Andrew Lane - Red Leech

Feet padded on rock behind him. Sherlock turned his head, slowly.

The second cougar was behind him.

His thoughts raced through possibilities, none of which helped. How could he fight two wild animals with just a knife?

But they weren’t wild, were they? They were partially tamed — or, at least, they obeyed Balthassar. They feared him, and that gave Sherlock a chance.

A sudden acceleration in the padding of feet behind him made him drop to the ground and roll sideways. Something dark flashed over his head. He jumped to his feet, but the cougars were quicker. They were side by side now, snarling at him.

Cats could climb trees, but they couldn’t climb rock.

As fast as he could, Sherlock scrambled up the sheer side of the gully; fingers scrabbling for gaps in the rock, feet trying to find small ridges and shelves that would take his weight without crumbling.

Below him, the cougars leaped.

His fingers closed over a flat area of rock and he hauled himself up desperately, just as a clawed paw caught at his boot and pulled him backwards. He put all of his strength into one tremendous heave, and pulled himself to safety on a ridge that ran along the side of the gully, heading upward in one direction and downward in the other.

He looked down, checking that his feet had survived unscathed. The heel of his boot had been pulled off by the big cat, but other than that he was intact.

From below, the gleam of the cougars’s eyes vanished as they headed off in different directions, looking for a way up to him. And this was their territory, not his. They would find a way.

“Entertaining as this is,” Balthassar’s voice called, “you are just postponing the inevitable. That isn’t a logical course of action. Just give in; it’ll be easier and less painful.”

“You promised me that before,” Sherlock panted, “and you lied.”

The ledge was barely wider than his body, and he sprinted along it, trying to get to somewhere relatively safe. He could hear the click of claws on stone from somewhere off to one side, and the deep rasping of breath echoing throughout the gully.

If he didn’t do something soon, he was dead.

Pressed against the side of the gully, he glanced downward. He could just make out Balthassar’s white hat below.

With a momentary prayer that his deduction about the cougars and their relationship with Balthassar was correct, he jumped.

He crashed down on to Balthassar, knocking the man to the ground and sending his revolver skittering away into the darkness. Sherlock’s left shoulder hit the rock of the gully floor as he tried to roll away, sending a spike of red-hot agony through his body. By the time he climbed to his feet, Balthassar was already standing. He was cradling his left arm with his right. It looked malformed, as if his thin bones had snapped in the fall.

His porcelain mask had been knocked off. It lay on the ground a few feet away, broken into three pieces. His face, bereft of the mask, was twisted into an expression of pure hatred.

“Southern courtesy aside,” Balthassar snarled, “I will see my pets strip the flesh from your bones while you are still alive and screaming.” The smaller, black leeches on his face looked like holes through to the darkness of the night sky behind him. Balthassar looked past Sherlock. “And here they are,” he said, and barked three words in the guttural language that he used to communicate with the animals.

Expecting at any moment to feel the weight of a cougar on his back and the agony of its claws ripping through his flesh, Sherlock stepped forward, towards Balthassar.

The thin man wasn’t expecting that. He flinched backwards, still cradling his left arm, but Sherlock reached out with his throbbing left hand and ripped the red leech from behind Balthassar’s ear. It tore free with some resistance. Blood spattered on the shoulder of Balthassar’s white suit; black in the moonlight.

Balthassar screamed: a high, thin noise of distilled rage and shock.

The giant red leech was squishy and wet in Sherlock’s hand. Before Balthassar could do anything, before the cougars could spring, Sherlock bought his knife up and sliced it in half. It writhed and twisted, leaking Balthassar’s blood into his palm. He turned, each hand holding a part of the leech, and threw them at the two cougars that were advancing towards him.

Given their reaction earlier, on Balthassar’s veranda, he had thought they might turn and run in terror, but they surprised him. The cougars snapped the halves of the leech out of the air as if they were titbits thrown as treats and swallowed them whole.

They continued to advance on him.

No, not on him. Their eyes were fixed on Balthassar.

Sherlock moved slowly to one side. The cougars ignored him, and continued moving towards Balthassar.

It made a strange kind of sense. The man who had dominated them was injured, weakened, and the leech that they feared was gone. Whatever power Balthassar had over them appeared to have been broken. They had the power now. He couldn’t hurt them.

Balthassar backed away. The rocky edge was behind him. He said something in the language he used to control the cats with, but they ignored it.

Sherlock watched, his mouth dry and his heart pounding. Balthassar took another step back, hands raised to ward the cougars off, but his right foot ended up past the edge of the rocky overhang, over empty air, and he fell, screaming, into the darkness.

The cougars stood there for a moment, looking over the edge, and then, without looking at each other or at Sherlock, they padded away, into the hills.

Sherlock stood there for a while, getting his breath back and letting the pain in his shoulder subside. It didn’t seem broken. At least that was something.

The cougars didn’t come back.

Eventually he went over to where his horse was cowering and calmed it down, stroking its flanks until it stopped shivering. Then he pulled himself up into the saddle and continued his journey, down the slope that led to the grasslands.

At the bottom of the slope he found Balthassar’s body. It lay, twisted and broken, in a flattened area of grass. The leeches had vanished from his face. Presumably they had left to seek other prey the minute his blood had stopped pumping through his veins. Not necessarily a logical decision, but an instinctive one.

Sherlock must have fallen asleep on the ride back, because the next thing he knew the horse was trotting through the outskirts of town and there was a blue blush on the horizon. He left the horse tied up outside the stable and headed for the hotel. He could pick up his deposit later.

There was nobody in the dining room when he walked in. He headed up to his room. Nobody tried to stop him. He almost expected someone to leap out and attack him, or something to leap on to his shoulders when his back was turned, but there was nothing. Everything was peaceful and calm. He let himself into his room and slipped beneath the covers. It was as if nothing had happened. It was as if he’d not left the room since he’d first entered that morning, after the long trek across the grasslands from Balthassar’s house with Matty and Virginia.

He slept without dreaming, or if he dreamed then he did not remember the dreams when he woke up, and that was probably a good thing.

The sun was shining through his bedroom window when he awoke. He lay there for a while, cataloguing what had happened and consigning it to his memories. Then he got dressed and went downstairs.

Amyus Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two of the Pinkerton’s agents. He said something to them, then crossed over to Sherlock as they left.

“Ain’t seen much of you since yesterday morning,” he said. “I’ve been busy with the Pinkertons, but Matty and Virginia said you never left your room. You must have needed your sleep.”