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

And was completely unaware of any other form of consciousness trying to intrude upon his own. Which left him at a loss. The trees grew closer.

“Better start looking for a suitable target, then,” he said out loud.

Masterton glanced around at him like he was mad, but kept on driving.

There was a small herd of zebras nearby, quite delightful to Holmes’ eye. But he drove such notions out of his head, slipped the heavy rifle off his shoulder and took aim … only to have his attention diverted by a pair of giraffe wandering through the background of the area that he was pointing at. His head came up again. He studied them intently. Maybe those?

But Jomo tapped him on the shoulder and then pointed up ahead. Ah yes, absolutely perfect. The same female rhino with her calf that they had seen their first day out was standing there.

“Get me closer in,” Holmes told his driver.

Masterton grunted sombrely, but then complied.

Who in his right senses would harm any creature that had a dependent offspring? It amounted to a double-murder. But Holmes skirted that issue carefully and tried to cleanse it from his mind. The truck drew up some fifty yards away from the great wrinkled beast, which showed no sign that it had even noticed its arrival. Holmes aimed down the barrel of the gun, getting the rhino in his sights.

He put every other idea out of his head save for this one. A cold determination to kill that rhinoceros. The mental picture of its great dead body lying on the dried brown earth. Taking its head as a reminder of the act. And perhaps turning its big feet into ashtrays as a final insult.

His eyelids narrowed and he gritted his teeth. His breath became uneven and his heart began to beat far quicker. He thumbed back the hammer of the rifle, and his finger tightened slightly on the trigger.

A low humming sound came wafting to his ears.

Holmes turned immediately to the two men who’d accompanied him.

“Get out of here, both of you!” he shouted. “Out of the truck! And don’t take any weapons with you!”

Jomo and Masterton looked immediately concerned. Neither of them appeared particularly willing to leave the great detective to his fate. They wanted to stand by him. But what earthly good would that achieve?

The older man’s face coloured. And his African assistant had on an expression like he’d bitten into sour fruit. But both chaps did as they were asked, clambering down from the Land Rover and retreating backwards.

Holmes forgot about them, swivelling around to face the woodlands.

And as first, it looked like nothing unpleasant might happen. There was only that approaching sound. But then a strange shape burst out from between the trees, if it could genuinely be called a ‘shape’ at all.

It was altering its dimensions and scale with every passing second. And could have been taken, at first glance, for an extremely low-lying and very thick black cloud. Except that it was no such thing, and Sherlock understood that only too well. It was composed of thousands of winged black bodies.

He held himself up very straight, ignoring his raging pulse and the thick, hard knot of gristle that had formed inside his throat. He tried to let his intellect take over and control his actions. Only … what if, on this one occasion, he had got it wrong? Once such an attack had been launched, could it even be recalled? Lord Almighty, but he didn’t even know.

He tried to imagine himself as a footsoldier, facing down an attack by the Mahdi’s howling Dervishes. And only succeeded a little. By the saints, this was far harder than he’d thought.

Holmes waited until the swarm was halfway across the savannah to him, and then held the rifle high and pulled the trigger hard, three times. There were no accompanying explosions.

“You see?” he yelled. “It isn’t even loaded! I had no genuine plans to kill that beast!”

The cloud of insects kept on coming, and he felt his heart beat even faster. Perspiration sprang up on his lip.

“If you harm me for no reason,” he called out, “then aren’t you just as bad as any hunter?”

And at first, he thought that he was done for nonetheless. The swarm of bees came right up to the truck and then surrounded him like some dense pall of writhing smoke. Holmes went rigid, waiting for the pain to come. But felt none whatsoever. Not a single stinger was so much as even brushing up against his flesh. But he was still unable to relax.

The swarm was churning all about him. Its sound filled his head so loudly that it felt like it might burst. The world beyond the horde of bees – the plains and the trees and the two men he had come here with – was muddled, blurry, indistinct. Holmes did his very best to maintain his composure, but he couldn’t help but notice he was shaking. These creatures could set upon him any second. There was nothing he could do to stop them.

He held the rifle over the side of the truck and let it drop.

“You see?” he murmured underneath his breath, genuinely afraid again to open up his mouth too much. “I have no murderous intent. I simply thought that we might meet?”

Was his mind being examined? His words and actions being measured? The detective simply wasn’t sure. The bees kept whirling round him, so that every passing second felt like an eternity.

“Mr Holmes?” Jomo shouted out, fear written across his handsome face.

His employer was the same. But Holmes ignored the pair of them. The only thing that he could do was wait, now. He was dealing – and he knew it – with an intellect quite different from his own.

The bees abruptly turned away as one, and began streaming back into the forest. And Sherlock Holmes’ consciousness … it seemed to suddenly rise up, departing from his corporeal body. He was not exactly sure how that had happened.

But it followed them.

An out-of-the-body experience. Jack London had described such things, and Madame Blavatsky. Holmes had experienced a great number of strange events, but never one like this before.

He was no longer aware of his own heartbeat, since he’d left that thing behind him. His nerves were not trembling, and there was no sweat dripping down his top lip any more. He had become reduced to his essential form, his consciousness and nothing more.

Holmes felt himself calming as he followed the dark swarm. Tree trunks and low branches flashed by. He was aware of the variety of tiny sounds inside the woodlands, dead leaves crinkling and midges holding low, whispering conversations with each other. And he was very conscious of the way the sunlight trickled through the leafy canopy above and made strange patterns on the ground. A massive royal blue butterfly went past, and he could feel the tiny gusts of wind the flapping of its wings made.

Then he reached the wide depression at the centre of the woods. Up ahead of him, a shining, hollow looking, greenish-blue disc had appeared in mid-air. Could it be some kind of portal?

Yes indeed, it turned out that that was the case. Because the entire swarm of bees began to pour inside it, disappearing.

And the very next instant, Sherlock Holmes was doing the same.

He appeared to lose all sensation for a moment. And when his sight and hearing returned, Holmes found himself inside of what looked like some kind of cavern. Except that the walls were a regular and geometric shape – a large dodecahedron. And there were strange figments of greenish-blue light flowing across them in constant streams. Mathematical symbols, perhaps? They could indeed be that, but he had never once in all his days seen anything quite like them.

A peculiar sound came to his ears, and it was no longer the humming of the swarm. The bees were still present, surely, but they were no longer on the wing. They had landed on the strangely lit-up walls, were moving across them, and had the lazy air of being finally at home.