The Watchers

by A. M. Shine

  ‘Thank you,’ Madeline said to Ciara as the screams grew closer, and soon speaking was pointless. Their voices couldn’t be heard.

  The night had never been so riotous nor so defined by absolute terror. Bodies hammered against the glass, sending distorted reflections quivering wildly against their will. The mirror was never still. It shook and it creaked as though it would, at any second, shatter. The watchers had flooded into the living room, too, and now, for the first time, they beat against the door, causing all those locks to rattle.

  On the cold floor, Mina held her hands tight to her ears. Every thought and afflictive imagining invoked only visions of blood and pain. Her tormentors assumed a legion of guises for she had yet to behold their true, terrifying form. Her fears focused on the claws – the markings and scars that were everywhere and would soon be upon her body. Skin and bone torn like a child’s doll. Discarded or devoured, death was always the outcome – the inescapable end that they each shared.

  Ciara had nudged in beside Mina. Their fingers entwined instinctively. Her hand, unlike Madeline’s, was soft. It was warm. Ciara’s façade of earlier had fallen away. She was again that timid little girl who had peeped, sleepy-eyed from her bed, smiling as though this moment would never come.

  The watchers’ assault was relentless. There was no telling which would break first, the glass or the door; castle gates besieged and soon to be conquered. They could do no more than wait and hope. With Mina and Ciara huddled on the floor, and Daniel hidden out of sight, only Madeline had the will to act. Her survivalist’s sense had gotten her that far and she wasn’t ready to give up. She was their tall, fading protector. Her outward appearance was one of frailty. Yet every hardened crease and cleft through Madeline’s skin was another etching on her being; another day, another week, they all gathered and kept sacred her struggle. She reached out to Ciara with an open hand. Nobody knew the locks like Madeline, and the keys were passed to her without a second’s hesitation.

  Mina had watched her like an infant too young to help. But if this was their last stand, the last drop when all else was spent, then she would sooner die standing by Madeline’s side than cowering on the floor.

  The door was shuddering, all locks strained to their limits. Madeline pressed her weight into it. Those monstrous hands spread wide, all bones rising under the skin. Mina wanted to join in her effort, but what strength did she have to offer? She looked to Ciara, still petrified on the floor, staring as if in a trance at the table in the room’s centre, so solid that it remained static when all around it seemed to shake. Only then did its worth dawn on her. That ugly hunk of wood could wedge the door in place. Its weight was more valuable than all their strength combined.

  Mina tried to pull it out of place, body arched, fingers cracking dirt from its crust, but it wouldn’t shift. She gestured over to Madeline for help, but the woman was hesitant; unwilling to pitch in. She was seen to frown with disapproval like a housewife who didn’t want any aspect of her home altered. ‘Come on,’ Mina shouted, but the watchers’ attack overruled her voice. Did Madeline not understand what she was doing? It was Ciara who ran first to Mina’s aid, and only then did Madeline join in, having conceded that this was happening with or without her help.

  These things had massacred a unit of armed soldiers. Against steel and skill, they arose victorious. Mina knew the hopelessness of their situation, encircled on all sides, waiting for the glass to blast into pieces. Her eardrums faltered against a beat that they couldn’t keep pace with. None of them were soldiers. But they were survivors.

  She looked to Ciara and Madeline, cheeks flushed and gasping for breath. ‘Okay, on three,’ she mouthed, nodding her head. ‘One, two,’ and together they dragged the table across the floor, leaving a rail-track of white on its cement. When it was jammed in tight against the door Mina turned and stopped suddenly, as if some invisible barrier had fallen before her.

  Where the table had once been, in the centre of the room, there was now an indentation in the floor, perfectly square. Its outline was aligned in filth, and by the white light all eyes were drawn to it – this oddity concealed until that moment. The wood wasn’t the cause of the depression. Heavy as it may have been, it certainly couldn’t sink into solid cement.

  Mina fell to her knees and drew her ear alongside the floor. She hammered her knuckles on the cement, and then again, searching for some explanation. She would tap, and she would listen. Every aching part of her was shaking.

  Amidst the screams and the madness, she had to draw her mouth against Madeline’s ear so that she could hear her.

  ‘It’s hollow,’ she said. ‘There’s something under there.’

  14

  Peace came with the dawn. The earliest inklings of light were smoky and weak. They trickled like ash through the darkness, scattered by the wind’s tender sough. The grey wept from the top down; white where the daylight dipped its toe. The night seemed reluctant to leave.

  The building had been overrun. In all of Madeline’s time there, she’d said she had never experienced anything like it. For the longest night imaginable they had endured the watchers’ bound and determined barrage against them, and in the swiftest second, they were gone, leaving a silence suspect and unsettling. The light turned off, revealing an eyesore of scored trees and severed branches. The ruins of their labour. But Mina’s focus didn’t extend that far. All that she could see were the claw marks cleaved into the pane’s every inch. It was a miracle that it had remained intact.

  Even over their shrieks, the scraping of their talons had still been heard. A hundred nails on a single chalkboard, scratching out their horrific strain. The watchers had thrown every vicious part of themselves at the glass.

  Madeline always maintained that it was the watchers’ wish to merely terrify and toy with them, that they were safe so long as they lived by the coop’s light. But that night changed everything. The rules had been broken and punishment was necessary. It was only a matter of hours before the watchers returned. They had nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run to.

  Leaden rays of light were flooding in pools across the forest floor and trickling like silvered sap down trees. Their amputated branches were piled around them. The other side of the door had been hacked into a bloodied board of splinters, its wood coarse and whittled. To draw a hand along it would maul the skin like a cheese-grater. Madeline examined it closely but didn’t comment. Some things are best left unsaid. The glass wouldn’t last another night, and neither would the door.

  The rest of the building was no different; defiled, and undeserving of the word home. Never before had so many of them entered. Their stench was nauseating, and Madeline had to hold the blanket to her face as if it were the only way to keep her stomach from retching. They must have fought their way into the narrow corridor, funnelling forward, clambering over each other’s naked bodies. The gashes from their claws glistened in the dim morning light. Even in the darkest corners they burned like a brand hot from glowing coals. Mina thought of all the hours, days, and months Madeline had spent tidying that room, making it habitable and warm. It was all for nothing. In a single night, the watchers had made it theirs. Mina would never sit by the fire again, no matter the cold.

  Madeline found Mina’s keys in a corner of the living room, lost amidst the madness, under the filth and twigs dragged inside by the horde. She handed them to her without remark. Mina thought about throwing them away but that would be to relinquish whatever little hope remained, and so she put them in her pocket. They were all that she had left.

  Time was not on their side. Should the attack recommence the following night, then they had one day to accept their fate, or to devise a means to escape it.

  Mina met Daniel in the eye, still hunkered in bed, watching her. He looked as if he wanted to approach them, to align his life with theirs, to offer whatever help he could and to act as if nothing had happened. But he was the odd one out now. It was all his doing. It was because of him that the watchers had tur
ned on them.

  ‘What do you think is down there?’ Mina asked.

  The three of them stood around the hollow, all eyes glued to the floor. It was a dip in the concrete. A structural flaw, perhaps. But the fact of it being there – in the centre of that room – meant that it could be something so much more.

  ‘That’s where the watchers go during the day,’ Ciara whispered. ‘We can’t go down there.’

  ‘If they were underneath us, we would have heard them,’ Madeline said, frowning at the floor as though it were a familiar face that she couldn’t quite place. ‘The concrete amplifies their screams. Whatever is down there, I don’t think that it’s part of their tunnel system.’

  Mina curled her toes against the cement’s cold grit. She had all but forgotten that she was barefoot. Other matters – the life-and-death variety – had distracted from her discomfort. Her socks had been in her hands when Madeline chased Daniel to the coop’s door. She must have left them outside in the corridor. Everything that was hers – the remnants of her old life – were gone. The boots, like her bag, had been shredded into non-existence. The sketchbook, too, was gone, and with it her many strangers and the study of the burrows.

  Mina crouched down and rapped her knuckles against the floor, both on the indent and the immediate space surrounding it. There was no mistaking the difference – the hollow echo of its centre. The coop’s cement throughout the room was solid and had been poured on deep, but not there. The square was certainly large enough to fit through, assuming that that was its purpose.

  ‘Whatever’s down there,’ Mina said, ‘it can’t be any worse than what’s up here when that light clicks on.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Madeline replied. ‘Daniel, come over here, will you?’

  The boy was startled by the sound of his own name. Hours had elapsed since anyone had spoken to him. He approached Madeline hopelessly, as though a noose dangled from the ceiling, measured just for him.

  ‘Now, Daniel,’ she said, meeting him in the eye but with no fixed emotion, ‘we’re not breaking through the floor with our bare hands, are we? I need you to find us something hard and heavy. The more jagged the stone, the better. Do you understand?’

  The thought of leaving the coop seemed to jump-start Daniel’s heart. But if he were to earn their forgiveness, Mina knew he would do all that was asked of him. Now was not the time to be afraid.

  ‘I understand,’ he replied, nodding his head nervously. ‘I’ll find you a good one, don’t you worry.’ And with that he was out the door, his jacket zipped up to his neck, not giving his fears a chance to comprehend what he was doing.

  ‘Ciara,’ Madeline continued, ‘we still need water. Can you collect some from the spring as quickly as you can?’

  ‘Sure, no problem,’ she replied. ‘What about food?’

  ‘There’s no point in checking the traps,’ Madeline said. ‘No bird is going to fly close to the forest after last night, and they were most likely destroyed when they fanned out in search of us. Collect any edibles that you see, but the water is our priority.’

  Madeline was the only one amongst them who knew what had to be done. Maybe Ciara and Daniel finally understood that. If survival were still a possibility, it was Madeline – and Madeline alone – who could save them.

  ‘On it,’ Ciara replied before skipping over to the corner to grab a blanket. She draped it around her shoulders, securing it around her neck. It was far too long and gathered in folds on the floor.

  ‘It’s definitely a size too big,’ Mina said to her.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere fancy,’ Ciara replied, smiling.

  Was this the same girl who had snapped like a Jack Russell at anyone who looked at her? The loss of John had cracked her mould. Despair had recast Ciara as someone all but unrecognisable to her old, optimistic self. But just there, in that second, her face reminded Mina of the girl that she used to be.

  ‘Thank you for saving us,’ Mina said. ‘When you didn’t answer me, I just assumed that…’

  ‘I couldn’t leave you out there,’ Ciara interjected. ‘I know why you did it,’ she said to Madeline. ‘I know why you didn’t open the door that night, and it’s okay. I’ve forgiven you for that.’

  She left without another word, leaving Mina and Madeline standing over the anomaly in the floor like two witches prepping a ritual. If there was a conversation there – about John and that night – blooming in the faint morning sun, then now wasn’t its time.

  Mina still couldn’t work Madeline out. There were too many sides to the puzzle. Did they now share a friendship? Had the night’s gauntlet of emotion brought them together? Everything and everyone else seemed to have changed, and yet Madeline remained the same. Mina just saw her differently now. She resembled more so the woman who had lived within the pages of her sketchbook; the bravery and the beauty that was always there but stood just off-stage, behind the curtain that was Madeline’s way with people; ill-tempered and cold even when spitting orders from beside a hot fire.

  ‘Do you know about the patterns?’ Mina asked her, to which the woman’s head lifted. ‘I think that their burrows are arranged in a pattern.’

  Madeline looked at her, waiting for more. ‘A pattern?’ she echoed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can probably draw it better than I can explain it,’ she replied.

  Mina shared with her all that she knew. Drawing with her finger on the floor she explained the layout once hidden in her sketchbook, offering up the intelligence that she had planned to trade for Madeline’s own secrets, back when they were rivals, surviving side by side, but always trying to edge one step ahead of each other. It was bizarre to think that it was the watchers and the events of the night before that had brought them closer together.

  ‘So, you see,’ she began to explain, ‘it seems as though the coop is in the centre and these burrows have been dug around it. And they aren’t just randomly placed, like you said they were. There’s a set distance between them. I’d say it’s like a pattern, but I can’t be sure of that.’

  Madeline just stared at her. It was impossible to tell if she believed anything Mina was telling her or if she already knew it all.

  ‘So,’ she continued, all faith in her findings dwindling under Madeline’s gaze, ‘it’s possible, maybe, that this place was built smack bang in the centre of their underground system or,’ she said, raising her index finger, ‘I think the watchers built their tunnels around it. Maybe they all just wanted to have a good look at us or…’ and this thought had just crossed her mind ‘…what if they were trying to get into whatever is beneath us?’

  Madeline’s deadpan expression didn’t alter. Mina felt like a conspiracy theorist in a tinfoil hat.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Madeline said abruptly, almost dismissively. ‘But if we are smack bang in the centre of it all, as you so eloquently put it, then we’ve nothing to lose by going down there. We might even get some answers or, even better, somewhere to last out the night.’

  Mina nodded her head, still unsure as to the credibility of her theories. Madeline seemed indifferent to them.

  ‘I can tell you, Mina,’ she continued, ‘but keep it to yourself. There’s no guessing which they will break through first, the window or the door. But the truth is that if we’re trapped in the coop when that light clicks on, we’re all as good as dead.’

  ‘Maybe they will have calmed down after last night,’ Mina said.

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied, ‘but I doubt it. I don’t think they need us anymore. They’ve watched us for long enough.’

  ‘Why do they watch us?’ Mina asked.

  Madeline hesitated, her lips parting only to close without a sound. A sudden sadness seemed to overcome her. It was as though she wanted to answer but thought it kinder not to.

  ‘Please,’ Mina pressed. ‘I need to know.’

  ‘How is your knowledge of fairy folklore?’ she asked. It was clear from her voice that she didn’t approve of calling it that.

 
‘Let me see,’ Mina replied, biting her lip, thinking. ‘I know about the banshee. People used to say that you could hear her crying outside your home before a death in the family. And I know that there are stories about fairy mounds, but that’s all the little people and leprechaun stuff.’

  ‘Pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, yes?’ Madeline put in.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mina replied. ‘That’s hardly true, is it?’

  ‘It was believed that the fairies were banished underground,’ Madeline said, ignoring the question, ‘and there were places, like this forest, that people knew better than to enter for fear of disturbing them.’

  ‘You’re serious about the fairies?’ Mina asked.

  ‘Well, based on our situation we can assume they used the word fairy very loosely,’ she replied. ‘There was one, how shall I put it, type of fairy that appears a lot in the old stories.’

  ‘And which one is that?’

  ‘Changelings,’ Madeline said. ‘These tales usually involved a fairy replacing a child, assuming its identical likeness so that even the mother couldn’t tell the two apart.’

  ‘And what fairies are we dealing with?’ Mina asked.

  ‘You still haven’t seen them yet, have you?’

  ‘No, thank God,’ Mina replied. ‘I kept my eyes shut last night, like you asked me to.’

  ‘Their appearance changes,’ Madeline said. ‘In their natural form they’re perfectly horrible; all gangly limbs and claws. There was one night when I lingered too long by the door. I had only been here a few days. I saw them. They all looked identical. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.’

  ‘Why?’ Mina asked. ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘They all looked like me, Mina. Every last one of them looked like me.’