Chapter 11

The Watchers

I looked at the green house for a long time. I could not believe what I was seeing. “What does this mean?” I asked myself again and again, but I had no answer. I felt both amazed and afraid. I noticed more and more things that looked the same as my own house. Finally, feeling tired and confused, I looked away to see the rest of this strange place.

Until now, I had only looked at the House. But when I looked around, I began to understand where I was. The area was a perfect circle, about ten to twelve miles wide. I decided to call this place “the arena.” The House stood exactly in the middle. The ground in this arena looked unclear, but it wasn’t real fog or smoke.

I looked up at the mountains that made a circle around the arena. They were completely quiet. This deep silence bothered me more than anything else I had seen. I studied the tall rock walls. The red light from the strange sun made everything look slightly unclear.

While I was looking at the mountains, I felt a new kind of fear. To my right, high up on one of the walls, I saw a huge, dark shape. It looked like a giant figure with a horse’s head and large ears. It seemed to be watching the arena, as if it had been there for thousands of years. As I kept looking, I could see it more clearly.

Then my eyes moved to something else even higher on the rocks. I looked at this second figure for a long time, feeling more and more scared. It seemed familiar to me somehow. It was black with four arms in strange positions. Its face was hard to see clearly, but around its neck, there was a chain. Looking closer, I saw the chain was made of small heads. There was also a belt around its waist.

Suddenly, I remembered something from my school days – this was Kali, the god of death from Hindu stories. My mind went back to my old lessons. I looked again at the huge creature with the horse’s head. Now I knew it was Set, a god from ancient Egypt known for destroying lives.

I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. “Two gods?” I thought to myself. Strange ideas filled my mind. “Old gods from ancient stories!” I looked back and forth between these two figures, trying to understand why they were here, watching over this strange copy of my house.