Rebel Fire

by Andrew Lane

  “Funny.” He glanced around. Nothing immediately suggested itself. “Can you ride back to those kids we saw playing with the ball?” He delved into his pocket and brought out a handful of coins. “Give them a few pennies and ask if we can borrow the ball for a while. Tell them we’ll bring it back.”

  Matty looked at him strangely. “We came a long way to play ball games.”

  “Just do it—please.”

  Matty sighed and took the coins, then trotted off, glancing back over his shoulder and making an audible “tch” noise.

  Sherlock dismounted and waited patiently, tying up his horse and then moving closer to the edge of the trees and looking at the house. Nobody was moving. Was it Shenandoah, or something else, like Summerisle or Strangeways?

  After what seemed an age, Matty returned. He was holding the ball under one arm.

  “We were done,” he said, stopping. “This ball is flat.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s wander back down the road, throwing the ball to each other. When we get to the house, whoever has the ball throws it but deliberately misses, and gets it as close to the front door as they can.”

  “So the other one can run and fetch it. Yeh, okay.”

  “So that I can run and fetch it. I need to see what it says on that sign, and you can’t read, remember? Not properly, anyway.”

  They wandered back down the road, throwing the ball back and forth. Once or twice Matty would drop it to the ground and kick it up in the air towards Sherlock.

  When they got to the point on the road nearest the house, where a path led off towards the front door, Matty manoeuvred himself around so that he was at the other side of the road. He brought the ball behind his shoulder and threw it high, over Sherlock’s head. It sailed into the garden and bounced once, floppily, before rolling towards the front door.

  Sherlock made a dumbshow of irritation, throwing his hands wide and shrugging, then turned around and scooted up the path towards the front door. Without making it obvious, as he reached the ball and bent down to retrieve it he glanced up at the sign beside the door.

  Shenandoah.

  It was the right house. Now all he had to do was decide on his next step. Did he want to stay and watch it for a while, so he could describe the occupant to Mycroft and Amyus Crowe, or did he dare sneak in and look around, if the occupant wasn’t home?

  The decision was taken away from him as the door was flung wide open and a man appeared out of the darkness. He was thin, with a narrow, pointed beard shot through with grey hairs, but the thing that made Sherlock freeze in shock was the left side of his face. He’d been burned at some stage, badly burned; the skin of his face was red and lumpy, and his eye was just a dark hole, with no eyeball showing.

  “You yapping little cur,” he snarled. He grabbed Sherlock’s hair and dragged him inside the house before he could make a sound.

  THREE

  Sherlock’s scalp felt like it was on fire. He grabbed at the man’s arm and let himself be pulled along, trying to lessen the agony of his entire body weight hanging off a handful of hair. He half expected chunks to tear out at the roots, leaving bleeding areas of raw flesh exposed to the air.

  “I was just getting my ball back!” he cried.

  The man ignored him. He was muttering a stream of profanities and accusations to himself as he pulled Sherlock along.

  The hall of the house was light, with the sun shining through a skylight high above. It had an empty, half-furnished feel to it. The man’s footsteps echoed on the tiled floor.

  He pushed open a door with his left hand and dragged Sherlock inside. It was a reception room: comfortable chintz-covered chairs with antimacassars on top to stop the hair oil of any gentleman from staining the cloth, and some occasional tables sitting around with nothing on them but lace doilies. It had an unlived-in feel—a house, not a home.

  Oh, and there was a body on the floor. Sherlock only just caught sight of a pair of boots and the lower half of a body, facing downward against the carpet, as he was pulled past and thrown into a chair.

  He quickly reached up to check his hair, feeling for warm blood or raw flesh, or even just for some looseness in his scalp where it might be peeling away from the skull beneath, but it all felt normal. Except for the pain. That didn’t feel normal at all.

  “Please!” he cried, still trying to pretend that he was an innocent victim, just passing by, “let me go. My ma and pa will be worried about me! They just live down the road!”

  The man wouldn’t meet Sherlock’s gaze. Instead, his head kept jerking back and forth like a bird’s, going from window to door, door to window, back and forth.

  Sherlock took a moment to look properly at the man. All he had really caught in the doorway was the ruined flesh on the left-hand side of the man’s face, but now he let his gaze roam up and down the man’s body, trying to spot something that might help.

  The man’s suit was good cloth, that much Sherlock was sure of. It was black, and quite fine, and the way the jacket and the trousers hung made Sherlock think that it had been made by a tailor who knew what he was doing. It didn’t look like a wool sack with sleeves, which some of the jackets worn around Farnham did. But there was something odd about the cut, something … almost foreign. Sherlock found a part of his mind wondering whether you could identify which tailor had made a suit just by the stitching and the cut; or, at the very least, whether the tailor followed a particular style—German, or English, or American.

  The man was thin, and his wrist bones and Adam’s apple stood out prominently. From the right side his face was classically handsome, with a prominent moustache and goatee beard, but from the left side it was a wreck. The skin was red and shiny and cratered like the surface of the moon. The beard on that side was sparse and sickly, poking through the skin like the charred remains of a forest fire, and the eye socket was just a red-scarred hole in his face.

  “Mister—” Sherlock started, but the man cut him off with an abrupt gesture.

  “Quiet!” he commanded. His voice was piercing, but there was a whining tone in it that made Sherlock’s flesh creep. “Quiet, you little whoreson whelp!”

  His voice was tinged with an accent that wasn’t English. It sounded more like the way Amyus and Virginia Crowe spoke, but it wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps slightly more cultured. And he spoke as if he expected to be listened to. He projected, as if he were on a stage, performing. Sherlock had seen some interminable Shakespeare plays performed in the open air at his mother and father’s manor house in Reigate, and if it wasn’t for the twitching of his head Sherlock would have put this man down as an actor from the way he stood and the way he spoke.

  “How long have we got?” the man asked abruptly. “How long till they’re back?”

  “I don’t—” Sherlock started to say, but the man stepped towards him and belted him across the face with the back of his hand. Stars and galaxies burst apart in Sherlock’s head. Shocked, he tasted blood.

  “Don’t lie to me, boy. I can smell a lie on the wind. How long have we got?”

  “Maybe an hour…” Sherlock replied. He wasn’t sure what the man wanted, but he was sure the man wasn’t stable. The best thing to do was just to play along.

  “Smoke…” the man said out of nowhere. His head was raised, and he was sniffing. “I can smell smoke.” Abruptly he looked at Sherlock. “We need to get away. Back to the Orient. It’s safe there. Too many people looking for me here. Too many eyes. Too many ears.”

  “I could check out back, see if the coast is clear,” Sherlock offered.

  “The coast!” The man’s eyes seemed to light up. “We get a boat. A ship. We can sail to Hong Kong. Hide out there till it’s safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Sherlock asked, but the man just glared at him.

  “Don’t pretend you’re not in on it. You’re all in on it. Every last mother’s son.”

  Remembering the discussion back at Holmes Manor, Sherlock tried to work out whether this man had it
in him to assassinate anyone, let alone the president of the United States of America. He was obviously unstable, on the edge of a nervous collapse, but he was American, and maybe whatever he’d been through had driven him to the edge of madness. Sherlock had enough information now to take back to Amyus Crowe and to his brother—the problem was, would he ever be able to get away?

  The man’s head suddenly jerked around, as if it were attached to a string that someone had pulled from outside. “Smoke!” he cried. He dashed out of the room abruptly, leaving Sherlock alone.

  Apart from the body.

  For a moment, Sherlock considered making a run for it. If he moved fast he might be able to get past his captor, even if the man was standing outside in the hall, and get to the front door. Or he could head in the other direction, to the reception-room window, and get out into the garden that way. Matty would still be waiting for him, and they could escape together on the horses.

  But there was a body with him in the room, and he had to check to see whether the person was dead or wounded. He knew he couldn’t just leave him there. That would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  He left the chair and crouched beside the body, checking for the return of his captor. It was a man with muttonchop whiskers. His head was turned to one side, and his eyes were closed, but Sherlock was relieved to hear him breathing heavily through his mouth. The hair on the back of his head was matted with blood that had partially clotted into a thick, glutinous mass. He’d obviously been struck from behind and fallen. He was lucky to be alive.

  Sherlock thought for a moment. The man who had dragged him into the house was obviously mentally deranged. Was the man on the floor here some kind of keeper? A guard? And the lunatic had somehow managed to knock him out and was now looking for some way to escape from the house?

  Sherlock dragged the unconscious man into a more comfortable position, one where his breathing wouldn’t be obstructed by the angle of his head. He couldn’t help noticing that the man’s clothes were cut in a similar style, and from a similar cloth, to those of his captor. They probably came from the same place.

  A noise from out in the hall alerted him. He just managed to get back to the chair before his captor re-entered the room. His forehead gleamed with beads of sweat, but the glossy red ruin of the left side of his face was as dry as bone.

  “There’s a ship a-waiting to take me to China!” he declared, but his eye was open so wide that the white of the eyeball was visible all the way around, like a frightened horse, and Sherlock knew that he was hallucinating the existence of the ship in the same way he appeared to be hallucinating the smoke that he kept smelling. The smoke from the fire that, Sherlock assumed, had caused that terrible scarring.

  “You go ahead,” Sherlock said, as calmly as he could. “I’ll follow on.” He was hoping that his confident, level tone of voice might persuade the man to just turn around and go, but it had the opposite effect. The man brought his hand up in front of him, and with a chill of horror Sherlock saw that the hand was holding a silvery gun with an immensely long barrel and a revolving drum just above the handle.

  “Leave no trace behind!” the man declared, and pointed the gun at Sherlock’s forehead.

  Sherlock rolled sideways off the chair as the gun exploded with smoke and noise, and the antimacassar where Sherlock’s head had been resting turned into a burst mess of torn fabric and horsehair stuffing. He came up underneath an occasional table and heaved it towards the man with the gun. The man fired again, wildly, and the lead ball tore long splinters out of the table’s surface, knocking it spinning away from the two of them.

  He aimed at Sherlock again. This time the lead ball screamed over Sherlock’s head and hit the window, shattering the glass.

  Sherlock ran for the door to the hall. A fourth shot caught the door frame, knocking chunks of wood out of it as Sherlock passed.

  The route down the hallway to the front door was too far. By the time he was struggling to throw the door open, the man would be in the hall and firing at him again, and he would be trapped. Instead, he turned and headed up the stairs.

  The man appeared at the bottom of the stairs just as Sherlock reached the upstairs hall. He was in the process of reloading the gun. Obviously not completely mad, Sherlock thought as he sprinted along the first-floor landing. The head of an elk that had been mounted on a shield-shaped board suddenly jerked sideways as the gun went bang! downstairs; a hole appeared where one of the glass eyes had been. It wasn’t enough that the poor thing had been shot once; it had to endure the indignity of being shot again, and this time it couldn’t even run!

  The landing ended with a choice of two doors. Sherlock could hear footsteps on the staircase. He considered, trying to remember the layout of the house as he’d seen it from outside. There had been wisteria growing up to one window, on this side. Was it the left or the right?

  He chose the right, more on a whim than anything else. If he left it any longer, trying to work out which door to go through, he’d be dead anyway. He had a fifty-fifty chance.

  The door opened under the pressure of his hand. He slipped through the gap and quickly closed the door again. If the man with the gun had to check both bedrooms, that might give Sherlock a few minutes’ grace before he was discovered.

  There was a bed in the room, unmade, as if the occupant had just stumbled out of it and got dressed without worrying about tidiness, and no maid had come to straighten the room out. Sherlock assumed that the only people in the house were the man with the gun and his captor/guard. If they were up to no good, hiding from some undefined peril, then a maid would be a risk. Best for the men to keep isolated, avoiding arousing any interest. And that meant they were probably doing all the cooking and cleaning themselves.

  And that, Sherlock suddenly thought, probably meant there was a third man at least, if the madman needed constant supervision.

  Wary of noises outside, or the sudden movement of the door, Sherlock crept across to the window. As he passed the bed, he noticed a black Gladstone bag on the floor beside it. The top of the bag gaped open, and inside Sherlock could see the gleam of glass and metal. Intrigued, he moved closer and looked in.

  A series of vials containing a colourless fluid were strapped into individual compartments on one side of the bag. A collection of medical instruments, scalpels and suchlike, had been thrown willy-nilly into the bottom. And separate from both of them was a long, flat box that Sherlock recognized. He’d seen boxes like that before, belonging to the doctors who had treated his sister during her periods of illness. They usually contained hypodermic syringes: hollow cylinders of glass ending in plungers and tipped with sharp needles, used for injecting drugs into the bloodstream. For a moment he wasn’t in that bedroom anymore, he was in his own home, watching through a gap in the door as the doctors and nurses bustled around his sister’s bed. Needles and syringes fascinated him: the light glinting on them, their grotesque functionality, the way they blurred the boundary between the inside of the body and the outside. The way they made things better. The way they stopped the screams.

  He shivered. No time for memories. He had a madman with a gun just a few seconds behind him.

  For a moment he thought the window was bolted, or nailed shut. It wouldn’t move as he tugged it upward. It had to, he told himself. If this room had medical equipment scattered around then it wasn’t the madman’s bedroom, and there would be no point in sealing the window.

  The madman’s window, he felt sure, would have bars on it.

  He threw all his strength into tugging at the window till, with a squeal of wood on wood, it slid upward. Blessedly cool air washed across his face. He squirmed out onto the windowsill and looked around. No sign of Matty in the garden or on the road. No sign of anyone.

  He looked down. The wisteria grew all the way down to the flower beds beneath. He could climb down easily.

  And then what? If the madman entered the bedroom while he was halfway down, then he was a sitting duck. The m
an could just shoot him in the head and watch him fall.

  He glanced upward. The wisteria went all the way up to the roof, as far as he could tell, its tendrils infiltrating the mortar between the bricks of the wall, and there was a balcony, or a sill of some kind, running all the way around the edge. If—when—the madman came into the bedroom and across to the open window, then his immediate reaction would be to look downward. If Sherlock was climbing upward, he might evade capture. At the very least, he would buy himself a few more seconds.

  He stood on the windowsill and grabbed hold of the wisteria vines to one side with his right hand, using his left to slide the window carefully shut. His retreat was blocked off, but it might gain him a few additional moments of safety.

  He extended his right leg out to the side and felt gingerly with his foot for a point where two vines crossed and the junction would take his weight. After what seemed like forever he found something that gave a little under pressure but would support him.

  Nervously, he let the vines take his weight and scrabbled around with his left foot for another point of purchase. When he found one, he boosted himself up and reached with his left hand for another vine to grip. Instead it found a gap between two bricks. He jammed his fingers in and it took his weight. Laboriously, one step after another, he hauled himself up until the window was below him and he was climbing towards the roof.

  Brick dust fell past him and stung his eyes. He shook his head, eyes closed, to dislodge it. More dust and small bits of rubble pit-patted against his head and shoulders.

  The wisteria lurched suddenly beneath him. His weight was pulling it out of the wall, dragging the tendrils from where they had infiltrated through gaps and nooks and crannies and were gripping the brickwork. He could feel his centre of gravity pulling away from the wall. He glanced down and felt immediately sick when the ground seemed to eddy back and forth beneath him as he swayed. The vines in his right hand became loose, and he quickly scrabbled further up, looking for a firmer handhold. His fingers closed around a thick stem that appeared to be anchored in place, and he pushed upward with his right foot. His left hand closed around a flat tile on the edge of the roof. Thankfully, he rested for a moment, getting his breath back.