Story: 'Night Trials', VII

I've said it before: Mathematics and writing are anathema to each other. After two days of numerical things I can barely draw a few words together in coherent fashion! Pondering boundary conditions and pounding out finite difference schemes seems to ruin the writing soul.

Tonight's movie is 'The Black Cauldron'. It's creepy as anything so far, but not exactly Disney-like. It's fascinating to me that in the 1980s Disney was looking for a direction, having lost the focus that made it legendary to begin with. People like Pixar stars John Lasseter and Brad Bird were moved out of Disney in this period, which of course is madness in retrospect.

Anyway, back to the business at hand... which is cold.


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Night Trials: Part VII
(Parts VI , VIII)

Two weeks later the situation was clearer. Bob had used his time wisely and secured a base in some old diggings just out of town, obtained food covertly from his friends on the outskirts and observed the behaviour of Wandering Yip. It seemed that there were far different patterns at work in town to those he had known.

At night there was no obvious human activity at all, with perhaps everyone staying inside. Whether this was forced was not obvious but it could just as well have been for people to avoid the presence of the aliens, who stood still at regularly placed positions about town, sentinels until the day ahead. As the sun rose above the horizon the aliens would lean from side to side, moaning, until finally retreating to the old liberty hall. As the aliens withdrew so would the humans emerge. At night the alien behaviour would be in reverse. Obviously there has to still be alien influence in action, otherwise the townsfold would escape at night, but how?

During the day, the aliens were rarely seen at all, although their machines moved around commonly. Two such machines floated around some defined perimeter of town all day, always on opposite sides of the town from one another.

As to the aliens, they were of bizarre aspect, oozing and sliming through metallic casings. The first he had seen was short and stout, but of the nine he had seen there were all the comibinations of tall and short, stout and slender, pale and dark. In terms of appendages there was little difference between these aliens and humans, but in vision the alien had four additional smaller eyes around their heads. What that meant, Bob could not say, but the silence at night time did not bode well.

Taking it all into account, Bob decided it was clearly time to act. That night, he would secure a witness and two horses and make a break for civilization.


To be continued...