Read Online Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs - Free Book Online Page A

we pulled the edge over our faces. It was black and hot under the fabric, and it smelled overpoweringly of motor oil.
    â€œAre you frightened?” Addison whispered in the dark.
    â€œNot particularly,” said Emma. “Are you, Jacob?”
    â€œSo much I might throw up. Addison?”
    â€œOf course not,” the dog said. “Fearfulness isn’t a characteristic of my breed.”
    But then he snuggled right between Emma and me, and I could feel his whole body trembling.
    * * *
    Some changeovers are as fast and smooth as superhighways, but this one felt like slamming down a washboard road full of potholes, lurching around a hairpin turn, and then careening off a cliff—all in complete darkness. When it was finally over, my head was dizzy and pounding. I wondered what invisible mechanism made some changeovers harder than others. Maybe the journey was only as rough as the destination, and this one had felt like off-roading into a savage wilderness because that’s precisely what we had done.
    â€œWe have arrived,” Sharon announced.
    â€œIs everyone okay?” I said, fumbling for Emma’s hand.
    â€œWe must go back,” Addison groaned. “I’ve left my kidneys on the other side.”
    â€œDo keep quiet until I find somewhere discreet to deposit you,” Sharon said.
    It’s amazing how much more acute your hearing becomes the moment you can’t use your eyes. As I lay quietly beneath the tarp, I was hypnotized by the sounds of a bygone world blooming around us. At first there was only the splash of Sharon’s pole in the water, but soon it was complemented by other noises, all stirring together to paint an elaborate scene in my mind. That steady slap of wood against water belonged, I imagined, to the oars of a passing boat piled high with fish. I pictured the ladies I could hear shouting to one another as leaning from the windows of opposite-facing houses, trading gossip across the canal while tending lines of laundry. Aheadof us, children whooped with laughter as a dog barked, and distantly I could make out voices singing in time to the rhythm of hammers: “Hark to the clinking of hammers, hark to the driving of nails!” Before long I was imagining plucky chimneysweeps in top hats skipping down streets full of rough charm and people banding together to overcome their lot in life with a wink and a song.
    I couldn’t help it. All I knew about Victorian slums I’d learned from the campy musical version of
Oliver Twist
. When I was twelve I’d been in a community theater production of it; I was Orphan Number Five, if you must know, and had suffered such terrible stage fright on the night of the show that I faked a stomach flu and watched the whole thing from the wings, in costume, with a barf bucket between my legs.
    Anyway, such was the scene in my head when I noticed a small hole in the tarp near my shoulder—chewed by rats, no doubt—and, shifting a little, I found I could peek through it. Within seconds, the happy, musical-inspired landscape I’d imagined melted away like a Salvador Dalí painting. The first horror to greet me were the houses that lined the canal, though calling them houses was generous. Nowhere in their sagging and rotted architecture could be found a single straight line. They slouched like a row of exhausted soldiers who’d fallen asleep at attention; it seemed the only thing keeping them from tipping straight into the water was the tightness with which they were packed—that and the mortar of black-and-green filth that smeared their lower thirds in thick, sludgy strata. On each of their rickety porches a coffinlike box stood on end, but only when I heard a loud grunt issue from one and saw something tumble into the water from beneath it did I realize what they were or that the slapping sounds I’d heard earlier hadn’t come from oars but from outhouses, which were contributing to the very