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.