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

The creature took another swipe at him. Again, he narrowly avoided it. Half a row of seating was disintegrated by the blow. Holmes stumbled back.

But then, he noticed a change came across the witch woman that altered his original frame of mind. The beast’s swelling shadow had spread across her. And in that vile penumbra, the true nature of her appearance was revealed.

All beauty fled, her face becoming leathery and wizened. Her eyes were sunken deep. Her open lips framed desolate gums, only a few rotted stumps of teeth remaining. Her body was hunched over, and her fingers horribly gnarled.

She had to be hundreds of years old, a filthy hag, and had only kept herself alive by means of her dark conjurations. Holmes felt his resolve return. There was no further time to waste. His arm straightened. He took his shot.

His aim was true. The woman was struck instantaneously dead, crashing to the floor.

And the pendant burst into a thousand gleaming carmine shards.

The effect was immediate. An obscene wailing, followed by a sucking noise, made Holmes look back up. The Manitou was shrinking, disappearing, being siphoned away, almost certainly, into some other plane of existence in which only spirits dwelt.

As for the congregants, they took in what was happening and then – true to their debased natures – turned tail and fled, leaving the room by any exit they could find, in the same manner as a swarm of rats confronted in their nest.

It was over, thank God. Holmes used the sleeve of his raincoat to wipe perspiration from his brow. He remained where he was for half a minute, letting his breathing steady. And then he hurried down to help the kidnapped man.

A couple of hours later, Holmes and Capaldi found themselves sitting on the front stoop of the theatre. There was continuing activity around them, since the forensics boffins were still processing the scene. Two slim, attractive women, one auburn-haired, the other dark and slightly shorter, went past them into the building.

“We’ll get the others. They’ll be charged with being accessories,” the lieutenant assured him.

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“Witch women?” Capaldi grunted. “Evil spirits? Man, that has to top even Moriarty.”

But Holmes just became stiff-lipped. “Believe me, Lieutenant. Nothing, however inhuman or vile, ever quite manages that.”

“But he’s long gone, ain’t he?” the policeman smiled. And he was freshly surprised when Holmes responded with a brisk shake of his narrow head.

“Proposition one: I am immortal. Proposition two: Moriarty is my constant and unflinching Nemesis, as I am his. It therefore stands to reason that if I am still alive, then so …”

He let the final pair of syllables die unspoken on the hot night air. The two men gazed across the rooftops at the purple sky, a depthless silence falling over them.

Which was finally broken when Capaldi asked, “Any idea where he might be?”

“Not a clue,” Holmes muttered.

The big white SUV with sheriff’s department markings down its sides went roaring out past Phoenix city limits, powered down the freeway for a good long distance and then left the blacktop altogether and continued on.

Holmes jerked with alarm as everything around him began lurching violently and creaking.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

The driver of the vehicle, Sheriff Harlan Moore, let out a loud bark of a laugh, then smacked his lips, still grinning.

“Lived in these parts my whole lifetime, Mr Holmes, sir. I could find my way along an ant-trail in the dark.”

Holmes certainly hoped so. The horizon out in front of him was swaying so aggressively they might as well have been on board a ship during a mighty storm. But what a horizon it was!

This was the Sonoran Desert, the lowest situated and so the greenest one in the whole world. There were no sand dunes and no salt flats here. The terrain in front of him was very heavily vegetated, except that this was plant-life of the hardiest kind. There were great masses of thorny scrub, most of it decorated with bright little flowers. There were the sturdy barrel shapes of cacti too, similarly adorned. And most impressively, there were the enormous saguaro cacti, the ‘sentinels of the desert’, some of them standing over twenty feet tall. Holmes had known of them for a long time, since they had featured on the covers of the penny dreadful ‘cowboy stories’, back in his own day. But to see them in real life? He had to admit it was a most impressive spectacle.

The sun beat down mercilessly on everything that he was looking at. It hung above them like the opening to a furnace. Nothing much was moving in this heat, Holmes noticed. A pair of doves flapped suddenly up in front of their vehicle and circled away, but that was all.

“And how long has this ‘commune’ been here?” he asked.

“Practically a year.”

“But surely, this is protected land?”

“It’s called the Sonoran Desert National Monument,” Harlan Moore beamed proudly. “Most beautiful national park in these United States, in my opinion. But Krane’s smart. He set up his place on the very edge, where we can’t touch him. And on top of that, he’s claiming Maricopa Indian in his blood. He’s claiming land rights of some kind or other. And I reckon the courts won’t get it sorted out for years.”

“He has money, then?”

“Nope. He has the top law firm in Phoenix working pro bono for him. That feller is certainly the persuasive type.”

And for the first time since they’d met, the sheriff looked grim. But only for a moment.

He was a behemoth of a man, at least six and a half feet tall. There was no flab – it was all muscle. He had hands as large as catcher’s mitts, a fact that had alarmed Holmes when they had first shook. But his manner was altogether relaxed and jovial. A laughing giant, the detective had decided.

As well as his beige uniform, he was wearing impenetrable dark glasses. And there was a massive white hat perched on his enormous head.

“And three of his followers have died so far, you say?” Holmes asked.

Moore nodded. “None of them in his encampment. All of them out here. Which makes me figure they were trying to get away.”

“And human hand seemed to have played no part in any of the deaths?”

Holmes had already had this explained, but was trying to fix it clearly in his rather muddled thoughts.

“None. One, a young woman, died of a rattlesnake bite. Another, a man, from scorpion stings. And the final one, another gal – tarantulas.”

“But I thought that was a myth?”

Moore pursed his thick lips for a second. “And you’re absolutely right. One tarantula bite won’t kill you. But forty or fifty will.”

Holmes felt such a shock run through his frame that his surroundings were momentarily forgotten.

“And is such an occurrence even likely?”

“Darnedest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Were there any ligature marks?” Holmes tried.

Perhaps the unfortunate woman had been tied down while the spiders bit her.

“Buzzards and coyotes got to her before we did. You couldn’t have found ‘Poppa’ on the Tattooed Lady. It was the same for all of them. We had to judge the cause of their demise by the type of venom in their veins. That’s to say, what veins we could find.”

They continued on in silence for a while, the fantastical landscape around them shimmering in a heat haze. Finally, some man-made shapes appeared in front of them which gradually coalesced. The great detective had been told about this too. He felt his heart skip a whole beat.

These were none other than tepees or wigwams, about a hundred of them, all stretched out in even lines across an emptier-than-usual stretch of desert floor. And there were modern Western people living in them?