Third entry for The Watchers, Enjoy

Shepherd Benjamin was what many refer to as a “competent man.” If pressed, he can butcher a sheep, make his own clothes, tune a buzz ship, even restore an operating system. He had climbed glacier-covered mountains, pot-holed his way through underwater caverns and written successful grant proposals. In his own world, he liked to think that nothing wrong could happen to him that he could not either prevent, solve or pass off on someone else. Now he felt as close to helpless as a naked mouse standing beneath a descending owl. His life had just been saved by an half-grown child with a missing hand, and without her word … and well-aimed missile, he could have done nothing to save himself. He had not been alert; he had missed all the obvious signs. All his mind had read was that he was late, very late, to a critical appointment.
Benjamin sighed, rubbed his face and studied his ransacked room. “Think of it, things could be worse.” He had thought, and things got worse. In the half morning he had been gone, someone or something has entered and smashed, ripped or broken every furnishing, case or article of clothing. What they had not destroyed, they had covered with enough passings to ensure that no human would touch the remains. He groaned, closed his eyes and let the prayers come. One is never alone in the presence of That Which Animates All Living Things, he told himself, but he certainly was feeling vulnerable now—a stranger in an increasingly strange and hostile world where even friends were weird. He owned nothing but what he carried; his only possible hope for returning to his own world with answers to his many questions had appeared to be those elders, his supposed hosts and assistants—and they were gone. He really was up that proverbial stream without the means of propulsion. What was making things worse, he now had to factor in something called the “Watchers.” Who were they? The term meant nothing. Why would they send that beggar girl to warn him? Why did they care? What did they gain from his survival?
One matter was certain: he could not stay here. His aging nose was not about to tolerate it. Benjamin lifted his staff and aimed it at the most transportable of his luggage. A few simple instructions later and the staff’s end had become a steam nozzle cleaning and sterilizing the excrement-covered duffle. When the bag reached a stage just short of new, Benjamin began to retrieve, clean and pack it with other essentials. He was soon able to rehabilitate an extra set of small clothes, socks, his field boots and a meagre travel kit. As he had hoped, everything fit into the duffle sack with room to spare.
As his staff did its work, he used his left-hand ring to rescan the room. The ring found no snoops or monitors. It did show Benjamin the location of his computpad which he had feared to take with him that morning and had left behind in a random, vision-blocking path cycle around the main room. He snagged it on its second pass by his outstretched hand and slipped it into a cloth sack strapped under his left arm. Good. One more item and he would have all the essentials. He tip-toed across the room, checking for detect traps and other unamusing and possibly-fatal retards to his progress. “Ah,” Benjamin smiled faintly, then gently lifted up a dusty codex whose title hinted only at a romantic bodice-ripper, its vivid cover depicting a pink-clad damsel succumbing to some beak-nosed, large-pectoraled dark-haired man. Benjamin scanned the tome twice before shoving it in the duffle. That was it. He retraced his steps until he was once more standing by the outer door. Perhaps his enemies were not as omnipotent as he had begun to fear. Still, he dared not underestimate their resources.
One more scan, instrumental and visual, and he would be gone. The first three days here had given Benjamin many good memories. The gear he was about to leave behind had granted him even more. Half of his most recent life was bound up in this now ruined and destroyed garbage, but he would be angry and grieve later. “Aye,” he breathed again. That mark had not been there before. Benjamin studied the small, red stamping—like a signature chop—that floated just left of the room’s fireplace. If he tried to look at it directly, it disappeared, leaving just blank wall. Only when he shifted his vision and tilted his head slightly right, could he see it. “Clever.” It had definitely not been there before this morning, and, since seeing it required his peripheral vision, he still could not take in any details. Red horns? Yes, the chop was an image of some creature with red, curved horns and very long teeth—like a sabre-toothed cat crossed with an Irish Elk. Not the sort of thing one wished to meet in a dark alley or even a public boulevard. Shivering only slightly, Benjamin stepped out of the room, gently closed the door and made tracks.

LEGO return

I have been a big fan of LEGO ever since my own children were barely walking. At one time we had a train setup that took an entire room, allowing two trains to run simultaneously. Alas, time and space moved on. But this year, for the first time in over a dozen, I got the trains out and created a small setup. To my surprise, everything still works!

Here a Freight comes around the curve. Note the street lights, powered by transformers wired into the old 4.5 volt LEGO light fixtures.

A minifig team climbs a mountain. The rope leader is chopping ice out of a handhold. His teammate is providing belay.
The pesky Belville girls, including two Lassies in tartan, are once more invading minifig country. I loved to work in the Belville dollhouse scale, but it sure takes a lot of bricks.
Here is an overview of the south side of town. Note the traffic light.

Second entry for The Watchers, Enjoy and give me feedback.

Shepherd Benjamin saw himself as a quiet scholar, a seeker of truth and the higher planes of existence. He do not care for the thrills or dangers of violence, but this was inhospitable and unprovoked! He tapped his staff against the doorstile, stepped back in front of the doorway, pointed the staff’s end into the interior, closed his eyes and spoke a few, seldom-used phrases. The flashes of light that followed were all any mid-summer festival could have hoped for in pyrotechnics. Screams and grinding metal sounds preceded a break-building explosion. He shivered. “Ugh!” The place still stank. He turned and walked away, mumbling brief prayers for the souls of the sapient beings his staff had just turned to ash.
When he reached the far side of the fountain, the beggar girl moved in beside him, matching her pace to his own. “That was impressive,” she enthused. “What happened to those inside?”
Benjamin stopped and took a deep breath, letting the clean, stenchless air he was now moving through his lungs linger in his nose and throat. “I am afraid that all those inside were overly sensitive to light. It is possible that they separated.”
“Separated? Life force from body?”
“Indeed. Their bodies have departed. I know not where their life forces now reside.”
“You use strange verbs, holy man.”
He chuckled, allowing himself a nervous look at his most-recent savior. “You have a strange way of understanding them. Thanks for the warning …and the flash bomb.”
The girl gave him a brief, fierce look then shrugged and cupped her right stump in her left hand and rubbed. Head tilted back slightly, she returned his look in the same manner as before. “Where do you go now, holy man?” she asked.
“Back to my lodging, I guess.”
“You do not wish to examine the place you just incinerated?” she asked.
“Hmm. Had not considered that.” Benjamin stopped, turned around and studied the worship house. It appeared unchanged except for faint streams of pale smoke that continued to drift from the doorway and several small, shattered windows set in its upper dome. Nothing now would be alive inside—not even the elders he had sought—if they had yet been resident. No, he needed the fresh air and these clean, sanded streets, not rooms half-filled with burnt meat. “No, child. I think I have done enough here.”
“Then I shall,” the girl answered, and left him. He watched her skip and weave her way back to the entry, tapping the fountain’s basin edge with her good hand as she passed it and whistling a simple melody that he was sure he knew but could not at that moment place. She waved to him once, then disappeared inside.
“‘You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,’” he quoted, sighed and resumed his retreat as the fire sirens began scream their warnings. It was only the next day that he realized that the girl’s melody was Bach’s “That Sheep Might Safely Graze.”

Birds, and more birds

I covered some of my bird photography on my older web site , but thought I would add a few more pictures here as a salute to the new year.

The lesser snow geese were in migration and using Harney Lake in East Central Oregon.
The American goldfinch, the yellow-headed blackbird and the ruby-crowned kinglet were shots taken on the fly, handheld, using a 400mm F4.5 Nikkor with pistol grip. The pigmy owl was much closer and, after rehabilitation, about to be released back into the wild.

First pizza

We made our first pizza in the oven on the 20th. It came out perfectly and made one of the best suppers we have had so far at our new place.

The Watchers: a story in progress

Here is the first chapter from a story in progress. Let me know what you think and whether you would like to read more. Happy Holidays.

The Watchers

The girl stood by the stile of the worship house, her dark hair neatly parted and pulled back close to her skull. In her left hand—the soiled one, the evil one—she held a colorless, unglazed bowl. The thin material of her simple, almost seamless, muslin tunic could not conceal either her frailty or undergown nakedness.
The pale-faced cleric turned away, embarrassed by his own observing eyes. She was, after all, a child of God, set here by their holy ones, regardless of which hand she used. Her sex, age or name—if she still had one—no longer mattered. He firmly set his gaze straight ahead, his eyes boring into the dark, shadowless interior of the building which he intended to enter. His vision, adapted to the white-hot sunlight he was about to leave, gave him no objective or dimensional clue as to what it was he was moving into. He paused and blinked, briefly taking in the entry’s carved stone archway with its three-dimensional relief of gargoyles and demons. Cool, hardened clay brushed his left arm. “Please, Sir. A coin, one coin before you die?”
“Bless you, child,” the man answered, but neither reached for his purse, nor shifted his gaze. This child was already in their Supreme One’s hands. He would not be the reshaper of her fate. He habbened his staff and stepped toward the darkness.
“Aaah!” The cleric spun around, pulling his left leg back. “Blessed book! Dare you kick me?” Raising his free hand, he glared at the girl. She stared back, her light-blue eyes steady and bright. She was taller than he had first thought. His gaze shifted to her still out-stretched hand. Hand? She had only one. Where her right should be was only a leather-covered stump the size of a thumb and half a palm. “Ouch,” he whispered.
“A coin, Sir?” she repeated. Her voice was as level as her fearless gaze.
“… and if I don’t, you will kick me again?”
“No, Sir. You will die.”
The man’s appointment in the worship house seemed far away now. “We all shall die, eventually.” He still did not reach for his purse. Not yet, but this child was already proving more interesting than anything he could have planned for this hot, solstice day. “That is the safest prediction anyone can make.”
The child set her chin on the covered stump of her right hand. A smile flickered across her thin, sunburned face. “You speak great truth, Sir. But what is your life worth if you could extend it one more day?”
“A coin in your bowl will do that?”
“No.” She straightened up so that her eyes were almost level with the visitor’s shoulders. “But what I will tell you in exchange for your coin will.”
“Mmm. You know something that, if I know it, will safeguard me for one extra day of my allotted time?”
She nodded. “Something like that.”
“Well, I am late for my appointment. If you be here when I leave, I will look for you. Perhaps then I may find a coin that is worth a day of my life.” The man turned to go.
“Perhaps if I told you that one day was today …”
The cleric stared at the interior darkness. His eyes had adjusted and he now could see shapes: more archways, chairs and large creatures waiting—more than he had been led to expect. A metal blade caught an unseen light and glittered briefly. He took a deep breath and opened his purse without moving his eyes. “Here is your coin, child.”
“Thank you,” she said. He could hear the coin clink in the bowl, its sound harsh against this house’s swelling silence. “The holy ones that you are appointed to meet today are dead. Those who wait for you inside wait only to enjoy your blood.”
“Where am I safe?”
“Outside, in the sun.”
A chillness moved across his chest and down his arms. “Vampires?” he whispered.
“I do not know that term. They are not human—although once they might have been.”
The cleric stepped back out of the doorway and onto the street. “Child, how do you know these things?”
She shrugged and rubbed her left wrist with her right stump before dropping the bowl and coin into the pocket hanging on her left hip. “The watchers know. They told me to stop you.”
“Watchers?” The visitor moved away from the doorway so that he was no longer in the line-of-sight of whoever was waiting inside.
“Watchers: because they watch everything and everyone. Thanks for the coin.” The girl skipped several feet away, circled around a dry, ancient bronze fountain, swung around a lamp post using her good hand, waved once, ducked into an alley and was gone.
“Wait!” A pause and he was snapping fingers in frustration. Now what? He gripped the rim of the fountain’s bowl. It, at least, was real. But what now was truth? He had an appointment—an appointment he was now a day and two dial turns late for. Was that truth? Or was the word of one strange, adolescent girl? If her missing hand was any indication, she was a thief, or a former one who got caught.
He patted the pockets of his under jack, pulled out a small, green tablet, regarded it briefly and popped it into his mouth. As the cool, fresh limey favor began to fill his taste buds, he contemplated his next move. The interior of the holy house had felt evil; it had smelled of mold and old rat poison. It had not been what he had expected. But a thief? He sighed and walked over to the quiet, waiting opening. First tapping the dust from his shoes, he stepped just inside the entry way.

“Good day, kind sir. You are?”
“Huh?” He had been squeezing and blinking his eyes, trying to adjust to the breeze-cooled passage and its dim lighting. But how had he missed this creature, or thing, that now hovered a yard from his right elbow. How indeed, for it stank worse than gutted roadkill under a noonday sun. Involuntarily, he stepped back, pausing at the edge of the light.
“You are?” the creature prompted him again.
“I am Shepherd Benjamin,” the man replied formally.
“Shepherd? A shepherd. Hmm …” The doorkeeper pulled long yellow locks of matted hair away from its grey-furred face and began sniffing at a digital tablet it held in its third hand. “”Mmm. Ah, yes. Here. They are no longer here to meet you. So sorry.” The creature folded its lower arms, causing the tablet to disappear.
“Did the elders leave a message or location where they might be reached?” The sunlight touching Benjamin’s heels and calves was like a safety line holding him to the real, saner world of the outside. Ahead, he could now see and count at least seven other creatures standing in the vestibule fewer than a dozen paces away. Most appeared humanoid, but only in the sense that they stood erect on two limbs and were using their forelimbs to hold and carry tools.
The doorkeeper shook its head. “Would you come farther inside? One of our caretakers might know … I believe a message might be waiting …”
Caretakers? A strange word choice, Benjamin told myself. Time to trust a young thief over the word of a something that used its nose rather then its eyes to read a computablet. “Thank you. I will try to reconnect with the elders from my lodgings.”
“Please come in,” a new voice called, honey-trimmed like a girl-child’s at first commitment. Three of the creatures began moving toward Benjamin. Others shifted left and right. Again he caught the faint reflections of dull, unpolished metal just edging the light behind him. “Do, do come in.” The voice was soft and insistent, but Benjamin felt his stomach rebelling against the rank odor still smashing against his nostrils.
“Wogard!” a deep-throated creature called.
Benjamin tightened his grip on his staff and turned it crosswise, moving it to guard position. As he did, a shining disk flashed by his head and into the interior. “Run,” the child’s voice screamed from behind him. Benjamin leaped back to one side of the entry as silvery, searching tendrils and spinning stars launched themselves toward where he had stood.

Lodge life

Our little garden in our solar house is doing well, despite the recent bitter cold. Swiss chard and zuchini are growing and the zuchini is developing buds.
An evening view. Wes on his computer, the masonry heater burning a charge and our Amish light iluminating everything.