I dreamed that I had been accepted into Harvard as a doctoral student in mathematics, and would be starting in the fall. In the mean time, I needed to complete a third year of university-level foreign language. They had a program where I could go to France and take third-year French, so I jumped on that opportunity.
So I went to France, and had started classes, but couldn't find the book the instructor recommended in the university book store. I thought his book might be one I already had from previous French studies, so I went back to the class to ask if my Vis-à-Vis book would be okay to use in the class, or if I needed to buy the book store's book, which looked different from what he'd shown us.
I couldn't find the professor, and since it had gotten dark, I decided to just go home and try again the next day. I was walking across the park when I found some children standing around a storm grate, fishing. I couldn't figure out where their parents were, but as I stood there chatting with them, they kept reeling in these half-decomposed fish carcasses. More and more children were walking up. I glanced over my shoulder to see where they were coming from, and Sherlock and Watson (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) were there. Sherlock said it was some sort of clue, look at the children's faces.
I turned back around, and saw that the faces of the children were turning a waxy, moldy, livid green. The texture was like half-withered leaves, with veins standing out, like their skin would crunch and crumble if touched. Sherlock said something was beginning to wake up in the castle, and we needed to investigate.
Sure enough, the water below the storm grate was flowing down from a nearby hill topped by a spectacularly turreted stone castle, falling into ruin. We climbed the hill and crawled through the rubble of its front gates to enter yard. The stone was a bluish-gray slate filmed here and there with dark patches of damp and bright patches of golden-green moss. In the moonlight it was a mass of shaddows. We split up to see if we could find the source of the trouble.
I walked through a vast stone hall, its floor littered with a tumble of stone and wooden tables and chairs. All around the sides of the hall staircases climbed and spiraled to different levels, cloistered corridors, towers and turrets. Bits of bright color flashed in the darkest corners, but when I tried to look into the shadows to see them more clearly, they were gone.
I found my way to a wide terrace overlooking the moat. As I gazed down, the sluggish, leaden water began to bubble here and there.
"Bubbles," Sherlock said behind my shoulder. I jumped and spun around, and he and Watson were there with me, looking down at the moat.
"'Bubbles,' what does that mean, 'Bubbles'?" Watson asked.
"Follow me," Sherlock replied. He turned on his heal, his dark great-coat flying out around him, and he began to run. Watson and I followed him.
We sped up stair cases, to the highest tower. We came out upon a landing overlooking a high courtyard, where the years seemed to have turned the paving stones to gravel. The gravel bulged and stirred ominously. A woman appeared, clinging to the wall on the other side of the courtyard. She was skeletal, with skin as green and waxy as the children in the park. She wore a red and purple and white harlequin's suit, and had flying, straw-like pale hair and deep circles around her blazing eyes. She began to laugh, saying it was too late to stop what was about to happen.
Giant fanged worms burst out of the gravel, their faceless heads writhing higher and higher, up toward the landing where we stood, and we scattered. I fled back into the stairwell, up, up, up to the top of the highest tower, then up again to the top of the small turret at its back. But there was nowhere to hide from the worms. They wound their way up the tower, up the turrent, and I dashed back into the darkened stairs and sped down to the hall.
The flashes of color resolved themselves into the skeleton woman's minions, thin as paper, but tough as horn, in purple and red, flapping and drifting down from the shadows to hold me. They could pin me against a wall. Their edges could cut and slice. But they could also be evaded. Then I found I could catch one from behind and roll it up into a sort of pointed lance, and it would be helpless in my hands. That tough lance could then be used to pierce and pin the others.
I began catching and rolling and pinning them to walls while I tried to find their queen. I figured she could probably be destroyed with one of those lances, too. And somehow I knew that if I destroyed her, the worms would die. I kept pouncing on the skinny minions and rolling up a lance, but others kept attacking and I had to use my lance before I found the queen.
Finally, up on the terrace above the moat, I found her, and I had a lance in hand. She was wheedling with Sherlock, telling him she'd call off her army if he'd consent to be her king. I was hiding in the shadows, waiting for my chance. The leaden waters bubbled below. A sickly looking moon shown through a rusty iron lattice, all that remained of what must have been glistening mullioned windows looking out over the water. Sherlock denied her, and demanded she release the children in the park from her spell, and she began to laugh. I spun to stab her with my lance, and then I woke up.
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