Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [15]
The man’s head suddenly jerked around, as if it were attached to a string that someone had pulled from outside. ‘Smoke!’ he cried. He dashed out of the room abruptly, leaving Sherlock alone.
Apart from the body.
For a moment, Sherlock considered making a run for it. If he moved fast he might be able to get past his captor, even if the man was standing outside in the hall, and get to the front door. Or he could head in the other direction, to the reception-room window, and get out into the garden that way. Matty would still be waiting for him, and they could escape together on the horses.
But there was a body with him in the room, and he had to check to see whether the person was dead or just wounded. He knew he couldn’t just leave it there. That would haunt him for the rest of his life.
He left the chair and crouched beside the body, checking for the return of his captor. It was a man with mutton-chop whiskers. His head was turned to one side, and his eyes were closed, but Sherlock was relieved to hear him breathing heavily through his mouth. The hair on the back of his head was matted with blood that had partially clotted into a thick, glutinous mass. He’d obviously been struck on the head from behind, and fallen. He was lucky to be alive.
Sherlock thought for a moment. The man who had dragged him into the house was obviously mentally deranged. Was the man on the floor here some kind of keeper? A guard? And the lunatic had somehow managed to knock him out and was now looking for some way to escape from the house?
Sherlock dragged the unconscious man into a more comfortable position, one where his breathing wouldn’t be obstructed by the angle of his head. He couldn’t help noticing that the man’s clothes were cut in a similar style, and from a similar cloth, to those of his captor. They probably came from the same place.
A noise from out in the hall alerted him. He just managed to get back to the chair before his captor re-entered the room. His forehead gleamed with beads of sweat, but the glossy red ruin of the left side of his face was as dry as bone.
‘There’s a ship a-waiting for me to take me to China!’ he declared, but his eye was open so wide that the white of the eyeball was visible all the way around, like a frightened horse, and Sherlock knew that he was hallucinating the existence of the ship in the same way he appeared to be hallucinating the smoke that he kept smelling. The smoke from the fire that, Sherlock assumed, had caused that terrible scarring.
‘You go on ahead,’ Sherlock said, as calmly as he could. ‘I’ll follow on.’ He was hoping that his confident, level tone of voice might persuade the man to just turn around and go, but it had the opposite effect. The man brought his hand up in front of him, and with a chill of horror Sherlock saw that the hand was holding a silvery gun with an immensely long barrel and a revolving drum just above the handle.
‘Leave no trace behind!’ the man declared, and pointed the gun at Sherlock’s forehead.
Sherlock rolled sideways off the chair as the gun exploded with smoke and noise, and the antimacassar where Sherlock’s head had been resting turned into a burst mess of torn fabric and horsehair stuffing. He came up underneath an occasional table and heaved it towards the man with the gun. The man fired again, wildly, and the lead ball tore long splinters out of the table’s surface, knocking it spinning away from the two of them.
He aimed at Sherlock again. This time the lead ball screamed over Sherlock’s head and hit the window, shattering the glass.
Sherlock ran for the door to the hall. A fourth shot caught the door frame, knocking chunks of wood out of it as Sherlock passed.
The route down the hallway to the front door was too far. By the time he was struggling to throw the door open, the man would be in the hall and firing at him again, and he would be trapped. Instead, he turned and headed up the stairs.
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