starfishstar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
starfishstar) wrote2015-12-24 05:25 pm
starfishstar) wrote2015-12-24 05:25 pm
Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name, chapter 4
BUDS AND BELLS AND STARS WITHOUT A NAME
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Characters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock, cameos from Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Donovan, Moriarty (sort of) and Redbeard (sort of); eventual Sherlock/Lestrade, but can also be read as mostly gen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER FOUR
Once Greg came close enough to see it, the spider web did indeed sparkle in what little moonlight was able to wrestle its way free of the cloud cover overhead and shine down on the grassy dell that nestled here in the cradle of the dark, quiet woods. Greg had definitely never seen this bit of the park.
No earthly spider could have spun the web that lay before him. It stretched clear across the dell, at least thirty yards across. Greg stepped closer and touched a finger to one of its outermost strands, which stretched from a tree at the edge of the dell into the labyrinthine heart of the web. The strand was sticky to the touch, and Greg felt the reverberation travel through it, away from him and back again, before he jerked his hand away.
He didn’t see any giant spider – not that he’d expected to – but in the faint light, Greg could make out large, dark, inert forms scattered across the web, just as dead flies might look immobilised in the silken threads of a real spider’s web, but on a grotesque and enormous scale.
But this was not a giant spider web, those were not enormous mutant flies, and there was going to be real-world explanation for all this. Somehow.
Somewhere close by, a dog whined. And Greg saw with horror that one of the dark, immobilised lumps was still moving, struggling feebly where it lay bound in the sticky web.
The dog whined again, high and piteous and scared.
“Damn it,” Greg said aloud. Because he hadn’t come here to rescue some dog that had blundered into a spider’s web – blundered into something that looked like a spider’s web, he corrected himself, because no matter how it looked this was not actually the web of a giant spider – but now that he was here, of course he couldn’t ignore it.
Greg studied the web, assessing how he could navigate from where he stood at its edge to the dark, shivering lump that was the dog. The strands of the web were sparser towards the edges but strung ever more closely together nearer to its centre, too close to walk between. They were not quite rope-like in thickness, too thin to walk and balance on, too high off the ground to easily jump over. But they all lay in roughly the same plane, about three feet off the ground. Perhaps he could pass underneath, by ducking beneath and between the threads.
Greg sighed, gripped his torch in one hand, and ducked beneath the first strand, carefully keeping his head below its level, so as not to get caught by its gluey length. So far so good. Carefully ducking and dodging, he made his piecemeal way forwards, zigging and zagging, lifting his head up into the small open spaces between the sticky strands to assess his progress.
As he got closer, Greg could see that the dog had the long, shaggy fur of a red setter. It was impossible to tell colour in the faint moonlight, but the size and shape of the dog seemed right for a setter. It whiffled softly in greeting as Greg approached, only a dozen feet separating them now, and attempted weakly to wag its tail. The dog lay on its side, suspended in the web and bound from shoulder to rump in the sticky, ropy strands. The web vibrated ominously as it tried to move.
No – that vibration wasn’t coming from the dog.
Something huge and nightmarish and black was approaching across the web, something with too many legs, sharp-edged pincers and darkly glittering eyes that caught all of the scant moonlight and reflected it back, its gaze malevolent and fixed on Greg. The creature moved with strange, jerky motions, picking its way with disconcerting speed as it moved side to side and forwards along the interconnected strands of the web, towards Greg and the dog that lay, struggling, between them.
“Get away!” Greg shouted, for all the good shouting would do. He shoved his torch out of the way into a jacket pocket and plunged forwards, flinging himself down at the ground and moving at the fastest possible crawl towards the trapped dog, determined that if nothing else, he’d get to the dog before that nightmare-thing did.
The rough ground scratched Greg’s palms as he half-ran, half-crawled under and through the web – towards the dog, towards the massive spider, towards danger, because he couldn’t do otherwise, not when faced with a threat like that. He just hoped Sherlock had got away to somewhere safe.
Greg swore as his head brushed against a strand of the web and he had to tear his hair free of its gluey hold as he scrambled on.
The night around him had taken on a nightmare quality, faint lights glinting strangely, sounds weirdly amplified, the swish of the monster’s long legs audible as it approached, the dog’s high, desperate whine sharp in Greg’s ears, but he was almost there, had almost reached the dog where it struggled against its bindings near an unusually slim oak tree that protruded up out of the ground between two strands of the web, which was funny because Greg didn’t remember seeing any trees in the dell when he’d viewed it from above –
“Get out of here!” Sherlock shouted, and it was Sherlock there, not a tree, of course it was Sherlock, standing lithe and tall in his long coat, a dark outline against the dark sky, then Sherlock was bending over the struggling dog and tearing at the spider silk that bound it. “Get out!” Sherlock cried again. “It’s too dangerous here for mortals, Inspector, just go!”
The monstrous spider was mere feet away, but Sherlock, in some superhuman feat of strength, tore apart the last of the threads that bound the dog. He lifted the animal, which was shaking with fear, free of the sticky web and set it gently down on the ground below.
“Go,” Greg heard Sherlock whisper in the dog’s floppy ear, in a voice warmer and more tender than Greg would have thought possible from a man so cool and strange. “Go on, run home, go.”
The dog gave a yelp, tottered at first on its legs after so long immobile, then found its balance and ran, just as Sherlock had told it to do, streaked away under the strands of the web and up to the rim of the dell, and then it was gone into the woods.
Greg turned his head for the briefest moment to watch the dog make it away to safety, and in that moment the monster loomed up behind him and a breathy voice at his ear said, “Hi!”
Greg spun and found the monstrous spider staring straight down at him with all eight of its darkly glinting eyes, its sharp pincers waving in and out. It perched delicately, its eight legs balanced across several different threads of its web, a visitation out of a nightmare, something primeval, something horrible and wrong.
“You’re dishy,” the monster cooed. “Oh, yes, I like this one! I think I’ll keep you. I’d like to devour you, right down to your heart. Ah!” The spider made an odd, agitated clicking noise and seemed to dance on all eight of its legs, the web undulating weirdly beneath its weight. “Yes, oh, yes, I do like pets, so touchingly loyal, but this one’s even better. Sexy. I think I’ll keep him. Thank you for this present, Sherlock, thank you.”
“He’s not for you,” Sherlock snapped, and he was suddenly there beside Greg, only one thin strand of the web separating them. Sherlock stared up into the spider’s hairy face, standing impossibly tall and undaunted by this nightmare apparition. “And London’s not for you, either, come to that. Get out, Moriarty. This is not your battleground.”
The spider clicked, a noise Greg felt bizarrely certain was its way of laughing.
“Oh, Sherlock Holmes,” it said. “Sherlock, Holmes, whatever name you wear these days. I’ve loved this, this little game of ours, chasing each other across human history. They’re so darling, aren’t they, humans? Love how gullible they are. Anyway. The point is, you don’t want me to go away! How could you play the hero without me? Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. And what could possibly fit better than a monster in the deep, dark woods, huh, Sherlock? You need me. You want me. You’re my reason to stay.”
Sherlock cut his eyes sideways to Greg, and with a shock of realisation, Greg saw that Sherlock was tempted. Whatever this creature was, whatever Sherlock was, he was tempted by the macabre narrative this monster spun, by its appeal to Sherlock’s love of the dramatic.
“First, though,” the spider drawled, “we’ll have to get rid of your pet. Police detective, isn’t he? Hope he’s as tasty as he looks.”
Lightning fast, two of the legs snapped down and pinned Greg between them, lifting him up until he was suspended high above the web.
“No!” Sherlock shouted.
The spider’s legs were cold and hairy and hard and impossibly strong. Greg struggled to no avail, then gave up struggling in favour of frantic planning. This thing had to have a weak spot. Fairy tale monsters always had a weak spot, didn’t they?
“It was nice to meet you,” the spider purred, all of its eyes fixed on Greg. “But we both knew it couldn’t last, didn’t we? I’m a monster and I’m soooo changeable.”
“Final warning,” Sherlock growled from the ground below them. “Put him down.”
“Or you’ll do what?” The spider laughed that same strange, high clicking sound, its legs clamping even harder around Greg’s abdomen. “You’ll sneer at me? You’ll weep sad little tears over your human friend? I thought you were better than that, Sherlock. I thought you were like me, but you’re ordinary, aren’t you?”
“Never!” Sherlock shouted, and he threw back his head and made the strangest sound Greg had ever heard, an eerie, wailing, high-pitched shriek, like a bird’s cry if a bird were trying to summon a denizen of the land of the dead. Greg’s head pulsed and ached with the sound, something surely human ears were never meant to hear.
An answering cry came from above, and something dived down out of the darkness in a riot of feathers and claws.
“Go for the eyes!” Greg heard Sherlock cry out. “You like shiny things, don’t you? Go for the eyes!”
The spider screamed in panic and dropped Greg, who fell, hard, to the ground. He landed in an awkward half-roll, slapping his arms to the ground to break the worst of the impact, but still catching the back of his skull against the rocky ground.
Winded, bright bursts of light splashing across his vision, Greg only half saw what came next – a feathery creature with a human face diving at the spider, clawed talons outstretched; the spider rearing back in fear, striking out wildly with its forelimbs, scissoring its pincers in the air.
The winged thing rose, circling to make another pass, and with it momentarily out of reach the spider thrust its pincers at Sherlock instead, except was it a tree standing there where Sherlock had been? The spider’s pincers were like great axes, slamming into the tree trunk from both sides, and someone screamed, a horrible rending noise of pain, and Greg’s vision blurred to black as somewhere above him the spider roared and the bird-thing screamed and dived.
(continue to the final chapter, CHAPTER FIVE)
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Characters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock, cameos from Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Donovan, Moriarty (sort of) and Redbeard (sort of); eventual Sherlock/Lestrade, but can also be read as mostly gen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER FOUR
Once Greg came close enough to see it, the spider web did indeed sparkle in what little moonlight was able to wrestle its way free of the cloud cover overhead and shine down on the grassy dell that nestled here in the cradle of the dark, quiet woods. Greg had definitely never seen this bit of the park.
No earthly spider could have spun the web that lay before him. It stretched clear across the dell, at least thirty yards across. Greg stepped closer and touched a finger to one of its outermost strands, which stretched from a tree at the edge of the dell into the labyrinthine heart of the web. The strand was sticky to the touch, and Greg felt the reverberation travel through it, away from him and back again, before he jerked his hand away.
He didn’t see any giant spider – not that he’d expected to – but in the faint light, Greg could make out large, dark, inert forms scattered across the web, just as dead flies might look immobilised in the silken threads of a real spider’s web, but on a grotesque and enormous scale.
But this was not a giant spider web, those were not enormous mutant flies, and there was going to be real-world explanation for all this. Somehow.
Somewhere close by, a dog whined. And Greg saw with horror that one of the dark, immobilised lumps was still moving, struggling feebly where it lay bound in the sticky web.
The dog whined again, high and piteous and scared.
“Damn it,” Greg said aloud. Because he hadn’t come here to rescue some dog that had blundered into a spider’s web – blundered into something that looked like a spider’s web, he corrected himself, because no matter how it looked this was not actually the web of a giant spider – but now that he was here, of course he couldn’t ignore it.
Greg studied the web, assessing how he could navigate from where he stood at its edge to the dark, shivering lump that was the dog. The strands of the web were sparser towards the edges but strung ever more closely together nearer to its centre, too close to walk between. They were not quite rope-like in thickness, too thin to walk and balance on, too high off the ground to easily jump over. But they all lay in roughly the same plane, about three feet off the ground. Perhaps he could pass underneath, by ducking beneath and between the threads.
Greg sighed, gripped his torch in one hand, and ducked beneath the first strand, carefully keeping his head below its level, so as not to get caught by its gluey length. So far so good. Carefully ducking and dodging, he made his piecemeal way forwards, zigging and zagging, lifting his head up into the small open spaces between the sticky strands to assess his progress.
As he got closer, Greg could see that the dog had the long, shaggy fur of a red setter. It was impossible to tell colour in the faint moonlight, but the size and shape of the dog seemed right for a setter. It whiffled softly in greeting as Greg approached, only a dozen feet separating them now, and attempted weakly to wag its tail. The dog lay on its side, suspended in the web and bound from shoulder to rump in the sticky, ropy strands. The web vibrated ominously as it tried to move.
No – that vibration wasn’t coming from the dog.
Something huge and nightmarish and black was approaching across the web, something with too many legs, sharp-edged pincers and darkly glittering eyes that caught all of the scant moonlight and reflected it back, its gaze malevolent and fixed on Greg. The creature moved with strange, jerky motions, picking its way with disconcerting speed as it moved side to side and forwards along the interconnected strands of the web, towards Greg and the dog that lay, struggling, between them.
“Get away!” Greg shouted, for all the good shouting would do. He shoved his torch out of the way into a jacket pocket and plunged forwards, flinging himself down at the ground and moving at the fastest possible crawl towards the trapped dog, determined that if nothing else, he’d get to the dog before that nightmare-thing did.
The rough ground scratched Greg’s palms as he half-ran, half-crawled under and through the web – towards the dog, towards the massive spider, towards danger, because he couldn’t do otherwise, not when faced with a threat like that. He just hoped Sherlock had got away to somewhere safe.
Greg swore as his head brushed against a strand of the web and he had to tear his hair free of its gluey hold as he scrambled on.
The night around him had taken on a nightmare quality, faint lights glinting strangely, sounds weirdly amplified, the swish of the monster’s long legs audible as it approached, the dog’s high, desperate whine sharp in Greg’s ears, but he was almost there, had almost reached the dog where it struggled against its bindings near an unusually slim oak tree that protruded up out of the ground between two strands of the web, which was funny because Greg didn’t remember seeing any trees in the dell when he’d viewed it from above –
“Get out of here!” Sherlock shouted, and it was Sherlock there, not a tree, of course it was Sherlock, standing lithe and tall in his long coat, a dark outline against the dark sky, then Sherlock was bending over the struggling dog and tearing at the spider silk that bound it. “Get out!” Sherlock cried again. “It’s too dangerous here for mortals, Inspector, just go!”
The monstrous spider was mere feet away, but Sherlock, in some superhuman feat of strength, tore apart the last of the threads that bound the dog. He lifted the animal, which was shaking with fear, free of the sticky web and set it gently down on the ground below.
“Go,” Greg heard Sherlock whisper in the dog’s floppy ear, in a voice warmer and more tender than Greg would have thought possible from a man so cool and strange. “Go on, run home, go.”
The dog gave a yelp, tottered at first on its legs after so long immobile, then found its balance and ran, just as Sherlock had told it to do, streaked away under the strands of the web and up to the rim of the dell, and then it was gone into the woods.
Greg turned his head for the briefest moment to watch the dog make it away to safety, and in that moment the monster loomed up behind him and a breathy voice at his ear said, “Hi!”
Greg spun and found the monstrous spider staring straight down at him with all eight of its darkly glinting eyes, its sharp pincers waving in and out. It perched delicately, its eight legs balanced across several different threads of its web, a visitation out of a nightmare, something primeval, something horrible and wrong.
“You’re dishy,” the monster cooed. “Oh, yes, I like this one! I think I’ll keep you. I’d like to devour you, right down to your heart. Ah!” The spider made an odd, agitated clicking noise and seemed to dance on all eight of its legs, the web undulating weirdly beneath its weight. “Yes, oh, yes, I do like pets, so touchingly loyal, but this one’s even better. Sexy. I think I’ll keep him. Thank you for this present, Sherlock, thank you.”
“He’s not for you,” Sherlock snapped, and he was suddenly there beside Greg, only one thin strand of the web separating them. Sherlock stared up into the spider’s hairy face, standing impossibly tall and undaunted by this nightmare apparition. “And London’s not for you, either, come to that. Get out, Moriarty. This is not your battleground.”
The spider clicked, a noise Greg felt bizarrely certain was its way of laughing.
“Oh, Sherlock Holmes,” it said. “Sherlock, Holmes, whatever name you wear these days. I’ve loved this, this little game of ours, chasing each other across human history. They’re so darling, aren’t they, humans? Love how gullible they are. Anyway. The point is, you don’t want me to go away! How could you play the hero without me? Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. And what could possibly fit better than a monster in the deep, dark woods, huh, Sherlock? You need me. You want me. You’re my reason to stay.”
Sherlock cut his eyes sideways to Greg, and with a shock of realisation, Greg saw that Sherlock was tempted. Whatever this creature was, whatever Sherlock was, he was tempted by the macabre narrative this monster spun, by its appeal to Sherlock’s love of the dramatic.
“First, though,” the spider drawled, “we’ll have to get rid of your pet. Police detective, isn’t he? Hope he’s as tasty as he looks.”
Lightning fast, two of the legs snapped down and pinned Greg between them, lifting him up until he was suspended high above the web.
“No!” Sherlock shouted.
The spider’s legs were cold and hairy and hard and impossibly strong. Greg struggled to no avail, then gave up struggling in favour of frantic planning. This thing had to have a weak spot. Fairy tale monsters always had a weak spot, didn’t they?
“It was nice to meet you,” the spider purred, all of its eyes fixed on Greg. “But we both knew it couldn’t last, didn’t we? I’m a monster and I’m soooo changeable.”
“Final warning,” Sherlock growled from the ground below them. “Put him down.”
“Or you’ll do what?” The spider laughed that same strange, high clicking sound, its legs clamping even harder around Greg’s abdomen. “You’ll sneer at me? You’ll weep sad little tears over your human friend? I thought you were better than that, Sherlock. I thought you were like me, but you’re ordinary, aren’t you?”
“Never!” Sherlock shouted, and he threw back his head and made the strangest sound Greg had ever heard, an eerie, wailing, high-pitched shriek, like a bird’s cry if a bird were trying to summon a denizen of the land of the dead. Greg’s head pulsed and ached with the sound, something surely human ears were never meant to hear.
An answering cry came from above, and something dived down out of the darkness in a riot of feathers and claws.
“Go for the eyes!” Greg heard Sherlock cry out. “You like shiny things, don’t you? Go for the eyes!”
The spider screamed in panic and dropped Greg, who fell, hard, to the ground. He landed in an awkward half-roll, slapping his arms to the ground to break the worst of the impact, but still catching the back of his skull against the rocky ground.
Winded, bright bursts of light splashing across his vision, Greg only half saw what came next – a feathery creature with a human face diving at the spider, clawed talons outstretched; the spider rearing back in fear, striking out wildly with its forelimbs, scissoring its pincers in the air.
The winged thing rose, circling to make another pass, and with it momentarily out of reach the spider thrust its pincers at Sherlock instead, except was it a tree standing there where Sherlock had been? The spider’s pincers were like great axes, slamming into the tree trunk from both sides, and someone screamed, a horrible rending noise of pain, and Greg’s vision blurred to black as somewhere above him the spider roared and the bird-thing screamed and dived.
(continue to the final chapter, CHAPTER FIVE)