The Dragon Turn Read Online Free PDF

shape of a figure of eight, keeping his head down until he nears the south end of the park.
    The hotel is looming there: The World’s End. It’s a fitting name. It looks spooky enough during the day, just two storeys high, but long and black, with turrets at each end, as if it were home to a colony of vampires. At night, with all its lights out, it seems even gloomier. He approaches. He hears crows cawing from its heights and rats scratching and squealing around its base.
    His heart, much to his annoyance, begins to pound inhis chest. At the back, the building is lined with a wall of trees. They tower over him now — weeping willows and copper beeches, looking like monsters ready to defend the hotel from a rear attack. Suddenly, a wind comes up and moans through the branches.
    Sherlock sees a shape moving toward him in the darkness.

AT THE WORLD’S END
    S herlock grips his knife. But as the figure moves closer, he can see that it isn’t very big. In fact, when the moon gives him a clear view, Holmes is sure it is a child. But what a strange child: it is difficult to tell, at first, if this person is a boy or a girl. It is not only short, not much more than four feet tall, but so slender as to be skeletal. The eyes are sunken, the brow and cheekbones stick out, and the complexion, marked with filth, is bluish-white, like bones underneath the skin. The hair, growing long and unkempt under a hat made of nothing but a brim, is the color of dirt. But those eyes are large and blue, and full of expression, the lips thick and active.
    “Might a lad be of assistance, guvna?”
    His voice isn’t as high-pitched as expected, though it quavers a little. He doesn’t seem to be able to stand still as he talks.
    Older than he looks, perhaps twelve or thirteen, frightened but trying to appear not to be, grew up somewhere in the center of London, perhaps Seven Dials, homeless, orphaned. This is the boy Lestrade spoke of!
    The lad’s shoes are barely shoes. All ten toes glow white in the moonlight. His once royal-blue trousers are full of holes, and three or four sizes too big, held up by green suspenders, which is the only clothing covering his upper body. Holmes can count every one of the little lad’s ribs on his milk-white torso.
    “Yes, actually, you might be helpful,” smiles Sherlock, trying to put the other at ease.
    “At your servicement. I am employed ’ere. Security, for the ’otel, you know.”
    “Your name, sir?”
    “Scuttle.”
    “As in … Scuttle … butt?”
    “No sir, just Scuttle, no family name presently attached.”
    “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
    “Kind of you to say, guvna, but Scuttle shan’t be swayed by gleams and pleasantries. I must ’ave your name and then repulse you away from The World’s End ’otel. I keeps them all away, I do, even the famous ones. No one is allowed ’ere late at night, courtesy of the unparallel patrolling of yours truly. And I makes no expections, I don’t. I’ve seen ’em all.”
    “Them all?”
    “Famous celebrantites comes by the Cremorne all the times, you know. Scuttle knows ’em all, speaks with ’em I do. I knows the queen.”
    “The queen?”
    “Spoke to ’er, Scuttle did, and she gabbed back. And I said ’ello to Mr. Dickens … twice.”
    “
Charles
Dickens?”
    “The wery one, Scuttle leered at the famous explorer Richard Francis Burton too. ’As spear wounds in ’is face, ’e does. Conversated with ’im. I’ve looked at the famous famed Florence Nightingale, and … the Spring ’eeled Jack … of course.”
    “You don’t say?”
    “Scuttle does say so, sir. Do you doubt me?”
    “Not for a moment.”
    “I needs your name and then you must excavate the premises.”
    “I won’t be telling you my name. I am about to enter the hotel.”
    “But … Scuttle wouldn’t allow the famous Miss Menken ’erself to enter, that woman who rode ’alf naked on the ’orse in the London opera named
The Wild ’orse of the