Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [54]
Faced with the choice of a stairway that led down and going back again, he chose to go down. This wasn’t passenger territory any more: the walls were cruder wood, without the ornate panelling of earlier, and the oil lamps were guttering and yellow. There was only bare wood beneath his feet: not soft carpets.
From somewhere behind him, Sherlock heard footsteps. Grivens was still on his trail. He kept moving.
The sound of the ship’s engines was closer now, like the thudding of some huge mechanical heart, and the atmosphere was noticeably warmer. Sherlock was sweating, partly because of the chase but partly because of the steam in the atmosphere.
He went round a corner to find a large door ahead of him. It was shut. He glanced over his shoulder, briefly, but there was no point going back. He could only go onward.
He opened the door and went through.
Into Hell.
CHAPTER NINE
Heat hit him in the face, nearly knocking him down. It was like walking past the open door of a baker’s oven. He felt the short hairs on his neck curling up and the sweat springing out on his face and neck. The air itself was so thick and so hot that it was hard to catch his breath.
The doorway opened on a wrought-iron balcony which looked down on a cavernous inferno filled with machinery: pistons, wheels, axles, all moving in different directions at different speeds: side to side, up and down, round and round. It was the Scotia’s engine room, powering the huge paddle wheels on the sides of the ship. Somewhere nearby, Sherlock knew, there would be a separate boiler room, where sailors would be shovelling coal into a massive furnace where it would burn and produce heat, which in turn would turn water in a boiler above into steam and force it through a network of pipes into this room, where pistons and joints and wheels would convert the pressure of the steam into rotary motion which would be fed to the paddle wheels via massive axles. If it was hellishly hot in here then the boiler room would be worse than working inside a volcano. How could men stand it?
The noise was deafening: a combination of clanging, hissing and thumping that made Sherlock’s head hurt. He could feel the vibration through the doorframe where his hand was holding on and through the air itself. It was like being punched repeatedly in the chest. It would be next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation in conditions like that. The men who worked there would have to communicate by sign language. Deafness would be an occupational hazard.
Illumination was provided by dirty oil lamps that hung from the walls at various points, and also by gratings in the ceiling that let in a meagre trickle of light from the world above, but the light petered out quickly in the smoky, dusty, steamy atmosphere, and there were great pools of black shadow everywhere Sherlock looked. Air also entered through the gratings, providing a welcome cool breeze for anyone standing underneath. Coal dust and water vapour eddied in the atmosphere; restless spirits uncertain which way to go.
Sherlock quickly looked around, trying to work out where he could go. The engine room seemed to take up several levels inside the centre of the ship. Walkways were bolted to the walls and crossed from side to side at various levels. Wrought-iron ladders led up to the walkways. Massive iron beams crossed the room, giving it some stability and providing somewhere for the various pipes and wheels to be attached. It