The Watchers

by A. M. Shine

  ‘This is a bad idea, Meens,’ she whispered to herself.

  Daniel had retreated even further away, as if Madeline might throw him down the hole to test its depths. Maybe he hoped that the coop could withstand another night, that the watchers wouldn’t find him under all those blankets. Judging by the cracks that splayed across the window like glowing veins, what little hope remained was hardly worth mentioning.

  ‘I’m sure it’s quite safe,’ Madeline said.

  The woman’s questionable opinion was irrelevant at this stage. It was time for Mina to take the lead, to balance the scales and show Madeline what she was capable of. She shifted her body towards the opening and came to sit with both legs dangling into the darkness.

  ‘I suppose quite safe will have to do,’ she said, before lowering herself into the hatch.

  With each rung descended, another part of her vanished, as though her body was submerging in oil. Mina worked her way slowly downwards, praying that the silence would hold, all the while waiting for so delicate a thing to shatter. Would Madeline have shut the trapdoor if she were to scream? Would she have done the same if the roles had been reversed?

  She took one last look at Daniel before going deeper. The sum of his years had never seemed so meagre. He sat, hunched forward, trying to keep his trembling down to a minimum as the adults went about their business. Had he been given the choice they would have left it shut. In that woodland, nothing good ever came from beneath the earth.

  The parrot watched Mina descend warily from the safety of its cage. It no longer whistled like it used to, back when everything was new to its eyes and when the hum of their voices caused its little feet to dance. Though already a prisoner, caged and sold, it too had shrunk beneath the coop’s light. It had grown bored of the day-to-day – of the same sights and sounds. But that would all change in a few short hours. The window would smash into a million mirrored pieces, or maybe the door would break in first. Either way, the room they all knew so well wouldn’t feel like home anymore.

  Mina softened her breathing. She could taste the stale air slipping through her teeth. Each rung of the ladder was met with care, her bare feet searching expectantly for solid ground. The sensation was disorientating; the darkness, the deafening silence, and the feeling of falling no matter how hard she held on. The air below was different. It was warm. Then she felt it. Her toes touched the floor. In the black nothingness beneath the coop there was something.

  Mina hugged her body, squeezing arms and pinching flesh if only to reassure herself that amidst that soundless abyss she still existed. A bright tile of light hung above her head. Through it she saw the coop’s ceiling, impossibly far away.

  She was alone. Nothing – not even the watchers – could be that quiet. Mina turned her body, shuffling her feet on the spot where they had landed; too judicious to dip a toe into the unknown. With her eyes open she was blind. She occupied a black hole that swallowed life, light, and deluded the senses, stripping them of function. But there was something down there – a light, small and red, like an unblinking eye watching her from the far end of the room.

  ‘Mina?’ Madeline called out.

  Her face now occupied the square above, peering down. Mina’s attention was transfixed by the red circle, like a distant planet seen for the first time.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she replied, startled by the volume of her own voice. ‘There’s something here. It’s a light, I think.’

  With her arms outstretched, fanning the empty air, Mina approached it. Sweet reason screamed at her to stop. Trying to survive and taking risks were two opposites that didn’t attract. But what was there to lose? With each step the red dot grew larger, until it fell within her reach. Mina had no memory of ever beholding a colour so intense.

  ‘What do you mean there’s a light?’ Madeline asked.

  Mina pressed her finger into the red eye, and felt it sink and click into place. This wasn’t what Madeline would have done; she who abided by every precaution and took no chance however pleading. There was an eerie second of silence as the red switched to green. Then a low hum occupied the air. It was comforting, like a cat’s purr, and the room was bathed in soft light.

  ‘What is it?’ Daniel asked from above; his voice faint and distant.

  ‘Light,’ Madeline replied. ‘Mina’s turned a light on.’

  The room was long and narrow, and no more than eight feet in height. Horizontal corrugations ran across its steel walls, so clean they shone. The light on the ceiling was similar in shape to the one in the coop, but its honeyed glow didn’t sting the eyes. Rather it generated a sense of ease and security. All theories were tamed and tethered. Mina just took it all in, bit by bit, morsel by morsel. The same way Madeline ate every meal.

  The green button was set into a metal casement that occupied the entirety of the room’s end, from wall to wall. Thick wires extended from it and wormed through the ceiling. Every incision through its steel was perfectly cut; professionally executed and probably at great cost. Mina suspected that it was, perhaps, a power source. The same one that supported the coop’s cycle of darkness and light.

  To the right of the generator, running along the wall to the midpoint of the room, were four tiers of shelves. All bolts and metal, and all rigidly locked in place. Even underground, an earthquake couldn’t shake the stock from their shelves. Organised in neat towers were cans upon cans of food – sliced fruit, beans, meat, soup, and sweetened rice. Fat plastic bottles of water lined the floor. Mina gauged by the empty space on the lowest shelf that less than a quarter of the supply had been consumed. Someone’s sojourn underground had obviously not lasted quite as long as they had intended. Only a single vat of water had been emptied. One other had been opened. The first proper meal in weeks was hers to enjoy, and still the mystery of the room held Mina in its hands. Why would someone go through all this trouble?

  The ladder hung down in the room’s centre, quitting ten inches or so from the floor. Mina’s first impression was that of a submarine. It had been so long since she had seen the sea. If it ever had a colour, then she had no memory of it.

  At the far end of the room, in the right corner, there was a bed. Unlike the unruly range of blankets that Ciara so casually collapsed into, this had a raised steel frame and a mattress. Its black linen was arranged and looked relatively clean.

  Beside the bed was a desk, large enough to hold its two keyboards, dust-free and symmetrically arranged side by side. Between them was carefully set a compass and an opened deck of playing cards.

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Mina whispered. ‘It looks like I’m not the only one.’

  Whoever had lived there was a stickler for tidiness, or maybe it was the boredom. Two large desk monitors carried no trace of dust, and on the wall, reaching as high as the ceiling, were attached eight more screens, less streamlined than the others; chunky as though borrowed from a different time, when size meant quality. Their black, mirrored faces each showed Mina’s reflection; standing lost, like a child trespassing where she didn’t belong.

  ‘What do you see?’ Madeline called down. ‘Mina, what’s down there?’

  ‘It’s a shipping container, I think,’ she replied.

  None of it made any sense. The room was spotlessly clean. Someone had lived here. They had slept and eaten beneath the coop, in a steel box, modified, powered, and built with a purpose. Not even the watchers’ claws could penetrate it. This was a safe house.

  ‘What are you both doing?’ Mina heard Ciara ask; she must have just returned from the spring.

  ‘It’s another room,’ Danny replied. ‘It was all dark, but Mina found the light.’

  ‘What’s down there?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘but I think we’re going to find out.’

  Mina’s bones sank into the chair’s leather. She had forgotten what comfort felt like. Her hands glided over the keyboard without touching it. The fingers still knew their way. She could hear someone descending
the ladder.

  ‘Take a look at this place,’ she said, swivelling her chair to face Madeline, the first to reach the floor. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Madeline didn’t respond. She looked uneasy as she stood aside to make space for the others. Ciara and Daniel eventually gathered around the ladder, unable to believe their surroundings. All they needed was somewhere safe, where the watchers couldn’t get to them. What they had found surpassed even their most hopeful imaginings.

  ‘Look at all the food,’ Ciara screamed, rousing from Madeline an anger that her frown couldn’t conceal. Mina guessed what she was thinking. The safe house was designed for a single occupant. That much was obvious from the bed. The food reserve was ample, yes. But how long could it stretch between four mouths?

  Daniel, meanwhile, held on to the ladder. His mouth still hung agape as he looked around, dumbfounded. Madeline considered him with the same disdain, expecting nothing more from him than his trademark vacancy. The boy was useless in her eyes, and yet she knew that he would eat his share.

  Madeline walked the room in silence, considering its many aspects, just as Mina had done. After so prolonged a spell spent inside the coop, any other space was going to throw them off-kilter. Everything about the room was purpose-built and installed before the container had been welded shut on all sides. How would someone even transport such a cargo into the woodland?

  Mina relinquished the chair to Madeline when she approached the desk. Sometimes she felt so young in the woman’s company, always in her way. Madeline sat without so much as a thank you, as though it was her office and they were distracting from her business. Mina didn’t care. Too puzzled was she by the dead, black screens affixed to the wall. Why would someone need so many?

  Ciara and Daniel were both fondling the canned food and talking excitedly amongst themselves. Mina had never seen them like this – genuinely happy. Their fears were, if only for a little while, forgotten. Madeline ignored them. To her they were probably like animals. Their next meal was all they thought about.

  ‘I wonder if it still works,’ Mina said, leaning in beside her.

  She tapped the space bar on one of the keyboards and beneath the desk another steel box began to moan, awoken from its slumber. One of the monitors was flooded with reams of text – letters and numbers gone in a glimpse – and then the black lightened to blue.

  ‘I guess that answers that question,’ Mina said.

  Madeline shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The bones of her face were highlighted by the monitor’s light. The on-screen desktop was all but empty. The familiar trashcan was in its top corner and there was a single file in the screen’s centre. It carried no title. Mina recognised it as a media file, possibly a video or voice recording.

  Mina activated the other keyboard, and the second monitor followed the same routine. With its power returned, however, it presented them not with a desktop, but with software that she hadn’t seen before. The screen was divided into eight blank squares, and beneath each one was the same date and time – 00/00/00 – 00:00 – and the same message. Feed lost. Mina’s eyes strayed to the eight monitors on the wall.

  ‘They’re surveillance cameras,’ she said. ‘It looks like whoever lived down here was watching the watchers.’

  ‘Surveillance cameras,’ Madeline repeated.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mina said, staring at the eight screens, imagining the horrors that once flashed across them. ‘They probably installed them around the building or in the trees.’

  ‘There aren’t any such things in the forest,’ Madeline replied. ‘I would have seen them.’

  ‘Maybe there used to be,’ Mina said. ‘You said it yourself, nothing escapes them.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘Is that all this is?’

  ‘Perhaps this will tell us more,’ Mina said, pointing towards the blue screen and the lone file suspended in its centre.

  Was this the answer they had been searching for? Daniel and Ciara had stopped nattering in the background. Curiosity had somehow distracted their appetites.

  ‘What is it, Mina?’ Madeline asked, and her voice had never sounded so uncertain.

  ‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

  She opened the file, and the video began to play.

  18

  His eyes squinted back at them, raw against the monitor’s light that fell flat on his cheeks. His beard was a nest, blindly trimmed, with stray tufts reaching out from its sides. The bald head was rounded as the moon, and just as pale. The camera recording him was functional, but of poor quality. Everything was too bright or too dark, with no textures to define either. His shoulders were slumped, and around his chest hung open a woollen cardigan. The room behind him appeared unchanged from where they now stood, staring at this stranger – the one responsible for it all.

  ‘Well,’ he began, his voice gravelly and low, as though he hadn’t spoken for some time, ‘if you’re watching this, then I’m probably dead.’

  Here the man stared not at the camera’s lens, but somewhere else, almost distracted. With a large left hand that slipped into focus he squeezed the clump of hair around his chin and exhaled sadly as one facing a fate unwanted and yet inescapable. He obviously hadn’t planned what he was going to say, or maybe – now that he was recording – he wasn’t sure if he should say anything at all.

  ‘No one knows about this,’ he continued, ‘what I’ve done and why I did it. Everyone who helped me, well, they’re all dead.’

  Again, he hesitated, pausing to reassess what he was doing. His eyes looked anywhere but at the camera or the monitor, as though he couldn’t even face his own reflection.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said, sitting back, ‘I’ve nothing to lose. Not anymore.

  ‘Many men are dead because of me. I needed to build this, you see,’ he said, glancing around him. ‘I promised them more money than they would ever see in their lifetimes because I knew they wouldn’t live to receive it. Jesus, how many were there?’ he whispered, rubbing his sore eyes. ‘It took a few teams. Some of the men had families. Some were just boys looking for summer work. It had to be the summertime. I needed the long evenings.

  ‘All the vehicles broke down outside the forest. Getting this container here was the hardest part. It took a few attempts. Each time I hid in here and left them all outside in the dark. I listened to them being slaughtered – these men I had lied to and brought to this godforsaken place.’

  Mina looked to Madeline. The woman’s face was stolid; a bust that betrayed nothing of her feelings or fears. Both of her hands rested on her lap. Their fingers were interlaced, as the hands of the dead are set for the long slumber. There was no way of telling what she was thinking.

  ‘They built it exactly as I asked of them,’ the man said, ‘and worked so fast that it was almost as though they knew what was coming, racing against the clock. Each team picked up where the last one left off. They shared the same job and the same fate.

  ‘So much of it was for nothing,’ he said thoughtfully, his eyes looking up towards the eight monitors. ‘They took all the cameras out. I don’t know how they found them. All eight of them were hidden in the trees, in the fucking bark. Even I couldn’t see them and I knew where they were. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I don’t suppose any of it does.

  ‘I’ve destroyed all of my research. Every page burned. Every file deleted. All of it, gone. This recording will be all that remains.

  ‘My name is Professor David Kilmartin,’ he said, fixing his posture. ‘I am, or I was, a lecturer at Galway’s National University. I can only presume that you know there’s something out there, in the forest, though I doubt you’ve seen them. The glass has two settings. It’s controlled from in here, where it’s safe, by a switch near the generator. It still works as I record this despite the damage they’ve done.

  ‘I needed them to see me – to study me so that I might study them. But I knew that I would fear the very sight of them. That’s why the glass can be changed to act as a mir
ror. Some nights I could face them. But these were rare. I had hoped that they would eventually accept my presence amongst them, albeit behind the safety of the glass, with the door locked and bolted. But they haven’t. Given the chance they would kill me like all the rest.’

  Here the man sat back in his chair, pondering what next to say. Again, his hand fidgeted with his beard, pinching at its wiry ends. His eyes darkened to black pits as the screen’s light drifted out of reach. To think that they now occupied the same space; that Madeline now sat in the same chair. There was no telling how much time had passed since he made that recording, but nothing had changed.

  ‘I still can’t confidently tell you what they are. They are the stuff of legend and superstition, and yet they are real. Every tale passed down through the ages carries some grain of truth, I suppose. We couldn’t co-exist with them. They have powers beyond our own. Science tells us that such feats are impossible. But science knows nothing of these things. That’s why they were banished. Heaven knows how many lives were lost in doing so. And that is why I came to study them. That’s why, after centuries of no communication between our two species, I took it upon myself to meet them face-on.

  ‘Dear God, what have I done?’ he said, leaning forward, holding his head in his hands. ‘I wanted them to change form. I needed them to do it so that I could understand how it was possible. And so, I let them study me.

  ‘Some were more accomplished than others. In their faces I saw my own likeness, almost indistinguishable. But there was no emotion. No capacity to express feeling and so no true means to mimic our kind without noticeable flaw. The less skilled amongst them presented me with some of the most hideous sights I could ever, in many lifetimes, conceive. I saw my face twisted, malformed and monstrous, watching me from amidst the trees, like some malicious clone eager to steal my place on this earth. But it’s the bodies that haunt my days and nights. Despite their best efforts their frames remain too thin and disproportionate. Even when wearing the mask of man, still they are monsters to the eye.