Read Online Death in the Air by Shane Peacock - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Shane Peacock
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kill.
All Sherlock needs to do now, is lay his hands on evidence of The Swallow’s guilt.
TERROR AT THE PALACE
S herlock wakes in the middle of the night. Sigerson Bell is snoring in his bed upstairs. The boy sits up in the cot, silently pushes open the long doors of the wooden wardrobe he sleeps in, and steps out into the lab, his bare feet patting the stone floor. The cramped room is cluttered with glass tubes, poisons, and skeletons, all surrounded by those teetering stacks of books. He can barely see an arm’s length in front of his face, but he doesn’t want to light a candle. Here at the back, there’s a little water closet with a flush toilet that Bell invented (just as efficient as young Thomas Crapper’s) and near it, a creaking wooden staircase that spirals up into the two small rooms on the first floor. One is a parlor that has more of the detritus of an apothecary’s profession than furniture. The other is the old man’s messy bedroom where, snuggled under a feather blanket, he dreams of miraculous cures, as a red woolen nightcap warms his balding head.
In less than a week Bell will be thrown into the streets, and with him will go Sherlock’s home and his hopes of attending school for the autumn term. But the boy is sure he can win a reward for the solution to this flying-trapezecrime…. He already has a compelling suspect. No one else knows
anything
. He has to move now. He has to find out
exactly
what The Swallow did during the moments before Mercure fell, and find concrete evidence of his guilt. Sherlock must somehow get to the crime scene and back in the night, returning before Bell even rises.
As he takes a careful step, he thinks he hears a creak at the top of the stairs, as if the old man were stirring. The boy keeps still for a moment, but the noise doesn’t come again. He quickly boils a spot of tea, tears off a piece of slightly hardened bread kept in a wooden box next to a monkey’s brain floating in a jar of formaldehyde, slips into the front room past the display cases, and out onto little Denmark Street.
It is almost pitch-black at first, but once he is on a bigger street, the glow of the overhanging gas lamps provides a gloomy light in the hot and humid air. He crosses the now-silent market at Covent Garden, floats over Waterloo Bridge, and glides south-east, running as often as he walks, past a nearly deserted Elephant and Castle, out into the suburbs, and then the countryside. Just past Dulwich village he passes its renowned college, nestled just off the road, on the other side of a beautiful cricket grounds. Dim lights make the buildings shimmer. He stops for a moment admiring its ghostly, red gothic exteriors and its spires disappearing into the sky. It’s a famous public school for elementary children, offering opportunities he is denied. He wonders what itwould be like to awake within its dormitories. Some day, he vows, he will go beyond even this sort of institution, to a great university, by hook or by crook.
He scurries down Dulwich Road, runs past the toll gate, and gazes toward the Crystal Palace way up on Sydenham Hill. A few lights are left on in the night and it looks like a monstrous glass aquarium on a mountain. The last stretch up the hill winds through the trees of Gipsy Wood. His imagination fills with the thieves and goblins who, children say, inhabit this forest and run after them with arms outstretched…. He sprints until he comes to the back of the mighty building.
He wishes it was evening, not early morning, and that he was an ordinary boy who could scamper across the two hundred acres of beautiful grounds and play in its lakes, and especially climb up onto the life-sized statues of dinosaurs frozen in eternal slithers at the edges of the pools. But he has a job to do. He creeps by the big reservoir at the north end and over to one of the imposing brick water towers book-ending the building. The boy stares up at the column. Each tower is nearly three
All Sherlock needs to do now, is lay his hands on evidence of The Swallow’s guilt.
TERROR AT THE PALACE
S herlock wakes in the middle of the night. Sigerson Bell is snoring in his bed upstairs. The boy sits up in the cot, silently pushes open the long doors of the wooden wardrobe he sleeps in, and steps out into the lab, his bare feet patting the stone floor. The cramped room is cluttered with glass tubes, poisons, and skeletons, all surrounded by those teetering stacks of books. He can barely see an arm’s length in front of his face, but he doesn’t want to light a candle. Here at the back, there’s a little water closet with a flush toilet that Bell invented (just as efficient as young Thomas Crapper’s) and near it, a creaking wooden staircase that spirals up into the two small rooms on the first floor. One is a parlor that has more of the detritus of an apothecary’s profession than furniture. The other is the old man’s messy bedroom where, snuggled under a feather blanket, he dreams of miraculous cures, as a red woolen nightcap warms his balding head.
In less than a week Bell will be thrown into the streets, and with him will go Sherlock’s home and his hopes of attending school for the autumn term. But the boy is sure he can win a reward for the solution to this flying-trapezecrime…. He already has a compelling suspect. No one else knows
anything
. He has to move now. He has to find out
exactly
what The Swallow did during the moments before Mercure fell, and find concrete evidence of his guilt. Sherlock must somehow get to the crime scene and back in the night, returning before Bell even rises.
As he takes a careful step, he thinks he hears a creak at the top of the stairs, as if the old man were stirring. The boy keeps still for a moment, but the noise doesn’t come again. He quickly boils a spot of tea, tears off a piece of slightly hardened bread kept in a wooden box next to a monkey’s brain floating in a jar of formaldehyde, slips into the front room past the display cases, and out onto little Denmark Street.
It is almost pitch-black at first, but once he is on a bigger street, the glow of the overhanging gas lamps provides a gloomy light in the hot and humid air. He crosses the now-silent market at Covent Garden, floats over Waterloo Bridge, and glides south-east, running as often as he walks, past a nearly deserted Elephant and Castle, out into the suburbs, and then the countryside. Just past Dulwich village he passes its renowned college, nestled just off the road, on the other side of a beautiful cricket grounds. Dim lights make the buildings shimmer. He stops for a moment admiring its ghostly, red gothic exteriors and its spires disappearing into the sky. It’s a famous public school for elementary children, offering opportunities he is denied. He wonders what itwould be like to awake within its dormitories. Some day, he vows, he will go beyond even this sort of institution, to a great university, by hook or by crook.
He scurries down Dulwich Road, runs past the toll gate, and gazes toward the Crystal Palace way up on Sydenham Hill. A few lights are left on in the night and it looks like a monstrous glass aquarium on a mountain. The last stretch up the hill winds through the trees of Gipsy Wood. His imagination fills with the thieves and goblins who, children say, inhabit this forest and run after them with arms outstretched…. He sprints until he comes to the back of the mighty building.
He wishes it was evening, not early morning, and that he was an ordinary boy who could scamper across the two hundred acres of beautiful grounds and play in its lakes, and especially climb up onto the life-sized statues of dinosaurs frozen in eternal slithers at the edges of the pools. But he has a job to do. He creeps by the big reservoir at the north end and over to one of the imposing brick water towers book-ending the building. The boy stares up at the column. Each tower is nearly three
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