The Watchers

by A. M. Shine

  Madeline stepped gingerly forward. A long arm reached out from her blanket and took the bottle, like a wild animal snatching a morsel of food from a stranger’s hand.

  ‘Thank you, Mina,’ Madeline said, and she placed the water in the centre of the table. ‘Now, shall we sit down and dine together. Daniel has gathered us some food for dinner. Maybe afterwards we can talk about the bird traps again.’

  Mina’s thoughts were still fearfully transfixed on the voice that had come from behind the glass. What could it have been? The horror, so fresh and perplexing to her, didn’t seem to affect the rest of them. They had each conceded to this wretched life, imprisoned in a single cell by the nightly hours, to be watched from the darkness by unseen eyes. But why didn’t they flee? If daylight was their guardian, then they had ample hours to run for help.

  ‘Mina,’ Madeline said, as she knelt by the table, ‘won’t you join us? I speak for Daniel and Ciara when I say that it’s nice to have someone new amongst us. It’s good to sit together, to share in a meal. It proves that we are still civilised, despite everything.’

  Madeline divided out the berries amongst them, giving each person an equal share. It was by no means enough, but all that they had. She seemed less like an evil stepmother now and, surprisingly, more like a mother. Albeit a strict one. As erratic as she was, Madeline had obviously applied some element of routine to their days. Mina wondered if they sat together every night. A dysfunctional family, bound not by blood, but by the want to survive. Maybe Madeline was the reason for them lasting as long as they had. However long that was. Mina was curious to know, but the time would come. The hot topic of why they weren’t dead was not exactly dinnertime conversation. It was unusual to sit down and eat with others. But then, nothing about that day was borderline normal. Why should dinner be any different?

  Mina lived alone. Instead of renting out the spare room as her sister suggested, she had flipped the mattress against the wall, and christened it her studio. Artistic enterprise and inspiration took priority over her cooking. That’s partially why Mina dined out so much. The food was always more interesting than her half-hearted attempts. But more importantly, she could spy on the oblivious diners seated around her; candidates for the sketchbook – the enterprise. If she were familiar with the restaurant’s layout she would request a table in a corner, out of sight, where she wouldn’t be disturbed and yet had a view of those around her.

  First dates were her favourite to watch. All those nervous ticks and tells that Mina looked for when playing cards – they all revealed themselves, untamed and exaggerated. The silence was never allowed to settle because that meant there was nothing to say. So, between the postured laughter and anecdotes carefully selected to sell their best parts they usually managed to hold a conversation until the bill arrived. Mina hated dinner dates. The pressure to keep the dialogue afloat always sank her appetite.

  She accepted Madeline’s invitation and took a blackberry from the table, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. Daniel had nearly devoured his portion already. Ciara, on the other hand, was making them last, and seemed to be slowly sucking hers instead of chewing them. Madeline took each berry and currant one at a time; masticating it slowly, savouring it, swallowing it through, and then waited a moment before proceeding on to the next. Did the woman realise how odd she was? Her every action followed a system. It was as though she was on autopilot, like the animals in the zoo.

  ‘Hopefully,’ Daniel said to Mina, ‘we’ll have more food tomorrow. There’s not much meat on the birds, but it’s better than this. We’ll just keep it out of sight from your friend over there.’ He winked towards the parrot. ‘We don’t want him getting upset.’

  Madeline nodded her head as she licked around her gums. ‘Very good, Daniel. We can discuss the traps again while Mina is getting some rest, that is if Ciara would be so kind as to relinquish our only bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ciara replied, looking anywhere but at Madeline. ‘It’s just been a hard time.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ she replied with an air of disinterest, ‘none of us have it easy, do we? Hopefully with three of us awake they won’t start shrieking when they lose sight of you, Mina. I suppose we’ll know soon enough. Now go on. Lie down before Ciara steals the bed from under you. I have no doubt that you are tired and when we are tired, we must sleep.’

  4

  Madeline

  The building was constructed of concrete blocks. Plastered, but not painted. Its walls were clouded with a black damp that spread from the ground up. The gabled roof was corrugated iron. Fat, furry mosses spread through its grooves, and no gutter fringed its edges. When it rained the water just spilled right off it, carving trenches of wet silt on both sides. There was one way in – the same door that Madeline locked before sundown.

  It was divided into two rooms by a corridor that ran through its spine. This had no windows for light, only the bulb that dangled by its entrance, and was so narrow that only a single body could pass through it at a time. Hands and fingers had left their trails across its walls. The floors were cold, grey cement. In stark contrast to the soil and uneven trees that surrounded it, everything within was hard and square; immovable and manmade.

  At the far end of the passage, on the left, was an empty doorframe that led into the living room. This housed three rectangular windows in the main wall, set high at five feet off the ground, all of which held no glass. Lacerations could be found on their frames and throughout the room in its entirety. On the floor, across the ceiling, and on every wall. New ones were easy for Madeline to spot each morning when the plaster burned like a fresh wound.

  This room was known as the living room because of the square cavity and flue in its wall – the fireplace, just to the right of the doorway when one entered. It sometimes flooded during a downpour, but most of the time the trees bore the brunt of the rain. It was the building’s only source of heat. It kept people alive during the colder months, hence the name.

  So empty was this room that sounds echoed off its walls. Each word spoken merged into the next, until it was just noise; indecipherable layers. It was disorientating. No one raised their voice there. Some nights, when the watchers crept inside, their screams coursed through the building like a cancer, tainting every part of it. Nothing was ever left there overnight. When darkness fell it was off limits until the dawn, when there was peace, and the light clicked off.

  On the floor and wall by the middle window there were bloodstains. No manner of Madeline’s scrubbing could remove them. Blood on concrete was like red wine on white carpet – a reminder that bad things happen, and a warning that they could happen again. A few flecks could be found around the frame, beside a lonely, smeared thumbprint. If anybody stood by a window to get some fresh air, they instinctively avoided that one.

  The room had no electricity. There was no comfort. This was where they went during the day-lit hours to rest their eyes after the night before – when they were confined to the coop, as Madeline had humourlessly coined it. Where they gathered like moths whenever the light was on.

  Above the fireplace, someone had written on the wall. They had used some scorched timber to scratch out their lesson, pared to a needle’s point and bathed in hot, hypnotic flame. The letters were sharp and tortured, and reiterated so many times that they scored deep into the plaster. If written words could shout, these were screaming at anyone who would listen.

  Stay in the light

  Life was cold amidst the trees, where the sun fought to be seen, always overwhelmed by the branches that reached across the sky like a cage. Madeline lived and slept wrapped in her fleece blanket. It had become like a second skin, and she a shrinking skeleton beneath it. She had considered taking it down to the stream. It was musty from smoke, and the stains had collaborated to form their own pattern, and not one that Madeline particularly liked. Blood, dirt, and ash from the fire. But the air in the woodland was never dry in December. It was misty and it was damp. It could be days, weeks
even, before she could wear it again, and she wasn’t willing to make that sacrifice, not when her bones creaked the way they did. Every joint cracked out its unique key, arranging an almost musical score to the simplest movement. Spring was only months away, and she wasn’t going anywhere. No one was. She would wash it then, when those rare beams of light did more than thaw ice and make the white parts black. They brought warmth and made the woodland a little less cruel.

  Madeline had sent Daniel out that morning to forage and inspect the bird traps. It had been two days now without a catch. Their stomachs were running on fumes. Madeline had shown him time and time again how to set them. Those blank eyes of his assured her that the boy didn’t have a clue. He was the most able-bodied amongst them, and the only one who could climb high enough. This was his responsibility and his alone, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

  He was a child in Madeline’s eyes, only nineteen, and so Daniel did what he was told. He had left his motorbike outside the coop overnight at her behest. The scrambler, as he called it, was never seen again. Madeline had hoped as much. It was a relic from the Eighties apparently, and he had said it had been in his family since before he was born. Daniel had pushed it all the way from the woodland’s edge when it broke down, unable to part with it. They all came to stop there. There was one way to enter the forest, and that was on foot.

  Ciara hadn’t stirred for three days. Not since her husband took off to find help. Madeline’s pity for her was cold and active like a twitching corpse. Ciara was naïve and she was fat. She had these wonderfully romantic notions about love and the world, and she seemed to genuinely believe that escape was possible. Now she was a widow at twenty-six. Her crying was constant; a leaking faucet beyond repair.

  She had become a liability. A drain on what little they had, offering nothing but tears. Madeline wished that Ciara had gone in search of help, and that her husband had stayed. At least he was strong. She could have made some use of him. But he was gone now. He was dead, and she remained, bundled under their blankets in the coop’s corner, weeping to no one, wondering how everything could just disappear, leaving no proof that it ever existed.

  Ciara looked young and still relatively healthy. In the right light her innocence was almost gaudy. Madeline envied her for that. Her youth and the beauty it bestowed; something she could never mimic. But on their diet and without sunlight this would fade fast, becoming a memory too painful to recall, like anything lost that was never cherished. She still had that softness around her face and body, the kind that children keep until the years chisel a shape out of them. Give it one winter, Madeline thought, if she can survive even that.

  Ciara’s hair was copper red and had grown just below her shoulders. The girl had spent every moment of every day smoothing it behind her ears; a nervous habit that, despite their circumstances, never failed to make her husband smile. Ciara was pale the day she arrived. Not a wilting grey pallor like Madeline’s. Her skin was perfect porcelain, and her eyes were like emeralds, always glistening, always searching for happiness when there was none to be found; just another excuse to pity her.

  She had the doting husband, the home, the life that she had always wanted – the unspoken checklist. During her first days she had taken to sharing everything about herself, even airing their plans for the future as if nothing had changed. Holidays and festivals, children’s names and the schools where they would be spoken, like a record from a different time stuck on repeat. Madeline’s disinterest was obvious, and soon the sound of Ciara’s voice softened to silence.

  She and her husband, John, had clung to each other for support, and now she was reaching out for someone who wasn’t there, and Madeline knew never would be again. Ciara would come to realise this in time. As young as she was, she was still old enough to learn what hopelessness meant.

  Madeline had ventured out at dawn. Thin tapers of morning light broke the canopy above, melting the frost in patches, leaving the rest crystal white. The spring was their sole source of water and requisite to their survival. It wasn’t far. Madeline had cleared a path and could reach it within half an hour at a stable pace. Daniel had packed a two-litre bottle of water with him when he set off on his bike all those months ago; his one contribution. Maybe he wasn’t so useless after all. Madeline had emptied out his backpack onto the floor the day he arrived and taken all that she wanted. The boy was too nervous to stop her, and too confused by his surroundings to collect his courage. He had never seen a room like it.

  The coop was Madeline’s responsibility. She alone held all the keys. She kept it locked when they were inside. Ciara and Daniel had been warned. If they weren’t there come nightfall, then they weren’t getting in, and so they rarely strayed too far. Madeline’s threats were not to be taken lightly.

  The coop’s entire front, from the floor to the ceiling, was one colossal pane of glass that framed the surrounding woodland. Madeline tried to keep the window clean, wiping it down whenever they had water to spare. It made the myriad scratches on its exterior all the more noticeable. Everyone struggled at first. But that sense of being so exposed and vulnerable never went away. They just learned to live with it.

  On the other wall was set a long electrical bulb that stretched between both gable ends. It was encased in what looked like glass, but it was unbreakable. Madeline hoped that the pane that stood between them and the forest was as strong. It was all that kept them safe. The light was blindingly bright and couldn’t be looked at directly. No one had worked out yet how it was powered. It came on automatically at night, and turned off at dawn, when the first rays of light scourged the forest floor of darkness.

  This is where they spent all their nights. In the far corner, tucked under the light, was their bed of blankets; a mismatched clump of faded fibres. Ciara had been buried under them for too long now. Usually, they weren’t allowed to sleep when the light was on. They had to stay awake, otherwise the watchers would scream and howl, and hammer at the glass. How many attacks could it take before it shattered?

  There was a table in the room’s centre. It was a chunk of deadwood, crooked and wobbly, and so low that one had to kneel on the floor in order to eat off it. It was unsightly. But like Madeline, Ciara, and Daniel, it was part of the room.

  In the coop they stored their supplies – edibles they had gathered during the day, fresh water from the spring, and anything that was or may have been of some use to them. They kept it clean. Madeline made sure of that. Unclean spaces bred infection, and they had no medicines to fight it.

  Daniel and Ciara were in the coop when Madeline heard the parrot’s squawk. Birds never landed on the forest floor. They knew what was down there, and they valued their lives more than a few nuts. The air was always deathly quiet in the moments before the watchers crept out of their pits, as though the woodland held its breath, waiting for their screams to sear through the silence. She had seen the woman struggling towards her. Madeline was surprised by how fast she had moved. Truth was that had Mina fallen only once, the door would have slammed shut.

  5

  Daniel

  The coop’s light switched off. Daniel never knew the time, but when the mirrored pane turned to glass, it had to be morning. He lost so many hours staring at his own reflection that the version of him trapped in the mirror had become somebody else; another Daniel who, like the watchers, only appeared when night fell, and departed just before the dawn.

  It was still dark, inside and out, and the air was cold as a tomb. The paling sky was leaking through the trees, revealing a forest still and lifeless, and crisp from a frost that would last through the day.

  Madeline unlocked the door without hesitation. Some mornings she stood by it, waiting, as though, unlike Daniel, time was something she could measure. When the bulb was dull and dormant it was safe to leave the coop. The light never lied to them. But Daniel wasn’t so eager to step out. It was, after all, not quite daylight. Not yet.

  He often wondered how deep the burrows went. Did they
stand atop a vast catacomb of tunnels and hollowed-out chambers, stretching for miles in all directions? Did the watchers continue to dig, expanding their subterranean empire, edging ever closer with each claw of dirt towards civilisation?

  Madeline had marked out the locations of those pits closest to their water trail. They didn’t seem to bother her. She might as well have been side-stepping a puddle. Daniel imagined the watchers lingering close to the surface as the darkness dissipated, hoping for him to abandon the coop too soon and to step within reaching distance of them. How deep would they drag him? Would anyone hear his screams?

  He always waited. It wasn’t morning until Daniel saw daylight. Ciara would join him, in silence, by the window. The air felt empty without the light’s constant hum. Sometimes he almost missed it. Without the warmth of the sun or the sound of birdsong it never seemed like morning, just a lighter shade of night.

  Madeline inspected the building every day without fail. Sometimes she brought Daniel with her, showing him what to look for. As expected, the water was gone. Everything they valued should have been stored in the coop where it was safe; the only space that was essentially theirs. There were some fresh scratches on the living room’s open frames that she pointed at until Daniel pretended to understand their significance. A few had come inside, Madeline had told him, but they hadn’t caused any meaningful damage that she could identify. The walls and ceiling seemed unchanged to Daniel’s eyes. The stench of their bodies still lingered; a noxious, unclean air of excreta and old flesh. A lit fire would smoke it out of the room. Aside from that one scream that sent Mina to the floor, the watchers had been surprisingly quiet. Madeline said that she was obviously a novel enough addition to keep them entertained for one night.

  While Mina slept, Madeline had sat Daniel down again. Ciara, too, was told to listen in. Madeline’s words had the sharpest edges, just like Daniel’s father, and they dripped in bitterness, stinging long after they were spoken.