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

Little moved in the encampment, and that had to be down to the heat as well. He thought he spotted a few tent flaps being pulled aside as they rolled closer. But no one emerged.

Moore finally braked and switched the engine off, then proceeded to give Holmes a hurried lecture on the rules regarding walking around in such a desert.

“Don’t go stepping over any low bushes – they might have rattlesnakes underneath. Don’t go turning over any stones, or sticking your hands in any holes. And if you see a mountain lion come running toward you … say the Lord’s Prayer, real damned fast!”

He exploded with another huge bark of a laugh, so massive this time that it shook the entire vehicle.

And then he reached into the back of the car, and produced another big white hat, almost exactly like his own.

“You’ll be needing this as well,” he explained, clamping it down over the detective’s head.

To which, the bewildered Englishman could only mumble, “Thank you.”

It was like stepping out into a kiln. Holmes could feel the terrible heat smack him in the face, and in an instant he was bathed in sweat, his eyes were stinging from it. Maybe he ought to invest in some dark glasses too? Except that he disliked the way that they distorted one’s perspective of the things around you.

He wiped a sleeve across his brow. And, as his vision cleared, he saw they finally had company. A man had stepped out from the nearest tent. And this had to be the leader of the commune, Eli Barnsford Krane.

Holmes had seen no pictures of the fellow, and had not been sure what to expect. But he felt his heart sink a little when he took the man’s appearance in. The words that came to mind immediately were ‘powerful’ and ‘knavish’. This was not some semi-comic Fagin. This was far more like the taller, nastier brother of Bill Sykes.

Eli Krane stood practically as tall as Moore. He was far thinner though – rangy, wiry, the muscles on his bare arms standing out like hawsers. His face was narrow, with a pointed chin and a hatchet of a nose. His eyes, Holmes could see, were black and dead looking. His skin was heavily tanned, for sure, but there seemed to be another quality to it. That of indelible griminess. Put this man under a shower for a week and you would still not clean him up entirely. And when he looked across at them and grinned, Holmes could see his teeth were bad.

The man was dressed in filthy jeans, brown leather boots and a black leather waistcoat which had nothing underneath. A brightly coloured bandana wrapped around his long and greasy locks topped off his unwholesome appearance.

And he was chewing on something the whole while that he stared across at them. Holmes preferred not to imagine what.

“Eli,” his companion acknowledged, one hand resting on his belt beside his gun.

“You got nothing else to do but come out here and pester me, Moore?” came the gravelly reply.

Sherlock Holmes was still trying to guess how old the man might be. By his body and the upright way he held himself, Krane was maybe in his late thirties. But by his eyes, perhaps a decade older.

“Just being neighbourly,” Sheriff Moore answered calmly.

Several more tent flaps were being pulled aside, and Holmes could feel eyes on him.

“Just harassment, more like. This is private land and we’ve done nothing wrong.”

Holmes had already been shown the man’s criminal record. There was everything from minor violent crime and drugs to mail fraud and embezzlement. He had been born in Texas, and had moved from town to town in the American Southwest, leaving a trail of robbed and cheated people everywhere he went. So how was this man qualified to lead any kind of community?

“This is disputed land,” Moore was correcting him, “and the day that you do nothing wrong, I’ll eat the goddamn tyres on that truck.”

Krane looked unconcerned, standing akimbo and tipping his head to one side, his whole expression feigning boredom. He swallowed whatever it was he had been chewing.

“You like hearing from my lawyers, don’t you, sheriff? Maybe you’re just plain queer for them.”

He took note of the way that Harlan covered his annoyance with a rather tightened grin, then turned his attention to Holmes.

“You don’t look like you’re from around here, pilgrim. What’s your interest in all this?”

“This here’s Mr Sherlock Holmes, from London, England,” Moore put in bluntly. “Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

Krane lost his bored look and his dark eyes brightened. “No kidding? You really him?”

He stepped up closer. When he moved, Holmes noticed, it was as smoothly as an animal. The detective was careful not to flinch back.

Krane lowered his head several inches, peering at Holmes through his bushy eyebrows.

“They say you’re immortal. Is that right?”

“Apparently so,” Holmes replied.

They were close enough together, now, that he could smell the fellow’s breath, and it was not pleasant.

Krane grinned through those rotted teeth of his.

“The Old Gods really have smiled on you then. You have my admiration.”

What ‘Old Gods’? Holmes wondered. But he kept it to himself.

“But I’m a little puzzled, Mr Holmes. What would bring a fine, upstanding English feller like yourself all the way out here to my humble commune?”

“The deaths,” was the brief answer.

And Holmes watched the man’s eyes carefully when he said that, but to no avail. They remained like anthracite, giving away nothing.

“The natural deaths. I thought that was already established. Sure, those people came from here. Sure, they lived under my guidance for a while. But they were all of voting age, and I wasn’t their daddy.”

Krane lifted his fingertips and spread them like a deck of cards.

“Could I help it if they went wandering off into a desert as hostile as this one? Is it my fault that they came to grief? They knew me, then they died. But one thing has nothing to do with the other.”

He had mentioned ‘guidance’ And Holmes couldn’t help but wonder what form that precisely took.

“Three have died, in the course of the last six months,” he pointed out.

“And it’s very sad, I’ll give you that. I knew those people personally.” Krane actually had the nerve to place a palm over his heart. “But what are you saying? That I turned into a snake? I turned into a scorpion? That’s a pretty far-fetched conclusion, Mr Holmes, sir.”

The grin on his face had grown even nastier the whole while he’d been speaking. And in comparison, Harlan Moore’s expression had become a lot less jovial. This man had them over a proverbial barrel, and he knew it.

But they were no longer alone in this part of the desert. The detective tore his gaze from Krane and looked around.

Some two dozen followers had emerged from the nearby tents and half surrounded them, but in a curious rather than an aggressive manner. And what a most peculiar sight they made.

They were all far younger than their leader, most of them in their early twenties or even their late teens. There was an even divide between male and female, they were tanned and healthy and attractive-looking. The women were in either indecently short woven dresses, or in bikinis with fringes dangling from them. The men were dressed like Krane, or else bare-chested altogether. They all wore boots – how could you not, on such terrain? But most of them had feathers in their hair, and a few had streaks of bright paint on their faces.

They seemed to be trying to ‘go native’ in other words. Holmes took that in carefully, then brought his attention back to the rascal stood in front of him.

“And what exactly might the philosophy of this commune be?” he enquired politely.