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.