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“Not until you tell us something useful!” Emma said. “The name of someone we can ask for help—who won’t try to sell us to the wights!”
Sharon broke out laughing.
Emma struck a defiant pose. “There must be one.”
Sharon bowed—“You’re speaking to him!”—then climbed the ladder halfway and plucked his rope from Emma’s hands. “Enough of this. Goodbye, children. I’m quite sure I’ll never see you again.”
And with that he stepped into his boat—and right into a puddle of ankle-deep water. He let out a girlish squeal and bent down to look. It seemed the gunshots that missed our heads had drilled a few holes in his hull, and the boat had sprung leaks.
“Look what you’ve done! My boat’s shot all to pieces!”
Emma’s eyes flashed. “What we’ve done?”
Sharon made a quick inspection and concluded the wounds were grave. “I am marooned!” he announced dramatically, then cut the motor, collapsed his long staff to the size of a baton, and climbed the ladder again. “I’m going find a craftsman qualified to repair my dinghy,” he said, breezing past us, “and I won’t have you following me.”
We trailed him single file into the narrow passageway.
“And why not?” Emma shrilled.
“Because you’re cursed! Bad luck!” Sharon waved his arm behind him as if shooing flies. “Begone!”
“What do you mean, begone?” She jogged a few paces and grabbed Sharon by his cloaked elbow. He spun around fast and yanked it away, and I thought for a moment his raised hand was about to strike her. I tensed, ready to leap at him, but his hand just hung there, a warning.
“I’ve run this route more times than I can count, and not once have I been attacked by Ditch pirates. Never have I been forced to abandon cover and use my petrol engine. And never, ever has my boat been damaged. You’re more trouble than you’re worth, plain and simple, and I want nothing more to do with you.”
While he spoke, I glanced past him down the passage. My eyes were still adjusting to the dark, but what I could see was terrifying: winding and mazelike, it was lined with doorless doorways that gaped like missing teeth, and it was alive with sinister sounds—murmurs, scrapes, scurrying steps. Even now I could feel hungry eyes watching us, knives being drawn.
We couldn’t be left here alone. The only thing to do was beg.
“We’ll pay double what we promised,” I said.
“And fix your boat,” Addison chimed in.
“Never mind your bloody pocket change!” Sharon said. “Can’t you see I’m ruined? How can I return to Devil’s Acre? Do you think the vultures will ever let me be, now that my clients have killed two of them?”
“What did you want us to do?” Emma said. “We had to fight back!”
“Don’t be facile. They would never have forced the issue if it wasn’t for … for that …” Sharon looked at me, his voice falling to a whisper. “You might’ve mentioned earlier you were in league with creatures of the night!”
“Umm,” I said awkwardly, “I wouldn’t say ‘in league with,’ exactly …”
“There isn’t much in this world I fear, but as a rule I keep my distance from soul-sucking monsters—and apparently you’ve got one following you like a bloodhound! I suppose it’ll be along any minute?”
“Not likely,” Addison said. “Don’t you recall, some moments ago, when a bridge fell on its head?”
“Only a small one,” Sharon said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see a man about a boat.” And with that he hurried away.
Before we could catch up to him he’d rounded a corner, and by the time we reached it he’d disappeared—vanished, perhaps, into one of those tunnels he’d mentioned. We stood turning circles, confounded and afraid.
“I can’t believe he’d just abandon us like this!” I said.
“Neither can I,” Addison replied coolly. “In fact, I don’t think he has—I think he’s negotiating.” The dog cleared his throat, sat up on his hind legs, and addressed the rooftops in a booming voice. “Good sir! We mean to rescue our friends and our ymbrynes, and mark me, we will—and when we do, and they learn how you’ve aided us, they’ll be most grateful.”
He let that ring out for a moment, then went on.
“Never mind compassion! Fie on loyalty! If you’re as intelligent and ambitious a fellow as I think you are, then you’ll recognize an extraordinary opportunity for advancement when you see one. We are indebted to you already, but scrounging coins from children and animals is an awfully modest living compared to what having several ymbrynes in your debt could mean. Perhaps you’d enjoy having a loop all to yourself, your own personal playground with no other peculiars to spoil it! Anytime and anyplace you like: a lush summer isle in an age of abiding peace; some lowly pit in a time of plague. As you prefer.”
“Could they really do that?” I whispered to Emma.
Emma shrugged.
“Imagine the possibilities!” Addison gushed.
His voice echoed away. We waited, listening.
Somewhere two people were arguing.
A hacking cough.
Something heavy was dragged down steps.
“Well, it was a nice speech,” Emma sighed.
“Forget him, then,” I said, peering into the passages that branched away left, right, and straight ahead. “Which way?”
We chose a passage at random—straight on—and started down it. We’d gone only ten paces when we heard a voice say, “I wouldn’t go that way, if I were you. That’s Cannibals’ Alley, and it isn’t just a cute nickname
.”
There was Sharon behind us, hands on his hips like a fitness coach. “My heart must be getting soft in my old age,” he said. “Either that or my head.”
“Does that mean you’ll help us?” said Emma.
A light rain had begun to fall. Sharon looked up, letting a little splash his hidden face. “I know a lawyer here. First I want you to sign a contract laying out what you owe me.”
“Fine, fine,” said Emma. “But you’ll help us?”
“Then I’ve got to see about getting my boat fixed.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll help you, yes. Though I can’t promise any results, and I want to state at the outset that I think you’re all fools.”
We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to thank him, given what he’d put us through.
“Now stay close, and follow every instruction I give you to the letter. You killed two vultures today, and they’ll be hunting you, mark my words.”
We readily agreed.
“If they catch you, you don’t know me. Never saw me.”
We nodded like bobbleheads.
“And whatever you do, never, never touch so much as a drop of ambrosia, or on my eyes, you’ll never leave this place.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said, and from their expressions I saw that Emma and Addison were likewise in the dark.
“You’ll find out,” Sharon said ominously, and with a swish of his cloak he turned and plunged into the maze.
Just before a cow is put to the hammer in a modern slaughterhouse, it is prodded through a winding maze. The tight curves and blind corners prevent the animal from seeing more than a short distance ahead, so it doesn’t realize until the last few steps, when the maze abruptly narrows and a metal collar clamps tight around its neck, where the journey has taken it. But as the three of us hurried after Sharon into the heart of Devil’s Acre, I felt sure I knew what was coming, if not when nor how. With each step and each turn, we threaded deeper inside a knot, one I feared we’d never work apart.
The fetid air did not move, its only outlet an uneven crack of sky high above our heads. The bulged and slumping walls were so narrow that we had to go shoulder-first in places, the tight spots greased black by the clothes of those who’d gone before. There was nothing natural here, nothing green, nothing living at all save scurrying vermin and the bloodshot-eyed revenants who lurked behind doorways and under grates in the street, and who surely would’ve jumped at us if not for our towering, black-clad guide. We were chasing Death himself into the pit of Hell.
