if it crossed the line into recklessness, like lying down for a nap in the middle of a road.

  The trouble with the merely unwise/deeply stupid line is that you often don’t know which side you’re on until it’s too late. By the time things have settled down enough for you to reflect, the button’s been pushed, the plane’s left the hangar, or in our case, the boat’s left the dock—and as I watched Sharon shove us away from it with his foot, which was bare, and I noticed that his bare foot was not quite human-looking, with toes as long as mini hotdogs and thick yellow nails that curled like claws, I realized with sinking certainty which side of the line we were on, and also that it was too late to do much about it.

  Sharon yanked the ignition cord on a dinky outboard motor and it coughed awake in a cloud of blue fumes. Tucking his considerable legs beneath him, he lowered into the puddle of black fabric his cloak made in the boat. He revved the puttering engine, then steered us out of the underjetty, through a forest of looming wood pylons and into warm sunlight. Then we were in a canal, a man-made tributary of the Thames walled on both sides by glassy buildings and bobbing with more boats than a toddler’s tub at bath time—candy-red tugs and wide, flat barges and tour boats whose upper decks teemed with sightseers taking the air. Strangely, none of them trained their cameras at, nor seemed to even notice, the unusual craft that burbled past them, with an angel of death at the tiller, two blood-spattered children in the seat, and a dog in glasses peering over the side. Which was just as well. Had Sharon charmed his boat somehow so that only peculiars could see it? I decided to believe it was so, because there was nowhere to hide in it anyway, should we have needed to.

  Looking it over in the full light of day, I noticed that the boat was extremely simple but for an intricately carved figurehead rising from its bow. The carving was shaped like a fat, scaly snake that curved upward in a gentle S, but where a head should’ve been was a giant eyeball, lidless and large as a melon, staring forever out before us.

  “What is it?” I asked, running my hand over its polished surface.

  “Yew wood,” Sharon
called over the motor’s growl.

  “I would what?”

  “That’s what it’s made from.”

  “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 im
agined, 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.