Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #3)(18)
“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.