by Andrew Lane
It was probably three-quarters of an hour later that a man fitting the description he’d been given left the Shaftesbury by the front door. He was dressed exactly as the printer had described him. He glanced up and down the street, then set off to his right.
Sherlock followed. Maybe the man would lead Sherlock to where he lived. That would be something to give to Amyus Crowe!
The man led Sherlock down Drury Lane, across a place called Seven Dials and then down towards Trafalgar Square. Sherlock was beginning to recognize bits of London now, and he was busy committing as much as he could to memory. The man turned left when he got to Trafalgar Square, walking past the ornate brown frontage of Charing Cross Station and the Charing Cross Hotel. He walked fast, and Sherlock had to hurry to keep up.
At Aldwych he turned right, and Sherlock realized he was heading over the Thames, across Waterloo Bridge. He stopped at a booth at the end of the bridge and handed over some coins. Sherlock debated quickly with himself: should he follow, or should he just go back to see Amyus Crowe? But what was he going to tell Crowe? That he’d found the man and then lost him again? No, he had to go on – at least to the other side of the bridge to see which way the man went.
Sherlock scrabbled in his pockets for some coins. The toll was just a penny. He paid as he squeezed past the toll-collector and kept going, catching up with his quarry.
The small man just kept on walking, without looking backwards or to left or right.
At the other side of the bridge, he walked towards what Sherlock recognized as Waterloo Station, but instead of going into the station he turned left. Sherlock followed, trying to hide himself behind other people in case the man turned round.
He didn’t turn round, but he did suddenly turn right, into an archway.
When Sherlock got to the archway, he paused, and peered round the edge of the crumbling brickwork. The interior of the arch was in shadow, and he couldn’t see the man.
He took a step forward, then another, until he was half in and half out of the light. Still no sign of the man.
Sherlock turned round, ready to head back to meet Amyus Crowe.
The small man with the long, stringy hair was standing right behind him.
‘You’ve been following me,’ he said. ‘I want to hear you tell me why. And then, just for giggles, I want to hear you scream.’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘You got a penny, mister?’ Sherlock whined, trying to look smaller than he was. ‘I ain’t eaten for days. Just a penny for a piece of bread.’
‘Don’t come the coney-catcher with me,’ the man snarled. ‘I ain’t buyin’ it.’
‘All right,’ Sherlock said in his normal voice, straightening up. ‘So what is a coney-catcher, then?’
The man grinned. His teeth were black stubs. ‘You want to know what a coney is? A coney is a rabbit that’s been raised for the cooking pot, so it’s tame and won’t run away when you come to break its neck. A coney-catcher is a man who pretends to catch a coney – a man who makes something easy look difficult.’
‘Oh, a con man,’ Sherlock said.
‘Exactly. Now we’ve got that out of the way, why are you following me?’
‘I wasn’t following you!’ Sherlock protested.
The man raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Remember, I can see through every garment of pretence you care to put on, sonny. You started following me outside the theatre, and you’ve been with me ever since. What I want to know is, why?’ He looked Sherlock up and down. ‘You’re not a flimp.’ He noticed Sherlock’s expression. ‘A pickpocket,’ he clarified. ‘So what is it you’re after?’
‘I’m not after anything.’
‘You followed me through London, across Waterloo Bridge and down here, into the tunnels.’
‘Coincidence,’ Sherlock said.
‘No such thing.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t have to tell me now, if you don’t want to. I can just as easily beat it out of you. I’d enjoy that. It’s been a while since I did some serious damage to a body. I’ve been following instructions, keeping my head down. I ain’t seen the claret flow for a few weeks now, and I’m nostalgic.’
‘The claret?’ Sherlock asked, knowing that he wasn’t going to like the answer.
‘Blood, sonny. Blood.’ He slipped his hand into his pocket. When it emerged, he was holding two metal objects that clinked together. ‘Best as I can figure it, either you work for one of the local gangs and they want to know what’s going on in the theatre, or you’ve spotted something odd at the theatre and you’re hoping that you can sell a tale to the Peelers for a few coppers.’ He slipped the fingers of his right hand through one of the metal objects. It looked to Sherlock like a collection of rings, fastened together and covered with spikes which pointed outward, rising up from his knuckles. ‘Either way, your curiosity is going to cost you dearly.’ He slipped the other metal object over the fingers of his left hand, and raised his fists so that Sherlock could see. The sparse light gleamed off the metal spikes. His hands had been transformed into deadly weapons that could slice Sherlock’s face apart if they even came close. ‘Now, let’s make a start, shall we? I ain’t got long. Things to do, people to see.’
Sherlock started backing away, heart beating faster. The man was blocking the route out of the arches, but there was bound to be another way, somewhere behind him, in the darkness. Sherlock just had to find it.
The man smiled coldly. He slipped a hand inside his coat pocket, the spikes on his knuckledusters catching on the fabric as he did so. The hand came out again with a bunch of silvery coins held between the fingers.
‘Half a crown for the first person to bring the kid to me!’ he called out. ‘You hear? You can live like a lord for a month on that, if you want. Half a crown, and I don’t even care if anything’s broken. Just as long as he can still answer my questions.’
The air around Sherlock seemed to rustle, as if it had a life of its own. He’d thought that he and the bearded man were alone in the arches underneath Waterloo Station, but the darkness moved, separating itself into five, six, ten small figures. They seemed to step out of the walls and pull themselves out of the squishy ground. They were small – smaller than Sherlock, smaller than his friend Matty – and their skin, where it could be seen through clothes that were more rips than rags, was grey with dirt and grease that had been ground in for so long that it had become a part of them. Children. Tunnel-dwellers, with no families and no way of surviving apart from scavenging in the dirt for things dropped by passing passengers. Their eyes were large and dark, like rats’, and the nails on their fingers and what he could see of their toes were sharp and long and encrusted with dirt. Their mouths were ragged: blistered, split lips stretched tight over diseased gums. What few teeth remained in those mouths were blackened and jagged, like ancient mountains. The children couldn’t even stand up straight: they spent so long scrabbling through narrow tunnels and searching through the mud and slime for dropped coins that they were hunched and bent. Their arms and legs were thin and twisted like branches, but their stomachs were strangely swollen. Straggly hair hung around their faces. He couldn’t even tell which ones were boys and which ones girls: the dirt and the starvation made them look the same. And the smell: dear Lord, the sheer stench of rot and decay that poured off them, so intense that Sherlock could almost see the air rippling around them.
How could people live like this, he asked himself as he backed away. There was nothing in their eyes as they moved towards him apart from a voracious hunger. To them, he was nothing but a way to secure the next meal.
His perception kept shifting. For a second or two they were monsters, creatures of the night ready to swarm over him and take him down, and then suddenly they were children, driven to desperate things by hunger. He felt his emotions swing frantically between horror and sympathy. How could people – how could children – be allowed to live like this? It was wrong.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, still moving backwards. The feral children
cocked their heads at the words, but he wasn’t sure they’d understood. Or, if they’d understood, that they cared. All they knew was that the big man with the beard would pay riches for Sherlock to be bought to him, and if they had to break Sherlock’s arms and legs to stop him getting away then that was just the way it had to be.
Sherlock had a feeling they’d done worse things, there in the darkness.
He turned to run, but there were four – no, five – of the children behind him. They had appeared noiselessly out of the shadows.
A hand caught at his sleeve. He recoiled, pulling the material from the thin fingers and hearing the fabric rip beneath the sharp nails.
He was surrounded.
In the light that spilt in from the street, Sherlock could see the bulky shadow of the bearded man. And he could hear him laughing.
Desperately he tried to suppress the panic that bubbled up within his chest. He had to think, and think quickly.
Another hand clutched at his elbow. He pushed it away. The skin that he touched felt squishy. Unconsciously, he wiped his hand on his jacket.
In seconds they would be swarming over him. He gazed around, looking for something, anything that he could use to get away.
The wall. His only hope was the arched wall to his left. The feral children were crowding him on all sides, but the way to the wall was clear.
He ran for it, jumping when he was just a few feet away. His feet scrabbled for gaps where the brick had crumbled away, and his fingers managed to get a grip between the bricks higher up. He hauled himself up, feeling the arch curve towards him above his head. He climbed as high as he could. Gravity was pulling at him. Beneath, the feral children were scampering up the wall after him, but the curve of the arch meant that he was now closer to the centre of the tunnel.
He pushed himself away from the wall, partly falling and partly leaping over their heads. He hit the spongy ground in the centre of the tunnel, stumbling but pushing himself back up to his feet. Before the children could work out what he had done, he turned and ran off into the darkness – the only direction he could go.
Within moments he had been swallowed up by shadows. In the distance behind him he could hear the slap of naked feet on moist earth. They were in pursuit.
He kept running, trusting to luck to keep him from hitting a tunnel wall. Either his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness or there was some light spilling in from somewhere above, or perhaps some phosphorescent moss clinging to the tunnel walls, but he found that he could just make out the edges of the bricks as he ran.
He made out the curved shape of a second arch to one side – a tunnel, joining on to the one through which he was running. He swerved sideways, down this second tunnel. If he had any chance at all to escape his pursuers it was by confusing them, giving them too many options as to where he might have gone. If he just kept running in a straight line they would track him down for sure, and then . . . well, he wasn’t entirely sure that the promise of a half-crown would overcome their immediate hunger, and their desire to search his pockets for whatever coins he might have on him.
The tunnel ended in a black wall and Sherlock nearly ran into it. Only a momentary change in the quality of the fetid air warned him that there was an obstruction ahead. He stopped abruptly and reached forward with a cautious hand. The wall was about two feet in front of him. If he hadn’t realized in time then he would have collided with it, knocking himself out and leaving himself as easy prey for his feral pursuers.
Was he going to have to go back, try to find his way past them?
A breeze blew on his face, warm and stagnant, but definitely a breeze. Maybe this wasn’t a dead end at all. Maybe it was a junction where one tunnel ended by joining up with another one.
He turned left and started to run, arm stretched ahead just in case he hit the wall. He didn’t – the tunnel extended on towards whatever fresh hell was awaiting him.
A sudden thunderous noise overhead made him flinch. It seemed to go on forever. Rancid drops of water pattered on to his head from the roof of the tunnel. A train, maybe? He was probably beneath the tracks coming out of Waterloo Station.
Perhaps it was a train heading for Farnham, where his friends were. Would he ever see them again, or would he die here, in darkness, undiscovered forever?
He felt his breath catch in his throat. Somewhere up there was a calm, ordered world where well-dressed people walked purposefully back and forth. Up there were blue skies, solid brick walls, firm marble floors and gas lights. Up there was heaven. Down here there was crumbling brickwork trickling with water, ground that was somewhere between solid and liquid, a smell that combined the worst elements of tar, human filth and decaying plants, and despondent children who were little more than animals. This was definitely hell.
He felt as if he couldn’t go on. He wanted to sit down, curl himself up into a ball and hope that he could force himself awake from this nightmare. Because it had to be a nightmare, didn’t it? There couldn’t really be places like this in the neatly ordered world in which he lived.
But it was real. He knew it was real. He couldn’t give up. He had to find a way out.
Mycroft was depending on him.
Up ahead he could see a shaft of light crossing the tunnel diagonally, top to bottom. It was probably just a crack in the brickwork through which weak sunlight was filtering, but to his dark-attuned eyes it was like a pillar of gold. He stumbled towards it, hoping that maybe the crack was big enough for him to climb into, up towards the station. Up towards safety and sanity.
It wasn’t. The crack was barely big enough for him to get his fingers into, and the light was a mere glimmer, refracted through a trickle of water that flowed down from above. Angrily he clawed at the brickwork, hoping against hope that he could widen the gap. For a moment it resisted him, but then it crumbled away, falling to the floor of the tunnel.
Beneath the brick, he caught a glimpse of something moving: something hard, black and glistening. He stared, wondering what on earth it was, and then recoiled in horror as he realized that he was looking at a mass of beetles, or maybe cockroaches, all scurrying away from the light and the air now that he had destroyed the walls of their hideaway, their lair. Within seconds they had vanished, leaving a rough hole behind. Sherlock glanced around, feeling his skin crawl. Was it the same behind every wall, every brick in the tunnel? Was there a second, hidden world of eyeless beetles living in cavities and channels, scavenging on what even the feral children left behind?
Listening carefully, he thought he could hear the quiet scurrying of the beetles everywhere around him. Surrounding him. Burying him.
With a meaningless cry of heartfelt fear, he started to run.
Ten steps down the tunnel, something dropped on him from the darkness above.
He screamed, clawing at whatever it was that was wrapping itself around his face. In his mind it was a mass of beetles, all working together, or perhaps just one gigantic cockroach the size of his head, but as his fingers clawed at the thing he found he was touching rags and slimy flesh. A hand tried to get a grip beneath his chin. It was a girl! One of the feral children who had been tracking him through the tunnels! Somehow she had managed to get ahead of him and waited, pressing herself tight to the brickwork before dropping on him as he passed beneath. His fingers closed on her neck, just as he felt her mouth, with whatever remnants of teeth she still possessed, try to fasten itself on his cheek. She was small and weak, and despite the way she squirmed away from him he managed to get a grip with his other hand on her leg, or perhaps her arm. He hesitated for a moment, aware that this was a child, a girl, and knowing that civilized people didn’t hurt girls, but her fingernails were raking painfully against his skin. He didn’t see that he had any choice. With a convulsive movement he pulled her off him and threw her across the tunnel. She hit the soft, marshy ground and rolled away. In the meagre light that spilt into the tunnel he could see her eyes gleaming. She hissed, and scuttled back into the darkne
ss, but he knew she hadn’t gone far. She was still there, watching and waiting for her chance.
His emotions flickered again, and he thought with a desperate lurch of his stomach about Matty, living by his wits and always wondering where the next meal was coming from. How much would it take to push Matty into a life like this? Not much, he suspected. These were children, for Heaven’s sake! They weren’t vampires!
He moved on, hearing a scrabbling in the shadows as the girl paced him. Somewhere behind he could hear a wordless yelping as the other kids searched.
Children or vampires, it didn’t matter. He was going to die. There was no way out. He could feel his heart thudding against his ribs, feel the desperation in his lungs as he tried to catch his breath, feel the burn within the muscles of his legs as he staggered on. He wasn’t going to make it.
‘A farthing for your life,’ a voice hissed from beside him.
‘All right,’ he breathed. A farthing it is.’
‘Got to see it now,’ the voice insisted.
Sherlock slipped a hand in his pocket and pulled out a handful of loose change. ‘You can have all this if you get me out of here alive.’
The child in the darkness drew in a breath. ‘Never seen that much before!’ it whispered. ‘You must be rich!’
‘Not that it’s going to do me much good if I die down here,’ Sherlock said urgently, aware of the sounds of searching in the darkness. ‘Take me back to where I came in!’
‘Can’t do that. They’re watching and waiting. Got to go another way.’
Sherlock swallowed. ‘Which way?’
‘Follow me.’
A shape appeared beside Sherlock, seeming to pull itself out of the wall. It – he? – barely came up to Sherlock’s chest, but there was something in his eyes that made him much older. That child had seen things that Sherlock hoped he’d never have to see.