We turned and turned again. Every passage looked just like the one before it. There were no signs, no markers. Either Sharon was navigating by some brilliant feat of memory, or completely at random, trying to throw off any Ditch pirates who might’ve been pursuing us.
“Do you really know where we’re going?” Emma asked him.
“Of course I do!” Sharon barked, bombing around a corner without looking back. Then he stopped, doubled back, and stepped down through a doorway sunk half below street level. Inside was a dank cellar, just five feet high and lit by the merest breath of sallow gray light. We ran hunched along a subterranean corridor, discarded animal bones underfoot, the ceiling brushing our heads, past things I tried not to see—a slumped figure in a corner, sleepers shivering on miserable mats of straw, a boy in rags lying on the ground with a beggar’s pail bangled around one arm. At its far end the passage widened into a room, and in the light of a few grimed windows there knelt a pair of miserable washerwomen, scrubbing laundry in a stinking pool of Ditch water.
Then we mounted more steps and went out, thank God, into a walled courtyard common to the backs of several buildings. In some other reality it might’ve contained a happy patch of grass or a little gazebo, but this was Devil’s Acre, and it was a dump and a pigsty. Waves of fly-blown trash tossed from windows crested against the walls, and in the center, staked crookedly in the mud, was a wooden pen in which a skinny boy stood guarding an even skinnier pig—just one. By a mud-brick wall a woman sat smoking and reading a newspaper while a young girl stood behind her, picking nits from her hair. The woman and girl took no notice as we trooped past, but the boy leaned the tines of a pitchfork at us. When it was clear we had no designs on his pig, he sank into an exhausted squat.
Emma stopped in the middle of the yard to look up at lines of laundry strung between roof gutters. She pointed out again that our bloodstained clothes made us look like participants in a murder, and suggested we should change. Sharon replied that murderers were hardly outlandish here and urged her on, but she hung back, arguing that a wight in the Underground had seen our bloodstained clothes and radioed his comrades about us; they made us too easy to pick out of a crowd. Really, I think it was more that she felt uncomfortable in a blouse now stiff with another person’s blood. I did, too—and if we found our friends again, I didn’t want them to see us like this.
Sharon grudgingly assented. He’d been leading us toward a fence at the edge of the yard but now pivoted and took us into one of the buildings. We climbed two, three, four flights of stairs, until even Addison was wheezing, then followed Sharon through an open door into a small, squalid room. A gash in the ceiling had let in rain and warped the landing like ripples in a pond. Black mold veined the walls. At a table by a smoky window, two women and a girl were sweating over foot-powered sewing machines.
“We need some clothes,” Sharon said, addressing the women in a stentorian basso that shook the thin walls.
Their pale faces looked up. One of the women picked up a sewing needle and gripped it like a weapon. “Please,” she said.
Sharon reached up and pulled back the hood of his cloak a little, so that only the seamstresses could see his face. They gasped, then whimpered and fainted forward onto the table.
“Was that really necessary?” I said.
“Not strictly,” Sharon replied, replacing his hood. “But it was expedient.”
The seamstresses had been assembling simple shirts and dresses from scraps of cloth. The rags they worked with were heaped around the floor, and the results, which had more patches and seams than Frankenstein’s monster, were hung on a line out the window. As Emma reeled them in, my gaze crawled around the room. It was clearly more than just a workspace: the women lived here, too. There was a bed nailed together from scrap wood. I peered into a dented pot that hung in the hearth and saw the makings of starvation soup, fish skin and withered cabbage leaves. Their half-hearted attempts at decorating—a sprig of dried flowers, a horseshoe nailed to the mantel, a framed portrait of Queen Victoria—were somehow sadder than nothing at all.
Despair was tangible here, weighting down everything, the very air. I’d never been confronted with such pure misery. Could peculiars really be living these discarded lives? As Sharon pulled in an armful of shirts through the window, I asked him. He seemed almost offended by the idea. “Peculiars would never allow themselves to be so reduced. These are common slum dwellers, trapped in an endless repetition of the day this loop was made. Normals occupy the Acre’s festering edges—but its heart belongs to us.”
They were normals. Not only that, but loop-trapped normals, like the ones on Cairnholm whom the crueler kids would torment during games of Raid the Village. As much a part of the background scenery as the sea or the cliffs, I told myself. But somehow, looking at the women’s weathered faces buried in rags, I felt no less terrible about stealing from them.
“I’m sure we’ll know the peculiars when we see them,” Emma said, sorting through a pile of dirty blouses.
“One always does,” said Addison. “Subtlety has never been our kind’s strength.”
I slipped out of my bloody shirt and traded it for the least filthy alternative I could find, the kind of garment you’d be issued at a prison camp: collarless and striped, its sleeves of unequal length, patched together from cloth rougher than sandpaper. But it fit me, and with the addition of a simple black coat I found tossed over a chair back, I now looked like someone who might plausibly be from this place.
We turned our backs while Emma changed into a sacklike dress that pooled around her feet. “It’ll be impossible to run in this,” she grumbled. Plucking a pair of scissors from the seamstresses’ table, she began to alter it with all the care of a butcher, ripping and jabbing until she’d sliced off the bottom at the knee.
“There.” She admired her rough handiwork in a mirror. “A bit raggedy, but …”
Without thinking I said, “Horace can make you one better.” Somehow I’d forgotten that our friends weren’t just waiting for us in the next room. “I mean … if we see them again …”
“Don’t,” Emma said. For an instant she looked so sad, absolutely lost in it—and then she turned away, put down the scissors, and moved purposefully toward the door. When she turned to face us again, her expression had gone hard. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time here as it is.”
She had this amazing capacity to turn sadness into anger and anger into action, which meant nothing ever kept her down for long. And then Addison and I—and Sharon, who I suspect hadn’t quite known whom he was dealing with until now—were following her out the door and down the stairs.
* * *
The whole of Devil’s Acre—the peculiar heart of it, anyway—was only ten or twenty blocks square. After coming down from the workhouse we pried loose a board from a fence and squeezed into a suffocating passageway. It led to another that was slightly less suffocating, and that led to one a bit wider still, and that to one wide enough that Emma and I could walk side by side. On they widened, like arteries relaxing after a heart attack, until we came to something that might properly have been called a street, with red bricks running down the middle and sidewalks paving the edges.
“Fall back,” Emma muttered. We shrank behind a corner and peeked out like commandos, our heads stacked.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sharon said. He was still in the street and seemed more worried about being embarrassed by us than being killed.
“Looking for ambush points and escape routes,” Emma said.
“No one’s ambushing anyone,” Sharon replied. “The pirates only operate in no man’s land. They won’t come after us here—this is Louche Lane.”
There was, in fact, a street sign to that effect—the first I’d seen in all of Devil’s Acre. Louche Lane, it read in fancy handwritten script. Piracy discouraged.
“Discouraged?” I said. “Then what’s murder? Frowned upon?”
“I believe murder is ‘tolerated wi
th reservations.’ ”
“Is anything illegal here?” Addison asked.
“Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that’s just for paperbacks.”
“There’s a library?”
“Two. Though one won’t lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.”
We shuffled out from behind the wall and cast a somewhat baffled look around. In no man’s land I’d anticipated death at every turn, but Louche Lane, from all appearances, was a haven of civic order. The street was lined with neat little shops, and the shops had signs and display windows and apartments on the upper floors. There was not a caved roof or a broken pane of glass in sight. There were people on the street, too, and they lingered, ambling along in singles and pairs, pausing now and then to duck into a shop or look in a window. Their clothes weren’t rags. Their faces were clean. Maybe everything here wasn’t new and sparkling, but the weathered surfaces and patched paint gave it all a handmade, worn-around-the-edges look that was quaint, even charming. My mother, if she’d seen Louche Lane in one of those thumbed-through-but-never-read travel magazines that papered our coffee table at home, would’ve crooned about its cuteness and complained that she and my dad had never taken a real European vacation—Oh, Frank, let’s go.
Emma seemed palpably disappointed. “I was expecting something more sinister.”
“Me too,” I said. “Where are all the murder dens and blood-sport arenas?”
“I don’t know what sort of business you think people get up to around here,” Sharon said, “but I’ve never heard of a murder den. As for bloodsport arenas, there’s only the one—Derek’s, down Oozing Street. Good chap, Derek. Owes me a fiver …”
“And the wights?” said Emma. “What about our kidnapped friends?”
“Keep your voice down,” Sharon hissed. “As soon as I take care of my own business, we’ll find someone who can help you. Until then, don’t repeat that to anyone.”
Emma got in Sharon’s face. “Then don’t make me repeat this. While we appreciate your help and expertise, our friends’ lives have been given an expiration date. I won’t stall and dawdle about simply to avoid ruffling some feathers.”
Sharon looked down at her, quiet for a moment. Then he said, “We all have an expiration date. If I were you, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to find out what it is.”
* * *
We set off to find Sharon’s lawyer. He quickly became frustrated. “I could’ve sworn his office was along this street,” he said, turning on his heel. “Though it’s been years since I’ve been to see him. Perhaps he’s moved.”
Sharon decided to go looking on his own and told us to stay put. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t speak to anyone.”
He strode away, leaving us alone. We clustered awkwardly on the sidewalk, unsure what to do with ourselves. People stared as they passed by.
“He really had us going, didn’t he?” said Emma. “He made this place sound like a hotbed of criminality, but it looks like any other loop to me. In fact, the people here look more normal than any peculiars I’ve ever seen. It’s as if they’ve had every distinguishing characteristic vacuumed out of them. It’s downright boring.”
“You must be joking,” said Addison. “I’ve never seen anyplace so vile or disgusting.”
We both looked at him in surprise.
“How’s that?” said Emma. “All that’s here are little shops.”
“Yes, but look what they’re selling.”
We hadn’t until now. Just behind us was a display window, and in it stood a well-dressed man with mournful eyes and a cascading beard. When he saw that he had our attention, he nodded slightly, held up a pocketwatch, and touched a button on its side. The moment he pressed it he froze, and his image seemed to blur. A few seconds later, he moved without moving—disappearing and then reappearing instantaneously in the opposite corner of the window.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a trick!”
He did it a second time, teleporting back to the other corner. While I stood mesmerized, Emma and Addison moved on to the next shop’s window. I joined them and found a similar display, only standing behind the glass here was a woman in a black dress, a long string of beads dangling from one hand.
When she saw that we were looking, she closed her eyes and stretched her arms like a sleepwalker. She began to pass the beads slowly through her fingers, turning each one. My eyes were so locked on the beads that it took me a few seconds to realize something was happening to her face: it was changing, subtly, with each bead she turned. At the turn of one bead, I watched the pallor of her skin lighten. At the next, her lips thinned. Then her hair reddened ever so slightly. The cumulative effect, over the course of several dozen beads, was that her face became entirely different, morphing from that of a dark, round-featured grandmother to a young, sharp-nosed redhead. It was both enthralling and unsettling.
When the show was over, I turned to Addison. “I don’t understand,” I said. “What are they selling?”
Before he could answer, a preteen boy came hustling up to us and forced a pair of cards into my hand. “Two for one, today only!” he crowed. “No reasonable offer refused!”
I turned the cards over in my hand. One had the stopwatch man’s photo on it, and on the back it read J. Edwin Bragg, bilocationalist. The other was a photo of the bead lady in a trance, and it read G. Fünke, woman of a thousand faces.
“Shoo, we’re not buying,” Emma said, and the boy scowled at her and scurried off.
“Now do you see what they’re selling?” said Addison.
I cast my eyes down the street. There were people like the stopwatch man and bead lady in almost every shop window along Louche Lane—peculiars, ready to put on a show if you so much as glanced in their direction.
I hazarded a guess. “They’re selling … themselves?”
“Like a dim bulb flickering to life,” said Addison.
“And that’s bad?” I said, guessing again.
“Yes,” Addison said sharply. “It’s outlawed throughout peculiardom, and for good reason.”
“One’s peculiarity is a sacred gift,” Emma said. “To sell it cheapens what is most special about us.”
It sounded like she was parroting a platitude that had been drilled into her from an early age.
“Huh,” I said. “Okay.”
“You aren’t convinced,” said Addison.
“I guess I don’t see what the harm would be. If I need the services of an invisible person, and that invisible person needs money, why shouldn’t we trade?”
“But you have strong morals, and that sets you apart from ninety-nine percent of humanity,” said Emma. “What if a bad person—or even a below-averagely-moraled person—wanted to buy the services of the invisible peculiar?”
“The invisible peculiar should say no.”
“But it isn’t always so black and white,” Emma said, “and selling yourself erodes your moral compass. Pretty soon you’re dipping into the wrong side of that gray area without knowing it, doing things you’d never do if you weren’t being paid to do them. And if someone were desperate enough, they might sell themselves to anyone, no matter what the other’s intentions.”
“To a wight, for instance,” Addison added pointedly.
“Okay, yeah, that would be bad,” I said. “But do you really think a peculiar would do that?”
“Don’t be daft!” said Addison. “Just look at the state of this place. Probably the only loop in Europe that hasn’t been laid waste to by the wights! And why do you think that is? Because it’s been extremely useful, I am sure, to have an entire population of perfectly willing turncoats and informants waiting to do your bidding.”
“Maybe you should keep your voice down,” I said.
“It makes sense,” Emma said. “They must have infiltrated our loops with peculiar informants. How else could they have known so much? Loop entrances, defenses, weak spots … only with help from people like
this.” She cast a venomous look around, her expression that of someone who’d just drunk curdled milk.
“No reasonable offer refused, indeed,” Addison snarled. “Traitors, every one of them. Ought to be hanged!”
“What’s the matter, hon? Having a bad day?”
We turned to find a woman standing behind us. (How long had she been there? What had she heard?) She was dressed in sharp and businesslike 1950s style—knee-length skirt and short black pumps—and puffed lazily at a cigarette. Her hair was teased up in a beehive and her accent was as flat and American as the Midwestern plains.
“I’m Lorraine,” she said, “and you’re new in town.”
“We’re waiting for someone,” said Emma. “We’re … on holiday.”
“Say no more!” said Lorraine. “I’m on vacation myself. Have been for the last fifty years.” She laughed, showing lipstick-stained teeth. “You just let me know if I can help you with anything. Lorraine’s got the best selection on Louche Lane, and that’s an actual fact.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Don’t worry, hon. They won’t bite.”
“We’re not interested.”
Lorraine shrugged. “I was just being friendly. You looked a little lost, is all.”
She started to leave, but something she’d said had piqued Emma’s interest.
“Selection of what?”
Lorraine turned back and flashed a greasy smile. “Old ones, young ones. All sorts of talents. Some of my customers just want a show, and that’s fine, but others have specific needs. We make sure everyone leaves satisfied.”
“The boy said no thank you,” Addison said gruffly, and he seemed about to tell the woman off when Emma stepped in front of him and said, “I’d like to see.”