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

It was a sudden change in engine noise that brought him sitting upright. The pitch of the jet on the port side of the plane remained at a continuous, steady moan. But the tone of the one on the starboard side – his side – had begun stuttering and faltering, and Holmes had never heard anything like that before.

A passenger in the rows of seats ahead of him let out a startled yell. And then he heard someone shout, in an Australian accent, “Christ, this isn’t happening!”

And then – to even Holmes’ rank dismay – a stream of even thicker murky black poured out beyond the glass that he was looking through. Smoke had begun belching from the engine. He could see no flames, or even sparks, but it had obviously overheated.

Holmes’ mind darted in several directions at once. The supremely logical part of his intellect puzzled itself over why this thing had happened, and concluded that it was most likely the result of struggling against the violence of the air around them. But the more practical part of his consciousness … it began looking around for solutions to the horrible dilemma he and all the rest were in. The engine could not be fixed until the craft was on the ground. And as for exit from it? His gaze went rapidly about the cabin, hunting for any sign of an expanse of fabric he could turn into a makeshift parachute. But there was nothing.

Everyone around him had gone awfully still and quiet, he noticed. Then he took in – almost with a sense of shock – that he had gone the same himself. Time hung suspended, like a bubble in a jar of honey – he was afraid that if he moved or made a sound the thin membrane would burst and he would be engulfed.

And then the whole plane shuddered with a groaning noise, tipping over almost to a forty-five degree angle and dropping several hundred feet in barely a few seconds, which made everybody scream at once.

Had he screamed? Holmes was not entirely sure. He felt peculiarly dislocated from his body, like his consciousness was floating just above his head. He could no longer feel his limbs, nor make his fingers respond to his mind’s instructions. If he tried to stand up, he felt quite sure he couldn’t manage it. This was like one of those awful, haunting dreams, where you were in a place, but were entirely unsure which manner of place it was or how you’d got there. Except that a dream was something that you woke from and then put behind you, and this plane was not as easily escapable as that.

The fuselage lurched wildly and then gave another massive downward jolt. And there were sparks appearing by this juncture, mingled in with the smoke from the ailing engine. It occurred to Holmes that he had never in his life felt so entirely helpless. But then his mind fixed on something else.

That tumble down the Reichenbach Falls … he had survived it. Numerous violent encounters since then had been lived through and he’d remained intact. He was immortal, or at the very least he’d lived an incongruously lengthy and replete existence. But should this plane smack down onto the grey water below them … could even he survive an impact such as that?

The plane was dropping lower, lower, like a mayfly in the dying seconds of its single day on earth. The starboard jet was making no sounds now, stuttering or otherwise, and so apparently had been switched off. But the storm continued beating at the fuselage with a merciless savagery. The lights inside the cabin all began to flicker.

Was this it? Was he done? The air of detachment that had closed over him grew ever more profound. His eyes told him that there was pandemonium around him, people crying, screaming, pleading with whatever God that they could summon up. He could see their mouths moving, see their hands wringing together but, strangely he could hear absolutely nothing.

He unbuckled his seatbelt very calmly and stood up. And then he stepped over the passengers beside him till he reached the aisle. He was forced to walk steeply downhill to reach Club Class, clinging to the other seats as he went by, since the nose of the jetliner was firmly down by this stage, the craft losing height rapidly.

Except that, when he found Lizzie, he was jolted by the shock of her appearance. Every single other person on this plane was caught up in the strident paroxysms of mortal terror. Whereas she was sitting just as calmly as she had been when he’d first met her in the departure lounge.

Her back was straight and her gaze steady. One smooth leg was folded carefully across the other. Her expression was as utterly unrumpled as her Chanel suit. This might as well have been a normal flight, so far as she appeared to be concerned.

She had pulled something out from beneath the blouse that she was wearing. It was some manner of pendant, hung about her neck by the thinnest of silver chains. Holmes tried to make out what it was, but it was half-concealed within her grasp. A flat pendant, and apparently silver, in the shape of … was that a strangely spiky tree, or could it be a coiled up dragon?

She noticed he was there, looked up at him and smiled. Then her gaze went to the empty chair across from her, indicating he should sit down in it. Once he had done so, she edged her shoulders to her left and handed him a tall flute glass.

“Here’s the champagne that I promised. I got served it when I boarded, and saved it for you. I’m most terribly sorry, but I fear it’s gone a little flat.”

Holmes took it, but did not respond, staring at her evenly and wondering what she might be thinking.

Now that he was looking closer, he could see the pendant in her hand was actually made of something other than plain silver. It had an altogether glossier surface, almost like a mirror, and reflected the lighting in the cabin strangely, breaking it up into bands of shifting colour, with a large preponderance of purple.

He was still amazed at how untroubled the woman was, and decided to put it into words.

“This plane is going down hard, Lizzie. Why doesn’t that bother you?”

Her gaze dipped for a moment, then she stared at him directly in the eye.

“You’ve begun suspecting I’m the cause of this?” Her blonde head gave a tiny shake. “That’s not true at all. It’s simply the case that I, like no one else on this airliner, understand what this storm is, since I’ve encountered it before.”

And she proceeded to tell him her story. She had been in her late twenties, already a reservist by then, flying a plane for the Air Force. And she’d been on a cross-country mission from one base to another in a different state when she had run into a storm exactly like this one.

“I thought that I was going to die.”

“Well, obviously, you did not.”

The walls of the cabin continued to shudder around them, but Holmes did his best to ignore it.

“But then I broke out into steady, open air, and saw something remarkable,” Lizzie was telling him. “The landscape below me was no longer arid desert, as it should have been. Instead, there were forests made of crystal. There were great lakes of a thousand different, subtle colours. And I thought at first that I had perished and then gone to someplace else, but finally I saw the truth. The storm had been a great tear in the fabric of the Universe, and I had broken through into another world.”

Holmes turned that over very slowly, and could come to only one conclusion. So he muttered the word, “Nevergone.”

“I knew that you, of all people, would understand.” And Lizzie shrugged, her expression becoming slightly wry and testy. “So basically, as an author, I’m a total fraud. I have no imagination in the least, and have never made up so much as a single story.”

“You have simply reported what you’ve seen and heard. You’ve been many times to this strange world you talk about?”