Free Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs Page A

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 ofits 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.
    â€œYou seem to know every last fact about this hellhole with the exception of anything that would be remotely useful to us.”
    â€œSuch as?” Sharon said, his patience thinning.
    â€œWhom can we trust here?”
    â€œAbsolutely no one.”
    â€œHow can we find the peculiars who live in this loop?” said Emma.
    â€œYou don’t want to.”
    â€œWhere are the wights holding our friends?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s bad for business to know things like that,” Sharon replied evenly.
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œGold 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.”
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œDrat, drat,
drat
,” he muttered. “This is a bad sign.”
    â€œIt’s only fog,” said Emma. “We’re not afraid of fog.”
    â€œNeither 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,