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

Holmes trudged along the Strip for a while, the bizarre sights around him melting to a tepid blur, the urgent sounds reduced to a static-like hissing in his ears. This was precisely one of those occasions when a three percent solution of cocaine would give his mind the few hours of respite it needed. But the laws had changed. And his conscience would not let him break them while he was still taking the LVPD’s shilling.

He finally wound up back in his room, sprawled out on the bed, watching old reruns of Star Trek .

“It goes beyond the bounds of logic, Jim.”

That was so beautifully succinct it almost made a tear well up.

Sleep practically overtook him, and he emerged from it with a jerk. Through his hotel window, he could see the sky had darkened. The coloured lighting on the street below glowed with a lurid brilliance.

The entire town was being swallowed up in shadow. Holmes felt his heartbeat speeding up again. He was close to getting to the bottom of this whole affair – of that, he was certain. The same frisson which had to overcome a hunter had him in its clutches.

But he reminded himself that adrenalin was also a drug, just as potent and confounding as the gambling addiction he had seen so often in this city. So he forced himself to slow down and think clearly. He was just one man, and headed into possible grave danger. How many congregants might be gathered at this ‘house of worship’? His gaze drifted towards his trusty revolver, which was on the nightstand.

Then it turned away, because he might need more than just five shots. In his time here in America, Holmes had purchased several brand new items of equipment. So he vaulted off the bed to where his bags were stored.

The blazes with his trusty revolver – where the devil were his trusty Glocks?

Holmes re-studied the small card that he’d been given on the way out. ‘House of Good Fortune’. The name described nothing, and was perfectly anonymous in its own way. In a city of this kind, it could be a small casino or a Chinese restaurant. It was in this manner that the people he was on the search for stayed below the radar.

By this time, he was quite convinced that he was dealing with a cult. He had encountered them before. They were more dangerous than any purely criminal organisation, since their members were fanatical and hell-bent on their goals.

A hot breeze skirled on the evening air around him. Holmes was dressed as he had been earlier, but had put on a light raincoat. Not that he expected rain, but the garment served to cover up the pair of sidearms, which both had extended clips.

The address he was headed to was several blocks behind the old part of the Strip. The clientele at these casinos were more hardy than their uptown counterparts. There were vagrants in evidence, even on the main drag. And the avenues further back had a dangerous reputation. But Holmes had known streets of this kind in Victorian London, and he pressed on, undeterred.

He came, finally, to the building in question. And his brow creased with mild shock. It was derelict, as he had already supposed. But he had not expected to find any place of worship in a closed-down porno theatre.

So far as he could make out, there was nobody guarding the exterior of the place. The front doorways were covered up with rusty corrugated iron. Holmes noticed immediately that one of the sheets was badly bent. He went over to it. Sure enough, it pulled back easily, sufficient to allow him through.

He went cautiously into the bowels of the theatre. The lobby was empty and perfectly dark, its air stagnant with the odour of decay. But from the double doors that led into the cinema, he could hear low chanting. There were chinks of coloured light.

Feigning the manner of a man lost and bewildered, he ventured through … to be confronted by a very deeply curious sight.

Up at the front of the auditorium, fires were blazing in large earthenware pots. The flames being cast out were not yellow. They were a startling crimson, giving the whole place a haematic aspect. The smoke from them rolled towards the ceiling, forming a miasma which let out a sickly stench.

There were perhaps a hundred congregants in here, far more than Holmes had expected. They were stood between the rows of rotting seats, and did not even notice him enter. All were of the same kind he had remarked on earlier – blighted, shabby souls enthralled by the failed promise of the gaming tables. Men and women, young and old. Holmes went gently down the aisle, and found a place beside the same grey-haired woman who’d invited him this afternoon.

She realised he’d arrived. Greeted him with a tight smile and a brief nod. And then returned her attention to the front of the theatre, and did not look away again.

None of these folk did. The Oriental woman had their complete attention.

She was standing at the centre of the open space out front, shaking a pair of large, crude rattles. Her face was tipped forwards and her eyes were closed. And she was yelling out some kind of chant, a fevered caterwauling in a language that Holmes did not recognise.

To one side of her was some kind of altar, hewn from a large block of stone. How it had been brought in here was anyone’s guess. On top of it was ranked a row of goblets of some dully-gleaming metal. It sickened one to think what those were used for.

The woman was dressed in the same manner he had seen her last time. Except that now, the collar of the blouse had been fully unbuttoned. Her neck and throat and the top portion of her breastbone were revealed.

Holmes squinted in the sickly light. Was it just a trick of shadow, or were those narrow scars on the side of her neck, cut in deliberate patterns?

Despite his parlous circumstances, Holmes allowed himself a knowing smile. He was beginning to comprehend this.

And then it faded away completely. From the darkened theatre wings, a gurney was wheeled out by four assistants.

The man strapped to it was perfectly healthy. All that he had suffered so far was the indignity of being stripped down to his underwear. His mouth was gagged. He was struggling mightily, but to no avail. And he might have been a taller, rather more muscular version of Fred Bonner.

This was without any shade of a doubt somebody else who had done well at some game of chance. It struck Holmes how badly all these congregants would like the opportunity to do the same.

But what was taking place here? How could capturing and killing such a man achieve …?

The woman’s chanting stopped.

She laid the rattles to one side, then stooped over her victim, grinning hideously. Save for the crackling of the flames, the room had fallen silent.

“Be still now. You have what we want,” Holmes thought he heard her mutter.

And she had to have some kind of mastery of hypnosis herself. Either that, or what she had said served to freeze the unfortunate man with incomprehension and terror. Because he became completely motionless, his widened eyeballs following her when she moved away.

She stepped over to the altar, picked up one of the goblets and something else that Holmes could not make out, then returned to her prey. Set the cup beside him on the gurney, and then turned her attention to the fellow’s wrist. He gave a muffled gasp of pain. Holmes finally realised what she had been carrying in her other hand. A thick, crude needle with a length of rubber tubing running from it.

She had pierced one of the man’s veins. The tube was dangled into the goblet. Blood began to fill it. It looked black in this strange light.

Holmes knew the time for action was almost at hand, but his limbs felt very stiff. His mind was whirring. He ought to have been expecting something like this after all the evidence he’d been presented with – he knew that. But what this woman and her followers hoped to gain by actions of this nature was impossible to fathom.