by Ransom Riggs
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.’
“And yet …” He raised a black-draped arm toward a young girl lowering a bucket into the water. “For many of these unfortunate souls, it serves as both sewer and spring.”
“She isn’t going to drink that!” Emma said, horrified.
“In a few days, once the heavy particles settle, she’ll skim the clearest liquid from the top.”
Emma recoiled. “No …”
“Yes. Terrible shame,” Sharon said casually, then continued rattling off facts as if reciting from a book. “The citizenry’s primary occupations are rubbish picking and luring strangers into the Acre to cosh them on the head and rob them. For amusement, they ingest whatever flammable liquids are at hand and sing badly at the top of their lungs. The area’s main exports are smelted iron slag, bone meal, and misery. Notable landmarks include—”
“It isn’t funny,” Emma interrupted.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, it isn’t funny! These people are suffering, and you’re making jokes about it!”
I am not making jokes,” Sharon replied imperiously. “I’m providing you with valuable information that may save your life. But if you’d rather plunge into this jungle cocooned in ignorance …”
“We wouldn’t,” I said. “She’s very sorry. Please keep going.”
Emma shot me a disapproving look, and I disapproved right back at her. This was no time to take a stand on political correctness, even if Sharon sounded a bit heartless.
“Keep your voices down, for Hades’ sake,” Sharon said irritably. “Now, as I was saying. Notable landmarks include St. Rutledge’s Foundlings’ Prison, a forward-thinking institution which jails orphans before they’ve had the opportunity to commit any crimes, thereby saving society enormous cost and trouble; St. Barnabus’s Asylum for Lunatics, Mountebanks, and the Criminally Mischievous, which operates on a voluntary, outpatient basis and is nearly always empty; and Smoking Street, which has been in flames for eighty-seven years due to an underground fire no one’s bothered to extinguish. Ah,” he said, pointing to a blackened clearing between houses on the bank. “Here’s one end of it, which, as you can see, is burnt to a crisp.”
Several men were at work in the clearing, hammering on a wooden frame—rebuilding one of the houses, I assumed—and when they saw us passing they stopped to shout hello to Sharon, who gave just a token wave back, as if slightly embarrassed.
“Friends of yours?” I asked.
“Distant relations,” he muttered. “Gallows rigging is our family trade …”
“What rigging?” said Emma.
Before he could answer, the men had resumed work, singing loudly as they swung their hammers: “Hark to the clinking of hammers! Hark to the driving of nails! What fun to build a gallows, the cure for all that ails!”
If I hadn’t been so horrified, I might’ve broken out laughing.
* * *
We coursed steadily down Fever Ditch. Like hands closing around us, it seemed to narrow with every stroke of Sharon’s staff, sometimes so dramatically that the footbridges crossing it became unnecessary; you could practically leap across the water from roof to roof, the gray sky but a crack between them, suffocating all below in gloom. All the while, Sharon nattered on like a textbook come to life. In just a few minutes he’d managed to cover fashion trends in Devil’s Acre (stolen wigs hung from belt loops were popular), its gross domestic product (firmly in the negative), and the history of its settlement (by enterprising maggot farmers in the early twelfth century). He was just launching into the highlights of its architecture when Addison, who’d been squirming next to me through it all, finally interrupted him.
“You seem to know every last fact about this hellhole with the exception of anything that would be remotely useful to us.”
“Such as?” Sharon said, his patience thinning.
“Whom can we
trust here?”
“Absolutely no one.”
“How can we find the peculiars who live in this loop?” said Emma.
“You don’t want to.”
“Where are the wights holding our friends?” I asked.
“It’s bad for business to know things like that,” Sharon replied evenly.
“Then let us off this accursed boat and we’ll set about finding them ourselves!” said Addison. “We’re wasting precious time, and your endless monologuing is putting me to sleep. We hired a boatman, not a schoolmarm!”
Sharon harrumphed. “I should dump you into the Ditch for being so rude, but if I did, I’d never get the gold coins you owe me.”
“Gold coins!” said Emma, fairly spitting with disgust. “What about the well-being of your fellow peculiars? What about loyalty?”
Sharon chuckled. “If I cared about things like that, I’d have been dead long ago.”
“And wouldn’t we all be better off,” Emma muttered and looked away.
As we were talking, tendrils of fog had begun to curl around us. It was nothing like the gray mists of Cairnholm—this was greasy and yellow-brown, the color and consistency of squash soup. Its sudden appearance seemed to make Sharon uneasy, and as the view ahead dimmed, his head turned quickly from side to side, as if he were on the lookout for trouble—or searching for a spot to dump us.
“Drat, drat, drat,” he muttered. “This is a bad sign.”
“It’s only fog,” said Emma. “We’re not afraid of fog.”
“Neither am I,” said Sharon, “but this isn’t fog. It’s murk, and it’s man-made. Nasty things happen in the murk, and we must get out of it as quickly as we can.”
He hissed at us to cover ourselves, and we did. I retreated to my peeking hole. Moments later a boat emerged from the murk and passed close-by going the opposite direction. A man was at the oars and a woman sat in the seat, and though Sharon said good morning they only stared back—and continued staring until they were well past us, and the murk had swallowed them up again. Grumbling under his breath, Sharon maneuvered us toward the left bank and a small dock I could just barely make out. But when we heard footsteps on the wooden planks and a low murmur of voices, Sharon leaned on his pole to turn us sharply away.
We zigzagged from bank to bank, looking for a place to land, but each time we got close, Sharon would see something he didn’t like and turn away again. “Vultures,” he muttered. “Vultures everywhere …”
I didn’t see any myself until we passed beneath a sagging footbridge and a man crossing above us. As we drifted under him, the man stopped and looked down. He opened his mouth and drew a deep breath—about to yell for help, I thought—but rather than a voice, what came out of his mouth was a jet of heavy yellow smoke that shot toward us like water from a firehose.
I panicked and held my breath. What if it was poison gas? But Sharon wasn’t covering his face or reaching for a mask—he was just muttering “Drat, drat, drat” while the man’s breath swirled around us, merging with the murk and reducing our visibility to nothing. Within a few seconds the man, the bridge he stood on, and the banks on either side of us had all been blotted out.
I uncovered my head (no one could see us now anyway) and said quietly, “When you said this stuff was man-made, I thought you meant by smokestacks, not literally—”
“Oh, wow,” Emma said, uncovering herself. “What’s it for?”
“The vultures will murk an area to cloak their activities,” Sharon said, “and to blind their prey. Fortunately for you, I am not easily preyed upon.” And he drew his long staff from the water, passed it over our heads, and used it to tap the wooden eyeball at the bow of his boat. The eyeball began to glow like a fog lamp, piercing the murk before us. Then he returned his staff to the water and, leaning heavily on it, spun the boat in a slow circle, sweeping the water around us with his light.
“But if they’re making this,” said Emma, “then they’re peculiar, aren’t they? And if they’re peculiar, perhaps they’re friendly.”
“The pure of heart don’t end up as ditch pirates,” said Sharon, and then he stopped the turning boat as our light fixed upon another approaching vessel. “Speak of the devil.”
We could see them clearly enough, but for now all they would see of us was a glary bloom of light. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but at least it allowed us to size them up before we had to retreat beneath the tarp. They were two men in a boat about twice the size of our own. The first man was operating a nearly silent outboard motor, and the second held a club.
“If they’re so dangerous,” I whispered, “why are we just waiting for them?”
“We’re too deep inside the Acre to escape them now, and I can most likely talk us out of this.”
“And if you can’t?” said Emma.
“You may have to swim for it.”
Emma glanced at the oily black water and said, “I’d rather die.”
“That’s your choice. Now, I recommend you disappear, children, and don’t move a muscle under there.”
We drew the tarp over our heads again. A moment later, a hearty voice called out, “Ho, there, boatman!”
“Ho, there,” replied Sharon.
I heard oars drag the water, and then felt a jolt as the other boat knocked against ours.
“What’s your business here?”
“Merely out for a pleasure cruise,” Sharon said lightly.
“And a fine day for it!” the man replied, laughing.
The second man wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Wot’s undah the rag?” he growled, his accent nearly impenetrable.
“What I carry on my boat is my own business.”
“Innithin passes through Fever Ditch s’our business.”
“Old ropes and bric-a-brac, if you must know,” said Sharon. “Nothing of interest.”
“Then you won’t mind us having a look,” said the first man.
“What about our arrangement? Haven’t I paid you this month?”
“Hen’t no arrangement nummore,” said the second. “Wights are payin’ five times the goin’ rate fer nice plump feeders. Any as lets a feeder slip away … it’s the pit, or worse.”
“What could be worse than the pit?” said the first.
“I dun inten’ t’fineout.”
“Now gentlemen, be reasonable,” said Sharon. “Perhaps it’s time to renegotiate. I can offer terms competitive with anyone …”
Feeders. I shivered despite a clammy warmth building under the tarp from Emma’s quickly heating hands. I hoped she wouldn’t need to use them, but the men weren’t budging, and I feared the boatman’s blabber would stall them only so long. A fight would mean disaster, though. Even if we could take out the men in the boat, the vultures, as Sharon had said, were everywhere. I imagined a mob forming—coming after us in boats, firing on us from the banks, jumping onto us from the footbridges—and I began to freeze up with fear. I really, really did not want to find out what feeders meant.
But then I heard a hopeful sound—the clink of coins being exchanged, and the second man was saying, “Wy, ’ees loaded! I could retire to Spain wi’ dis …”
But just as my hopes were rising, my stomach began to sink. A familiar old feeling crept into my belly, and I realized it had been building, slowly and gradually, for some time. It started as an itch, then become a dull ache, and now that ache was sharpening—the telltale tug of a nearby hollowgast.
But not just any hollow. My hollow.
The word popped into my head without warning or precedent. Mine. Or maybe I had it backward. Maybe I belonged to it.
Neither arrangement was any guarantee of safety. I expected it wanted to kill me just as badly as any hollow would, only something had temporarily plugged the urge. It was the same mysterious thing that had magnetized the hollow to me and tuned the compass needle inside me to it—and it was this needle that told me the hollow was close now and getting closer.
Just in time to get us caught, or ki
lled, or kill us itself. I resolved then that should we make it safely to shore, my first order of business would be to get rid of it once and for all.
But where was it? If it was as close as it seemed to be, it would’ve been swimming toward us in the Ditch, and I definitely would’ve heard a creature with seven limbs doing the breaststroke. Then the needle shifted and dipped, and I knew—could see, almost—that it was under the water. Hollows did not, apparently, need to breathe often. A moment later there came a gentle thunk as it attached itself to the bottom of our boat. We all jumped at the sound, but only I knew what it was. I wished I could warn my friends, but I had to lie motionless, its body just inches away on the other side of the wooden boards we lay upon.
“What was that?” I heard the first man say.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Sharon lied.
Let go, I mouthed silently, hoping the hollow could hear. Go away and leave us alone. Instead, it began to make a grinding sound against the wood; I pictured it gnawing at the bottom of the boat with its long teeth.
“I heard’at plain as day,” said the second man. “Boatman’s tryin’ to make us look like fools, Reg!”
“I think he is at that,” said the first.
“I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth,” said Sharon. “It’s this damned defective boat of mine. Past due for a tune-up.”
“Forget it, deal’s off. Show us what you got.”
“Or you could allow me to increase my offer,” said Sharon. “We’ll consider it a gratuity for all your kind understanding.”
The men conferred in an undertone.
“If we let ’im go an’ someone else catches ’im wi’ feeders, it’s the pit for us.”
“Or worse.”
Go away, go away, go AWAY, I begged the hollow in English.
Thud, thud, THUD, it answered, knocking against the hull.
“Pull back that rag!” demanded the first man.
“Sir, if you would wait just a moment—”
But the men were determined. Our boat rocked like someone was boarding it. There were shouts, then footfalls near our heads as a scuffle broke out.
