Young Sherlock Holmes: Bedlam (Short Reads)

by Andrew Lane

  It was one of those rare days in London when the sun shone on clean streets and the air did not smell of rotten vegetables and horse dung. A night of heavy rain had washed the streets clean without, mercifully, overloading the sewer system, and the cobbles and brickwork of the city glistened proudly like a man showing off his freshly cut and oiled hair. Sherlock knew it wouldn’t last for long, but for a while it made London into somewhere he thought he could live, one day.

  Sherlock and his tutor, Amyus Crowe, had left Farnham earlier that morning. Sherlock’s brother Mycroft had invited them for lunch at his club – the Diogenes. His reason, which he explained in a letter that had arrived the day before, was that he wanted to talk about Sherlock’s schooling. Having been removed from Deepdene School for Boys and placed in the care of the big American Amyus Crowe, it seemed to Sherlock that Mycroft was now wondering if he had done the right thing. Mr Crowe was a brilliant teacher, but only on certain subjects. Survival in the wilderness, tracking animals, fishing for carp and trout, identifying poisonous fungi, a little bit of recent political history and the logical analysis of evidence – these were all his strong points. Mathematics and Latin – not so much.

  Sherlock would much rather study the things that Amyus Crowe was teaching him, because he could see their value, but his brother had a strange regard for those areas of the syllabus for which Sherlock could see no earthly use. Every now and then he threatened to bring in another tutor to complement Crowe’s lessons, and Sherlock had either to avoid the subject entirely or try to talk him out of it. ‘If you want to make something of yourself,’ he would say, ‘then you need to learn dead languages, theology and the more obscure facts of history. There is no alternative, I’m afraid.’ The fact that Sherlock had no idea what he wanted to make of himself cut no ice with his brother. ‘You will go into the Civil Service, of course,’ he would rumble. ‘Either that or banking.’

  The hansom cab that Sherlock and Crowe had taken from Waterloo Station dropped them outside the Diogenes Club, which lurked behind an unremarkable door. Crowe, resplendent in his white suit and hat, flicked a coin up to the driver and strode across the pavement to the door, but as he did so a passing man in a suit and bowler hat jostled against him. Crowe turned to deliver a sharp rebuke, but the man unexpectedly pushed him in the chest. Crowe staggered backwards into two other men who were passing. Within moments, all four men were arguing.

  Unsure what to do, Sherlock stepped away from the cab. As he did so he heard movement behind him. Someone had come around the side of the cab and was looming at his shoulder. He turned his head, but liquid sprayed his eyes and nose. Gasping, he raised a hand to wipe his face clear, but his arm suddenly seemed to be moving in slow motion. His attention became fixated on his fingers and thumb. They looked like they weren’t even a part of him: pink, fleshy things that moved of their own accord. The lines on his palm took on the appearance of rivers crossing a landscape, like a map seen at a distance.

  What was happening to him?

  He felt nauseous. His head felt like it had doubled in weight, and as he laboriously swung it around to look for Amyus Crowe he saw that the big American was staring at him in concern, but Crowe’s face was swimming in and out of focus, and although his lips were moving Sherlock couldn’t hear anything apart from what sounded like the tolling of a distant bell. The cab and the sky and the brickwork of the buildings were all bleeding together into a mishmash of colours that made him feel as if he was looking at the world through a stained-glass window. He needed to rest, to sit down and gather his wits, but when he took a step forward his feet tangled together and he stumbled. He fell, and it seemed to take an awfully long time before he hit the ground. A hand grabbed at his shoulder, but when he looked up, all he could see was a grotesquely distorted face looming over him. He struck out with his fists, again and again, flailing around in a world of jumbled shapes and colours. Someone was screaming, and he thought he recognized the voice. He thought it was his own voice, but it was a long, long way away.

  Then there was darkness, and the feeling that his arms were being tightly held. And then there was just the darkness.

  The realization that he was lying on a bed of straw in a brick-lined room came slowly. He didn’t know at what point he understood where he was: there came a moment, as he was staring at the brickwork, that he realized that he had understood some time ago, but the information just hadn’t meant anything to him.

  He was in a brick room, and he was lying on straw. That was a starting point.

  And his name was Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.

  The rest seeped back gradually, like the sea washing over the beach as the tide comes in. The Diogenes Club. The cab. The fight. The liquid that had been sprayed over his face.

  He checked his clothes, running his hands down his body. He was still wearing the same jacket, shirt and trousers that he had been wearing earlier. That, at least, was something to hold on to. They were stained with dust and dirt, but not ripped.

  The room was like the inside of a stable, but there was no smell of animals. The straw was clean and dry, and had been laid down on flagstones. The brickwork that formed the walls was whitewashed and dry too: no moss, no trickling water, and the air was chilly but not damp. At first he’d thought he was in some sort of outbuilding, but the evidence suggested otherwise. He was indoors – just not in a particularly well-appointed room.

  There was a window in one wall, but it was tall and thin, barely wide enough for him to get his arm through if he tried. Certainly not large enough for him to escape. Even his friend Matty wouldn’t be able to get through that. The glass looked dirty, from where he lay.

  The wall opposite the window was interrupted by a door. It was heavy, and studded with big metal rivets like the heads of arrows that had been shot through from the other side. A small window in the centre of the door was barred, and it looked as if a wooden shutter had been closed across it from the other side.

  As Sherlock’s mind began to speed up, he realized that there were no hinges on the door. Or, at least, there were no hinges on the inside of the door. The hinges must have been on the outside, which meant that the door opened outwards, not inwards. Sherlock didn’t think that he’d ever been in a room where the door opened outwards.

  No, that wasn’t right. He had been in a room like that: the room in Bow Street Police Station where he and Amyus Crowe had spoken with his brother Mycroft a few months before. The door to that room had been designed so that people in the room could not pry the hinges apart and thus remove the door, or hide behind the door when it opened and attack whoever came in.

  He was in a cell.

  He sat up suddenly, shocked into complete wakefulness. He was in a cell! Surely he hadn’t been arrested? Now that the blood was flowing more swiftly through his brain he remembered vague images of himself flailing around in the street, punching people who came too close – but Amyus Crowe would have protected him, wouldn’t he? Protected him from arrest?

  Unless Crowe had been arrested too. The big American had been on the verge of a fight, after all.

  He checked his knuckles. They were scraped, and covered with dried blood.

  He tried to work out how long he had been unconscious. His throat and mouth were dry, but he wasn’t particularly hungry. He couldn’t have been out for more than a couple of hours. It was still the same day.

  He climbed unsteadily to his feet. His toes tingled with pins-and-needles as the circulation returned to them, and he shuffled from one foot to another to try to get the pain to subside. As soon as he could stand up straight he crossed to the window. It was above his head, but by reaching up and hooking his fing
ers over the sill and then pulling himself up, scrabbling with the toes of his boots to get purchase against the mortared ridges between the bricks, he could get his head up to a level where he could just about see out.

  Beyond the wall lay a manicured garden of lawns and bushes, and beyond them, just the other side of a wall, he could see the tops of hansom carriages going past. Lots of carriages. Pigeons were perched all along the top of the wall. It looked as if he was still in London.

  At least that was something.

  He dropped back down to the stone-flagged ground, brushing his hands against his trousers, and crossed to the door. There was no handle on the inside. He pushed experimentally at it. The door didn’t budge. Presumably it was bolted on the other side.

  He threw his weight against it, but it didn’t shift.

  He glanced back at the window. He may have been imprisoned but at least he wasn’t in the countryside, or even in France. That had happened before. He was in London. Amyus Crowe would get him out.

  Assuming that Crowe wasn’t in the next cell. The thought sent a cold shiver of fear through him. If he and Crowe were both imprisoned here, and if Mycroft didn’t know where they were, then there was nobody left to get any of them out. They might rot there forever.

  ‘Mister Crowe!’ he called. ‘Can you hear me? Are you there?’

  Nothing. No response.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. He could hear something. Now that he was listening properly he could make out a faint cacophony of moans and cries coming from the other side of the door. It seemed to have got louder when he shouted. And he could hear banging as well: metal against metal in a regular, mindless rhythm. It was like listening to a musical recital in hell.

  The window in the door suddenly slid open. He jerked his head back, startled. A face stared in at him, framed in the wood: eyes wary and skin scabbed.

  ‘Back away,’ a rough voice said. ‘Back across to the other side of the room. This door ain’t openin’ till you do.’

  Sherlock shuffled away until his back was against the wall, feeling the straw piling up behind his feet as they scuffed across the floor.

  The window slid closed with a thud. Moments later he heard the solid clunk of a large bolt being drawn, and then the door creaked open.

  Two men stood in the doorway. They both wore uniforms of blue canvas. Their hands were dirty and their faces unshaven. And they were both holding short wooden clubs.

  ‘Try anythin’ an’ you’ll be measurin’ your length on the floor, understand?’ The speaker was the man on the left. He was slightly smaller than his companion, and his eyes were blue. ‘Tell me you understand. Talk properly now.’

  ‘I understand,’ Sherlock said, voice unsteady. ‘Where am I?’

  The man turned to his companion. ‘You ’ear that? He don’t know where ’e is!’ He turned back and smiled at Sherlock. His mouth was empty of all but three blackened teeth. ‘You’re in Bedlam, mate! Now come over ’ere, careful like. The Resident wants to take a look at you.’

  The two men backed away, leaving a path through the door. Sherlock walked gingerly forward, still trying to process what they had told him. Where was ‘Bedlam’? Who was ‘the Resident’?

  The men stepped back as he walked through the door. He noticed that they were holding their clubs ready, in case he attacked them. He was smaller than them, and unarmed, but they seemed to be scared of him. Or, at least, wary.

  Outside, he found himself in a long, wide gallery lined with doors on one side and narrow, barred windows on the other. The floor was wood, apparently polished by years of feet brushing against it. The ceiling of the gallery was curved, with iron rods every few feet making it seem as if Sherlock was standing inside the ribcage of some vast beast: an impression reinforced by the bloody glow emitted by a cave-like fireplace a few yards away. The fireplace was covered by a black metal cage which had been bolted to the wall.

  There were people in the gallery. Off to one side, four men were playing cards at a small table. Another man, in a black suit and top hat, was standing by one of the windows and looking out. The expression on his face was desperately sad. Other men – and they were all men, Sherlock noticed – were walking up and down the gallery, some slowly, with their hands reaching out to trail along the brickwork, and others rapidly, as if they had somewhere urgent to be.

  One man brushed past Sherlock with a curse. He walked ten feet further on, then stopped for a moment and turned around. He walked back, brushing past Sherlock again as if he had never seen him before, and strode off in the opposite direction. As Sherlock watched, he stopped again, turned around and walked back towards Sherlock once more.

  Now that he was out of his cell, he could hear the cacophony of voices more clearly. It sounded like several hundred people all having conversations and arguments with themselves, or singing, or wailing, all at once, and all in ignorance of the others.

  The voices came from behind the doors which lined one side of the gallery.

  Turning, he spotted a blackboard bolted to the wall beside his door. On it were chalked the words Unknown boy – Acute mania, along with the date.

  The words were like spears of ice thrust into his heart.

  Acute mania.

  ‘This is a lunatic asylum,’ he said, and he could hear his voice verging on breaking. ‘This is where they send mad people.’

  ‘Like I said,’ the attendant said: ‘Bedlam. Or Bethlehem Hospital, to the gentry. Or the madhouse, to those of us who work ’ere.’

  Sherlock’s keen eyes noticed that the bolt on his door was huge – probably a foot or more long. It was a design he’d seen elsewhere: a metal cylinder that slid back and forth inside a couple of metal brackets across into a narrow brass barrel on the doorframe to secure the door. The cylinder could then be rotated by its handle so that it caught behind one of the brackets on the door, stopping it from being slid back unless it was rotated again. Very simple, and quite foolproof. Even if Sherlock could have picked locks, which he couldn’t, there was no obvious way out of the room. Accessing the bolt outside the door from inside would be almost impossible.

  If he was going to escape.

  ‘Now, ’ead down that way, to the end,’ the attendant said, interrupting his chain of thought. ‘That’s where the Resident’s office is. ’E likes to see all the new inmates. Very conscientious, is the Resident.’ He pushed Sherlock’s shoulder, backing away immediately in case Sherlock suddenly turned and grabbed him.

  Sherlock started to walk. A few doors were open, others were locked with the bolts pointing firmly downwards. Whoever ran this place liked an orderly system, the appearance of control. As he passed each locked door the noise of the occupant got suddenly louder, then quieter. He could hear words, sobs, screams, and in a couple of cases what sounded like music-hall songs.

  Perhaps the worst were the doors behind which he could hear no noise at all, but sense a malign presence, watching and waiting, like a spider in its web.

  A hand pushed Sherlock between his shoulder blades. He nearly went sprawling to the ground.

  ‘Move yourself,’ the attendant called. ‘We ain’t got all day.’

  With the two attendants behind him, Sherlock walked the length of the gallery, past innumerable wooden doors and narrow windows and occasional caged fires which blasted heat all around them. At one of the cages an enterprising inmate was holding a long wooden stick in the flames, toasting something. For a few moments Sherlock thought it was a chunk of bread, but as he got closer he realized that it was a mouse, curled up and blackened.

  The man with the stick watched Sherlock and the attendants pass. ‘I saw her again when they were all sleeping,’ he said in a reasonable, calm voice. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night.’

  ‘Good,’ Sherlock replied. It was the only thing he could think of to say.

  One of the attendants snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, look out for ghosts, boy. Make sure you say your prayers and sleep nicely or you ain’t going to li
ke what you see.’

  The attendants pushed him to the end of the gallery, where a large grille, like a portcullis, separated it from the space beyond. It was a circular hall, with a domed roof. One of the attendants opened a door in the grille with a key selected from a bunch that hung from his belt and pushed it open. He went through, leaving his colleague behind Sherlock, and gestured to Sherlock to follow him. The two of them had obviously done this many times before. They had the whole process down pat.

  The domed hall into which they led Sherlock was opulent: painted white with gold-leaf ornamentation, and beautiful paintings hanging up on the walls. This area didn’t have flagstones on the floor: it had black and white tiles. On Sherlock’s left was a large door that, he guessed from the position of the windows along the gallery, led out into the grounds. On his right was a smaller, internal door. It wasn’t locked or secured. Presumably it led into administrative areas: offices, examination rooms, kitchens, that sort of thing. And ahead of him, mirroring the floor-to-ceiling grille through which he had just passed, was another grille leading into another gallery. Vaguely, in the red firelight glow beyond, he thought he could see shapes moving. Women? A gallery for women, just as his was a gallery for men? More than likely.

  The toothless attendant pushed him towards the door to his right. ‘Through there, then first door on your left. We’ll be waiting outside. All the Resident has to do is shout, and we’ll be straight in.’ He suddenly lashed out with his club, catching Sherlock behind his left knee and sending a spike of sick agony up his thigh. Sherlock dropped to the floor, his leg suddenly unable to support his weight. His elbow hit the tiles, sending another wave of agony through him. He had to clench his jaw shut and swallow hard to stop himself from throwing up. ‘And if we have cause to come in, you’ll remember it for a very long time. Just bear that in mind.’

  He hauled Sherlock to his feet and pushed him towards the door. It swung open beneath the pressure of Sherlock’s extended hand. Beyond it was a long corridor lined with doors. Attendants were walking along it, much as the inmates had walked along the gallery, and with the same mixture of purpose and purposelessness.