Halloween Spook Me 2024 - The Night of the Spider.
Title: The Night of the Spider
Genre: Man from UNCLE
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4255
Prompts:
For the full story, click on the title. My thanks to nursesparky for her beta and her tremendous help with kicking this one up a notch.
A taste:
The webs hung as heavy as Spanish moss from the beams. Illya used the end of a stick to brush them away and made a face. “They could have at least tidied up if they knew we were coming.”
“That’s the thing about abandoned buildings… no self-esteem.” Napoleon ducked to avoid a web. “I’d hate to see the spider that spun this web.” Napoleon Solo kept his flashlight bouncing over the immediate area, his eyes narrowed to detect the slightest movement. There were lumpy piles around, all covered with thick webbing.
“I suspect it’s a collective effort rather than a singular achievement.” He brushed down a rather large web and his head twisted at the sound scurrying. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Nothing or, at least, that is my fervent prayer.”
“How are we sure that our agent is even here? All we have is a few suppositions.”
“And that one agent’s arm.”
“Well, yes, that is rather telling. But our ME said that it looked severely dehydrated and our agents haven’t been missing that long.”
“But the fingerprints were a match. Just more questions and, yet, even that is better than nothing. I’m not sure what I expected to find here, but it certainly wasn’t nothing.” Illya shook his head as if to knock away invisible spiders. “And apparently nothing is all there is here. They are probably right, that arm was left somewhere else and brought here by an animal. We need to start again.”
Genre: Man from UNCLE
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4255
Prompts:
For the full story, click on the title. My thanks to nursesparky for her beta and her tremendous help with kicking this one up a notch.
A taste:
The webs hung as heavy as Spanish moss from the beams. Illya used the end of a stick to brush them away and made a face. “They could have at least tidied up if they knew we were coming.”
“That’s the thing about abandoned buildings… no self-esteem.” Napoleon ducked to avoid a web. “I’d hate to see the spider that spun this web.” Napoleon Solo kept his flashlight bouncing over the immediate area, his eyes narrowed to detect the slightest movement. There were lumpy piles around, all covered with thick webbing.
“I suspect it’s a collective effort rather than a singular achievement.” He brushed down a rather large web and his head twisted at the sound scurrying. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Nothing or, at least, that is my fervent prayer.”
“How are we sure that our agent is even here? All we have is a few suppositions.”
“And that one agent’s arm.”
“Well, yes, that is rather telling. But our ME said that it looked severely dehydrated and our agents haven’t been missing that long.”
“But the fingerprints were a match. Just more questions and, yet, even that is better than nothing. I’m not sure what I expected to find here, but it certainly wasn’t nothing.” Illya shook his head as if to knock away invisible spiders. “And apparently nothing is all there is here. They are probably right, that arm was left somewhere else and brought here by an animal. We need to start again.”