“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.