PART ELEVEN: Last Encore of the Dragonfly.
If insects can snarl the Dragonfly snarled. If insects can roar, the Dragonfly roared. If insects can scream the Dragonfly screamed.
These boisterous acts of self-cleansing completed, the Dragonfly turned his attention to the business at hand. The noisy purge had honed his appetite to a razor edge. His was an age-old ritual, and as ever, it had successfully flushed away any personal bias and petty character blemishes that the events of the past little while had encouraged. He was now rid of hurt pride and the need for revenge. He was himself again, a shining carnivore, sharp of mind and sharp of claw. It was time to hunt, to kill, to devour.
He had long since ceased his impersonation of a windmill. The frantic tumblings and turnings were behind him. Now he rested, quiet and threatening, hovering far above the high bog, and meticulously cleaned himself and his yellow and purple accoutrements of the remains of an unpleasant and glutinously elastic something that had wrapped itself around his body.
His hooked claws and cut-throat mandible soon made quick work of a task that the Fly had found laborious and slow and in the end impossible to complete.
He smiled and with the lofty grimace of a cathedral gargoyle peered down with griffin eye into the gathering gloom.
The sun was bending low now, sinking ever closer towards the horizon. The last of its light smote his armour turning the purple to brown and the yellow to burnt orange. He glittered proudly like an abominable war satellite beneath a firmament sucked of its friendly blue.
Far, far below, encircled by the disappearing hills of heather and the murk-laden bog he watched the rush pool gleaming through the approaching dusk like an open eye in the darkness. In the impending twilight it seemed to wink at him in complicity.
Through the cold visor of his professional eye he picked out movement below him. He saw the Fly emerge unsteadily and in slow motion from the cream cake. His calculating hunter’s brain took in her inability to move properly. But then he saw the figure rise, toad-headed and wobbly. He was not programmed for interest in toads. Instantly he dismissed her, as he would have dismissed a pile of dead leaves or a blackberry bush.
His keen hearing picked up a horrified shriek. It rose in a tumbling wail, echoing over the water and a second later the Dragonfly saw the Gadfly leap from behind a clump of yellow reeds and begin a terrified scramble up the trunk of the nearest bulrush. For a long moment he was clearly visible outlined against the pale stem, a black and fragile silhouette, unbuckling his armour and flinging it medals and all into the pool. He was now naked and unprotected. In the fight or flight scale of things, he was clearly at the flight end of the equation, stumbling blindly and panic-stricken and in utter terror towards the Spider’s web which, still unnoticed by the Gadfly, gleamed and shimmered like a great neon advertisement between the reed he was climbing and its neighbour.
The Dragonfly did not see the Spider, lurking silently on the fringes of his cobweb. The Spider’s eyes glittered with excitement, measuring the coordinates of his theories as the scene unfolded before his eyes. He was poised in the discovery mode, close to a Eureka moment.
If insects can snarl the Dragonfly snarled. If insects can roar, the Dragonfly roared. If insects can scream the Dragonfly screamed.
These boisterous acts of self-cleansing completed, the Dragonfly turned his attention to the business at hand. The noisy purge had honed his appetite to a razor edge. His was an age-old ritual, and as ever, it had successfully flushed away any personal bias and petty character blemishes that the events of the past little while had encouraged. He was now rid of hurt pride and the need for revenge. He was himself again, a shining carnivore, sharp of mind and sharp of claw. It was time to hunt, to kill, to devour.
He had long since ceased his impersonation of a windmill. The frantic tumblings and turnings were behind him. Now he rested, quiet and threatening, hovering far above the high bog, and meticulously cleaned himself and his yellow and purple accoutrements of the remains of an unpleasant and glutinously elastic something that had wrapped itself around his body.
His hooked claws and cut-throat mandible soon made quick work of a task that the Fly had found laborious and slow and in the end impossible to complete.
He smiled and with the lofty grimace of a cathedral gargoyle peered down with griffin eye into the gathering gloom.
The sun was bending low now, sinking ever closer towards the horizon. The last of its light smote his armour turning the purple to brown and the yellow to burnt orange. He glittered proudly like an abominable war satellite beneath a firmament sucked of its friendly blue.
Far, far below, encircled by the disappearing hills of heather and the murk-laden bog he watched the rush pool gleaming through the approaching dusk like an open eye in the darkness. In the impending twilight it seemed to wink at him in complicity.
Through the cold visor of his professional eye he picked out movement below him. He saw the Fly emerge unsteadily and in slow motion from the cream cake. His calculating hunter’s brain took in her inability to move properly. But then he saw the figure rise, toad-headed and wobbly. He was not programmed for interest in toads. Instantly he dismissed her, as he would have dismissed a pile of dead leaves or a blackberry bush.
His keen hearing picked up a horrified shriek. It rose in a tumbling wail, echoing over the water and a second later the Dragonfly saw the Gadfly leap from behind a clump of yellow reeds and begin a terrified scramble up the trunk of the nearest bulrush. For a long moment he was clearly visible outlined against the pale stem, a black and fragile silhouette, unbuckling his armour and flinging it medals and all into the pool. He was now naked and unprotected. In the fight or flight scale of things, he was clearly at the flight end of the equation, stumbling blindly and panic-stricken and in utter terror towards the Spider’s web which, still unnoticed by the Gadfly, gleamed and shimmered like a great neon advertisement between the reed he was climbing and its neighbour.
The Dragonfly did not see the Spider, lurking silently on the fringes of his cobweb. The Spider’s eyes glittered with excitement, measuring the coordinates of his theories as the scene unfolded before his eyes. He was poised in the discovery mode, close to a Eureka moment.
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