Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [105]
‘I give orders wherever and whenever I please,’ Scobell said, his voice as calm as if he was buying a newspaper.
Sherlock glanced around, taking in everything that he could see, calculating whether or not he could use it to change the dynamic of the situation. Scobell’s men had the advantage, and Sherlock couldn’t see any way out. Another few minutes and he would lose both Virginia and Amyus Crowe. A few minutes more and he would be dead too, along with Matty and Rufus Stone. He had to do something.
His gaze moved over Gahan Macfarlane. The big Scotsman was staring at Sherlock. He glanced at the doorway to the previous room, then back at Sherlock again. Then he nodded.
What was he trying to say?
Sherlock remembered the pit in the centre of the room next door, and the creature that was penned inside. Was that what Macfarlane wanted him to think about? He didn’t know what the creature was, but judging by the dog fight and the boxing match in the other rooms, and by the various animal heads that hung from the walls here, Macfarlane liked to see people and animals fighting. Whatever was in the pit was likely to be big and fearsome. Macfarlane probably set dogs against it, or possibly even people, wagering not on whether they would win but on how long it would take them to die.
It gave Sherlock an idea, but he had to get to it first.
‘It’s time,’ Scobell said. ‘The names on my forehead and on my forearm have been red for too long. It is time to have them covered in black ink.’
As Scobell stepped forward, Sherlock’s eyes fixed again on the gold skull on his cane. The cane had a blade in the end, activated by one eye socket. But the skull had two eye sockets . . .
He reached out and jammed his forefinger in the skull’s right eye socket.
A blade erupted out of the slot in the skull and through Scobell’s hand. He screamed: a high-pitched, shocked noise that paralysed everyone in the room apart from Sherlock. He pushed past Scobell and towards the door to the previous room – the one with the beast trapped in the pit. Scobell’s men regained their wits and tracked him with their crossbows as he ran, but he was already through the doorway when they fired. He heard the bolts whizzing behind, and screams as some of them found a mark. Scobell’s men were shooting each other by accident.
There was chaos in the room he had left, cries and shouts and sounds of people running, but Sherlock was more concerned with what was ahead of him: the swimming-pool-like pit, and the waist-high wooden panels that lined the edge.
The creature in the pit roared. Sherlock heard the thudding of paws and the clicking of claws as whatever it was rushed towards his side of the pit.
He grabbed a panel and pulled it upward. It was loosely bolted to the floor and resisted for a moment, but in his desperation his strength was such that he tore it loose. He didn’t have the luxury of failure. The panel was perhaps fifteen feet long and three feet wide, and so heavy that he had difficulty in manoeuvring it, but somehow he managed to turn it and throw it into the pit so that one end was left on the edge by his feet, right in the gap where the panel had been fastened.
He had made a ramp so that whatever was in there could get out.
It was the only thing he could think of that could even up the odds.
With a roar, a massive shape surged out of the pit and loomed above him, shaggy arms wide and claws spread like handfuls of knife blades. It was a bear – a brown bear – and it must have measured ten feet from its tail to the tip of its nose. Its eyes gleamed red with rage and madness. God alone knew where Macfarlane had got it. Probably he’d had it since it was a cub. The chances were that it had been penned up for years, taunted and abused and forced to fight, and now it was free.
It swiped at Sherlock with a massive paw. Sherlock dropped to the floor and rolled beneath it, just as Scobell’s remaining men burst through the doorway looking for him. The bear forgot about