Young Sherlock Holmes: Bedlam (Short Reads)

It was one of those rare days in London when the sun shone on clean streets and the air did not smell of rotten vegetables and horse dung. A night of
heavy rain had washed the streets clean without, mercifully, overloading the sewer system, and the cobbles and brickwork of the city glistened proudly like a man showing off his freshly cut and
oiled hair. Sherlock knew it wouldn’t last for long, but for a while it made London into somewhere he thought he could live, one day.

Sherlock and his tutor, Amyus Crowe, had left Farnham earlier that morning. Sherlock’s brother Mycroft had invited them for lunch at his club – the Diogenes. His reason, which he
explained in a letter that had arrived the day before, was that he wanted to talk about Sherlock’s schooling. Having been removed from Deepdene School for Boys and placed in the care of the
big American Amyus Crowe, it seemed to Sherlock that Mycroft was now wondering if he had done the right thing. Mr Crowe was a brilliant teacher, but only on certain subjects. Survival in the
wilderness, tracking animals, fishing for carp and trout, identifying poisonous fungi, a little bit of recent political history and the logical analysis of evidence – these were all his
strong points. Mathematics and Latin – not so much.

Sherlock would much rather study the things that Amyus Crowe was teaching him, because he could see their value, but his brother had a strange regard for those areas of the syllabus for which
Sherlock could see no earthly use. Every now and then he threatened to bring in another tutor to complement Crowe’s lessons, and Sherlock had either to avoid the subject entirely or try to
talk him out of it. ‘If you want to make something of yourself,’ he would say, ‘then you need to learn dead languages, theology and the more obscure facts of history. There is no
alternative, I’m afraid.’ The fact that Sherlock had no idea what he wanted to make of himself cut no ice with his brother. ‘You will go into the Civil Service, of course,’
he would rumble. ‘Either that or banking.’

The hansom cab that Sherlock and Crowe had taken from Waterloo Station dropped them outside the Diogenes Club, which lurked behind an unremarkable door. Crowe, resplendent in his white suit and
hat, flicked a coin up to the driver and strode across the pavement to the door, but as he did so a passing man in a suit and bowler hat jostled against him. Crowe turned to deliver a sharp rebuke,
but the man unexpectedly pushed him in the chest. Crowe staggered backwards into two other men who were passing. Within moments, all four men were arguing.

Unsure what to do, Sherlock stepped away from the cab. As he did so he heard movement behind him. Someone had come around the side of the cab and was looming at his shoulder. He turned his head,
but liquid sprayed his eyes and nose. Gasping, he raised a hand to wipe his face clear, but his arm suddenly seemed to be moving in slow motion. His attention became fixated on his fingers and
thumb. They looked like they weren’t even a part of him: pink, fleshy things that moved of their own accord. The lines on his palm took on the appearance of rivers crossing a landscape, like
a map seen at a distance.

What was happening to him?

He felt nauseous. His head felt like it had doubled in weight, and as he laboriously swung it around to look for Amyus Crowe he saw that the big American was staring at him in concern, but
Crowe’s face was swimming in and out of focus, and although his lips were moving Sherlock couldn’t hear anything apart from what sounded like the tolling of a distant bell. The cab and
the sky and the brickwork of the buildings were all bleeding together into a mishmash of colours that made him feel as if he was looking at the world through a stained-glass window. He needed to
rest, to sit down and gather his wits, but when he took a step forward his feet tangled together and he stumbled. He fell, and it seemed to take an awfully long time before he hit the ground. A
hand grabbed at his shoulder, but when he looked up, all he could see was a grotesquely distorted face looming over him. He struck out with his fists, again and again, flailing around in a world of
jumbled shapes and colours. Someone was screaming, and he thought he recognized the voice. He thought it was his own voice, but it was a long, long way away.

Then there was darkness, and the feeling that his arms were being tightly held. And then there was just the darkness.

The realization that he was lying on a bed of straw in a brick-lined room came slowly. He didn’t know at what point he understood where he was: there came a moment, as he
was staring at the brickwork, that he realized that he
had
understood some time ago, but the information just hadn’t meant anything to him.

He was in a brick room, and he was lying on straw. That was a starting point.

And his name was Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.

The rest seeped back gradually, like the sea washing over the beach as the tide comes in. The Diogenes Club. The cab. The fight. The liquid that had been sprayed over his face.

He checked his clothes, running his hands down his body. He was still wearing the same jacket, shirt and trousers that he had been wearing earlier. That, at least, was something to hold on to.
They were stained with dust and dirt, but not ripped.

The room was like the inside of a stable, but there was no smell of animals. The straw was clean and dry, and had been laid down on flagstones. The brickwork that formed the walls was
whitewashed and dry too: no moss, no trickling water, and the air was chilly but not damp. At first he’d thought he was in some sort of outbuilding, but the evidence suggested otherwise. He
was indoors – just not in a particularly well-appointed room.

There was a window in one wall, but it was tall and thin, barely wide enough for him to get his arm through if he tried. Certainly not large enough for him to escape. Even his friend Matty
wouldn’t be able to get through that. The glass looked dirty, from where he lay.

The wall opposite the window was interrupted by a door. It was heavy, and studded with big metal rivets like the heads of arrows that had been shot through from the other side. A small window in
the centre of the door was barred, and it looked as if a wooden shutter had been closed across it from the other side.

As Sherlock’s mind began to speed up, he realized that there were no hinges on the door. Or, at least, there were no hinges on the inside of the door. The hinges must have been on the
outside, which meant that the door opened outwards, not inwards. Sherlock didn’t think that he’d ever been in a room where the door opened outwards.

No, that wasn’t right. He
had
been in a room like that: the room in Bow Street Police Station where he and Amyus Crowe had spoken with his brother Mycroft a few months before. The
door to that room had been designed so that people in the room could not pry the hinges apart and thus remove the door, or hide behind the door when it opened and attack whoever came in.

He was in a cell.

He sat up suddenly, shocked into complete wakefulness. He was in a cell! Surely he hadn’t been arrested? Now that the blood was flowing more swiftly through his brain he remembered vague
images of himself flailing around in the street, punching people who came too close – but Amyus Crowe would have protected him, wouldn’t he? Protected him from arrest?

Unless Crowe had been arrested too. The big American had been on the verge of a fight, after all.

He checked his knuckles. They were scraped, and covered with dried blood.

He tried to work out how long he had been unconscious. His throat and mouth were dry, but he wasn’t particularly hungry. He couldn’t have been out for more than a couple of hours. It
was still the same day.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet. His toes tingled with pins-and-needles as the circulation returned to them, and he shuffled from one foot to another to try to get the pain to subside. As soon
as he could stand up straight he crossed to the window. It was above his head, but by reaching up and hooking his fingers over the sill and then pulling himself up, scrabbling with the toes of his
boots to get purchase against the mortared ridges between the bricks, he could get his head up to a level where he could just about see out.

Beyond the wall lay a manicured garden of lawns and bushes, and beyond them, just the other side of a wall, he could see the tops of hansom carriages going past. Lots of carriages. Pigeons were
perched all along the top of the wall. It looked as if he was still in London.

At least that was something.

He dropped back down to the stone-flagged ground, brushing his hands against his trousers, and crossed to the door. There was no handle on the inside. He pushed experimentally at it. The door
didn’t budge. Presumably it was bolted on the other side.

He threw his weight against it, but it didn’t shift.

He glanced back at the window. He may have been imprisoned but at least he wasn’t in the countryside, or even in France. That had happened before. He was in London. Amyus Crowe would get
him out.

Assuming that Crowe wasn’t in the next cell. The thought sent a cold shiver of fear through him. If he and Crowe were
both
imprisoned here, and if Mycroft didn’t know where
they were, then there was nobody left to get any of them out. They might rot there forever.

‘Mister Crowe!’ he called. ‘Can you hear me? Are you there?’

Nothing. No response.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. He
could
hear something. Now that he was listening properly he could make out a faint cacophony of moans and cries coming from the other side of the
door. It seemed to have got louder when he shouted. And he could hear banging as well: metal against metal in a regular, mindless rhythm. It was like listening to a musical recital in hell.

The window in the door suddenly slid open. He jerked his head back, startled. A face stared in at him, framed in the wood: eyes wary and skin scabbed.

‘Back away,’ a rough voice said. ‘Back across to the other side of the room. This door ain’t openin’ till you do.’

Sherlock shuffled away until his back was against the wall, feeling the straw piling up behind his feet as they scuffed across the floor.

The window slid closed with a
thud
. Moments later he heard the solid
clunk
of a large bolt being drawn, and then the door creaked open.

Two men stood in the doorway. They both wore uniforms of blue canvas. Their hands were dirty and their faces unshaven. And they were both holding short wooden clubs.

‘Try anythin’ an’ you’ll be measurin’ your length on the floor, understand?’ The speaker was the man on the left. He was slightly smaller than his companion,
and his eyes were blue. ‘Tell me you understand. Talk properly now.’

‘I understand,’ Sherlock said, voice unsteady. ‘Where am I?’

The man turned to his companion. ‘You ’ear that? He don’t know where ’e is!’ He turned back and smiled at Sherlock. His mouth was empty of all but three blackened
teeth. ‘You’re in Bedlam, mate! Now come over ’ere, careful like. The Resident wants to take a look at you.’

The two men backed away, leaving a path through the door. Sherlock walked gingerly forward, still trying to process what they had told him. Where was ‘Bedlam’? Who was ‘the
Resident’?

The men stepped back as he walked through the door. He noticed that they were holding their clubs ready, in case he attacked them. He was smaller than them, and unarmed, but they seemed to be
scared of him. Or, at least, wary.

Outside, he found himself in a long, wide gallery lined with doors on one side and narrow, barred windows on the other. The floor was wood, apparently polished by years of feet brushing against
it. The ceiling of the gallery was curved, with iron rods every few feet making it seem as if Sherlock was standing inside the ribcage of some vast beast: an impression reinforced by the bloody
glow emitted by a cave-like fireplace a few yards away. The fireplace was covered by a black metal cage which had been bolted to the wall.

There were people in the gallery. Off to one side, four men were playing cards at a small table. Another man, in a black suit and top hat, was standing by one of the windows and looking out. The
expression on his face was desperately sad. Other men – and they were all men, Sherlock noticed – were walking up and down the gallery, some slowly, with their hands reaching out to
trail along the brickwork, and others rapidly, as if they had somewhere urgent to be.