Tony Richards - The Astonishing Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-First Century

He gradually began to notice that there were far fewer derelicts hanging about this row of city blocks than there’d been earlier today. And surely, the opposite ought to be the case? How very odd.

Holmes was still turning that over when he suddenly became aware that somebody had dropped in practically beside him, to the rear of his left shoulder. And was walking far too closely, keeping step with him.

The detective halted and turned, fully expecting to be confronted with a mugger or a vagrant. What he got, instead, was a rather familiar-looking woman, apparently in her mid-twenties.

She was easily as tall as he, very healthy in appearance. And her face was attractive in a slightly stiff and artificial way. She was wearing a dark casual suit, with a loose black T-shirt underneath it.

She could have been a close relative, a sibling even, of the dead, photographed couple that he’d seen – the two vanishing corpses that had been discovered outside the McMartin mansion. That struck Holmes straight away. And why the identical manner of dressing?

Her hair was cut short as well. The only difference being that it was black.

He stared at her, more than a little puzzled. And when she failed to speak, he asked her, “Madam, can I be of any help?”

“Walk away from this, Mr Holmes,” she told him curtly.

Holmes could feel a strange sensation, like a tugging at his throat. It was plain puzzlement, nothing more.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There is absolutely nothing you can do,” the woman said.

Night had fallen fully. San Francisco’s darkened air was filling up with thick tendrils of fog. Sounds were muffled – everything looked gauzy and quite vague around them.

“That’s a rather generalised statement. If you’d care to be a little more specific?” the detective asked.

But the woman refused to say anything more, and so he quickly glanced around again. It was even harder to make out his surroundings than it had been a minute back. He could make out, however, that the thugs and ne’er-do-wells – most of them drug dealers, surely – who had been hanging around the doorways of this city block had gone from sight to the very last. It was as if they’d sensed that something very odd was happening, and hurriedly made themselves scarce.

“Mr Holmes?” said another voice, a male one, directly behind him.

Sherlock swivelled around quickly, half-convinced that he was going to be attacked. He’d already raised both his forearms, ready to defend himself.

But the owner of the second voice was standing very calmly. He was dressed in the same manner as the woman. Was – Holmes could see – the same generous height. He was almost identical to her in every way, truthfully. Including the fact that his hair was short and black.

Holmes took in something else as well. He could not really make out what hue this chap’s eyes were. Maybe they were blue, or maybe they were green or hazel, but he simply couldn’t tell. Their surfaces were so glossy and reflective, it was like trying to pick out solid colour on a pair of drifting bubbles. Was this person wearing lenses? Or else, who had eyes like that?

“You don’t seem to understand what’s going on here, sir,” the man continued. “This isn’t any criminal case, no. I’m afraid that you’ve found yourself caught up in the middle of a war.”

Holmes had already begun suspecting something along those lines. People were not simply disappearing, they were dying too. He already had strong evidence that grave misdeeds were being performed. And so he held out the photo he’d recovered from the safe.

“And this war of yours has something to do with this?”

It was of a dead-end alley somewhere in this district, and had been taken on a night exactly like this one.

The letter accompanying it was a horribly misspelled scrawl. But what it conveyed was:

‘Dear Mr McMartin,

My name is Deena. I’m fifteen, and I ran away from home in Tuscon three months ago. I’ve been living on the streets down in the Tenderloin since then. It’s been rough, but I’ve managed to make some friends, other runaways like myself.

But then I noticed, a couple of weeks back, that some of them were disappearing. Street people were vanishing, and I didn’t know why. Then, last night, I found the truth out. It happened just off Market. And I still have a cell phone, and it takes pics, so I took one.

Will you print this in your paper? People ought to know.’

What the photograph revealed was utterly remarkable. The alley should have ended merely with a plain brick wall. And there was one of those, for sure. But some kind of shining portal had opened up at the centre of it. Four skinny, unkempt youths were stepping through it, the foremost of them vanishing into nothingness. The rest were about to follow his example, and seemed to display no nervousness about doing so. In fact, you could make out the faces of both the fellows at the rear, and they were blank and stiff, their eyes overly wide. Precisely as if they had been mesmerised.

And they were being ushered through the portal by a tall, blond couple – a man and a woman in dark casual suits. Possibly the same ones who had died outside McMartin’s house.

The black-haired man studied the details swiftly and then nodded, his irises capturing the brilliance of a nearby street lamp.

“They are Slavers,” he confirmed.

“And you?” Holmes enquired, his eyebrows rising.

“We are Abolitionists, exactly like the ones who were active in this country’s Civil War. We’d like to achieve more than we have so far. But we are too few in number.”

“And this is only happening in San Francisco?” Holmes asked.

The man’s head shook. “No. It’s going on in many bigger cities.”

Holmes turned that over for a few slow, pensive seconds.

“These Slavers … they are taking only homeless people? Vagrants, runaways?

“People who will not be missed, yes.”

“And Joel McMartin … he was getting too close to the truth?”

Which got him another nod.

“We stopped the first pair who came after him.” A smile tried to appear on the man’s perfectly shaped but textureless face, and never quite made it. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t stop the second attempt.”

Holmes waved the photograph under his nose again. “And portals such as this? They lead to …?”

“Only to the ship. The slave ship. It’s not far from here, a big one. And it’s leaving soon.”

“We’ll do our best to get McMartin back to you,” the woman said. She was still behind the great detective. “I’m afraid it’s all that we can manage for the moment.”

Except that, when Holmes turned around to look at her, she’d vanished. And when he swung back the other way, the man had vanished too.

His head spun for a short while. And Sherlock Holmes honestly began wondering whether he’d imagined this entire bizarre encounter.

Then he started putting two and two together. And he got smartly on his mobile phone to Lieutenant Greaves.

Greaves had left his car parked just off the main drag, and in another few minutes they were racing across the city’s precipitous hilltops in the direction of Fisherman’s Wharf.

“A ship, you say?”

“A large one, yes, apparently,” Holmes told him.

“Then shouldn’t we be headed for the port?”

Holmes kept his face expressionless. “I’m not sure that the Port Authority would quite know what to do with this one.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Then drive on, good lieutenant. All will be explained.”

The bayfront area was deserted when they reached it, the restaurants and stalls all shut. The fog was so thick in this area, they could not see more than a dozen yards ahead of them. As they went down to the water, Holmes could make out the faint shape of a wooden pier. The bark of sea lions was audible in the distance, wild and gloomy-sounding on a night like this.