Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [72]
Glancing into one of the tenement doorways, Sherlock caught sight of a movement. He squinted, trying to see what it was. A curtain fluttering in the wind? A pigeon or a seagull roosting?
Something white moved against the darkness inside the doorway. More quickly this time, Sherlock realized that it was a skull. The deep sockets of the eyes, the hairless surface of the head, the sharp edges of the cheekbones and the sinister grin of the teeth – another dead man was staring at him!
The figure moved back into the shadows before Sherlock could point it out to Matty or Rufus Stone. He scanned the row of doorways frantically. Was he going mad? Most of them were empty, but – yes, there! Another thin white figure stood half in shadow, watching him. It moved back into darkness as soon as it realized it had been seen.
Were these creatures connected with the Americans who had kidnapped the three of them, or was this some kind of hallucination born out of a breaking mind?
He gazed over at Matty, and saw that the boy was staring at the tenement doorways as well. Matty turned his head to look at Sherlock.
‘Did you see them?’ Sherlock asked desperately.
Matty nodded. ‘They’re dead men walking, aren’t they? They’re following us. They want us.’
‘I don’t believe that dead men can walk.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ve seen dead rabbits on butchers’ slabs, and dead fish in costermonger’s?’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘They never move. Not ever. When you’re dead, the vital spark has gone from you. Vanished. The only thing left is flesh, and that decays. Dead animals don’t come back to life, so dead people don’t come back to life.’
Matty looked unconvinced. ‘I ain’t got time to argue wiv you,’ he said.’
‘Come on!’ Rufus called. ‘We need to get out of here before they come back!’
On the side of the road a cart had been left, its horse tied to a stunted tree. The animal looked in considerably better condition than the ones in the ground across the road.
‘That,’ Rufus said, ‘is our ride home – if we knew which way home was.’
‘I memorized the route out,’ Sherlock said. ‘I can just reverse the times and the turns, and we can work out the way back to our hotel.’
‘But we’ll have to put a sack over your head,’ Matty murmured. He looked up at Sherlock and smiled. ‘So the conditions are the same as on the journey out. Otherwise you might get it wrong.’
Sherlock and Matty climbed into the back of the cart while Rufus clambered in the front. He flicked the reins experimentally and the horse started off as if someone had fired a gun. It didn’t seem to like being near the tenements.
Sherlock stood up behind Rufus’s shoulder, clutching on to a wooden bar, and tried to reverse the route that had brought them there. He assumed the cart was travelling at about the same speed, so all he had to do was remember the turns and the rough times in his head and then start the list at the bottom and work upward. Of course he had to change the turns around. A right-hand turn heading from the city centre to the tenements would be a left-hand turn heading back.
His neck was throbbing, and his ankles had been scraped raw by the rope. Whenever he took a breath he could feel a catch in his throat, as if the cartilage had been pushed in. Worse than the physical damage, however, was the feeling of helplessness that had flooded over him when he was hanging there, in the tenement room. He’d been close to death before, but he’d always felt that there was something he could do, some way he could fight. Before he had remembered the knife in his pocket – Matty’s knife – he had been completely at the quiet man’s mercy. He had been moments from a painful and