Devil's Acre

Devil's Acre
Basic Information
Type	Loop
Inhabitants	Myron Bentham (formerly) Sharon Peculiars across the world
Time	June 10, 1886
Location	Thames River, London
Country	England

“	It's a terrible place- the most depraved and dangerous slum in the whole long history of London.	”
–Addison MacHenry, Library of Souls

Devil's Acre is a prison loop within Wapping, London. Peculiars must travel through a tunnel in the Thames river to enter the loop. It is a major location in the second trilogy.

History

Devil's Acre was created on June 10, 1886 by an unnamed ymbryne as a prison loop for peculiars who broke the law.

Library of Souls

Jacob Portman, Emma Bloom, and Addison MacHenry track their kidnapped peculiar friends to the loop entrance of Devil's Acre, and Sharon helps them get inside.

Locations

Peculiar Ministries Building

Main article: Peculiar Ministries Building

Previously St. Barnabas' Asylum for Lunatics, it is now the peculiar ministries building and the Ymbryne Council's headquarters.

Fever Ditch

Fever Ditch is the canal. Factory waste, night soil, and animal carcasses flow perpetually into it and are the source not only of its odor but also of regular disease outbreaks, such as cholera. However, many inhabitants are also forced to treat it as a spring, as they skim the clearest liquid from the surface in a bucket of water after a few days. The water is oily and black. One section of the Ditch is infested with flesh-eating microbes, which take around a week to eat someone whole if they are not washed off.

Louche Lane

Louche Lane is located in the peculiar heart of the Acre. It is neater there than the areas where the loop-bound normals live and far less sinister. It is lined with neat little shops with signs, display windows, and apartments on upper floors. There are no caved roofs or broken glass. The surfaces are weathered, with patched paint, which gives it a handmade look that is quaint and charming. However, the shops are of peculiars selling themselves and being sold.

Doleful Street

Doleful Street has two undertakers, a medium and a carpenter who work exclusively with "repurposed coffinwood." There is also a troupe of professional funeral wailers with weekend duty as a barbershop quartet, and a tax accountant.

Oozing Street

Oozing Street is oddly cheerful. The houses are bright colors with flowerboxes hanging from windowsills. Even the slaughterhouse is a robin's egg blue, and Jacob has to resist going inside to ask for a tour. Sharon mentions sometimes dreaming of retiring to run it.

Periwinkle Street

Periwinkle Street has an open sewer down its center and aggressive flies. The sidewalks covered with putrefying vegetables are the property of a greengrocer claiming he could make them fresh with a kiss. Pavement gives way to mud and the houses become shabby, sagging flats. There are men congregating around the end of a seedy cul-de-sac, guarding a house with blacked-out windows. This house is an ambrosia den with blood sport.

Attenuated Avenue

Attenuated Avenue is fifty feet long with just one business: two men selling snacks. There are children that clamor for them, but the snacks are revealed to be boiled cat's meat.

Smoking Street

Smoking Street is a notable landmark of the Acre. It has been in flames for eighty-seven years due to an underground fire no one ever bothered to put out. Current of ash blow across the pavement. The buildings' paint are being singed away, windows are blackening and bursting, and eventually the buildings are falling apart. Flames can shoot up from seams in the pavement. The street terminates at Fever Ditch at one end and at the wights' bridge on the other. Winds blowing up can cause ash storms.

There is a shantytown in the direction of the wights' fortress, with low-slung huts made from fireproof scrap metal, tin roofs weighed down with boulders and tree stumps, and canvas flaps for doors. Those that live there are unwelcome even in the Acre, and are ambro addicts.

Wights' Fortress

Because of the lack of oversight in the loop, the wights created a Fortress in the Acre, which they used as a base of operations.

Other Minor Locations

• Munday, Dyson, & Strype, Att. at Law
• The Shrunken Head
• The Bonemender's
• Tinkerer's Workshop
• Miss Grackle's Theatre
• St. Rutledge's Foundlings' Prison (now Toy Museum)
• Mr. Squeers' Catsmeat Cart
• Indentured Peculiar Market
• Leech Collector's Hut

Description

Library of Souls

Before Sharon first takes Jacob, Emma, and Addison inside, Addison shudders at the thought of the place, calling it terrible, having heard stories of peculiar animals being made to fight each other for the entertainment of the outlaws, mercenaries, and exiles that live there. Sharon says that though it sounds like hell for most, it is paradise for others.

Jacob first sees that the architecture is sagging and rotted, and there are no straight lines- the houses are only stabilized by being packed together tightly and the mortar. There are coffinlike boxes on each of their rickety porches, and there are outhouses that contribute to the filth that hold up the architecture. A rickety footbridge spans the canal. The foundations of every house are decomposing. Wooden footbridges, some no wider than a board, crisscross the canal and its stinking banks are heaped with trash and crawling with spectral forms sifting through. The only colors are shades of black, yellow, and green, but mainly black. There are factories in the distance. Deeper in, the bulged and slumping walls are narrow and the tight spots are greased black. The only living things are vermin and bloodshot-eyed revenants who lurk behind doorways and under grates in the street. The air is a toxic-looking yellow.

The Acre has street signs, but in very inconvenient places such as behind public benches at knee height. Jacob thinks that the place was designed to drive its inhabitants mad, as it is difficult to find one's way around. All other streets besides Louche Lane are not visually pleasing. It is easier to learn the streets by character rather than name, as they are distinct and the shops are grouped by type.

A Map of Days

Though still described as a hellhole at heart, with grimy buildings and a yellow sky, the fires and debris of the battle with the wights had been put out and cleared away, with peculiars directing horse and buggy traffic in crowded streets.

The ambro addicts, peculiar flesh dealers, and gladiators are gone, with peculiars across several continents and different time periods as the main inhabitants instead.

Trivia

• The actual population is seven thousand two hundred and six, but the official population is zero.
• Primary occupations are rubbish picking and luring strangers into the Acre.
• People ingest flammable liquids and sing badly for entertainment.
• The area’s main exports are smelted iron slag, bone meal, and misery.
• A popular fashion trend in Devil’s Acre was stolen wigs hung from belt loops.
• There are more thief passageways, murder tunnels, and illegal dens in Devil’s Acre than anywhere in the world.
• The Ditch pirates' technique in blowing out vast amounts of smoke is believed to come from the soul of Damian Squirrley.
• In one of Ransom Riggs's Instagram livestreams, it was stated that books like Jack London's The People of the Abyss and Sarah Wise's The Blackest Streets served as some research for life in Devil's Acre.