Freaks Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    â€œI’ve got to go!” Till rushed to the hanging sheets and peeped through. “If that fat bloke catches me, he’ll give me a thick ear!”
    â€œDidn’t you get a ticket?” asked Sheba.
    â€œNah, I ran past that spoony cove on the door. Think I can afford a penny?” She put her eye back to the gap in the sheet. The thumping feet of Phineas came up the stairs toward Sheba’s partition. Till scuttled under the sheets, past Sister Moon, and down the stairs, just as the dozy, round face of Phineas Plumpscuttle peered around to where Sheba was sitting.
    â€œOi, girl. Have you seen a muddy little urchin in here? Uncle wants me to hit her.”
    â€œHaven’t seen anyone,” Sheba lied.
    As Phineas stomped off to look elsewhere, she rubbed the chipped glass of the marble with her thumb and wished for the little girl to come back another day.

Till had been out picking for a good hour. She’d found a few thin pieces of metal, half a clay pipe, and a brown bottle with a mouthful of gin still swilling in the bottom. A good morning’s work. Enough to sell on the street later for a penny or two, which in turn would buy a morsel for supper.
    The handful of treasures clanked together in the burlap sack at her side as she pulled one foot slowly out of the clingy mud and took another step forward. The riverbed released a small cloud of green gas, then closed up again over her footprint, leaving no trace of her passing at all. Her feet were wrapped with rags. Too poor for shoes, mudlarks needed some protection from glass and nails hidden in the slime. One cut could mean blood poisoning and a lingering, miserable death. This morning, Till was out with her brothers, Tam and Tob. Three of six children who lived in a one-room cellar with their parents, uncles, aunts, a couple of people who claimed they were relatives, and a wide range of furry vermin. They needed every penny they could raise to keep them all from starving.
    Somewhere to the left she could hear the distant
suck-slop-suck-slop
of one of her brothers, trudging in the same ungainly way. She would have been able to see him, too, if it wasn’t for the thick London fog. Usually, fog was just a collection of water particles hanging in the air. The worst it could do was spoil the view, or make you inadvertently step into something nasty. But the London variety was different. It crawled into your lungs like poured concrete, then sat there leaking poisonous chemicals into your blood. It seeped into your nostrils, your skin, even your eyes, stinging and burning and choking. It choked the narrow streets, too. And the whole river, the whole city, was more often than not erased from sight.
    Till kept her eyes fixed on the lumpy brown surface of the mud. Her mind kept drifting back to the night before, when she had snuck into the sideshow on Brick Lane. Her left ear still throbbed from where her da had clipped her when he’d heard what she’d done. Not for sneaking in without paying, but for wandering off when she should have been making the most of low tide.
We can’t afford to miss a chance to pick
, he’d said, for the hundredth time. Not that Till cared. It had been more than worth it to see those bizarre people, and to meet that little girl. Just like her, but covered in hair. And those teeth and claws!
If only I had something strange about me
, she thought,
then I could sit in a sideshow like a queen and have people pay to look at me, instead of having to wade through stinking slime every day
.
    She was just picturing herself with a pair of feathered wings, starring in a famous circus somewhere, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something ripple the surface of the silt.
    There wasn’t much still alive in the Thames, apart from an eel or two — slimy, pulpy things that were almost blind thanks to the river’s pollution. Some folk told of monster-sized ones that had grown fat on