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

She held the pendant up a little higher. “Its inhabitants, they gave me this. It’s a key, of sorts.”

“But … you were in an aeroplane the first time that you went there, Lizzie. How exactly did you land? And how on earth did you ever manage to return here?”

At which point, her eyes went to her own cabin window, a faraway look filling up those blue-green orbs. Her mouth pursed slightly, then she said, “They helped me.”

And, wondering who ‘they’ might be, Holmes tried to cast his own gaze in the same direction she was looking. Except that dark cloud was still rolling past the little windowpane, and it was suddenly illuminated with so bright a flash of lightning that it seemed to pierce his senses to their very core. His eyelids slammed shut, but the brightness lingered within his mind’s eye. Holmes believed there was a tinge of purple to it, but that might have simply been a product of his fraught imagination.

Save that when his eyes came back open, the storm was gone. The sky was clear and blue – though with a purplish tinge – in every direction that he looked.

He edged swiftly closer to the window and looked down. They should have still been over the Sea of Japan, but instead there were rolling forested hills below them, so vast that they stretched unbrokenly towards the far horizon. It looked like they were normal pines, at first. But then Holmes noticed that they were reflecting the sunlight. They were apparently made of some manner of crystal, exactly as had been depicted on the cover of the book Lizzie had given him.

Holmes’ jaw dropped open, and even his intensely acute mind went blank for quite a while. Of all the strangeness that he had encountered, right across this seething modern world, he had never been witness to anything nearly so bizarre as this. He felt numb and stunned, like he was in a trance. His senses returned to him only gradually.

What finally brought him out of his stupor was the realisation that, although their situation might have changed, their circumstances certainly had not.

The jetliner was just as wounded as it had been in the normal world. It continued to tilt downward, and it was still falling.

“Who are ‘they’ Lizzie?” he asked his companion urgently. “And if they are to help us, they must help us now!”

Lizzie’s demeanour was still tranquil.

“They are fast, and they are smart and strong, and always seem to sense when I’m in danger.” And then she broke into another smile, which then transformed, in turn, into a faint, delighted gasp. “Ah, here they come!”

She had turned her gaze towards the sun. It was paler than the one that Holmes was used to and far easier to look at. It still made him squint a little, for sure, but he could make out that it had a reddish outer edge. And at the centre of it, there were two small dots, which rapidly expanded as he watched.

And as they closed in on the stricken plane, their shapes began to flatten out, till Holmes could make out constant and repeated movement. These were winged creatures he was looking at … he thought at first they might be birds.

But then the strangely tinted sunlight glittered on their flanks, and he realised that was not the case. These were scaly creatures, getting nearer all the time until the great detective was able to discern that they were enormous flying reptiles, strong of limb, wild of visage, their huge fanged jaws agape, their eyes blazing red beneath their curving, armoured brows, their leathery wings beating at the atmosphere with practically a roaring sound.

Each of them, he reckoned, had to be forty feet long from the top of its muzzle to the spear-shaped tip of its tail. Holmes sucked in an astonished breath, since he was looking at a pair of dragons.

He scarcely had time to take in what was happening before they split apart, wheeled around the aircraft with a sleek agility that totally belied their size, then disappeared from sight.

There was a sudden bang from both sides of the plane. It jolted abruptly. Then its nose pulled up, and it was flying on the level in a few more seconds.

Lizzie Bradman was now beaming like a happy child.

Holmes pressed closer to the window, so that he could see the whole of the aircraft’s wing. And sure enough, one of the dragons now had hold of the metal in its mighty claws. Doubtlessly, the same was true on the opposite side. The creature had redoubled its efforts with its bat-like wings and, with the aid of its companion, it was keeping the jetliner comfortably aloft.

It took a while for his heart to cease its thudding, for his pulse to stop hammering in his throat and for his fogged mind to accept this situation. Sherlock Holmes was conscious of the reflex motion every single time he blinked. But he became aware of something else. The whole mood in the plane had changed. He had not been able to see the other passengers for the past few minutes, so situated was his chair, but he’d been able to hear their cries and screams. And all of that had died away. Every single person on this craft had lapsed into the same stunned silence that had recently come over him.

He finally settled back against his seat’s upholstery, gazed cautiously at Lizzie again and found the voice to ask, “How could you be sure they’d come?”

“They always do,” she chuckled, “every time I’m here. It’s one of the things I’ve learned about Nevergone. No one is allowed to come to any genuine harm here.”

“Is that so?” Holmes heard himself mutter.

“Yes, indeed. This is a far happier world than ours. I often wish that I could stay here.”

And he was about to ask her why she did not when Holmes noticed a slight change in the atmosphere directly around him. The recycled air had taken on the faintest glitter. It was as though it had been electrically lit up. The seat that he was in, the wall to one side and the little table to the other were all sparkling like a patina of golden dust had been applied. Even Lizzie and her own surroundings were aglitter when his head came up.

And he was wondering what was causing it, when a fresh movement made him look along the aisle. There was another flying creature on the inside of this plane, save that it was not any massive dragon this time. It had to be no more than five inches in height, had the veined and glassy thin wings of a dragonfly, but was other than that humanoid in shape, a woman’s shape, stark naked and pale pink.

Was this a …? He could barely even allow the word inside his head. Holmes attempted to stand up again, only to discover that his strength had really fled him.

The strange glow all around him, it was getting slightly stronger. And it was making him weary, making him drowsy, acting on his senses like an opiate. He could not understand why that was.

Nonetheless, he felt his head loll to one side, and that allowed him one last glance out of the nearby window. The crystal forests down below still rolled off towards the far horizon but, in the middle distance now, a huge section had been cleared. And a great city stood there. It was made of crystal too, but blue, purple and carmine this time.

Peaked towers like minarets rose very high into the air, and he could make out, at the centre of it all, a tall castle with battlements. He thought at first that the dragons might start heading across to that fantastic-looking place. But no, it seemed that they were merely flying past it.

The golden glow became so intense that Holmes could no longer make out anything past it. And then consciousness slipped away from him completely, his inner world becoming shapeless and entirely dark.

He was woken by a gentle bump. His eyes came open with a painful slowness, and he realised he was slouched low in his seat. He straightened up his back as gently as he could, then rubbed at his face and stared around him.