Out of nowhere a wind kicked up, sending ash and hot cinders skyward in a black blizzard. We turned and covered our faces in an effort to breathe. I pulled my shirt collar over my mouth, but it didn’t help much and I started to cough. Emma took Addison into her arms, but then she started to choke. I tore off my coat and threw it over their heads. Emma’s coughing quieted and I heard Addison’s muffled voice say “Thank you!” beneath the fabric.
It was all we could do to huddle there and wait for the ash storm to end. I had my eyes closed when I heard something move nearby, and peeking through slit fingers I saw something that even here, amidst all I’d witnessed in Devil’s Acre, startled me: a man strolling casual as could be, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth but otherwise unperturbed. He had no trouble navigating the dark because beams of strong white light were shooting from each of his eye sockets.
“Evening!” he called out, swinging his sight-beams toward me and tipping his hat. I tried to reply but my mouth filled with ash and then so did my eyes, and when I reopened them he was gone.
As the wind began to die, we coughed and spat and rubbed our eyes until we could function again. Emma set Addison on the ground. “If we’re not careful, this loop will kill us before the wights do,” he said. Emma handed me back my coat and hugged me hard until the air cleared. She had a way of wrapping her arms around me and nudging her head into the hollow of my chest so that no gaps were left between us, and I wanted badly to kiss her, even here, covered in soot from head to toe.
Addison cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt, but we really should be getting on.”
We unhooked our limbs, slightly embarrassed, and continued walking. Soon pale figures appeared in the fog ahead. They were milling in the street, crossing between shacks that encrusted the roadside. We hesitated, nervous about who they might be, but there was no other way forward.
“Chin up, back straight,” Emma said. “Try to look scary.”
We closed ranks and walked into their midst. They were shifty eyed and wild looking. Soot-stained all over. Dressed in scavenged castoffs. I scowled, doing my best impression of a dangerous person. They shied away like beaten dogs.
Here was a kind of shantytown. Low-slung huts made from fire-proof scrap metal, tin roofs weighed down with boulders and tree stumps, canvas flaps for doors if they had doors at all. A fungal smear of life overgrowing the bones of a burned civilization; hardly there at all.
Chickens ran in the street. A man knelt by a smoking hole in the road, cooking eggs in its blistering heat.
“Don’t get too close,” Addison muttered. “They look ill.”
I thought so, too. It was the limping way they carried themselves, their glassy stares. Several wore crude masks or sacks over their heads with only slits for eyes, as if to hide faces chewed by disease, or to slow a disease’s transmission.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Emma, “and I’m not about to ask.”
“My guess is they’re welcome nowhere else,” Addison said. “Untouchables, plague carriers, criminals whose offenses are considered unforgivable even in Devil’s Acre. Those who escaped the noose settled here, at the very bottom, the absolute edge of peculiar society. Exiled from the outcasts of outcasts.”
“If this is the edge,” said Emma, “then the wights can’t be far away.”
“Are we sure these people are peculiar?” I asked. There seemed to be nothing unique about them, aside from their wretchedness. Maybe it was pride, but I didn’t believe a community of peculiars, however degraded, would allow themselves to live in such medieval squalor.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Emma replied. “Just walk.”
We kept our heads down and our eyes forward, feigning disinterest in hopes that these people would return the favor. Most stayed away, but a few trailed us, begging.
“Anything, anything. A dropper, a vial,” said one, gesturing to his eyes.
“Please,” implored another. “We haven’t had a kick in days.”
Their cheeks were pocked and scarred, like they’d been crying tears of acid. I could hardly look at them.
“Whatever you want, we haven’t got it,” said Emma, shooing them away.
The beggars dropped back and stood in the road, watching us darkly. Another called out in a high, fraying voice. “You there! Boy!”
“Ignore him,” Emma muttered.
I side-eyed him without turning my head. He was squatting against a wall, in rags, pointing at me with a trembling hand.
“You him? Boy! You’re him, aincha?” He wore an eyepatch over glasses and flipped it up to study me. “Yeahhhhh.” He whistled low, then flashed a black-gummed smile. “They been waitin’ for you.”
“Who has?”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped in front of him. Emma sighed impatiently.
The beggar’s smile grew wider, crazier. “The dust-mothers and knot-blowers! The damned librarians and blessed cartographers! Anyone who’s everyone!” He raised his arms and bowed in mocking worship, and I got a whiff of ripe funk. “Waitin’ a lonnnnnng time.”
“For what?”
“Come on,” said Emma, “he’s obviously a lunatic.”
“The big show, the big show,” said the beggar, his voice rising and falling like a carnival barker’s. “The biggest and best and most and last! It’s allllllllmost here …”
A weird chill rattled through me. “I don’t know you, and you sure as hell don’t know me.” I turned and walked away.