He looks up the terrifying tower at the perch.
He has only one option.
He starts to climb.
UP IN THE AIR
It is a sort of paralyzing feeling: the one that invades your body when you are high in the air and petrified and you have no option but to go higher. It is like Sherlock has stepped up onto the tower and entered a nightmare. He’d had no idea whether or not he was afraid of heights, had never been at any extreme elevation. But now he knows. He is.
Both Sigerson Bell and his father have spoken to him about adrenaline. It is a liquid compound of some sort that some organ in your body secretes when you are terrified, when you want to run, when you are extremely excited. Adrenaline is pouring through his body at the rate beer flows out of the taps that fill the barrels in the many breweries on the Thames. He staggers up the cast-iron tower like a drunk, his legs rubbery, his heart slamming in his chest, feeling for each rung, slipping and falling … and still climbing. He is gasping and making noise, completely giving away his whereabouts.
In the midst of his terror, he starts thinking that something doesn’t make sense about this pursuit. And then it dawns on him. Why aren’t the bull terriers barking? It is a curious fact – the dogs are not making noise in the night. He looks down and sees the man standing at the bottom of the tower where it is bolted to the floor, his head down, concentrating on putting his foot securely on the first rung.
His beasts aren’t with him!
The boy is being pursued by dogs that not only make no sound, but don’t exist.
And the man … isn’t a man.
When his assailant looks up, Sherlock can see the face of The Swallow glaring at him.
So, this is his position: he is being chased up a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot cast-iron ladder by a professional trapeze artiste, as at home in the sky as a bird, a lad younger than he, but as strong as a tiger … a physically skilled, violent boy, trained to kill at a young age, who appears to have just murdered someone, and who will undoubtedly stop at nothing to conceal that fact. The Swallow now knows that the police think it was foul play; he knows that Sherlock was snooping around yesterday and saw him examining and tying up the trapeze bars, and that he is responsible for maintaining the troupe’s safety. The young snoop is in The Swallow’s sights, way up the tower in a near-deserted building … a perfect place to kill.
Sherlock can’t believe this is happening. Why, oh why, did he decide to investigate this murder? It’s turning out to be as violent as the Whitechapel case. He should have let Sigerson Bell fend for himself, and found other ways to get money for school – steal, for God’s sake.
He looks down and then back up. He has no choice. He must keep going toward the glass ceiling. He scurries skyward like a squirrel.
But The Swallow shortens the distance between them in a flash. He climbs at twice Sherlock’s speed. The tall, thin boy thinks he should calculate how long it will take L’Hirondelle to catch him, but he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter now. He simply has to move! He can’t fight the young athlete here. Maybe, if he gets to the perch first, he can think of something, have some sort of advantage. Maybe.
He decides to not look down. Turning his face upward, he makes for the perch with all he has.
He nears it. But The Swallow seems to be picking up speed.
“Boy!” he shouts.
Then Sherlock hears dogs barking down the hall in the northern transept. They are coming too.
His hand reaches the perch. He can feel his pursuer’s steps shaking the tower just a foot or two beneath him! He seizes the thick wooden surface and tries to swing himself up onto it. His grip slips, he loses his footing and falls, out into the space high in the Crystal Palace, toward its hard wooden floor a hundred and fifty feet below! He clutches at the perch again … and somehow grasps it with one hand. He tries to raise himself but can’t – he doesn’t have the strength. He feels The Swallow’s hand grabbing for him, grazing his boot, and with a Herculean effort reaches up with his other hand, grips the platform and pulls himself up onto it. He has no idea how he found the power.
Standing up, looking out over the edge of the perch at the two tiny dogs and man far below, he almost faints. It is an incredible sight. He can’t imagine how the Mercures, how El Niño, does it. For an instant, a strange, almost exhilarating feeling creeps into the pit of his stomach and makes him feel like giving up. Why doesn’t he just fall into the air and float downward the way you would at the end of a wonderful dream?
The Swallow’s eyes appear over the edge of the platform. Sherlock pivots and kicks at him, aiming the point of his shoe right for his nose, but the boy, his face calm and collected, reacts like lightening and seizes the foot. Sherlock stumbles and as he does one of his arms windmills in the air and knocks a trapeze bar from its hook on the tower just behind him, above his head. At the same time, he jerks his foot back and starts to fall again. He is going over the edge of the platform … out into space for good. Sherlock Holmes is dead. It’s like he is falling down a waterfall, plummeting to his destiny.
But at the last split second he spots the trapeze bar above, loosed now, and also swinging out over the open space.
He snatches it with both hands.
In an instant, Sherlock is flying through the air … with the least of ease.
He swings out over the central transept, holding on for dear life, his black frock coat fluttering as he swoops, his injured hands screaming.
Sherlock can’t breathe. He sees almost everything in the monster building, all the way down the north hallway to the end. He spots something curious – a small room at the western side of the transept, enclosed by a wall that doesn’t quite reach the ceiling. But he can’t see into it and it passes through his sight in a second and rushes past. He flails about in the air. He doesn’t know what to do. How do they move up here? Perhaps he can land way over on the other perch, on Monsieur Mercure’s boards on the other tower? He passes the bottom of the pendulum swing and is now climbing toward Mercure’s platform. He thinks of El Niño, kicking his legs as he flew to gain speed, so he tries that, but it has little effect. He tries again, amazed at the way it hurts his abdomen, and feels a slight push, upward toward the perch.
But when the platform is right beside him, he can’t get his long legs onto it, doesn’t have the vigor in his intestinal muscles to lift them high enough to set his feet onto the wooden surface. He misses and starts to go backward, on another gigantic swing in the direction he came from … toward The Swallow and the first perch. He is so terrified that he doesn’t care what happens. He just wants to get off. As he climbs the air near the first perch, he does something desperate. He lets go, hoping his momentum can simply shoot him up onto the platform, maybe even knock The Swallow down.
But it doesn’t.
He misses the perch altogether.
But something unexpected happens. He sticks one foot into a rung on the tower to brace himself, reaches out over the edge of the platform, and catches Sherlock in a powerful grip as he flies by.
In an instant, the young acrobat has him up onto the solid rectangular surface and is sitting on him. But he doesn’t seem angry. Instead, he appears relieved.
“What the ’ell were you doing, lad?” he smiles. “That’s some sort of act! Got a job, ’ave you? You know, we ’ave an opening!”