Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [90]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sherlock struggled wildly, trying to break free, but the fingers of his attackers were immovable. One of them held a knife to his throat. It had a tarnished blade, as if it had been buried in the ground for years. The message was clear, and he stopped struggling.
The figures turned Sherlock over unceremoniously. He noticed with a shiver of fear that their clothes were ragged and mouldy, as though they too had been underground for a while. Buried.
They bent and grabbed his feet, hauling him unceremoniously into the air. They were strong, despite their appearance. He was carried from the shelter like a sack of corn. None of them said anything, but he suddenly realized that he could hear them breathing. One of them wheezed like an asthmatic, while the others sounded just like ordinary men would if they were carrying something heavy. Dead men didn’t need to breathe, Sherlock told himself. They didn’t smell as if they were dead. Sherlock knew the cloying, awful smell of rotting flesh: he’d found enough dead animals in the woods in his time. Looking at these things, they should have reeked to high heaven, but all he could smell was sweat. So they weren’t dead men. Just men who looked like they were dead. But why? And what had they done with Virginia?
He looked down at where their thin hands were clutching at his shoulders. White marks were rubbing off on the material of his jacket. Make-up? On their hands? He breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t really thought they were dead, but it was a relief to have his deductions confirmed. He supposed it made sense: if you wanted people to think that you were dead, then you needed to look the part. White hands and white faces indicated a lack of blood circulating. If people saw them only at a distance, as Sherlock had till now, it was convincing.
They were carrying him downhill, away from Cramond. He caught sight of the occasional upside-down face as he was jolted along. This close he could see beard stubble poking through the white make-up on their cheeks and necks. He could also see how bits of thin paper had been stuck to their skin to resemble dry, peeling flesh, how the clever use of shading made it look as if their bones were poking through their skin, and how one of them had markings painted on his cheeks that, at a distance, would look like the grinning teeth of a skull. It was all theatrics and pretend. Dressing-up games.
‘Tell me where we’re going!’ he demanded.
The ‘corpse’ holding his right arm looked down at him and grinned. His teeth were stained green, like moss, but even that was make-up. ‘You come with us,’ he grunted in a voice that sounded like it was bubbling up through mud. ‘You see Clan Chief of the Dead.’
‘You’re not dead,’ Sherlock said. ‘You’re just pretending.’
The ‘corpse’ kept on grinning. ‘You sure about that?’ he asked. ‘You bet your life on it?’
Sherlock had no answer to that.
They carried him over rough ground for what seemed like an hour. He kept looking around to see if he could see Virginia, but if she was being carried as well then she was ahead of him and out of sight. He hoped that she’d managed to escape.
Eventually he was thrown on the back of a horse. His arms and legs were tied together with a rope running beneath the horse’s stomach, and his belt was fastened to the saddle so that he didn’t slip underneath the animal while they were riding. One of the ‘corpses’ mounted the horse, and they started to gallop away.
The repetitive thumping impact of the horse’s rump in his stomach and the heavy odour of the horse itself made Sherlock feel sick. He was constantly on the verge of sliding beneath the horse, where its massive legs would pound into him over and over again until his bones were smashed to fragments. He clenched his arms and legs as tight as he could, trying to stay where he was.
His head was jolted up and down so much that he couldn’t see what was flashing past. He was dimly aware, though, that there were other horses ahead of him and behind. Was Virginia