thudding against his ribs, feel the desperation in his lungs as he tried to catch his breath, feel the burn within the muscles of his legs as he staggered on. He wasn’t going to make it.
‘A farthing for your life,’ a voice hissed from beside him.
‘All right,’ he breathed. A farthing it is.’
‘Got to see it now,’ the voice insisted.
Sherlock slipped a hand in his pocket and pulled out a handful of loose change. ‘You can have all this if you get me out of here alive.’
The child in the darkness drew in a breath. ‘Never seen that much before!’ it whispered. ‘You must be rich!’
‘Not that it’s going to do me much good if I die down here,’ Sherlock said urgently, aware of the sounds of searching in the darkness. ‘Take me back to where I came in!’
‘Can’t do that. They’re watching and waiting. Got to go another way.’
Sherlock swallowed. ‘Which way?’
‘Follow me.’
A shape appeared beside Sherlock, seeming to pull itself out of the wall. It – he? – barely came up to Sherlock’s chest, but there was something in his eyes that made him much older. That child had seen things that Sherlock hoped he’d never have to see.
‘What’s your name?’ Sherlock asked as the child slipped away like a fish through the darkness.
‘Don’t got a name,’ the whisper floated back.
‘Everyone’s got a name,’ Sherlock insisted.
‘Not down here. Names don’t help anything.’
Sherlock was dimly aware that the child had turned sideways, back into the curved wall from where he had come. He moved across to the brickwork. A gap extended from floor to head height: not a crack, but an artificial, regular space. Maybe something left for ventilation, or perhaps for some other purpose. Sherlock heard scrabbling inside. Taking a breath, he followed.
The next five minutes were the worst Sherlock had ever experienced. Pressed between two vertical cliffs of damp, crumbling brick and hearing, or perhaps just sensing, the blind insects crawling through their channels a few inches away from his face, he pushed his way deeper and deeper into the unknown. Rough brick scraped at his face and hands. Cobwebs, strung from side to side, caught in his hair. Things dropped, scuttling, from the webs into his collar, and he had to fight the almost overwhelming urge to hit at his clothes to kill them as they looked for somewhere to hide. Every now and then his questing hands would find a trickle of something damp coming down the walls. He supposed it was water, but in the dark he couldn’t see what it looked like, and if it was water then it didn’t smell like anything he’d ever smelt before. It was more like something sticky and alive, as if he was pushing himself deeper and deeper inside the throat of some vast, ancient dragon, and what he could feel was its corrosive saliva. He could feel the ground – if it was ground, and not a tongue – beneath his feet squishing as he walked, and he had the terrible feeling that if he were to stop then he would slowly sink into the mire, up to his knees, then his hips, then his neck and then, if his feet hadn’t touched something solid, the soft mud would close over his head and he would suffocate.
The feral boy ahead of him seemed to be climbing rather than walking. Fingers and toes found cracks in the brickwork, and he moved above, rather than across, the yielding mud. Nails scraped against the bricks with a grating sound that made Sherlock want to scream. He’d obviously learned how to move around the tunnels and arches in a way that Sherlock couldn’t.
Abruptly the brickwork narrowed to a point where Sherlock had to turn sideways to get through. The walls clutched at his chest and his back. He breathed out, making his chest as thin as he could. He squeezed himself forward as far as possible, but eventually a projecting brick caught against his ribs and he knew he couldn’t go any further.
He couldn’t breathe. Not properly, anyway. The gap was too small to allow him to take more than a small gulp of air.
Panic welled up within him, dark and acidic. He tried to move back, but something in the narrow cleft had changed. Maybe by moving through it he had shifted some of the bricks. Whatever it was, it was as if the gap behind him had actually narrowed after he’d passed through it. When he tried to push himself backwards he found that something hard was pressing into his spine. He couldn’t move forward or back. He was trapped!
He wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t take enough air into his lungs. A red mist seemed to spill across his vision. His heart stuttered, beating heavily and irregularly, apparently trying to break out of his ribcage as desperately as he was trying to break out of the cleft.
A hand grabbed his wrist and pulled, hard. Brick scraped skin from his back and his ribs, but then the brick crumbled away in a shower of gritty dust and desperately flailing insects and he popped out like a cork from a bottle into a wider area.
The feral boy was standing in front of him. It had been his hand that had pulled Sherlock free.
‘You could have just left me,’ Sherlock breathed through gulps of air. ‘You could have just waited until I’d suffocated and just taken all the money from my pockets.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said, expression unreadable. Yeah. S’pose I could’ve at that.’ He turned away, then looked over his shoulder at Sherlock. ‘Got to keep going. They’re not far behind.’
Just a few feet ahead, the gap ended in a narrow flight of steps. Sherlock followed the boy up and out into a cavernous space, and what he saw made him gasp in disbelief.
They had emerged into what appeared to be a massive warehouse, so full of stacked boxes that Sherlock couldn’t see the walls. He could see the ceiling, however. It was made of grimy panes of glass held together in an iron framework, with blessed sunlight spilling through them, so bright to his dark-adapted eyes that he had to squint to see anything. Bigger iron girders crossed the space beneath them. Somewhere up there he could hear birds fluttering.
But it was the boxes that caught his attention. They were long – about seven feet from end to end – and narrow, but their sides weren’t regular. They swelled out to their widest point about a quarter of the way along, then narrowed again. For a few seconds he stared at them blankly, trying to work out what they were, and then he realized. Actually, he had known from the first moment he saw them, but his mind just hadn’t let him accept the horrible truth.
They were coffins.
‘What is this place?’ he gasped.
‘It’s where they store the bodies, ready to ship ’em to the Nekrops.’
‘The Nekrops?’ He’d not heard the word before.
‘Yeah. You know. The place where dead people are taken.’
Sherlock’s mind raced. You mean a cemetery?’ And then it clicked. You mean a Necropolis.’ The Greek he’d learned at Deepdene School came flooding back: a necropolis, a city of the dead.
‘Yeah. Down at Brookwood. That’s where the trains go.’
Brookwood? That was near Farnham, where his aunt and uncle lived. Where he was staying. And then he remembered something that Matty Arnatt had said when they first met, about not wanting to cycle to Brookwood. He hadn’t wanted to say why, and Sherlock hadn’t pursued the matter. Now he knew. There was obviously some kind of massive cemetery at Brookwood: a place where bodies were shipped from far away.
‘Why don’t they bury them in London?’ he asked.
‘No room,’ his rescuer said succinctly. ‘Graveyards here are all full. Bodies buried on top of other bodies. Come a decent rainstorm and coffins’re bein’ washed up an’ exposed for everyone to see.’
Sherlock looked around at the piles of coffins, noticing that they all had a chalked number on the side. Presumably the numbers corresponded to entries on a list that somebody had written down somewhere, so that a particular coffin could be associated with a particular funeral. ‘And all of these are… occupied?’
The boy nodded. ‘Every one of them.’ He paused. ‘Good pickings.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Boxes sometimes get dropped. Smashed. And people sometimes get buried with their possessions – watches, rings, all kinds of stuff. And there’s the clothes as well. Some people’ll pay well for a nice jacket. Don’t matter who was wearing it before them.’
Sherlock felt sick. This was a whole new world, and one he didn’t want any part of. But despite himself, he
