Andrew Lane - Red Leech

“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 along 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 just wounded. He knew he couldn’t just leave it 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 mutton-chop 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 on the head 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 for me 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 on 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 just 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, wildly, 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 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 just 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 any more, 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.