big man with the beard would pay riches for Sherlock to be bought to him, and if they had to break Sherlock’s arms and legs to stop him getting away then that was just the way it had to be.
Sherlock had a feeling they’d done worse things, there in the darkness.
He turned to run, but there were four – no, five – of the children behind him. They had appeared noiselessly out of the shadows.
A hand caught at his sleeve. He recoiled, pulling the material from the thin fingers and hearing the fabric rip beneath the sharp nails.
He was surrounded.
In the light that spilt in from the street, Sherlock could see the bulky shadow of the bearded man. And he could hear him laughing.
Desperately he tried to suppress the panic that bubbled up within his chest. He had to think, and think quickly.
Another hand clutched at his elbow. He pushed it away. The skin that he touched felt squishy. Unconsciously, he wiped his hand on his jacket.
In seconds they would be swarming over him. He gazed around, looking for something, anything that he could use to get away.
The wall. His only hope was the arched wall to his left. The feral children were crowding him on all sides, but the way to the wall was clear.
He ran for it, jumping when he was just a few feet away. His feet scrabbled for gaps where the brick had crumbled away, and his fingers managed to get a grip between the bricks higher up. He hauled himself up, feeling the arch curve towards him above his head. He climbed as high as he could. Gravity was pulling at him. Beneath, the feral children were scampering up the wall after him, but the curve of the arch meant that he was now closer to the centre of the tunnel.
He pushed himself away from the wall, partly falling and partly leaping over their heads. He hit the spongy ground in the centre of the tunnel, stumbling but pushing himself back up to his feet. Before the children could work out what he had done, he turned and ran off into the darkness – the only direction he could go.
Within moments he had been swallowed up by shadows. In the distance behind him he could hear the slap of naked feet on moist earth. They were in pursuit.
He kept running, trusting to luck to keep him from hitting a tunnel wall. Either his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness or there was some light spilling in from somewhere above, or perhaps some phosphorescent moss clinging to the tunnel walls, but he found that he could just make out the edges of the bricks as he ran.
He made out the curved shape of a second arch to one side – a tunnel, joining on to the one through which he was running. He swerved sideways, down this second tunnel. If he had any chance at all to escape his pursuers it was by confusing them, giving them too many options as to where he might have gone. If he just kept running in a straight line they would track him down for sure, and then… well, he wasn’t entirely sure that the promise of a half-crown would overcome their immediate hunger, and their desire to search his pockets for whatever coins he might have on him.
The tunnel ended in a black wall and Sherlock nearly ran into it. Only a momentary change in the quality of the fetid air warned him that there was an obstruction ahead. He stopped abruptly and reached forward with a cautious hand. The wall was about two feet in front of him. If he hadn’t realized in time then he would have collided with it, knocking himself out and leaving himself as easy prey for his feral pursuers.
Was he going to have to go back, try to find his way past them?
A breeze blew on his face, warm and stagnant, but definitely a breeze. Maybe this wasn’t a dead end at all. Maybe it was a junction where one tunnel ended by joining up with another one.
He turned left and started to run, arm stretched ahead just in case he hit the wall. He didn’t – the tunnel extended on towards whatever fresh hell was awaiting him.
A sudden thunderous noise overhead made him flinch. It seemed to go on forever. Rancid drops of water pattered on to his head from the roof of the tunnel. A train, maybe? He was probably beneath the tracks coming out of Waterloo Station.
Perhaps it was a train heading for Farnham, where his friends were. Would he ever see them again, or would he die here, in darkness, undiscovered forever?
He felt his breath catch in his throat. Somewhere up there was a calm, ordered world where well-dressed people walked purposefully back and forth. Up there were blue skies, solid brick walls, firm marble floors and gas lights. Up there was heaven. Down here there was crumbling brickwork trickling with water, ground that was somewhere between solid and liquid, a smell that combined the worst elements of tar, human filth and decaying plants, and despondent children who were little more than animals. This was definitely hell.
He felt as if he couldn’t go on. He wanted to sit down, curl himself up into a ball and hope that he could force himself awake from this nightmare. Because it had to be a nightmare, didn’t it? There couldn’t really be places like this in the neatly ordered world in which he lived.
But it was real. He knew it was real. He couldn’t give up. He had to find a way out.
Mycroft was depending on him.
Up ahead he could see a shaft of light crossing the tunnel diagonally, top to bottom. It was probably just a crack in the brickwork through which weak sunlight was filtering, but to his dark-attuned eyes it was like a pillar of gold. He stumbled towards it, hoping that maybe the crack was big enough for him to climb into, up towards the station. Up towards safety and sanity.
It wasn’t. The crack was barely big enough for him to get his fingers into, and the light was a mere glimmer, refracted through a trickle of water that flowed down from above. Angrily he clawed at the brickwork, hoping against hope that he could widen the gap. For a moment it resisted him, but then it crumbled away, falling to the floor of the tunnel.
Beneath the brick, he caught a glimpse of something moving: something hard, black and glistening. He stared, wondering what on earth it was, and then recoiled in horror as he realized that he was looking at a mass of beetles, or maybe cockroaches, all scurrying away from the light and the air now that he had destroyed the walls of their hideaway, their lair. Within seconds they had vanished, leaving a rough hole behind. Sherlock glanced around, feeling his skin crawl. Was it the same behind every wall, every brick in the tunnel? Was there a second, hidden world of eyeless beetles living in cavities and channels, scavenging on what even the feral children left behind?
Listening carefully, he thought he could hear the quiet scurrying of the beetles everywhere around him. Surrounding him. Burying him.
With a meaningless cry of heartfelt fear, he started to run.
Ten steps down the tunnel, something dropped on him from the darkness above.
He screamed, clawing at whatever it was that was wrapping itself around his face. In his mind it was a mass of beetles, all working together, or perhaps just one gigantic cockroach the size of his head, but as his fingers clawed at the thing he found he was touching rags and slimy flesh. A hand tried to get a grip beneath his chin. It was a girl! One of the feral children who had been tracking him through the tunnels! Somehow she had managed to get ahead of him and waited, pressing herself tight to the brickwork before dropping on him as he passed beneath. His fingers closed on her neck, just as he felt her mouth, with whatever remnants of teeth she still possessed, try to fasten itself on his cheek. She was small and weak, and despite the way she squirmed away from him he managed to get a grip with his other hand on her leg, or perhaps her arm. He hesitated for a moment, aware that this was a child, a girl, and knowing that civilized people didn’t hurt girls, but her fingernails were raking painfully against his skin. He didn’t see that he had any choice. With a convulsive movement he pulled her off him and threw her across the tunnel. She hit the soft, marshy ground and rolled away. In the meagre light that spilt into the tunnel he could see her eyes gleaming. She hissed, and scuttled back into the darkness, but he knew she hadn’t gone far. She was still there, watching and waiting for her chance.
His emotions flickered again, and he thought with a desperate lurch of his stomach about Matty, living by his wits and always wondering where the next meal was coming from. How much would it take to push Matty into a life like this? Not much, he suspected. These were children, for Heaven’s sake! They weren’t vampires!
He moved on, hearing a scrabbling in the shadows as the girl paced him. Somewhere behind he could hear a wordless yelping as the other kids searched.
Children or vampires, it didn’t matter. He was going to die. There was no way out. He could feel his heart
