Watch Over You

by Sabre, Mason

  “Sam was thirteen, I think, when she began to change. When she was little, there were always little things.”

  “Little things?” Tara asked.

  “Weird things. I don’t know. Just things.” He couldn’t think of the right way to describe it. “There was something different about her. When she hit puberty, she started to see things that weren’t there. She could hear people talking too. It used to make her scream so loud.”

  “She was sick? Did your adoptive parents help her?”

  Devan scoffed. “No. One day she was having one of her episodes. Some crap about someone outside the window. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Even I had had enough of it by then.”

  “Why didn’t they get her any help?”

  That question alone made Devan’s guilt spike through his veins and into his chest. They should have got her help, but no one did - not even him. “No. Gary ran past me. He yelled in her face. Told her she better shut up. That just made it worse. Then he hit her so hard across the face she went flying. I thought she was dead. That’s how he used to solve it after that. It was the only way to get some quiet. I did nothing.”

  Devan expected Tara to be appalled. He expected that she would tell him how awful he was for doing that, but she didn’t. She reached out and cupped his face, her hand was so soft and warm against his skin. He didn’t deserve a touch so tender as hers. “You were just a child yourself.”

  “I was her brother.”

  “That doesn’t matter. They were the adults. They were the ones doing something wrong.”

  “Do you know the worst part?”

  Tara shook her head.

  “I did the same as our parents. I left. I abandoned her. I left her with Gary and Suzie and got myself out of there.”

  “You ran away?”

  “No, I went to university. I wanted to study art and history. I never went back. Never visited. Never called. To me, they were just gone. In my second year, just before Christmas, Gary called me. He never called me. Sam had left too. She was fifteen.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Down south. To Somerset.”

  “You met Eric down in Devon? When you were looking for her?” Devan didn’t answer but waited as he watched a million thoughts and questions spinning around in her mind. “Did you come up this way because of Eric too?”

  His heart lurched and he was uncertain how to answer. Instead, he slid away from her, yanked his blanket off and stood up.

  “Devan?”

  Devan turned away from Tara. He didn’t want to see the disappointment on her face. “Sam took her own life,” he said quietly. “Before I could find her. She was already gone. I didn’t know how to stay down there after that, but I also didn’t know how to leave. She was buried down there, but I needed a fresh start. The place was killing me. Then I met someone and there was no reason for me to stay anymore. So I didn’t.”

  “Someone?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want to say anymore. "You should get some sleep. We’ll be leaving in a while. I’m just going to check everything is locked.”

  He jumped down off the stage before Tara could protest. He had said too much.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tara was alone when she woke up. Pulling herself up, she shivered from the cold, not just in the air, but also from the coldness that had managed to cling to her clothes. Although they were now dry, they remained rigid and uncomfortable. Her shoulder ached as well, and her neck was so stiff that just stretching sent ripples of pain rolling through her muscles. She hadn’t moved in her sleep, evidently; not that she remembered falling asleep in the first place. She rubbed her eyes and yawned and, for just a second, normality snuck into her mind and she craved a nice, hot shower

  As she stood, she clutched the blanket around her. It was itchy and hard, but the damn thing was warm. She noticed then that Devan wasn’t with her. He wasn’t on the stage at all. His blanket, she realised, had been added to her own for extra warmth. “Devan?” She crept to the front of the stage to have a better view of the rest of the room. He wasn’t there. Panic threatened to engulf her. “Devan?” Desperation stole his name from her lips at a higher pitch. “Devan?” she shouted, dread pervading her every cell.

  “Shush. I’m here,” he spoke suddenly from behind her. Relief washed over her as she saw him come up the steps from the back of the stage. “I hope this tastes okay,” he said, offering her a small cup. “I found some coffee in the kitchen.”

  “Thank you.” Using one hand to keep the blanket in place, she let the other slip out between the centre gap to take the cup. She noticed that he had bound his hand with a piece of cloth, but it hadn’t stopped the bleeding. She caught sight of the blood that had seeped through it already, but decided not to comment this time. They hadn’t said a word since he had told her Sam was dead, but her mind was filled with even more questions than before. Had Eric helped him move up north? Had they been great friends? Was it Eric who helped him to find Sam? What happened to the person he had met and left with? She couldn’t find the right words to say, though. Her mind just sent the images tumbling around. “Is it light outside?” she asked. Agitation at the entire situation was beginning to bubble to the surface. Silence and inertia made her uneasy. She needed to do something.

  “Almost.” He sat down beside her and took a sip of his coffee. Screwing up his face, he made an unintelligible sound, something between a choke and a laugh. “This is disgusting,” he sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  It made Tara wary to try her own coffee, but still she brought it to her mouth and inhaled. It didn’t smell too bad. She blew across the top of it. It was far too hot to drink yet. “Have they found us?” she asked Devan as she lowered her cup again.

  “No, not that I can see. The sun is almost up, though. So it won’t matter soon.”

  “They can't come out in the dark?”

  “They need shadows.”

  Tara sipped her coffee, it wasn’t too bad. Cheap and a little bitter, but it didn’t taste old. She had no desire to know exactly how old it was, though. “What are they exactly? The black things. You said they come for the souls of the broken? Sounds a little late night television to me.” They didn’t scare her like they should. She was scared of what they wanted, but not of what they were. When she was a child, her mother had dragged her along to every kind of spiritualist church, medium or self-proclaimed clairvoyant. It had long lost its appeal and fear factor. Tara herself had toyed with the idea when Eric first died, but then she decided that if there were ghosts - spirits of loved ones - then that would mean there was a higher power. How could there be a higher power that would allow such suffering?

  Tara wasn’t afraid. Her mother had once taken her to some weird séance at one of her friend’s houses. She was supposed to go and play with the other children, but she had wanted to see a ghost. She’d watched from behind the sofa as one of the women had suddenly pitched forward and vomited the most vile, white, transparent, viscous-like mucus thing she had ever seen. The entire room had fallen silent - but no one had heard the voice. Tara had, though. She had also seen a boy; he may have been a little older than she was at the time. He wasn’t one of them. He had walked around them and no one had seen him, only her. When he had left the room, he had walked right through the closed door as if it weren’t there. Her mother hadn’t believed her when she had told her, casting it aside as nothing more than a child’s fuelled imagination. But the memory had always stayed with Tara, and she had never denied the what if. Yet, if ghosts did exist, surely Eric would have come back?

  “They’re shadow walkers,” said Devan. “They literally walk the shadows. Like ghosts, I guess, like you said.”

  “Shadow walkers? Why do they want me? What do they want?”

  “Maybe you’re just unlucky,” he murmured. “We need to get moving.” Devan poured his coffee into a plant pot. It hadn’t occurred to Tara before that it was strange the plant was alive and
green. If anything, it was thriving. She said nothing about that either, though. She just finished her coffee while Devan went along the windows, spying through holes in the boards where they had rotted away. The entire place was a contradiction. While on the one hand many things were old and rotted and indicated a place that hadn’t been used in a very long time, the rest of it looked no older than the last time she had been there.

  Devan was standing on one of the chairs to peer out of a hole that he hadn’t been able to reach, face pressed against the board. When she finished her own coffee, which was too bitter to drink to the end, she went to stand by him. “Do you think we can nip back to my house? There are some things I would like to get.”

  He froze at her words, body going tense. “We don’t have the time.”

  “It’s five minutes.”

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. We can't spare the minutes. We need to leave as soon as you are ready”.

  “Where are we going that I can't just pop home?”

  Devan shook his head at her. “We can't go back to your house.”

  “I’ll go by myself.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You said yourself that they hide in the shadows. I won’t go near any.”

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s just…”

  He waved his hand at her like a parent dismissing a child. “I said no. You need to go and we need to leave.” He turned his back on her then, jumped down from the chair and went to another window. When she didn’t move from her position, he turned to look at her with a frown. “Now, Tara.”

  “What if I just go? Are you going to stop me?”

  Devan tensed. “Why won’t you listen?”

  “These things are important to me. I need to get them. Why won’t you listen?”

  He slammed his hand against the board and muttered something that she couldn’t quite make out. “Listen to me, Tara. You will not go back to that house. Whatever is there, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You said that if you could go back in time, you would listen to Eric and not get in the car like he had said. This is your chance now. We will not go back to the house, and I won’t discuss it with you anymore.”

  Her temper soared and her face flushed bright red from anger. She stared in disbelief as he walked away from her unperturbedly after she had been dismissed like a petulant child. Tears threatened to spill, sadness mixed with anger. How dare he take her words that way. She’d give anything to have made a different decision that night. Not to have driven home. Tara stormed off to the bathroom to wash face and to calm her shaking nerves.

  She wanted to slam the door behind her, but the hydraulics of the fire safety unit on it stopped her. She smacked it with the palm of her hand and let out a soft, infuriated cry. Then she turned and, for a second, Devan’s words were forgotten. The bathrooms were just as she remembered - old and outdated - but clean and cared for. She ran her fingers along the rim of the sink, sweet nostalgia flooding her. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her face looked tired and her hair was a mess. She tried finger combing it, but that did little to help. She needed a good hot bath and some form of reality check. She turned the tap on to wash her face and was surprised to feel the water heating up. She pushed the thought aside; on the level of weird shit happening, a tap that produces hot water was not high on her list. She washed her face and cast her mind to other things. Things that weren’t Devan and what he had just said to her. She couldn’t get her mind off the house, though. She needed to go home. Those were Eric’s things she wanted to go back to get.

  It was as she was drying her face with some paper towels, and trying her hardest not to let Devan seep back into her mind, that she noticed the windows. They were high, but low enough that if she were to climb onto the sink, she could get out of them. It would only be a few minutes. She felt a little childish as she felt her triumph well up inside. Ha, she told him mentally. He had said that they didn’t come out in the day and she could see through the glass that it was daylight.

  She tiptoed over to the bathroom door as if Devan would suddenly realise from the way she walked what she was planning. She cracked the door open as quietly and as little as possible and peered out. He was sitting on the stage with his legs swinging back and forth, looking at some artwork. She regretted it had to be this way, but there were things that were far more important than her life. Tara had no doubt in her mind that when Devan realised she had gone, he would head to the house himself. She had to run, and fast, if she was to get there before he could stop her.

  She climbed up onto the sink. It rattled under her weight - not that she was heavy. She held onto the window ledge above and prayed that the sink would hold. Easing open the window catch, she pushed against the frame, but the window was old and hadn’t been opened in a while. It wouldn’t budge.

  She counted to three aloud and then slammed the palm of her hand against the wood. The window came open and Tara hoisted herself up and then pulled herself through it to drop down on the other side before Devan could come running.

  She didn’t know exactly which way they had come specifically; she just ran. Her anger at Devan was soon replaced with adrenaline as she set out in a general southern direction. She ran down the path and out onto the main street. They had come this way, she was sure of it. Glancing around as she ran, she saw streets and roads that she had not seen in a very long time. The sights almost stopped her in her tracks, but she had no time. She checked over her shoulder to see if Devan was following her, but he wasn’t. Maybe he hadn’t heard. It was only a matter of time, though, before he went to see what was taking so long and saw the open window.

  Her lungs were bursting, yelling at her to slow down as she sprinted along the main road. She didn’t. She reached the public gardens that were home to children’s miniature golf and hopscotch games. She pushed open the gate and slid through, not stopping to look at anything. She ran between hurdles and stepped over novelty obstacle courses where children tried to score a hole-in-one through a clown’s mouth. When she had come out on the other side and pushed through another gate, she stopped to survey her surroundings.

  They had come out of one of these gardens, she was sure. It had bushes and flowers like hers did. It had a climbing frame. She walked alongside the back garden gates, peering over them as she did until she found one with a child’s swing and slide set. This was the one. The garden was fitted for a perfect family of four. Typical suburban living of the middle class family.

  She lifted the latch on the gate to let herself in. She remembered they had emerged from the side of the house somewhere between the hedges. She scanned the greenery that lined the garden, looking for the gap that they had used. She found it just behind an old shed.

  She slipped through the gap. She wasn’t going to be that long - maybe a minute or two. There were just some things that she couldn’t leave behind. She had to shimmy sideways as she didn’t quite fit. Just as she was about to, someone grabbed her hand and tugged. She was jerked backwards and smashed right into Devan’s solid chest.

  “What are you doing?” he ground out.

  “I told you. I want to get some things from the house. I was coming back.”

  “Why don’t you listen to me?”

  “I don’t understand the harm. They aren’t there. It’s five minutes.”

  “You don’t understand because you can't.” He gripped her hand and tried to pull her along. Tara resisted, digging her heels into the ground while trying to prise her fingers from his.

  “Let me go,” she demanded.

  He didn’t. He didn’t stop pulling her either. Not until they were back in the family garden. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he grated as he spun her around to face him. His face was nothing but stone.

  “I only wanted a couple of things. Eric’s wedding ring. I can't leave without it. It’s just five goddamn minutes.”

  He rubbed at his tem
ples with the balls of is hands and paced away from her. “It’s not time that is the problem.” He lifted his head to stare at her. “We can spare the five minutes.”

  “Then what is it? Explain to me so I can understand.”

  He didn’t answer her. Anguish danced over his features.

  “I won’t be long,” she said, and taking him unawares, she jerked her hand free and ran.

  Devan made a lunge for her, but she was too swift. “Tara, no,” he yelled. She shuffled through the hedge as fast as she could with Devan hot on her heels.

  “Let me go, Devan,” she shouted.

  Twigs scratched at her face and she felt the burn as one of them scraped along her cheek. Branches caught her arm and leafy fingers entwined in her hair. She didn’t remember it being this long when they had slipped through the night before. Around and around she went. Was she lost? She didn’t know. It was impossible that there would be so many hedges. She threw a quick look over her shoulder but Devan was nowhere in sight. Tara didn’t have a clue which way she was facing any longer. She panted heavily as she pushed her way in any direction. An opening appeared just ahead. She made her way towards it, hoping that it didn’t just lead back to the garden or to Devan. Relief flooded her momentarily as she caught sight of her own garden. She emerged from the thick undergrowth, and Devan stepped out in front of her.

  Tara gasped and took an involuntary step backwards. How on earth had he got there before her? Where had he come from?

  “I said no,” he growled.

  Anger started to rage inside her. He wasn’t going to tell her what to do. Who did he think he was? Without a word, Tara pushed him out of her way and walked past him - then stopped short. She was standing in her garden; she was sure of it. It was the same half built brick outdoor grill that Eric had started but never finished. It was the same garden shed. It was the same everything. But when she cast her eyes over the garden and across the patio, her house was gone.