Eye of the Crow

He stumbles and falls, crashing to the floor, the fancy cabinet almost landing on top of him.

He springs to his feet and flies down the stairs like a swallow. Violins are playing in his head.

The way out!

He hears a man shout from the bedroom. The whole house awakening, servants hitting the floors upstairs. The master’s feet pound into the hallway and rush to the top of the steps.

The front door!

Swooping off the bottom steps, Sherlock makes for it. He drives the heavy bolt back and heaves.

It won’t open.

The gentleman is thudding down the staircase, shouting amid the sound of other voices, and of something wooden and steel being pulled from a wall.

A rifle!

Sherlock feels for another bolt on the door, there it is … and another. He drives them both back, yanks the door open, and whacks it closed behind him.

Then a sudden realization hits him like a punch.

The hound! He has forgotten about the hound.

He hears it instantly, bounding around from the passageway, so large when he sees it up close that its massive head seems as high as his shoulder, some sort of evil hybrid dog the size of which he could never have imagined, capable of seizing him by the throat and tearing it out in one rip.

Sherlock looks toward the wrought-iron fence. It is as high as his head and pointed at the tips like spears from the Dark Continent.

He has no choice. He heads for it.

The hound’s hot breath is at his back.

He reaches the fence and leaps as high as he can. One hand seizes the horizontal bar at the top, the other the sharp tip of a spearhead. He can feel it go into his flesh, touching the bone. Sending his scream and pain deep into himself, he jerks the wounded hand off the spear and onto the horizontal bar and pulls himself up.

But the hound can leap too. It sails through the air as he snaps his feet up to the top of the fence, pulled by the strength of his arms. One leg goes over the spears, out toward the street.

The hound catches the other.

Its teeth enter his calf, tearing into the flesh. But when the giant canine opens its mouth again to strengthen its grip, to crunch bone … the boy is gone. He whips his wounded leg over the fence and lands, almost on his face.

Sherlock runs, ignoring the pain in his hand and leg. He puts his head back, chest out, pumps the air with his arms, and dashes down the stately street out into the rest of London, and on and on until he is sure no one is following and he is deep in the city, in The Seven Dials, down another dark alleyway. He collapses in a heap against a wall and squirms into a dustman’s mound of stinking rubbish and refuse. Buried under it, his chest heaving so hard that the mound looks alive, Sherlock isn’t thinking about his wounds. His mind is back in that bedroom.

They were wrapped in each other’s arms.

And there’s something else.

He hadn’t been able to make out the color of the iris on the false eye when he first saw it submerged in the water, but he’d noticed something else when it rolled. It had no initials. Mr. Lear’s do. That eyeball must have come from a different manufacturer than the murderer’s.

The gentleman in that second-last house is not his villain.

Whether Sherlock falls asleep or blacks out he doesn’t know, but within minutes his consciousness is gone.

“One left,” he murmurs, just before he fades away.

DEATH

He wakes in the morning with a searing pain in his leg. There were special physicians who tended to his mother’s family – he wishes he could go to one now. His father has told him about infection and that possibility worries him. It can kill. He pulls up his trouser leg and looks at the ugly wound, caked with blood. A message courses through his brain. Survive. Before long, he thinks of something that might help.

It starts to rain. He sets off through the streets, east-bound, aware that a noose is tightening around his neck: the injury may be growing worse and Mayfair is surely going on alert.

But he has to go back there, tonight. All he can hope is that the gentleman in that last house didn’t see him clearly and can’t tell the police that a tall, thin boy with dark hair, dressed like a chimney sweep, was in his very bedroom.

At Fetter Lane he notices that someone has dropped a newspaper against a red pillar box on a dirty footpath. He snatches it up and reads as he walks.

Crime pages.

Here it is …

Mayfair last night … break-in reported … owner could not see the perpetrator in the darkness of his house.

Sherlock looks up to the sky for an instant, thankful. He reads on.

The police are concerned about goings-on in Mayfair … a door was reported to have been unlocked from the inside the night before …

So, that’s the way it will be – he will have to enter that last house with a Bobbie on every Mayfair corner. The solution to the crime is within his grasp, but will his pursuers let him solve it?

He is sure that some of the bottles and flasks he noticed in the chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital contain disinfectant, the new way of killing infection that his father has often spoken of – Wilber read about microscopic bacteria in the writings of the great French scientist Louis Pasteur, and scoffed at the idea that bad smells infected people and that fly maggots should be used to eat dying flesh and save only parts of infected limbs. Science, Wilber knew, could do better.

Sherlock sneaks into St. Bart’s again, entering by the same arched back door. He knows where to find the lab and what he is looking for inside. But someone is there when he arrives, likely a medical student. He waits until the white-coated, thick-set, young man leaves. He slips in. It takes a long time to find what he needs, and his fear grows as the clock on the wall ticks. He searches label after label. Finally, he spots a small bottle containing a clear liquid identified as “Lister’s Carbolic Acid Solution,” drops it into a pocket, and makes off down the white corridors, passing the man in the white coat. He hobbles away as fast as he can, and when he gets to the streets, keeps moving. On an embankment down by the Thames he raises his bloodied pant leg and pours the potent elixir over the wound.

He cries out. He has to. The pain is unlike anything he has ever felt before, like someone is burning his flesh with a firebrand. His shriek goes out across the Thames and is swallowed up. The liquid bubbles on the injury, beginning to destroy the infection. He drops more onto his skewered hand.

Across the Thames … that’s where he wants to go before he returns to Mayfair … because he is faltering. It seems like suicide to attempt this last break-in, the odds are so highly stacked against him. Should he go home? Just briefly?

He needs to see Rose. What he hopes to gain, he isn’t sure. Perhaps she will convince him not to go. And that would be a godsend. Or maybe she will give him the courage to do it? He wonders if he wants that.

Perhaps he just wants to see her for the last time.

The sky clears as he heads south.

It is amazing how easy it has become for him to enter a house unseen. Malefactor would be impressed. Sitting alone in their flat, which seems even smaller and more pitiable now that he has been inside the mansions of