Black Ice

CHAPTER FIVE

‘You got a penny, mister?’ Sherlock whined, trying to look smaller than he was. ‘I ain’t eaten for days. Just a penny for a piece of bread.’

‘Don’t come the coney-catcher with me,’ the man snarled. ‘I ain’t buyin’ it.’

‘All right,’ Sherlock said in his normal voice, straightening up. ‘So what is a coney-catcher, then?’

The man grinned. His teeth were black stubs. ‘You want to know what a coney is? A coney is a rabbit that’s been raised for the cooking pot, so it’s tame and won’t run away when you come to break its neck. A coney-catcher is a man who pretends to catch a coney – a man who makes something easy look difficult.’

‘Oh, a con man,’ Sherlock said.

‘Exactly. Now we’ve got that out of the way, why are you following me?’

‘I wasn’t following you!’ Sherlock protested.

The man raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Remember, I can see through every garment of pretence you care to put on, sonny. You started following me outside the theatre, and you’ve been with me ever since. What I want to know is, why?’ He looked Sherlock up and down. ‘You’re not a flimp.’ He noticed Sherlock’s expression. ‘A pickpocket,’ he clarified. ‘So what is it you’re after?’

‘I’m not after anything.’

‘You followed me through London, across Waterloo Bridge and down here, into the tunnels.’

‘Coincidence,’ Sherlock said.

‘No such thing.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t have to tell me now, if you don’t want to. I can just as easily beat it out of you. I’d enjoy that. It’s been a while since I did some serious damage to a body. I’ve been following instructions, keeping my head down. I ain’t seen the claret flow for a few weeks now, and I’m nostalgic.’

‘The claret?’ Sherlock asked, knowing that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

‘Blood, sonny. Blood.’ He slipped his hand into his pocket. When it emerged, he was holding two metal objects that clinked together. ‘Best as I can figure it, either you work for one of the local gangs and they want to know what’s going on in the theatre, or you’ve spotted something odd at the theatre and you’re hoping that you can sell a tale to the Peelers for a few coppers.’ He slipped the fingers of his right hand through one of the metal objects. It looked to Sherlock like a collection of rings, fastened together and covered with spikes which pointed outward, rising up from his knuckles. ‘Either way, your curiosity is going to cost you dearly.’ He slipped the other metal object over the fingers of his left hand, and raised his fists so that Sherlock could see. The sparse light gleamed off the metal spikes. His hands had been transformed into deadly weapons that could slice Sherlock’s face apart if they even came close. ‘Now, let’s make a start, shall we? I ain’t got long. Things to do, people to see.’

Sherlock started backing away, heart beating faster. The man was blocking the route out of the arches, but there was bound to be another way, somewhere behind him, in the darkness. Sherlock just had to find it.

The man smiled coldly. He slipped a hand inside his coat pocket, the spikes on his knuckledusters catching on the fabric as he did so. The hand came out again with a bunch of silvery coins held between the fingers.

‘Half a crown for the first person to bring the kid to me!’ he called out. ‘You hear? You can live like a lord for a month on that, if you want. Half a crown, and I don’t even care if anything’s broken. Just as long as he can still answer my questions.’

The air around Sherlock seemed to rustle, as if it had a life of its own. He’d thought that he and the bearded man were alone in the arches underneath Waterloo Station, but the darkness moved, separating itself into five, six, ten small figures. They seemed to step out of the walls and pull themselves out of the squishy ground. They were small – smaller than Sherlock, smaller than his friend Matty – and their skin, where it could be seen through clothes that were more rips than rags, was grey with dirt and grease that had been ground in for so long that it had become a part of them. Children. Tunnel-dwellers, with no families and no way of surviving apart from scavenging in the dirt for things dropped by passing passengers. Their eyes were large and dark, like rats’, and the nails on their fingers and what he could see of their toes were sharp and long and encrusted with dirt. Their mouths were ragged: blistered, split lips stretched tight over diseased gums. What few teeth remained in those mouths were blackened and jagged, like ancient mountains. The children couldn’t even stand up straight: they spent so long scrabbling through narrow tunnels and searching through the mud and slime for dropped coins that they were hunched and bent. Their arms and legs were thin and twisted like branches, but their stomachs were strangely swollen. Straggly hair hung around their faces. He couldn’t even tell which ones were boys and which ones girls: the dirt and the starvation made them look the same. And the smell: dear Lord, the sheer stench of rot and decay that poured off them, so intense that Sherlock could almost see the air rippling around them.

How could people live like this, he asked himself as he backed away. There was nothing in their eyes as they moved towards him apart from a voracious hunger. To them, he was nothing but a way to secure the next meal.

His perception kept shifting. For a second or two they were monsters, creatures of the night ready to swarm over him and take him down, and then suddenly they were children, driven to desperate things by hunger. He felt his emotions swing frantically between horror and sympathy. How could people – how could children – be allowed to live like this? It was wrong.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, still moving backwards. The feral children cocked their heads at the words, but he wasn’t sure they’d understood. Or, if they’d understood, that they cared. All they knew was that the 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 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 couldn’t help but ask more questions. He needed to know. ‘So how do they get to Brookwood?’

‘Special railway’ The boy gestured into the distance. ‘Nekrops Railway. Tracks are over there.’

‘They run trains just for the dead?’

‘And for the ones they left behind.’ The kid smiled, revealing a mouth with one rotten tooth left in it. ‘First, second and third class travel, just for the coffins. Travel in style when you’re dead, you can.’ He gestured around. ‘Good thing people don’t see how their loved ones’re looked after before they get put on the train, ain’t it?’

Sherlock looked around again, at the serried ranks of coffins, stacked up higher than his head. All with dead bodies inside. He was standing among enough dead bodies to populate a small town. Scary stuff.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The boy shook his head. ‘You’re on your own from here, mate.’

‘All right.’ Sherlock handed across the fistful of change from his pocket. ‘Thanks.’

The boy nodded. ‘You’re a gent.’ He stepped back, put his fingers to his lips and let out a whistle so loud it hurt Sherlock’s ears. ‘’E’s over ’ere!’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘’E’s escapin’!’

‘I thought you were helping me,’ Sherlock protested.

‘I was.’ The boy shook the fist in which he was holding the coins. ‘Deal’s completed. Now I’m ’elpin’ them. Maybe they’ll let me ’ave your shoes.’

Sherlock could hear noises from the narrow gap he’d emerged from – the sound of long fingernails and toenails against brick. Looking into the darkness he could see the glitter of tiny eyes blinking in the light.

He stepped forward and caught the boy by the wrist. Twisting him round, he pushed him into the gap. ‘He’s got my money!’ he shouted. ‘He’s holding it!’

The boy stared back at Sherlock in horror for a moment before he was pulled into the shadows by a score of tiny hands. Sherlock heard him shout, and then there was nothing but the sounds of fighting and cloth tearing.

He ran. While they were distracted, he had a chance to get away.

Still feeling breathless, still feeling a burning in his lungs and his muscles, he moved as fast as he could through the stacks of coffins. Within a few moments he was clear and out in the open.

Ahead of him were three steam trains. They were on rails, but standing at the end of the line, nestled against barriers. They were like the one that had bought him and Amyus Crowe to London, except that they were painted black: engine and carriages. Each of the carriages had a white skull painted on it at the front and the back. The white skulls had crossed bones beneath them.

Sherlock assumed that the trains only ran after dark. Seeing one of those during the day would be a distressing experience for anyone.

Then again, having one appearing at night out of a cloud of smoke, boiler glowing red with the heat of the burning coals, would be a pretty terrifying experience as well.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the stacks of coffins. In the shadows around them he thought he could see the glimmer of eyes watching him, but he wasn’t sure. The important thing was that they weren’t pursuing him. They wouldn’t come into the light, and he certainly wasn’t going to go back into the darkness. It was over. For the moment.

He turned and took a step forward. Something crunched beneath his feet. He looked down, and saw a white section of bone protruding from the ground. He’d stepped on it, cracking it in two. Boxes sometimes get dropped, the feral boy had said. Smashed. It looked like the contents got left where they had fallen. All this pomp and circumstance for the dead – special trains, a massive city of the dead at Brookwood – and yet the remains were just left to rot where they fell if the coffins got broken. It was as if the spectacle was more important than the actuality. The mourners did not know, or maybe even did not care, whether the family member they had lost was in the coffin when it was buried.

Somewhere beyond the trains, the tracks would lead out into the open air. A breeze was blowing in, scouring away the smell of the catacombs through which Sherlock had been chased and in which he had so nearly lost his life. He trudged wearily towards the weak sunlight. Somewhere out there, back in the real world, Mycroft was still facing a murder charge, and Sherlock had to help clear his name. He was exhausted and in pain, but that didn’t matter. Mycroft needed his help.

He was so tied up with his own thoughts that it took him a few seconds to register the fact that the man with the stringy hair had just stepped out from behind the engine of one of the trains.

‘No escape for you, sonny,’ he said. He raised his hands. The meagre light glinted off the metal spikes on his knuckledusters. ‘And it looks like I saved myself a half-crown into the bargain.’