Signs all around the campground warned people of recent bear attacks. They needed to keep food inside heavy, lockable plastic tubs or inside vehicles. Preferably both.
Ben did notice that Dad parked the SUV as close to the campsite as he could get it. And he left it unlocked.
For three days Ben and his family did all the things they normally did on a camping trip. They found a meadow on a plateau above the cliff face and watched deer graze. They swam in the artificial lake created by a nearby dam. Mom fished and prepared her catch for dinner.
Ben took a lot of pictures and spent his evening translating them to the sketch pad. He almost forgot that he needed to keep an eye out for anything unnatural.
Then on the fourth evening, the next to the last they planned to stay, the wind came up and the moon rose full and bright. Jennifer wanted to tell ghost stories by the fire as the moon bathed them in soft light.
Mom and Dad looked at each other anxiously and started a singalong instead. Marie was still little enough she enjoyed clapping to the simple songs more than telling stories. Ben didn’t want to take a chance that their stories would bring an unwanted visitor.
It came anyway.
Ben had just fallen asleep when the wind came up and partially roused him. He peeked out, to make sure his tent pegs were secure and his sisters were snug in their own tent.
He watched fir branches high up in the canopy sway gently. They rattled a lot louder than they should for so little movement.
He ducked back inside and opened the camera function on the phone, then tucked into the chest pocket of his T shirt. He also made sure his sketch pad and a fresh pencil lay ready for him to grab.
Clomp. Clomp. The ground shook under the weight of something moving down the path along the creek.
Shivering in fear, Ben pulled on his jeans and hiking boots. He wanted to be ready for anything.
Seconds later he heard a tree branch break and crash to the ground. He peeked through the screened window.
Sure enough a blurry black shadow tinged in red and silver with leafy fur shuffled forward. Again he saw the phasing in and out movements.
Click, click, click.
The creature roared so loud, the rocks on the cliff shook. Small loose pieces trickled down to strike Ben’s tent.
He gulped and took several more pictures in rapid succession, wondering when a boulder from the cliff would crush him. Was he safer here or out in the camp with the... the nightmare.
It grabbed a Douglas Fir trunk, two feet across and uprooted it, throwing it into the river across the road.
“Everybody into the truck. Now!” Dad yelled.
Ben didn’t wait for a repeat of the order. He grabbed his sketch pad and hightailed it to the SUV.
Once more they huddled together and watched the monstrous beast shamble through the campground, knocking over tents and picnic tables, roaring with displeasure with each blow.
Other campers scrambled for the dubious safety of their vehicles.
Marie and Jennifer cried. Mom and Dad held the girls, eyes huge with fear.
Ben kept blinking his eyes, trying to get them to focus. Every time he tried to fix the outline of the beast, it blurred and phased even worse.
“Ben, climb over the back seat and hand me my rifle. And the ammo,” Dad said. He sounded grim and determined.
Ben did as he was told, handling the weapon with the respect and caution Dad had taught him. Shooting that thing out there might be the only way to save themselves.
Dad unlocked the case, loaded the rifle, and opened his window just wide enough for the muzzle to poke out. The beast came closer, roaring and reaching for them. Its claws seemed to have grown to twice the length Ben remembered.
The beast phased in and out with each movement.
Dad squeezed the trigger. Everyone covered their ears against the explosion of sound. The beast was so big that at this range he couldn’t miss. The bullet passed through the beast as if it wasn’t truly there, plunking into the twisted table top. No blood, no wound. Nothing.
Ben had seen it penetrate the leafy fur. Ears ringing from the rifle blast, he watched the beast shudder as it absorbed the impact.
Desperate to understand what was happening he resorted to his sketchbook. Without looking at what he drew, he kept his eyes fixed on where the creature had just been. Afterimages of its movements lingered and projected forward with each step and gesture.
“Is... is that what it really looks like?” Dad asked. He sounded on the verge of tears. Everything he’d done to protect them had failed.
He fired off another round. It struck the cliff wall directly behind the beast, sending a new cascade of rocks and dirt into the campsite. It had to have gone through the beast to get there.
Still no effect on the animal.
“Huh?” Ben looked up. The creature seemed less blurry. He checked his sketch. In his mind he saw the line of the jaw, and the shape of the nose. He drew them in.
The same features solidified on the beast outside.
I think maybe I created this thing and only I can make it go away, Ben thought.
Biting his lip in concentration he drew the fingers and claws (much shorter and duller than he’d seen), the markings on its fur.
Bit by bit he added detail to his drawing. Bit by bit the animal took form for real. The phasing went away.
“It’s still mighty big and dangerous,” Dad whispered. Another shot went right through it as it began shaking the SUV.
Ben got an idea. He pulled the gum eraser out of his pocket and removed an arm from his drawing. Then he re-drew it on the ground some distance away.
The creature turned a half circle and screamed in pain. Its right arm flew off its body and landed several feet away.
Then Ben erased and redrew the other arm.
The roars turned to whimpers.
With a few quick lines, Ben drew duct tape around and around the muzzle, making sure his shading made it shine a little bit in the moonlight. Just like the real thing.
Silence as the beast clamped its mouth shut.
It shook its head frantically, trying to dislodge the invisible clamp.
Then Ben erased the entire picture.
With one final muffled roar, the creature dissolved into a pile of dust that looked like erasure debris.
“Magic!” Mom gasped.
Ben couldn’t get a word around his very dry mouth.
“By... by defining the thing, Ben gave it limitations and vulnerabilities,” Dad said. He looked puzzled.
“It’s sort of like being afraid of the monster under the bed until you discover it’s really just a mound of old toys covered in dust,” Ben choked out.
Then he gulped, realizing he’d just admitted to where he’d swept all the junk in his room when Mom told him to clean up.
“I can’t believe you dragged us out camping again after the first attack,” Mom said, a little too loudly.
“Me? You were the one who couldn’t wait to have fresh fish for dinner.”
“How could you endanger the children...”
Ben knew the argument would go on forever. Marie started crying again. Jen looked like she’d start wailing too.
He cringed inside. Then he got an idea. On a new page of paper he drew Mom and Dad hugging and kissing.
Mom stopped yelling in mid-sentence. Dad clamped his mouth shut. They stared at each other in a long moment of silence. Then Mom started chuckling. Dad burst out in loud laughs. They fell together with their arms about each other and locked into a forever kiss, the kind of kiss that usually got Ben and the girls sent to bed early.
Ben flew through a quick sketch of their house with the truck parked in front of it.
“Let’s pack up and go home,” Dad whispered.
“That’s a good idea, Dad,” Ben answered. “I’ll start pulling the tents.”
“Um, Ben, leave the sketchbook and your phone in the car while we pack. We can make our own decisions,” Dad said f
irmly.
Ben gulped and nodded.
~THE END~
Dragon Treasure
This is another story I used to feed the insatiable maw of new free fiction on the front page of the Book View Café website. In part I used the writing to work through my grief when my Mom passed—see the dedication at the end. In part it just needed to be written. Thanks also to Lea Day for some of the inspiration, a good friend and the best researcher I know.
<<>>
“Peel me a watermelon, Jenks,” I called to my servant.
“Peel it yourself, Your Monstrousness, Madame Lea,” the pixie sneered back at me.
With that attitude, he should have been a gnome. I threw a book at him, the newest in a cozy mystery series I had just finished reading. Jenks flitted up into the cobwebs at the top of the cave. I sent a dribble of flame after him. Any more and I risked the danger of setting fire to one of the stacks of books piled around me.
My aim was off. I sent five spiders scuttling to safety but missed my target.
“Hey, send some more fire this way, Your Volatileness. Helps clean up a bit,” Jenks taunted me.
“House cleaning is your job.”
“If you’d hire some proper house fairies rather than enslaving an innocent pixie...” He darted into a corner behind the stack of Egyptology tomes.
“You know I can’t afford house fairies.” Jenks had come to me as part of a trade. I scared a pack of bandits away from a farmer’s livestock in return for some books. Jenks had been ensorcelled inside a delectable volume on wheat hybrids (I think the wizard figured no one would ever open the book and discover the bad-tempered brat). I broke the spell in return for services. Some day I’ll write a book about that adventure. Some day when I’ve finished my to-be-read-pile, or got bored with re-reading my favorites.
“If you’d get off your fat arse and go hunt up some treasure like a proper dragon...” Jenks ducked as I threw a rotten tomato at him. It was sitting right where I’d left it when I started reading the mystery series—goodness, can that have been two weeks ago? How time flies.
I lumbered off the lounge, displacing the pile of old romances that propped up the broken leg. A fog of dust engulfed me as the books tumbled. I was mad enough to spit fire, but had to settle for loosing a stream of ancient curses—gleaned from one of the Egyptology tomes.
“Where are you, you miserable pixie?” I screamed as I batted my forepaws through the thick air, trying to clear it before I sneezed.
Too late. “Achooooooooo!” Smoke and fire shot upward as I turned my muzzle away from the precious books.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Jenks screamed at me as he beat at a flamelet on a hardcover dust jacket with his hands. Unfortunately, his flapping wings only fanned the embers into real fire.
“No great loss.” I stomped upon the wildfire, half hoping I’d flatten Jenks in the process. “It’s only a duplicate copy of Astarte, Love Goddess To Unlovable Thieves, true porn masquerading as romantic erotica, probably the worst book ever written.”
“My favorite,” Jenks protested as he squeezed between my toes.
Drat! I missed the little gnat.
He examined a bent wing. The fire had singed the tip, and my talons had made a rent down the middle, a least two thirds its rainbow length.
“I claim the other copy as recompense for damages, Your Addicted-to-Justice-ness” Jenks moaned.
“Fine, and clear out some of this other crap while you’re at it.” I kicked a pig skeleton into the deep recesses of the cave. It bounced back from the pile of refuse, and shattered upon impact. I pulled a splinter free of the carcass and picked my teeth.
“You really should do something about the mess, Your Slobbishness,” Jenks said, shaking his head.
He rummaged through a pile of rags to unearth a medicine bag from the last wizard who had tried to steal treasure from me. When the spell-caster had discovered nothing but books, I couldn’t allow him to leave. After all, my fierce reputation was all that gave me any privacy for reading.
The land was thick with knights and other adventurers; younger sons who couldn’t inherit the family homestead and had to make their own way in the world. I guess they hoped to pilfer a few diamonds and such to purchase their own land or make them more attractive to an heiress.
To tell you the truth, if I had a spare diamond or two, I’d sell it and buy more books. That’s the only use for treasure, in my not-so-humble opinion. My fractiously feuding family doesn’t agree with me, on much of anything. Especially the issue of books. Boils and pustules, what can I do with them?
They believe the purpose of a dragon’s life is to amass treasure and then defend it against thieving humans. Now if we could just teach more of those humans to read and to treasure books... But that’s another matter.
My family, with their hoards of shiny treasures can afford house fairies to keep everything clean and polished and properly accounted for in thick ledgers.
A clean cave is a sign of a sick mind. Or a sign of a dragon with nothing better to do with her time.
I’d rather spend my time reading.
Whenever family obligations require we meet, I always go to their places. I’d never invited a single one of them here, nor have I allowed them to “drop by” or escort me to a family gathering. They might discover that I’m not just erudite, I’m a total slob.
The doorbell rang. Such a rare phenomenon that Jenks and I stared at each other long enough for the visitor to get impatient and ring again.
“Quick, Jenks, get rid of it, whatever it is.” I slunk into a dark recess, grabbing my book along the way.
The bell rang again, a long and loud bong that repeated a dozen times, as if someone actually swung from the rope rather than rapping it smartly against the bronze bell. I wasn’t curious enough to peek out the window crack to see for sure.
“Keep your greaves on, I’m coming,” Jenks groused. He had to walk the ten tail-lengths to the iron-hinged and studded double oak doors. He couldn’t lift the latch of course. It was heavy enough to make me think twice about lifting it—so I rarely left the place. Jenks crawled beneath the door, then right back inside.
“Get your scaly chartreuse body over here, Your Immenseness. This is one of yours.”
“A knight?” I really didn’t want to fight a knight today. They’d left me alone for so long, I’d lost my taste for human flesh. Besides, I was just getting to the good part of the book, the part where the hero says this one special word in ancient Sumerian and the heroine melts into a puddle of oil.
Psst, I should mention that I usually recast the characters in the books I read. The ones you might ordinarily call villains are the true heroes. The nice guys are just too... too vanilla.
“A knight of sorts,” Jenks choked under his nectar scented breath.
Then I realized the hacking sound coming from his miniature body was laughter. If he’d make a decent mouthful, I just might eat him. But then, if Jenks didn’t lure game into the cave, I’d have to find food and cook occasionally. That would disrupt my privacy and my reading.
“Who dares trespass on my property,” I bellowed in my fiercest dragon voice. I let a little smoke seep under the door. That usually scared off all but the most desperate and poor of the thieves.
For an answer I heard only a tremendous thud against the stout door.
“What’s he got, a battering ram?”
“Better,” Jenks chortled. “A trebuchet.”
Curses and flames hit the door in equal measure. It caught fire and splintered under the next blow.
Where could I hide? More important, how could I keep the invader away from my books?
Panic made me shrink into a brittle shadow of my robust self.
“Quick, Jenks, sprinkle the place with pixie dust so he thinks all this is treasure and not just garbage. Maybe he’ll haul away a pig carcass or three.”
“Or six,” Jenks muttered. “You know if I dust the books maybe he’ll haul away a
few stacks, give us some more room.”
“Over my dead body!” I puffed myself up and loosed another blast of fire. The knight was attacking the door with a fresh barrage of boulders anyway, maybe if I singed him through the cracks a little, he’d think twice.
“He’ll make your body dead if you aren’t careful.” Jenks threw a handful or two of pixie dust over the remains of my last six meals.
“More, Jenks. That’s not enough dust to fool anyone.”
“All I can do, Your Gluttonness. Can’t fly, thanks to you singing my wing, so I can’t properly dust anything.”
“Maybe if you throw it in his face...”
“You willing to hold me high enough, and close enough to reach his face?” The cocky gnat stood, hands on hips, feet spread in an aggressive stance.
“I don’t... If I have to.” My knees began to tremble and I dropped to all fours rather than fall flat on my face.
Did I mention that besides being an erudite slob I am also a coward?
“That’s better,” Jenks said. “You’re thinking, rather than just reacting and depending upon your size and strength to win this fight.”
Yeah, right.
He began climbing my body as he would a mountain. “If you rolled onto your side, I could make better headway on your scales. Not fight gravity.”
Whatever. I obeyed his command and he slithered and hitched himself up, scale by scale, shaking loose a few itchy mites along the way.
Meanwhile, the knight made headway on the door with boulders, nearly as large as myself, banging into it every few minutes. Before Jenks reached my muzzle so I could stand up again, the door crashed to the floor.
“Yeep!” I squeaked and scrambled for a more dignified pose.
“All right, Lea, hand them over!” shouted a scrawny man crouching behind a shield made of translucent dragon scales. He brandished a rusty sword that belonged in a museum. His token armor consisted of motorcycle leathers and a helmet—not very stylish or well-fitting leathers at that. They bagged at his shoulders and butt. He’d had to roll up the pant legs and sleeve cuffs to accommodate their bulk and length to his underdeveloped frame.
Fantastical Ramblings Page 8