“We can help you escape! Show me where the door is!”
They turned sluggishly to stare, splayed on their chaises and daybeds.
“Throw something to break the glass!” Emma said. “Be quick!”
None moved. They seemed confused. Perhaps they didn’t believe rescue was really possible—or perhaps they didn’t want to be rescued.
“Emma, we can’t wait,” I said, tugging at her arm.
She wouldn’t give up. “Please!” she cried into the tube. “At least send out the children!”
Full-throated shouts from inside the office. The door shook on its hinges. Frustrated, Emma slammed the glass with her fist.
“What’s the matter with them?”
Rattled stares. The little boy and girl began to cry.
Addison tugged the hem of Emma’s dress with his teeth. “We must go!”
Emma let the speaking tube fall and turned away bitterly.
We hit the door running and burst out onto the sidewalk. A thick yellow murk had blown in, bundling everything in gauze and hiding one side of the street from the other. By the time we’d sprinted to the end of the block we could hear Lorraine bellowing behind us but couldn’t see her; we turned one corner and then another until it seemed we’d lost her. On a deserted street by a boarded-up storefront, we stopped to catch our breaths.
“It’s called Stockholm syndrome,” I said. “When people start to sympathize with their captors.”
“I think they were just scared,” said Addison. “Where would they have run to? This whole place is a prison.”
“You’re both wrong,” Emma said. “They were drugged.”
“You sound pretty sure,” I said.
She pushed back hair that had fallen over her eyes. “When I was working in the circus, after I’d run away from home, a woman approached me after one of my fire-eating shows. She said she knew what I was—knew others like me—and that I could make a lot more money if I went and worked for her.” Emma gazed out at the street, her cheeks flushed from the sprint. “I told her I didn’t want to go. She kept insisting. When she finally left she was angry. That night I woke up in the back of a wagon with my mouth gagged and hands cuffed. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think straight. It was Miss Peregrine who rescued me. If she hadn’t found me when they stopped to reshoe their horse the next day”—Emma nodded behind us, to where we’d come from—“I might have ended up like them.”
“You never told me that,” I said quietly.
“It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“I’m very sorry that happened to you,” said Addison. “Was that woman back there—was she the one who kidnapped you?”
Emma thought for a moment.
“It happened such a long time ago. I’ve blocked out the worst of it, including my abductor’s face. But I know this. If you’d left me alone with that woman, I’m not sure I could’ve stopped myself from taking her life.”
“We’ve all got demons to slay,” I said.
I leaned against a boarded window, a sudden wave of exhaustion breaking over me. How long had we been awake? How many hours since Caul had revealed himself? It seemed like days ago, though it couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve hours. Every moment since had been a war, a nightmare of struggle and terror without end. I could feel my body inching toward collapse. Panic was the only thing keeping me upright, and whenever it began to fade, I did, too.
For the merest fraction of a second, I allowed my eyes to close. Even in that slim black parenthesis, horrors awaited me. A specter of eternal death, crouched and feeding upon the body of my grandfather, its eyes weeping oil. Those same eyes planted with the twin stalks of garden shears, howling as it sank into a boggy grave. Its master’s face contorted in pain, tumbling backward into a void, gutshot, screaming. I had slain my demons already, but the victories were fleeting; others had risen up quickly to replace them.
My eyes flew open at the sound of footsteps behind me, on the other side of the boarded-up window. I hopped away and turned. Though the store looked abandoned, someone was inside, and they were coming out.
There it was: panic. I was awake again. The others had heard the noise, too. Acting on collective instinct, we ducked behind a stack of firewood nearby. Through the logs I peeked at the storefront, reading the faded sign that hung above the door.
Munday, Dyson and Strype, attnys at law. Hated and feared since 1666.
A bolt slid and slowly the door opened. A familiar black hood appeared: Sharon. He looked around, judged the coast clear, then slipped out and locked the door behind him. As he hurried away in the direction of Louche Lane, we consulted in whispers about whether to go after him. Did we need him anymore? Could he be trusted? Maybe and maybe. What had he been doing in that shuttered storefront? Was this the lawyer he’d talked about seeing? Why the sneaking?
Too many questions, too many uncertainties about him. We decided we could make it on our own. We stayed put and watched as he turned ghostly in the murk and was gone.
* * *
We set out to find Smoking Street and the wights’ bridge. Not wanting to risk another unpredictable encounter, we resolved to search without asking for directions. That became easier once we discovered the Acre’s street signs, which were concealed in the most inconvenient places—behind public benches at knee height, dangling from the tops of lampposts, inscribed into worn cobblestones underfoot—but even with their help, we took as many wrong turns as right. It seemed the Acre had been designed to drive those trapped inside it mad. There were streets that ended at blank walls only to begin again elsewhere. Streets that curved so sharply they spiraled back on themselves. Streets with no name—or two or three. None were as tidy or tended to as Louche Lane, where it was clear a special effort had been made to create a pleasing environment for shoppers in the market for peculiar flesh—the idea of which, now that I’d seen Lorraine’s wares and heard Emma’s story, turned my stomach.