The Worst Part is the Waiting.

The worst part is the waiting.

by Louis Shalako

It was D plus Three of the invasion of Vega-Prime. The first and second waves were on the ground and holding their bridgehead.

Major J. Birney of the Fourth Division, Royal Marines, stood beside Lieutenant D. Edwards of H.M.S. Agincourt, flag of her squadron. The dark and compact Scot, with his beefy shoulders and forty some-odd years and the lanky, red haired youth, seemingly too young to be a commissioned officer, got along like a house on fire, which was a relief to Major Birney after a previous experience on another vessel. They were going over the proposed fire-plan.

The vessel was part of the Thirteenth Heavy Bombardment Flotilla, three squadrons plus one reserve squadron, firing in support of Eighth Combat Infantry Brigade, just one small component of the First Fleet. They were conducting offensive operations in the sector of space surrounding the rebel conglomerate’s home world, based on the Vega system and only twenty-five light years from Earth.

After six years of war, the Empire had established strategic and economic superiority, defeating the rebels in campaign after campaign. In the early days it had been a very close-run thing, and politically, with acknowledged war-weariness growing at home, it was time to end the war with one crushing, final victory.

Hence the high priority set on the invasion of Vega-Prime. It could well be decisive, and with a bridgehead already established, the stakes were very high. The senior officers would be fresh after a good night’s sleep for the operation, but more junior officers had a harder time of it. With Vega-Prime heavily populated and expected to be occupied for many years into the future, tactical and strategic nukes had been ruled out. It was a pretty challenge for the artillery, both ground and space-based.

“Aw…ah.” Birney yawned definitively. “Oh, God, I thought it was bad enough groundside.”

The Major rocked back and forth on his feet. The nature of combined operations made inter-service cooperation vital to the success of the mission. He was aboard Agincourt coordinating fire missions with the Support Force, who had all the really big guns until the Marines’ own heavy batteries were fully unloaded and deployed.

The monitor was a very special kind of ship. Major Birney had never been on one before. Even so, the boredom of a long night watch had been punctuated only by the intense planning of their fairly-complex fire mission. Monitors and their specialized mission were predicated on the carrying of one or two very big recoilless launchers. The ships had limited storage capacity in all things, including re-loads for the tubes. They were armed with only minimal anti-ship defense systems, light automated weapons for close-in defense. Safety lay in numbers as well as the heavier Fleet units nearby guarding the troop convoys. Lethality relied on vast numbers of replenishment ships, perhaps the Empire’s best-kept secret before the war. Edwards was a whiz and the Admiral of the Fleet trusted his judgment. Birney had been impressed at the Fleet’s communications, with all Gunnery Officers contributing in the finer details regarding their adopted units and the unique objectives set out for them. Tomorrow’s attack would secure a more effective starting line for an offensive set for the coming weeks. Troops on the ground, comprising a surprising tally of different units and detachments, Army, Marines, Air Forces, would attempt to break out of the LZ and establish themselves in the jungle-clad hills where the enemy capital lay open and resplendent in a vast emerald river basin as seen from the Agincourt’s observation cupolas.

“What?” Edwards, a fresh-faced twenty-three years old, looked up from the plan, overlaid on the latest Intelligence map display, stylus hovering over some minor detail. “I’m sorry?”

The fellow was never satisfied.

The speakers broke into Birney’s thoughts in typical style, laconic and emotionless.

“Roxy Three. On it. Fire three for effect.”

The response from their sister ship was crisp and succinct.

“Roger that.”

A screen with an external link displayed the launch of three salvos from Pomfret.

The radio speakers crackled again but the handle wasn’t theirs. That’s not to say that they didn’t hear it. Technicians sat, listening through headphones, and watching their tactical screens, as bored as anybody, but the possibility of surprise attack was unsettling enough to keep them alert.

All defensive weapons were warmed up and on high alert here in CC.

Birney yawned again. He looked around at the technical people. They were a good bunch, and he was oddly enjoying the duty.

“I’m going for more coffee.” Edwards nodded, with a bleak expression and his eyes faraway.

Birney headed for the alcove at the back of the room, an oasis of sanity in an otherwise sterile and very technical environment. The Fleet could be surprisingly civilized sometimes.

They’d worked all the night to get the fire plan ready, with targets listed for each battery, each ship, and each section. It would take very little time for the plan to be sent in code to all units.

Getting divisional approval, which of course involved regimental and battalion approval down on the ground…there were bound to be additions, perhaps some wishful thinking, and maybe a few questions, but Birney was fairly confident. That would all come soon enough. He could see them down there in his mind’s eye. He’d fought alongside many of them for the last three years, although there were inevitable losses. He could almost see them waiting with bated breath for the fire-plan to be thrust into their hands. Their lives might depend on it.

The whole thing looked as good as they could make it with the available resources.

“Yeah. Can you grab me one too?” Edwards couldn’t tear himself away.

It was a thing of beauty, when done right. The attack on the ground must quickly overwhelm the dug-in enemy troops concentrated in strength, all heavily armed and well supplied according to Intelligence, and break out of the defensive perimeter. Once through the siege lines around it, open country lay ahead. Armored spearheads and motorized infantry, supported by strong air contingents would exploit any success, with initial breakthroughs expected to the north and then hopefully to the north-east.

Behind the closed doors of the control centre, the movements of large numbers of crew as they manned the guns, light batteries, the loading rooms, taking stations all over the vessel, could only be sensed, not heard. 

Separate from the bridge, where more normal tones were used by all concerned, the quiet in the CC was ensured by thick insulation and a calm demeanour on the part of those initiates most privy to her secrets. A glance at the bridge screen showed the Captain had not arrived yet. They still had time to get a bite to eat…but Birney thought better of suggesting it.

Interestingly, thought Birney, the CC had the best air on the ship, with all the computers operating under optimum climate control according to his briefing.

Edwards printed off a large-scale copy of what he had on screen. Taking up his red pencil, he moved to a wide plotting table, sitting down and then asking a crewmember to adjust the lights so he could see better. It wasn’t red-light conditions yet, that would come later. The crewmember complied and then went back to monitoring the communications more directly than her superiors, making occasional notes as she did for the log. There was a fair amount of signals traffic, as both sides raided and patrolled and probed each other’s defenses on the ground. Fire support came from other units as traffic was light.

The Agincourt had fired her weapons early in the shift, ten rounds of HE on a strongpoint in prep for tomorrow. It was just one of a long list over the last few days, but she hadn’t been called upon since.

Birney came back and carefully set the cups down well away from the edges of the map.

Hopefully he had gotten the Lieutenant’s right, as the lad liked a lot of cream and sugar by his standards.

He looked over Edwards’ shoulder, and then at his watch. The ship’s chronometer and his own time-piece were in perfect agreement.

“All right. Let’s have one more look.”

***

Fire Plan Tango.

H-5 to H-0 engage targets at map reference points 240, 241, 242 HE two batteries each slow.

Light batteries within range will fire anti-personnel at normal rate. Third battery reserve, on call for FOOs.

H to plus 10, map reference point 247 Smoke one troop, rate very slow, adjusting on call for wind and drift in target zone.

Plus 10 to plus 20, target map references 250, 253, 256 HE one battery (D-Section) rate normal.

Light batteries rate slow, anti-personnel. Other batteries in reserve.

Plus 30 All Batteries Defensive Fire, if called on, and Harassing Fire on targets of opportunity on call from FOOs. Otherwise firing by target list as provided, firing by priority or as opportunity presents, rate of fire extra-slow except emergency calls, where fire will be directly as per FOOs’ instructions.

Plus-1 Thirteenth Heavy Bombardment group moves to Point B and replenishes. Mission calls will be handled for one hour by the Seventeenth Heavy Bombardment group who must replenish at Plus-2 hours in order to relieve the Ninth Heavy Bombardment group on schedule by Plus-3 hours.

Plus-2 hours Thirteenth Heavy Bombardment group back on Station for Phase Two.

Phase Two consists of on-call fire support, as well as concs* and stonks* on Mike and Uncle targets. Individual batteries and individual vessels will be on call with adopted units and for other units as needed as ammunition and time allows. All fire must be coordinated and observed by FOOs.

Phase Two will be in place until otherwise notified or the offensive is concluded. Ammunition stocks are presently seven days supply at Normal Combat Rate A and replenishment will be provided from Fleet level at Priority One.

#

The Major sipped his coffee.

“Looks good.” The file was already sent anyway.

In fifteen minutes or so they would know.

Edwards nodded. Inexorably, his eyes went down to the heavy time-piece on his left wrist and his thoughts turned to the waves of troops, those already on the ground and those now loading into the landing craft from the transports. So far, the enemy’s light attack ships had caused some losses, and they were no doubt planning more attacks. They were rumoured to still have considerable Fleet units remaining, but if they were about no one in higher command was saying.

Edwards sat up and took a deep breath. He heaved a long sigh.

The plan looked good. Most likely it would be approved.

It was still three hours until dawn in the target area.

The worst part was the waiting.

End

*concs—‘conks,’ firing on concentrations of enemy troops as called by FOOs.

*stonks—old mortar-men’s term, to bring the maximum fire on a small area in the shortest possible time, called in by FOOs.

*FOOs—forward observation officers; fleet officers operating with ground troops to observe targets and order fire missions.

*Mike targets are called in from regimental level.

*Uncle targets are called in from divisional level.

Practice Makes Professionals.

Nice lady. Please don't throw that at me.

by Louis Shalako

On Kindleboards someone asked, ‘Does haste affect the quality of the work?’

Comments mentioned some author friends posting big word counts on Facebook and the like, which people tend to do mostly during Nano-Month. (I’m up to ten or eleven thousand words for the year, by the way, by the time I’m done this post, and it’s only January 9.)

It’s a very good question.

The answer is yes and no, and I know how you all love that one.

What I kind of said on Kb was, ‘It depends on who’s doing it.’

Hopefully that wasn’t too snarky.

But, ah, please bear with me.

If you wrote ten stories in a year, say from two to four thousand words each, that represents from twenty to forty thousand words. In a year. In ten years, that would be anywhere from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand words, maybe from two to four books, or a bunch of shorter works.

Forget about past experience, mine or yours, forget about quality.

How much practice does it actually represent?

Speaking strictly in scientifically accurate terms, it represents 20,000 to 40,000 words of practice, no more and no less. Per year.

Ignore everything else. It’s just practice of the craft of writing—putting words down on paper, constructing sentences and paragraphs, (most of which should be almost subconscious or second nature at some point) and working with ideas.

Now think of the guy who grinds out twenty to forty thousand words a month. Some of it is crap. That might never be published. Some of it’s okay. It might end up being self-published or given away for exposure, it might go in a contest, he might publish it on a blog or website, under a girl’s name even.

What does he care? He likes the work. He’ll tackle any genre at some point just to see if he can do it, or just to have some fun with it and do something different, something no one else dared do because they were worried that somewhere out there in the world, there would be one person who didn’t much care for that author. They didn’t like a certain book or story.

Well, big deal. After a few years, we have the right to forget all that. We can move on.

Twelve months times twenty thousand words is two hundred forty thousand words…of practice, per year, if we give the guy credit for nothing else. He’s also publishing more often. He also problem-solving and trouble-shooting more often, creating more marketing images, writing more blurbs, typing in more meta-data, reading more blog posts on writing, publishing, craft…

It all adds up over time in a cumulative fashion.

Within one year he has twelve times as much experience as the guy (or girl) who writes twenty to forty thousand words a year.

That’s like twelve years of ‘experience.’

And with practice, and with experience, and no doubt, in some small way, with some confidence in the result, quality actually improves—it does not diminish with practice or experience.

It can only get better, in that sense practice is not a zero-sum game. Because so many different learning curves come together—developing a work ethic, studying other masters, listening to them talk, watching what the real pros do, and more than anything, writing story after story and book after book creates quality because it creates skill. To practice all the different aspects of self-publishing results in knowledge, skills and experience that are greater than the sum of all the individual parts.

I’ve been writing for over thirty years. Most of the progress has come in the last four or five years. But then, in the last four or five years I wrote my ass off, and it shows.

For too many years I pecked away at this and that project and dreamed of a future that sure as hell wasn’t going to be coming around and knocking on my door.

I had to go out into the world, take some risks and meet Fate halfway at least.

And now I’m knocking on your door. Because in ten years, I will probably write a minimum of five million words! It might even be more than that.

That is a veritable shit-load of books and stories, ladies and gentlemen.

I have every expectation of being pretty good at it, at some point—and let the critics fall where they may.

END

The Tailgater.

The balls to tailgate and not one iota more.

by Louis Shalako

It was always the way, wasn’t it?

Earl Gardiner had pulled out of the doughnut shop onto London Line, a hot medium double-double in the drink holder in the centre console, and a thin black cheroot sticking out of the pack on the seat beside him. His lighter was keeping warm in his right jacket pocket.

Earl loved driving at night, it was like a game of golf to some other guy. He couldn’t really explain it. A moonlit, winter night-drive, one with good visibility and plenty of snow on the ground was a special thing. It didn’t happen all that often.

He was just lighting up, and congratulating himself on how open the road ahead was, when he saw the headlights coming up from behind in the distance.

All he really wanted was to relax, listen to the radio and get away from his small apartment for a while. He had no place in particular to go. He just felt like a drive. He didn’t much like being hurried, not in anything. 

Not at his stage in life.

Glancing at the speedometer, he increased the throttle a bit but it was no good. He could just tell. They were coming up fairly fast, and it seemed pretty inevitable, but he was already going ten kilometres over the limit…

And here they were; after a while. Of course, the person driving, didn’t back off until the last minute. It was always the way. You literally wondered sometimes if they were going to hit you.

Earl speeded up a little, as nothing bugged him more than someone ten feet behind his bumper when they had the whole road open to them.

“We already know you can go fast…” He had all kinds of thoughts about such drivers.

Of course such folks would never pass. They had enough balls to tailgate you and not one iota more. This was their great failing as human beings. He could accept that.

This one showed no signs of passing. There was a good possibility they had been drinking. They were following his tail-lights, like blind mice or something. Maybe they lived just up ahead, and yet there was still no call for it. Driving so close just put all parties in danger.

Earl speeded up, starting to get a little hot under the collar now as the danged vehicle behind him stayed right where it was, dropping back to no more than fifteen or twenty feet. That’s what it seemed like to him, in fact this guy was unusually tenacious.

Surely not the most relaxing way to get home after a night of pounding back the boilermakers and pinching pudgy, middle-aged waitress’ bottoms.

Earl muttered a few things unprintable.

He looked at the speedometer.

A hundred and four kilometres an hour in an eighty kilometre per hour zone. Predictably, they didn’t turn off at the exit for the four lane divided highway, neither did they make a right and go south. No, of course not.

It was like a fucking conspiracy or something.

Grrr.

They stayed right on him.

Earl slowed right down to eighty for a while. His skin crawled, but he put his head down, adjusted the mirror and hung in there. The road ahead was clear and he thought they would pass. Never happened, they just stayed there. The guy couldn’t be more than eight feet from his rear bumper.

After a while he just couldn’t take it, and straightened up again.

Earl put some more gas to it. He gently eased it up, one or two kilometres at a time until the other guy looked to be about forty feet back there…Earl kept up the pressure, as the speedometer slowly wound its way up the scale.

…a hundred and five kilometres an hour…a hundred and eleven kilometres an hour…still hanging in there.

Earl had tried this once before. These creeps would tailgate you at a hundred and eighty. It was a personality type. He wondered how they were to walk on the same street with, would they be stepping on your heels? 

Probably, he decided.

It was almost too much to watch the road properly, the bugger was still right on him. The funny thing was, they might be totally unconscious of how irritating it was.

They might be so innocent—I didn’t know, mister. Sorry.

He could imagine the look on their face if he pulled them over and beat them to death by the side of the road.

They would be so shocked—so mystified by it.

Didn’t mean nothing by it. I never realized.

Earl took it up to one-thirty, the front wheels shaking a bit and the pull to the left of the old car becoming much more pronounced. He had to clamp on, using both fists, his biceps taut to hold it steady through the turns, of which there were one or two along here…dark as sin out there, with the yellow lines faded from wear and no lights, no houses nearby.

He had it at one-thirty-five, and the vehicle was still back there, its headlights bathing everything inside his own car in white glare and dark shadows that shook and darted about with every bump.

Argh.

Earl pushed it straight to the floor and tried to keep an eye on the road ahead.

Sure enough, if a cop saw this he’d probably nail Earl for speeding, let the other car go free as a bird and claim not to have noticed anything funny about how close that guy was following…he knew exactly what they would say.

“If someone is following too close, then pull over.”

But you couldn’t do that every time, could you? It was always like this. Always.

Earl had it up to a hundred and forty-five kilometres an hour and it was all he could do just to hold the thing on the road, but the bastard was still back there.

“Son of a bitch!”

***

“Let me know when you want me to hit the lights.” Constable Sharon Owens looked over at the sergeant with a sardonic grin.

“Naw. That’s okay. I’m just fucking with his head.”

Sergeant Hal Winchester looked at the speed good old Earl was going and shook his head in amazement.

“Still got it, old boy! Whoo-whee, and good for you, too.” He slapped the dashboard with his open right hand, in sheer cussed good humour and at last backed off on the throttle.

The wind noise fell away and the speed slid down the scale. The radar readout showed the old piece of junk was now going a hundred and fifty-three kilometres per hour and accelerating steadily.

He looked over at Sharon as if suddenly recalling her presence.

“Hungry?”

She nodded, watching Earl’s tail-lights disappearing up the road at a formidable rate of speed.

“Sure. I could eat.” Her words were carefully neutral.

Something weird had just happened there and she wasn’t quite sure what.

END

The Hyper-Writing Learning Curve.

Savoia-Marchetti S-55, 1933. This example flew with Aeroflot in the Soviet Union. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

I’ve been fooling around with semi-scientific non-fiction, and so I am making an illustrated ebook hypertext. 

The first time I loaded it up, the text looked fine but the pictures didn't render, and so I inquired further.

I didn’t panic, and I didn’t get upset, I didn’t even really get all that irritated. I sort of expected problems going in.

It’s a learning process, it involves experimentation and research into the basic techniques.

It requires things like making pictures smaller than 127 kb, and I also learned Kindle doesn't support > right/left html tags, etc., for photos. Pain in the butt ensues.

It might not even be a very good book. However, without some kind of book, there is no way to learn the process, and until I learn the process, I don't know what kind of book I and the system are capable of producing.

So that's day one of the New Year--we learned something, and sooner or later there will be an illustrated hypertext with my name on it.

As of January 2, it looks like the thing is ready to go. We’ll see what happens in the Kindle previewer, and take it from there, one logical step at a time until it’s complete. Having compressed the file below 5 MB, it can now be uploaded to Smashwords, Kobo, etc, wherever I want it to go.

There are other possibilities, all opened up by this one experiment. An experiment may be defined as a learning experience, or even one step in “a learning curve” as Dr. Evil would say, making his characteristic air quotes as he did so.

An illustrated ebook without a lot of links out is also very feasible. In that case, normal footnotes would apply, and yet I can’t seem to put cut-lines or photo captions in the ebook format. In that case, a POD paperback or hardcover still works in the usual fashion. Simply put, I can make illustrated books now, however unskilled the first few might eventually turn out to be, looking back from my deathbed.

Now, what that does, is to open up the possibility of writing non-fiction, with graphs, charts, cartoons, photos and illustrations, all nicely laid out and formatted on the page—and a hard copy doesn’t suffer from the same limitations in terms of rendering photos. The layout in a POD could be really nice compared to the ebook version.

Before I ever heard of ebooks, I dreamed of writing a coffee-table book, in a couple of different genres, but then I owned a couple of big books that I read from cover to cover and still treasure.

(He likes big books, and he cannot lie. – ed.)

I still keep them books around. I trashed all my notes at some point, but starting the research off from scratch might not be a bad thing, and now my research would be online—no going to the library and writing old-fashioned paper and envelope-style letters looking for things like archival photo clearances. This dream has been around a while!

Whatever the dream turns out to be—a book on Italian WW I seaplanes or whatever, is made a little more possible by acquiring the basic skills on a project of less importance. This is only part-way along a particular learning curve, one that began four years ago, Jan. 1/2010 when I decided to publish a book if it killed me.

(So far it hasn’t)

All that posting and reading, all those photo-searches for my blog have paid off in terms of knowledge. 

Theoretically, I am capable of putting together an online magazine, although it’s never been a high priority, and I think if that’s your dream, fine—but it has never been my dream.

That’s not to say I am unaware of the potential, another side effect of learning new things.

We learn new things and therefore we can see new possibilities—possibilities that didn’t exist in our own little universe before.

And if you want to pay for colour in the production of the book, you can even have colour, print-quality pictures in your POD. That affects the price of the product. But that’s all it affects, it doesn’t affect the ability to actually create the product.

So all this learning curve for one thing goes to support the learning curve for something else.

It all goes to experience and creating a database of simple skills that transfer from one genre or format to another.

Someone once said, “To keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results is insanity.”

In the four years I’ve been doing this, I have done plenty of things differently from the established way, and learned a few things.

However, doing a few things the same way as the established way might help to get different results, so we’ll put some thought into that along the way.

The thing there (maybe for the next little while) is to model ourselves after someone successful in the marketing department—how a successful author formats a book, (or most likely ships it out to someone else to format) is a question of lesser importance than how in the hell they manage to sell so many short stories, or how the hell they manage to license their works in so many ways.

Whether they write in the morning or evening, whether they like coffee or tea is irrelevant to my needs.

I need to learn how to attract readers, generate revenue from selling short stories, maybe put a little more thought into this and that, and so that’s what we’ll be studying, assuming that’s what we (or the reader) want to do.

Note: I ended up contacting Amazon support. The reason my file was not uploading correctly is because I needed to save it to a zip file, which you can do by highlighting it on your desktop and then right-clicking. Now click on 'send to' and select > zip folder.

That's what you upload to Kindle--not the ordinary html file.

The book, Love, Money, Sex and Death, Questions for the 21st Century, retails for $3.99 and will be available on Kindle tomorrow.

END

It was all so innocent in the beginning: I just wanted to publish a book if it killed me.

Here’s what that mistaken idea has mushroomed into.

The Fae.

by Louis Shalako

Blanchard slept all afternoon and spent the evening preparing his gear. He left town in his old blue pickup in the wee hours of the morning, when most other people were asleep.

He mentally rehearsed what he had to do in order to avoid spooking the subjects. By prior arrangement with a gentleman named Stan Fuller, a farmer near the village of Rosedale, all he had to do was pull up the lane and park by the barn. Fuller had a regular quad-runner trail going back into the sugar-bush, although Blanchard was on foot. Fuller had a small creek crossing his land and the cataract plunged over a dozen ledges of various heights. At low water the flat ledges along the right bank should be mostly exposed. Blanchard had been all up and down this valley and this was one of his favorite spots. He’d known about it forever.

Over the hills and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go.

It was a full moon and the faint trail along Fuller’s side-creek would hopefully be visible. In amongst the trees it would be all dry leaves and dead twigs. He’d make a lot of noise. The night was warm and foggy in the valleys, which tended to muffle sound, but he would be making his way into a slightly gusting breeze. Walking with care, it might mask the sounds of his approach. Anything he had that could rattle, accidentally beep, or clunk was wrapped in cotton rags, bagged separately, or safely stowed in pockets and pouches.

The subjects knew what vehicles and roads and buildings were, and could probably track him by sound alone.

He closed the truck door in a natural fashion as Fuller’s dogs barked inside of the house. Sound travelled for miles, at night, out in the country. A shape appeared at a lit window, the curtains parted and a portion of Fuller’s face appeared in silhouette. He sure was up late. Blanchard waved awkwardly in the rancid yellow glare of the light over the pole barn’s side door and Fuller went away again. As agreed, he didn’t come outside. He just wanted to reassure himself who it was. Blanchard dragged his heavy bag from the passenger side floor and left the keys in the ignition rather than lose them in the woods. The left strap of the pack-sack snagged on his watch and then the weight settled on him.

Three-quarter inch granular limestone grated underfoot. He used a pocket flash to pick his way through tractors, abandoned implements rusting in the long grass, and a couple of good used cars, according to Stan. The thought brought a small grin. Behind the barn it was much darker.

He paused and adjusted the straps of the knapsack, settling it properly on shoulders and across his upper hips. The knees felt good. He had toilet paper with him, but didn’t think he’d need it. He had plenty of water and juice. He blinked in the darkness, listening. A dog down the road barked a while, and then settled down again. Darting, fluttering black shapes in the glare of the moon revealed that the night was still warm enough for bats. The woods dripped, and trickled, and snapped a little, the anonymous noises of the night coming from here and there, nearby and far away.

He was used to it by now. He was more predator than prey. Still, there was an odd flutter in his guts.

Blanchard looked at his watch. The moon was up and it was three-seventeen a.m. The well of silence all around was gone again as the crickets decided collectively that he was all right. Somewhere off in the eastern blackness an owl screeched, raising the hair on the back of his neck momentarily. It was an eerie sound and the sort of thing that had originally attracted him here in the first place. That and the waterfalls, their sound muffled to just a background hiss with a couple of intervening ridges in the way. He’d spent half his life taking pictures of animals, but this was different. He’d always wanted to buy this land. Stan didn’t know that and Blanchard would never tell him. In some strange way, it was his refuge—a home away from home.

His heart settled down. The key thing was to take his time and avoid tripping hazards. Blanchard’s mind dropped into gear. He could see well enough now. The way in was a good two and a half kilometres. If he saw nothing or otherwise blew it, there were other photographs he could take in the area. Sunrise was always good in this kind of terrain.

 Its remoteness was what saved it from commercialization, that and the fact that the valley was so small. It was tucked away in the back of beyond, just one small tributary in a much larger river system. It was a rural part of the county where the really big hills took over and brooding dark firs cloaked the hillsides along the highway, the monotony broken only by crossroads, or the occasional peeling billboards advertising this or that fishing-camp.

***

He would never know how good of a job he was doing, unless he saw something.

As a boy, when he read about wild Indians and woodsmen stalking through the forest as silent as wraiths, he had always taken it for granted that the author knew what he was talking about.

It wasn’t so easy, but the centre of the trail was clear and he had learned to walk by now, a curious rolling off the toes and heels that was pretty quiet in the damp forest after three full days of soaking rain. His clothing rubbed against itself, making small noises, but hopefully the sound was lost in the bigger picture as there wasn’t much he could do about it. It was the pack and the jacket mostly.

Having found his perch, previously scouted and mapped, marked in red pencil on a bigger topographical sheet of the area, he pushed four steel rods into the ground and erected his blind. The collapsible chair had been selected for light weight but with an eye to quietness as well. The tripod was in its own soft bag, and he took care not to let the legs clank together as he set it up.

Blanchard screwed his camera into place. Marvelling at his own efficiency, he hadn’t even used a light yet. The moon was almost due south, high in the sky over his right shoulder, and sunrise in late June came early. He was surprised how well he could see, as he ever so slowly zipped up the fabric. He had an old juice can in the corner and the fly sheet closed over his head. There was just room enough to kneel if he had to relieve himself and it was light enough inside to move around a bit in there.

With the beeper turned off and the camera warmed up, Blanchard settled in for a wait, savouring the tang of cedar in the air, watching the ford and the only really sandy beach along this stretch of the Sapphire River. He listened to the crows and the blue-jays. There were a half a dozen or so species of bird identifiable by their calls, notably the robins and their cheerful morning song. Not even a squirrel moved about. There was only the sighing of the breeze in the tops of the trees and the sound of rushing water.

There was a glimmer of that indescribable creamy, golden incandescence along the eastern horizon and the world was waking up. The crowing of a rooster back at Stan’s place was faintly heard off behind him and there was a solitary tractor making its way along the highway which suddenly changed pitch and then faded away somewhere beyond the northern ridges.

***

It was them. At first, he didn’t believe it. He didn’t even comprehend what he was looking at.

Heart in his throat, he put his eye up to the viewfinder and focused carefully. He pulled in on the telephoto lens and gently panned the tripod to centralize the largest group for study.

They leapt into focus. He’d only glimpsed them twice before, although he had found their footprints on a few occasions.

Well, well, well. What have we here?

The white faces, the unaffected walk of youth, the big, dark almond eyes, the pale, attenuated, well-formed limbs, their manes of long and uncombed hair hanging down their backs, all combined to give them an air of otherworldliness. Their shapeless, off-white linen shifts, bare feet and general lassitude set them apart from any other race and he wondered how they had gotten here, how they remained yet undiscovered, even in this forgotten part of the state. There were twelve or fourteen of them, but he didn’t have much time to count.

He watched as they came down out of the gorge just downstream. There were trails on both sides of the river, and more side-creeks along each bank. They bunched up and crossed from his side of the river. They paused in the middle and drank from cupped hands, some filling up leathern bags from the crystalline waters. The light was growing stronger and they wouldn’t stay long. He’d never seen them in the broad light of day, only at dusk and dawn. This was his first night foray.

Blanchard breathed as quietly as he could. A few had crossed to the other side and stood looking back at the group. The rest began moving again, as the last one tied off the top of her water bag.

Who in the hell were these people? The sight of all those young girls, none of them much over twelve or thirteen years of age by his guess, was bizarre in the extreme. They were so pallid of feature, with those big dark circles under their eyes, and the pathetically vulnerable feet, considering the terrain and the brush. They were all one of a kind.

He’d had a hawthorn come right up through the bottom of his shoe once. It came all the way up through his big toe as well, until it hit the inner side of his toenail and stopped.

They lived like hermits. That was all he could figure. It seemed unlikely on so many levels. Simple poverty didn’t look like this.

Blanchard framed a shot while he still had some of them in the water and a sufficient number of them facing more or less into the camera.

He locked the tripod, and pulled his eye away, satisfied with what he had, and found the remote switch hanging by his right hand.

The camera tripped with its faint click and then light appeared in the viewfinder again. He took another look.

They were all staring straight back at him.

Hurriedly, heart racing in guilt and shock, for they were all staring straight at him with that God-awful look on their faces, he re-focused and zoomed in even tighter on one of the taller ones.

His trembling hand found the switch and he hit it again. The camera snapped.

The young lady was frozen in the frame, almost filling it, with a pair of smaller girls in front and mostly in the frame. The faces were thin but clean, and their hair wild and ragged. Their eyes were blue, not black as he’d originally thought. The linen was shapeless and fringed, unfinished or roughly sewn. It was the expressionless eyes that got him. Three pairs of them were locked right on his position. It was uncanny.

By the time the camera was ready again they were gone and Blanchard sat there with his mouth open and a strange look on his face.

Thoughtfully, he reached down and pulled out a bag of trail mix. All of that effort and he had gotten just two pictures. It was exciting—that was all that he could think. It was exciting.

He’d have a little snack and then go up to the house and show old Stan what he had found, no—what he had proven after all. Still observing silence or at least being as quiet as possible, he unscrewed the cap from a small bottle of apple juice.

He’d first glimpsed the strange girls last spring, hundreds of metres away in the evening gloom. The second time, he thought, but could never be sure, that he had caught sight of an arm, just an arm but full length, and a bit of the dress through a gap in the brush, last autumn before the rains came.

They were real after all. The question was what to do about it. The truth was, he had no idea.

It’s not like anyone would really care. It's not like anyone would ever believe it...

Feeling slightly foolish about the whole thing, he abruptly drained the juice and put the garbage away.

It was time to get out of there and go home.

END

Here is Shape-Shifters, a fantasy novel on iTunes.