Andrew Lane - Red Leech

From behind her, Matty called, “Virginia, you’ve got to get up!"

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” she hissed, pushing herself up. “I would never have thought of that!"

They started off again, one after the other. Time seemed to melt away, each second, each minute blending into the next, so that when Sherlock realized that there was solid ground between the tracks they were already a hundred yards or so past the edge of the ravine.

“Let’s take a break,” he said. “Just ten minutes.”

Matty groaned. “I need to sleep.”

“My brother says that a man can go without sleep for days on end, if what he’s doing is important and interesting enough.”

“Walking to the nearest town might be important,” Matty pointed out, “but it’s certainly not interesting.”

Sherlock allowed them what seemed like ten minutes, but might have been anywhere from thirty seconds to an hour judging by the way time was stretching and blurring, before he got them to their feet and started them walking again. They continued to walk in silence along the side of the tracks. Twice, in the distance, Sherlock heard a howling noise. For a terrified moment he thought that Balthassar had spotted their absence and had sent his cougars after them, but Virginia just said quietly, “Coyotes.”

“What’s a coyote?” Matty called from the back.

“It’s like a wolf,” Virginia replied.

“Oh.” A pause. “I wonder what they taste like.”

“Funnily enough,” Virginia said, “that howl probably means they’re wonderin’ the same about you.”

The moon rose above the horizon: a bloated white disc, seemingly much larger than Sherlock remembered from England. Surely America wasn’t any nearer the moon? The world was round, after all. Every point on its surface had to be the same distance from the moon. The only explanation he could come up with was that there was something about the atmosphere, some trick of the heated air, that magnified the image and made the moon look larger.

After a while he realized Matty was talking to himself. Sherlock had assumed that he was talking to Virginia, but Matty was leaving gaps and Virginia wasn’t filling them. It was as if Matty could hear a voice that nobody else could. A hallucination? Maybe the tiredness and the lack of food was getting to him. He’d had a stressful couple of weeks, after all.

Even though he was thinking about Matty hallucinating, it didn’t seem odd to Sherlock that Mrs Eglantine, the housekeeper from his aunt and uncle’s house, was walking alongside him for some of the journey. She didn’t say anything to him. She just looked at him with disapproving eyes, her mouth pursed into a tight little bud, her head shaking from side to side. He didn’t know when she had appeared and he didn’t know when she vanished. All he knew is that for at least part of the journey, she had been there, a silent companion keeping pace with him. Odd, he thought — of all the people he might have imagined walking beside him, why her? Why not Mycroft, or Amyus Crowe? Come to that, if his mind was disturbed, why not any of the people whose lives he had been responsible for — Mr Surd, Gilfillan, Ives or Grivens? Even Plato would have been a better travelling companion than Mrs Eglantine.

If Virginia saw anyone who wasn’t there then she never said anything about it, either then or later.

By the light of the moon, Sherlock saw the occasional barn or farmhouse silhouetted on the horizon. He thought about diverting off their path and stopping to ask for help, or at least food and drink, but something kept him going along the line of the tracks. Explanations would take time, and might just land them in more trouble. And besides, the one thing they needed was a telegraph office, and that would only be found at a train station in a town.

After a while the few scattered barns and farmhouses turned into a handful, and then what looked like a scattered community. They were on the outskirts of something. If they were lucky, it would be the town. Sherlock didn’t remember the train passing through any other large collections of buildings after leaving the station at Perseverance, but he hadn’t been looking out of the window all the time. Other things had been happening to distract his attention. It was possible this was a different town, one without a station or a telegraph office, in which case he decided that they would stop, if only for a short while. Maybe they could pay someone to drive them to Perseverance.

A flush of rose-hued colour spread across the horizon as they walked. The sun was coming up. Had they really been walking all night? Judging by the stiffness of his muscles and the dryness of his throat, Sherlock suspected they had.

Or was it just another hallucination, like Mrs Eglantine?

After hours of travelling in a straight line across the landscape, the train lines curved now, leading into the centre of the town. And finally, there ahead of them, was the cluster of buildings that Sherlock remembered from when the three of them had briefly got off the train — the station, and the outhouses. They had arrived. Against the odds, they had arrived.

A train was drawn up in the sidings beside the station. It was shorter than Sherlock remembered from the day before. It was also deserted and dark.

There was nobody around when they staggered on to the raised station platform. Even the telegraph office was locked up. Sherlock banged on the door, in case anyone was sleeping inside, but nobody answered. The whole town seemed to be still asleep, despite the daylight blue that was spreading across the sky.

“Come on,” he said, the words catching in his dry throat, “let’s find a hotel and get something to eat. The telegraph office probably won’t open until later.”

“Food,” Matty said, his voice cracked. “Sleep.”

Virginia just nodded. Her face was chalk-white — the freckles standing out like spots of ink — and she looked like she was at the end of her tether.

The hotel was across the street from the station. The street was dry earth, and rutted by the wheels of countless carts, and strangely Sherlock found it harder going than the grasslands.

The swing doors weren’t locked, which felt like the first piece of good luck they’d had in a while.

And standing over a table in the centre of the open main room, looking down at a map spread out in front of him, was Amyus Crowe.

He glanced up at the sound of the three of them entering, and his face registered so many different emotions within the space of a second that Sherlock felt he was looking at several different men at the same time.

Virginia ran to her father and threw her arms around him. Matty just sank into a chair and closed his eyes.

“You tracked us,” Sherlock said. He couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice. Maybe the night-long walk had burned it out of him. He just felt very tired.

“I talked to the newspaper boys,” Crowe said. He was obviously struggling to keep his voice level. “There’s not much happens in the city that they don’t know about, and they manage to get by largely ignored by the rest of the population. They told me about you bein’ followed, an’ managin’ to reverse the process. Neat trick with the cap, the jacket an’ the papers, by the way. One of them saw you at the boardin’ house, an’ another saw the two of you at the station. I managed to piece the rest of it together myself.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I think I can work out what got you from there to here. If I thought you’d done it deliberately, son, I’d put you on the first boat back to England an’ make sure you an’ I were never on the same continent again, but I reckon what happened was a series of small accidents, at the end of which you were far away from where I was an’ where I could help.”