PART EIGHT: The Fight. Disappearance and Evasion. Sticky Wickets.
One moment the Gadfly was very much in evidence, up there, nose to nose with the Dragonfly, and trembling, clearly with battle anticipation and the intoxicating adrenalin of the hero born to battle. The next, in a flash of iridescent blue and with the utter invisibility of a column of empty air, he was gone. The spectators gasped. The speed of the manoeuvre defied the ability of the eye to see and the mind to grasp. It was as if the Gadfly had dissolved under their very gaze. Vanished or banished? A discussion broke out far below and beside the pool bets were already being taken by the racier punters.
Would he reappear as a lightening strike from above in the heroic and brilliant manner of an avenging angel? Or swoop up from the dark and foetid under-deeps, attacking with an assassin’s thrust, deadly and poisonous, to pierce the Dragonfly’s unprotected flank? Among many a slight mood of uneasiness prevailed.
The light was beginning to fade a little by now, and the shadows among the reeds were slowly taking on a chocolate tinge. Behind the yellow stems where the sun still lingered there was a murky unprotected zone out of which the day already seemed to have been sucked.
The Fly held her breath, looking around anxiously. The Gadfly was nowhere to be seen. From behind a nearby bulrush stem she thought she heard for a brief second what sounded like the clank of armour being unbuckled and the briefest of clinks as if somebody were removing a medal. A base thought crossed her mind. Instantly it was blown to smithereens as the status quo collapsed beneath her. It went tumbling in all directions like a faulty scaffold, leaving not the slightest moment for the smallest smidgeon of suspicion, or any other thought at all for that matter. Horror of horrors! A rush of air lifted her from her reed-bound perch and with a harsh clattering of his leathery ailerons the Dragonfly was upon her. His eyes chewed into her as he scanned her with the ferocity of a diner whose plat du jour has been cancelled and who has been fobbed off with the à la carte.
The Fly shrieked, slamming her own wings into gear. They squealed as if about to wrench themselves from her shoulder sockets and to a rattling whine like an air conditioning fan coming loose from its moorings she was propelled instantly and vertically upwards.
Up, up, up she rocketed, but the rattling and clattering of the Dragonfly’s heavy propulsion rocketed with her. She could hear the rasp of his grunting inhalations as he drew closer and closer and smell the tart odour of his unflossed mandibles each time he exhaled. The stink rose inexorably with him, reaching out its long fingers towards her throat until it outpaced even her own velocity. -I thought it was only tigers who had such aggressive halitosis she thought, -but I suppose it goes with the aggressive teeth. I wonder how the mighty trumpeting walrus of the white and shaven ivories….
She had reached the apex of her trajectory and further speculation died along with her upward progress as the personal nature of the toothy ferocity about to be visited upon her sank in with a crunch. At once she felt herself beginning to drop helplessly, tumbling limp like a lead shot after it has missed its duck.
-This won’t do, she gasped. -Where is the Knight in Blue and Iridescent armour? Where is Mister Muscleman of the Mighty Gallantry and the Scion of the Dinosaur-Scourges? Where is the Tormentor and why isn’t he here doing some tormenting? Where on earth is the Gadfly, for goodness sake? But the hopes and fears of all those years was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, and she with it, and she found herself falling and falling and falling.
Down, down, down she tumbled and as she fell she was aware of a dark shadow gaping wide above her. It was the mouth of the Dragonfly, black and bottomless as a railway tunnel. She thought of the Black Holes in space from which nothing escapes, not even hope. She shuddered with horror at the thought and suddenly a strange and new determination came over her.
With a flutter and a rasp she folded her wings as tightly as she could against her body, spun her head around so that it faced the ground, retracted her legs until they were scarcely more than painted shadows against her flanks and having put herself into the plummet position, plummeted with the heavy determination of an anvil heading home to the iron core at the centre of the Earth.
Down, down, down she plunged. Faster and faster and faster, until the wind beat about her thorax and bellowed and flapped from the one leg which had not fully retracted, owing to the unfortunate circumstance that something unpleasant and sticky was still attached to it. Whatever it was it now billowed out behind her like an unopened parachute throwing up a great unstable turbulence in its wake.
The Fly was unaware of this handicap for by now her heart was in her mouth and the screeching wind was whistling through the space where it once had been. The far reaches of empty space were opening around her and she plummeted on down sliding like a hovercraft on her own terrified momentum.
Perhaps it was the unaccustomed substance now bubbling in her wake. Perhaps it was the unpleasantness of the substance clinging to her leg. Perhaps this trailing ectoplasm made her look huge to the Dragonfly. Whatever it was, it seemed briefly to unnerve him.
The distance between them grew, by a length at first and then by two and then by yet another.
Below her a flash of water showed the pond among the reeds. Beyond it the bog spread to the hills and the red horizon and the mustardy fringes of the sky. It all looked so far away.
She looked behind her. Though the Dragonfly was no longer close he was still there. He seemed a little smaller now, as if hovering as she fell. But her own descent was becoming erratic. She began to turn and tumble, like an arrow that has lost one of its feathers.
The horizon started spinning. Reed beds turned to sky, to heather hills, to scraw and back again to gleaming pond. One moment all was yellow rushes, the next all chocolate shadow. And hidden within ten thousand eyes were watching and waiting, bug-eyed, bog-eyed, pop-eyed and fat with anticipation.
She felt weak and lost, falling through silence.
All of a sudden the noise returned and with it panic. As the silence broke behind her she heard again the rattling and the roaring and the helicopterous clattering of the Dragonfly’s quadruple wings. He was back and attacking. Now she could hear the noisy acceleration of his wings, the clatter of his pursuit, the swishing of his jaws.
But impeded as she was, she fell slowly now, and it seemed no time at all before he had regained the lost distance.
And now he was there, mouth open wide, rushing towards her, rushing to crush her in his mighty jaws, rushing to swallow her. She felt like turtle-bait. She closed her eyes and braced herself. If this was the end, she wondered vaguely, what might be next? She should have spent more time with the Spider. He would have had a few ideas about that. A slight curiosity began to enter her mind. What if…?-I suppose, she thought, it’s too late now.
One moment the Gadfly was very much in evidence, up there, nose to nose with the Dragonfly, and trembling, clearly with battle anticipation and the intoxicating adrenalin of the hero born to battle. The next, in a flash of iridescent blue and with the utter invisibility of a column of empty air, he was gone. The spectators gasped. The speed of the manoeuvre defied the ability of the eye to see and the mind to grasp. It was as if the Gadfly had dissolved under their very gaze. Vanished or banished? A discussion broke out far below and beside the pool bets were already being taken by the racier punters.
Would he reappear as a lightening strike from above in the heroic and brilliant manner of an avenging angel? Or swoop up from the dark and foetid under-deeps, attacking with an assassin’s thrust, deadly and poisonous, to pierce the Dragonfly’s unprotected flank? Among many a slight mood of uneasiness prevailed.
The light was beginning to fade a little by now, and the shadows among the reeds were slowly taking on a chocolate tinge. Behind the yellow stems where the sun still lingered there was a murky unprotected zone out of which the day already seemed to have been sucked.
The Fly held her breath, looking around anxiously. The Gadfly was nowhere to be seen. From behind a nearby bulrush stem she thought she heard for a brief second what sounded like the clank of armour being unbuckled and the briefest of clinks as if somebody were removing a medal. A base thought crossed her mind. Instantly it was blown to smithereens as the status quo collapsed beneath her. It went tumbling in all directions like a faulty scaffold, leaving not the slightest moment for the smallest smidgeon of suspicion, or any other thought at all for that matter. Horror of horrors! A rush of air lifted her from her reed-bound perch and with a harsh clattering of his leathery ailerons the Dragonfly was upon her. His eyes chewed into her as he scanned her with the ferocity of a diner whose plat du jour has been cancelled and who has been fobbed off with the à la carte.
The Fly shrieked, slamming her own wings into gear. They squealed as if about to wrench themselves from her shoulder sockets and to a rattling whine like an air conditioning fan coming loose from its moorings she was propelled instantly and vertically upwards.
Up, up, up she rocketed, but the rattling and clattering of the Dragonfly’s heavy propulsion rocketed with her. She could hear the rasp of his grunting inhalations as he drew closer and closer and smell the tart odour of his unflossed mandibles each time he exhaled. The stink rose inexorably with him, reaching out its long fingers towards her throat until it outpaced even her own velocity. -I thought it was only tigers who had such aggressive halitosis she thought, -but I suppose it goes with the aggressive teeth. I wonder how the mighty trumpeting walrus of the white and shaven ivories….
She had reached the apex of her trajectory and further speculation died along with her upward progress as the personal nature of the toothy ferocity about to be visited upon her sank in with a crunch. At once she felt herself beginning to drop helplessly, tumbling limp like a lead shot after it has missed its duck.
-This won’t do, she gasped. -Where is the Knight in Blue and Iridescent armour? Where is Mister Muscleman of the Mighty Gallantry and the Scion of the Dinosaur-Scourges? Where is the Tormentor and why isn’t he here doing some tormenting? Where on earth is the Gadfly, for goodness sake? But the hopes and fears of all those years was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, and she with it, and she found herself falling and falling and falling.
Down, down, down she tumbled and as she fell she was aware of a dark shadow gaping wide above her. It was the mouth of the Dragonfly, black and bottomless as a railway tunnel. She thought of the Black Holes in space from which nothing escapes, not even hope. She shuddered with horror at the thought and suddenly a strange and new determination came over her.
With a flutter and a rasp she folded her wings as tightly as she could against her body, spun her head around so that it faced the ground, retracted her legs until they were scarcely more than painted shadows against her flanks and having put herself into the plummet position, plummeted with the heavy determination of an anvil heading home to the iron core at the centre of the Earth.
Down, down, down she plunged. Faster and faster and faster, until the wind beat about her thorax and bellowed and flapped from the one leg which had not fully retracted, owing to the unfortunate circumstance that something unpleasant and sticky was still attached to it. Whatever it was it now billowed out behind her like an unopened parachute throwing up a great unstable turbulence in its wake.
The Fly was unaware of this handicap for by now her heart was in her mouth and the screeching wind was whistling through the space where it once had been. The far reaches of empty space were opening around her and she plummeted on down sliding like a hovercraft on her own terrified momentum.
Perhaps it was the unaccustomed substance now bubbling in her wake. Perhaps it was the unpleasantness of the substance clinging to her leg. Perhaps this trailing ectoplasm made her look huge to the Dragonfly. Whatever it was, it seemed briefly to unnerve him.
The distance between them grew, by a length at first and then by two and then by yet another.
Below her a flash of water showed the pond among the reeds. Beyond it the bog spread to the hills and the red horizon and the mustardy fringes of the sky. It all looked so far away.
She looked behind her. Though the Dragonfly was no longer close he was still there. He seemed a little smaller now, as if hovering as she fell. But her own descent was becoming erratic. She began to turn and tumble, like an arrow that has lost one of its feathers.
The horizon started spinning. Reed beds turned to sky, to heather hills, to scraw and back again to gleaming pond. One moment all was yellow rushes, the next all chocolate shadow. And hidden within ten thousand eyes were watching and waiting, bug-eyed, bog-eyed, pop-eyed and fat with anticipation.
She felt weak and lost, falling through silence.
All of a sudden the noise returned and with it panic. As the silence broke behind her she heard again the rattling and the roaring and the helicopterous clattering of the Dragonfly’s quadruple wings. He was back and attacking. Now she could hear the noisy acceleration of his wings, the clatter of his pursuit, the swishing of his jaws.
But impeded as she was, she fell slowly now, and it seemed no time at all before he had regained the lost distance.
And now he was there, mouth open wide, rushing towards her, rushing to crush her in his mighty jaws, rushing to swallow her. She felt like turtle-bait. She closed her eyes and braced herself. If this was the end, she wondered vaguely, what might be next? She should have spent more time with the Spider. He would have had a few ideas about that. A slight curiosity began to enter her mind. What if…?-I suppose, she thought, it’s too late now.
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