For Spacedmonkey...
Sherlock Holmes had not been asleep. He had not been asleep for four days.
It’s far more accurate to say that in the depth of the night, his senses moved from passive to active as his bloodshot eyes noticed a shadow where no shadow should be. He got to his feet like a marionette untangling itself, blinked, and then stood fast, poker at the ready. “Stop skulking,” he challenged. “I can see you by the skirting board.”
The shadow grew.
“Your powers of obfuscation...”
And grew, thickening and darkening as it did so, gaining form and features.
“...leave a lot to be desired,” Holmes finished, his voice smaller and with less swagger in it than at the start of the sentence.
The obsidian terror filling the corridor looked at him, its eyes shining silver white and reflective like a cat’s.
Holmes was of a time and class where the superiority of the English was as impenetrable as any armour; and the sword of his intellect was razor-sharp. “I shan’t stand for any nonsense. It’s perfectly clear, as I am a gentleman of reason: you do not scare me and either you are a supernatural entity - which I sincerely doubt - or else you are a hallucination of my own creation, or, you are a ruffian in a quite singular disguise sent to do the old girl harm.”
The monstrosity grinned. It had too many teeth. Not like a mad uncle who hadn’t visited a dentist in a while; but like the sort of deep sea eel fishermen tell stories about. Its neck curved down, which was peculiar as the thing hadn’t previously displayed a neck of any sort and here was one that appeared to have been stored like an accordion between its shoulder blades...
Presented with such an opportune target, Holmes delivered a stroke a little like a karate strike and also somewhat like a sabre thrust with the poker.
Instead of decapitating the monster it cut right through: a knife through self adhesive jelly. The detective regained his balance and adjusted his grip on the poker as he watched everything flow back together; curliques as delicate as smoke, as dark as Indian ink, as thick and implacable as bitumen.
Holmes sniffed. “Pure ephemera,” he complained, twirling the poker and striking a coup de grace at the creature.
Movement: an arm unfurled like a cobra, the huge mercury-hued shears that existed in place of hands intercepting the weapon, catching it between the two blades. The poker screeched briefly as the shears tightened and held in a grip strong enough to halt all forward momentum, delicate enough not to cut the iron through.
The set of shears around the poker were lifted into the air; the poker naturally followed and, never one to be deterred, so did Sherlock Holmes. Dangling, he was brought level with one mordant, phosphorous eye.
“Sentient soot junket!” the detective cursed.
The thing gave him a slight shake; not the hectic worrying of a rat-catcher hound with his prey, more a maid selecting a coat from the chesterfield and wondering if the moths had got to it.
Its voice was like a thousand snake-skins being rubbed the wrong way. “TJEN MA’ET EM T’JEN?” It cuffed him on the side of the head with a force that ought to have cracked his skull. Instead Holmes felt as if he’d been punched in the face by a pillow. (Which, for a five year old walking into a Mycroft trap, is no small deal, but for a great detective might be shaken off.) He coughed, or maybe sneezed; he had the sentation of water clearing from his ears and he saw - because Sherlock Holmes was always very good at seeing what was really there and not what he believed or expected - a cloud of fine gold dust that had, apparently, been knocked from him at the creature’s strike.
“Do you terrorize bees?” he asked, wondering if bees were ever forced to lose the pollen they had collected in the same way.
“TE. JESHNEY-SE KET SEBATERET. MEDA,” the thing said with a certain amount of satisfaction.
“I’m fluent in Latin and Greek and I know a smattering of Hebrew, Arabic, Sumerian and - though it pains me to admit - Enochian, but really old boy...”
“YOU ARRRE LI-TTTLE THINNNGG,” it announced, sand-sibilant and raspy. “VERYBRIGHT.”
The detective bridled; even hanging in mid air from a fire-iron the man was not without ego. “I beg your pardon, I’ll have you know that...”
The thing dropped Holmes. Four days without sleep and rising indignation do not make for swift reflexes; the detective landed safely but without any grace whatsoever, losing his grip on the poker. As he picked himself up he was in time to watch the monstrosity flick the poker into the air with one shear-tip and catch it in its mouth with a snap. There was a sound like a metal grinder under strain. The thing spat out the misshapen and severely chewed stick of brass and iron.
“NOTTT SOBADD TOOOBE SHHHADOW. WEFIGHT. WWWE PRO-TTECT WELOVE WELIVE WEARE NNNEED-ED. NOTTT BE NNEVERBORN. RRRRE-MEMBERR-ED.” Then it grinned, a wide wide grin such as the maws of megalodons and megalomaniacs might smile: a whole obsidian mountain of shards, a shoal of eels, a basket of barber-surgeons’ sharps. One set of shears clicked open and closed with the longest silken-steel ‘snnnniikkkk’; the eyes burnt brighter, and the whole thing evaporated into swirls of inky shadow.
Holmes blinked owlishly at the now empty corridor. “You owe me a fire-iron,” he called softly to the shadows, picking up the spectacularly malformed poker with a sigh and resuming his vigil.