Becoming Holmes (23 page)

Sherlock sees shadows amongst the stones, but none take the shape of a man.

But then he sees him, far down the cemetery, almost at the end of it, struggling with his sack. Whatever is inside looks like it weighs as much as a human being. Holmes realizes that he may be in luck (if that is possible, given what he is doing). Crew is preoccupied with his load. He is likely rarely so distracted. This may be the one night he can be tracked.

As Holmes watches, Crew struggles to the end of the graveyard, steps out onto Church Street on the other side, and vanishes. With that, Sherlock’s plans go out the window and danger increases. He had believed that Crew was living somewhere on the church grounds, perhaps in this cemetery, or even in the crypt below the building. But Crew has passed through the church property and the graveyard without pause. Sherlock had studied the church and its cemetery on a map.

He knows it isn’t a good idea to abandon carefully devised plans when you are in a dangerous situation, especially when you are on the trail of, and in close proximity to, a ruthless fiend who means you grievous harm. If he follows Crew now, he will be doing so without any idea of where he is going, without any forethought about how he
might watch him or deal with him should things get out of hand.

But Sherlock decides to be bold. Usually, he isn’t a gambler. He believes in scientific approaches to his problems and placing the odds in his favor; both his father and Sigerson Bell have taught him that. But he is about to take a terrible chance. He is gambling that Crew isn’t paying attention tonight.

He runs through the graveyard and emerges onto Church Street. Rather than being in a dark, treed area or in a hiding spot around the church, he is now out on the gaslit streets with his murderous enemy. When he gets there, he spots him, continuing to struggle with his sack and not looking back, turning right onto Rochester Street. There are few folks about on these back roads at this hour, mostly poverty-stricken locals, prostitutes, and others who have nothing to lose in life. This isn’t a part of London where a regular citizen wants to be during the night.

Sherlock suddenly realizes something, and it gives him an unpleasant sensation in the pit of his stomach. Crew is heading in the direction of the Mint! He is within four or five streets of his family’s old flat, above the Leckies’ hatter shop where Beatrice still lives with her ailing father.

What is he doing here? Where is he going? Is he drawing me in this direction?

He remembers how Beatrice had betrayed him during the Spring Heeled Jack affair.
Trust no one
.

But a minute later, when he sees Crew turn down Redcross Street, another possibility comes to his mind, and
it is more frightening than
anything
he has been considering – it makes his knees shake. But it seems almost impossible.
No human being could possibly live there
.

He is thinking of another home for the dead, directly in Crew’s path. It is only two or three minutes away, between the hatter’s shop and where he is now. It is known as the Cross Bones Graveyard.

The year before Sherlock was born, it had been closed because it had become the dumping ground for so many rotting corpses. It is fenced off now and abandoned. When he was growing up, he was told to stay away from it. Only the bravest boys played nearby, competing at skittles with the yard’s human skulls and bones that had found their way into the streets. Some of those children, it was said, disappeared. Local stories told of this place being many centuries old, originally a spot where prostitutes were buried and later a pauper’s cemetery where those so poor that they couldn’t afford a funeral of any sort were slung into shallow graves, often one on top of another. When Sherlock was little, its odor could be smelled from a great distance. That stench, the last time he had smelled it, perhaps two years ago, had subsided a little. But it remained a place where few dared to go. It wasn’t very large, just a small town block, and most of its trees were dead. It was a place of curses and evil.

Is Crew really going there? And if he is, dare I follow?

Sherlock watches him walking down Redcross Street, keeping far behind, alert for anyone who might be trailing both of them. The buildings are brick and grimy here, tight to the narrow foot pavements on the narrow street. Before
long, the gates and walls of Cross Bones come into view ahead of the villain, just north of Union Street and St. Saviour’s Parochial School. Crew stops, sets down his sack, and looks back.

Sherlock ducks into a doorway. As he does, someone screams. He looks down. An old woman is lying there, no shoes on her feet, her toes black, without nails. Her dress is the color of dirt and barely covers her. Her hair hangs in strings from her brown-stained bonnet. She has no teeth and smells of some sort of disgusting alcoholic or medicinal brew. Sherlock has stepped on her thigh. But once she has finished screaming, a short cry that pierces Holmes to the heart and has him envisioning Crew rushing down the street toward them, she looks up to see the interesting young man in the old black frock coat. To her, he looks frightened, and not just because she has screamed. She thinks he is trying very hard to seem older than he is. She smiles and reaches out for him. He jumps into the road. The instant he does, he realizes his mistake. He is in plain view. But when he looks up Redcross toward Cross Bones, Crew isn’t running toward him.

In fact, the devil is nowhere to be seen.

It takes Holmes more than fifteen minutes to get from where he encountered the old woman to the rusty gates of Cross Bones Graveyard, even though it is no more than two hundred feet away. He moves up the street as cautiously as
if he were being hunted, slipping in and out of doorways, looking every which way, even up above, trying to keep himself calm.
Is this a trap?
He can’t go back. That would leave him equally open to detection. There is almost no one in the street – just the odd barely clothed woman passes, sometimes followed by a rough man or two. Crew can pounce on him here and murder him in an instant. He thinks of Sutton saying that this enemy enjoys killing in gruesome ways. Sherlock tries not to imagine any of them.

At the gates, he peers through the bars and surveys the yard. In all his years growing up nearby, he had never done such a thing. He never would have dreamed of it. The boys who played with the Cross Bones’ remnants never entered. Only the ones who disappeared were said to have actually gone in.

DO NOT ENTER
reads a sign above the gates, accompanied by a Southwark seal and another from the Lord Mayor of London.

But Sherlock Holmes is nearly a man now, and he has a sacred quest. He cannot allow anything to stop him, not even the Devil himself. That vow is filling him with courage, though it doesn’t still his pounding heart.

As he looks through the bars, he can see that there aren’t many tombstones in Cross Bones Graveyard. There are bushes and dying trees and a few overturned markers and little crosses lying on their backs. The ground is rough and stony, disturbed throughout, where corpses were hurriedly buried for hundreds of years, back even before Shakespeare’s day. Holmes can smell Cross Bones tonight. He thinks he
can see what look like big round stones and sticks everywhere. But he knows that that isn’t what they are; they are human remains.

He climbs up on the gate, his whole body shaking. But before he jumps down, he sees something. There’s a little building in the center of the yard. It is obscured from view from outside the gates, but can be seen from up here. There are bushes all around it. It isn’t very tall, just slightly higher than the average human being, but it is built in the style of a classical structure, white and with the appearance of marble like a Greek or Roman mausoleum, lined with pillars.

A crypt
.

And at the front door of that home for the dead, Sherlock now sees Crew. He must have taken his time coming through the graveyard, perhaps looking at the skulls and bones, likely something he enjoys each night. He has set his big sack down. It writhes at his feet. His back is to Holmes and he is working away at the door, probably trying to put a key into the lock in the keyhole, while keeping his foot on the sack so it won’t slither away.

Sherlock is so shocked that his foot slips. The top of the gate is lined with the tips of spears. As the boy falls, one of the sharp points enters his throat. Blood spurts from him and he cries out. As he does, Crew turns.

Holmes pulls himself off, falls from the gate, and lands with a thud on the ground outside the graveyard. His throat is sliced near his jugular vein. He staggers to his feet, stopping his wound with a hand. He glances through the bars and sees Crew emerging out of the bushes and coming
toward him at a fast walk, looking angry. The sack is over his shoulder.

Though feeling faint, Sherlock takes to his heels. He knows his way around this area and gets to Borough High Street in a flash. From there he sprints to the bridge, flies across it, through the Old City, along Fleet Street, north through Trafalgar Square and all the way back to the apothecary shop on Denmark Street. He loses a great deal of blood, and by the time he is in the door, collapses on the floor, Sigerson Bell by his side in an instant, working to stem the flow from his throat.

Before Holmes had even reached Borough High Street, Crew had arrived at the graveyard gates. There, he found a thick streak of fresh blood on one of the rusty spears. Holding back the writhing sack, he put one of his sweaty, fat fingers to the red liquid and then brought it to his lips. It tasted good. He nodded to himself and smiled.

21
FAREWELL

S
herlock wakes with one thing on his mind. He must see Irene. Feeling vulnerable and mortal, aware that he not only almost died the night before but that he must go back to Cross Bones tonight, enter that crypt, find Crew, and gamble his life again, he dearly wants to see her. It may very well be for the last time, whatever happens. He wonders if an opportunity lies before him – to set aside all this manly nonsense about fighting evil for the rest of his life and take the young woman he really loves into his arms and go with her wherever she goes, live a normal
and
exciting life with the beautiful Irene. But what would she say?