The Watchers

by A. M. Shine

  When she got home, she would have to disinfect it. This was the first thought that crossed her mind and one that gave her cause to smile, even during the pain as the thorn passed out through the skin. For too long her home had been a place in her past, like the rose-tinted memories of a childhood summer.

  Mina had it all planned out. She would run a hot bath. That bottle of wine – the Sancerre that she received for her birthday and had somehow saved for an occasion worthy of its price tag – would be opened and every mouthful cherished. Mina’s taste buds had wilted, and no doubt her tolerance for such pleasures had waned to nothing. She would be drunk after a glass. Even the smell of it would probably make her dizzy. And the thought of this – that old, familiar drunkenness – thrilled her enough to bypass the pain. She flicked the thorn away and rubbed some feeling into her foot.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Daniel asked, holding her hand into his shoulder.

  ‘Never better, Danny,’ she replied. ‘I’ll put something on it when I get home.’

  Mina visualised her bathroom – where wine and hot, bubbly water awaited her – and all of those suspended little jobs and doings. Her bath towel still hung over the door. The mirror was speckled with soap stains after she had washed her hands in a flurry. Always late and always rushing. She hadn’t cleaned the floor since the weekend before she left. Long black hairs had gathered like tumbleweed behind the door and clung like cracks to the porcelain sink.

  Only one person could have disturbed it – Jennifer. She had been given a spare key in case Mina lost hers. Maybe she had come looking for her. She rang so often and so rarely would Mina answer. But they always touched base eventually. As persistent as her sister was, she might have just given up. Mina could imagine Jennifer sidling into bed beside her husband, ranting as she did about her no-good sister – the one who drank and smoked too much, and never answered her phone. What would Mina tell her when she got home? Would Jennifer even have the patience to listen to her lies?

  Madeline stopped suddenly and Mina almost crashed into the back of her. The path had led somewhere. They stood before a clearing. A bald patch in the woodland. Nothing natural broke the soil, but in its centre stood that which snapped the air from their lungs.

  A stone doorway was sunken into the earth. Around its frame was carved a pattern of spirals and weathered symbols, corroded by age and the elements, but still visible beneath the sun that now soared high in the sky above. Its entrance was blocked by a colossal boulder, and packed tight with earth so that not even a wisp of air could escape from within.

  ‘What is it?’ Ciara whispered.

  Mina was aware of Daniel’s head peering over her shoulder, using her body as a shield. It looked as though the soil had been built up around it. Centuries of hard rain had blasted it clean. The ominous etchings, and the sheer size of the portal alone were enough to hasten the boy’s breathing, and that’s all Mina could hear as she stared at the oddity before them.

  ‘This is where they buried them,’ Madeline said, taking a step forward. ‘They banished the watchers under the earth and sealed the doorway shut.’

  Mina looked to her in puzzlement. The woman had never mentioned any doorway to them in the past. She didn’t even appear surprised by its discovery. But then, Madeline’s expressions were limited strictly to disinterest and displeasure. And she hoarded secrets like an avid collector.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Mina asked her.

  ‘Because these things were never meant to escape,’ she replied, running her hands along the engravings. ‘But they found a way. They weren’t going to stay hidden forever. Just long enough for the world to forget that they were real.’

  All that she had told them was true. Like Kilmartin before her, Madeline had come to that place looking for them – these fairies of folklore; never lending a thought to the horror that their existence would bring, like a seafaring explorer searching for the edge of the world and finding it.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s keep moving. We don’t have much time.’

  22

  Faces were nicked and scratched. Hands were rusted with blood, and all fingernails were black-lined or broken. They had torn through the woodland’s leafy walls since dawn and still the end was nowhere in sight. Panic was setting in hard. Not even a fool’s hope could ignore it. Their palms were mottled, and burned from the thistles’ touch. Skin was rough as old gloves; their leather chapped and faded. Here and there the sun flashed between the trees, but it never lingered long enough to dispel the cold. The shadows were too quick.

  They had reaped fresh wounds and their bodies had tired, but nothing else seemed to change. They traversed the same noiseless prison where everything worked against them. Mina felt as though they had been travelling in the same circles. She dreaded the possibility that they would fall upon the coop, and that all their efforts would be for nothing.

  Madeline still clutched the compass. Their lives were in her hands. The woman hadn’t spoken for what felt like hours. Nobody had. Only the yellow one was brave enough to make a sound. It perched in its cage like a backseat driver, chirping and giving out every time Mina lost her footing.

  She couldn’t have attempted the journey alone as John had done. And Mina knew that these were the thoughts that haunted Ciara’s every step; the last moments of the one she loved – the foundation of all her memories, and the one she spoke to when everyone else was quiet. How far could he have gotten? Without a compass and with no path to guide him, he never stood a chance. He would have heard the watchers’ approach. He would have known the end was coming long before they found him.

  Between the branches, the sky was beginning to bleed. The sun would soar no higher. It could only go one way now. The moon was waiting in the wings to take over. The winter days were short. And if they didn’t reach the boat before sundown, then their night would be even shorter.

  The light would turn on soon. Mina pictured the coop, with the watchers’ feculence tarred across its floor, the glow of the safe house reaching like a stem to the ceiling, and the window – not yet a mirror – with that wretched view that she would never forget; those familiar trees, the lesions through their bark, and the scratches in the glass that glistened white in the morning frost. She could still smell the dust and the concrete, and she could taste the staleness of its air.

  The watchers would rush back inside. Even after the prior night’s failings, they would never give up. Mina realised now that they should have closed the hatch after them. It might have bought them more time. But these things were hunters. They were trackers. The path they had cut through the forest was anything but subtle. The watchers would fly through the trees, chasing their scent, and they wouldn’t rest until they tasted it.

  ‘Madeline, what time is it?’ Mina gasped.

  ‘It’s after five o’clock,’ she replied, in that voice of hers that seemed oblivious to what she’d just said. ‘We’re running out of time. The last of the light will be gone before six.’

  Was there ever any chance of reclaiming their old lives? Kilmartin’s recording wasn’t dated. Granted, the technology that adorned his little bomb shelter was relatively current but there was no knowing when he conducted his research there. The promised boat could have turned to rot by now. They tread on the narrowest tightrope of hope, or was it desperation? Perhaps they were one and the same.

  Another possibility crossed into Mina’s mind. What if Madeline knew that they were a doomed party? Making decisions for them without prior discussion was by no means beyond the woman. Maybe death was a kindness. One last, short scream instead of a long, drawn-out cry for help that wasn’t coming.

  Madeline’s pace never faltered. Her shawled body forced through whatever stood in her way, shouldering and trampling, swinging at the surrounding barbs like the last knight on a battlefield, overwhelmed but defiant in the face of sure defeat. The forest belonged to her. It had been the woman’s home for so long. It was her past and present but not her future. She owed
it nothing. Mina had caught her glancing back at them more than once. And though the woman’s face was too embittered by experience to ever express her concerns, Mina knew what she must have been thinking. They were too slow. They weren’t going to make it. The sands of the hourglass were piling high, burying them alive.

  A crucible of adversaries guarded their path; enlisted for their branches, their leaves, and most of all their thorns. Every opening was fought for, offering no reward, only the repeated, torturous obligation to face their next foe. And the forest’s champions had waited centuries to prove their worth. As the hours passed, Mina had tired from the fight. She couldn’t remember the last word she had spoken or to whom. If impressed to speak, she wouldn’t have known what to say. Run! We need to go faster! She knew they were each trying their best, but it was becoming more and more obvious that their best simply wasn’t good enough. A darkness was falling like a curtain closing over their lives, concluding the tragedy of their final act to riotous, taloned applause.

  Mina had just squeezed her way through a screen of glossy leaves, hugging the yellow one’s cage with both arms, when she saw Madeline stood stock-still in front of her, inhabiting the half-light like a phantom trapped for all eternity, waiting to be saved, and yet cursed only for disappointment.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mina gasped, her bare feet stepping silently behind her, toes black as the soil rising between them.

  Madeline craned her head to one side. She was listening, but not to Mina. ‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, staring ahead. ‘It’s just another pit. No different from the others.’

  It was the widest opening that Mina had encountered, and she had uncovered her fair share. The earth around it had been cleared by the watchers’ nightly surfacing. A sense of death snaked around its edges. Deep gashes lined its clay, and the stench was unsettling even at a distance. The fastest way was straight ahead, so close to the pit that the eye could meet the darkness within, where naked bodies were coiled to pounce, salivating as the sun sank lower, their sweaty skin simmering like a fever.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ Madeline said, looking Mina in the eyes directly, never more serious than in that moment. ‘We can’t slow down, do you understand? They’re coming, Mina. And when they do there’s nowhere you can hide that they won’t find you. Throw the boy over it if that’s what it takes. We can’t afford to waste any more time.’

  With that she was gone, storming ahead just as Ciara had finally caught up, panting and holding a hand to her side where the pain had warped her into a curtsey.

  ‘What was that about?’ she asked, breathless, running the sweat through her hair. ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘We have to move,’ Mina replied sharply. ‘That’s the fastest way.’ Here she pointed towards the murky hole in the earth that Madeline had already crossed without a care.

  Daniel emerged from a shock of leaves, like a wanderer falling through a low-lying fog. His cheeks and forehead were bloody with cuts. The boy had heart, there was no denying that, but would it carry him past the pit? Mina knew how they affected him like a phobia he couldn’t reason with.

  ‘Danny,’ she said, taking his hand in hers, ‘we don’t have time to think about this.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, squinting at her through the sweat. ‘We don’t have time to think about what, Mina?’

  Ciara grabbed his other hand. ‘Do you trust me, Danny?’

  ‘More than anyone in the world,’ he replied, smiling down at their fingers entwined.

  Testament to Daniel’s word, he didn’t dig his heels or hesitate. Mina and Ciara escorted him forward and he acquiesced, gripping both of their hands as the pit loomed closer, always strongest when people believed in him. If the sight of it had triggered any alarms, their company on either side of him were enough to silence them. As they neared the burrow they broke into a hasty queue, slipping single file beside it. Ciara pressed Daniel ahead of her before the darkness could lure his courage into its depths. Mina was following close behind them, but she stopped, just like she promised herself she wouldn’t. Ciara was too busy throwing an arm over Daniel’s shoulder to notice. They’re leaner and they’re longer. But what do they look like? She edged closer to the pit where the shadows swirled like the blackest fog, suffocating its secrets out of sight. The others hadn’t noticed Mina lowering onto her haunches, ignoring those sore muscles that ached at her to stop. She stared into the abyss, seeing nothing and hearing not a sound.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ciara called back to her. ‘Mina, we have to…’

  ‘Just one minute,’ she interjected, eyes transfixed by her own imaginings. ‘I just…’

  The shock of the scream came as a blast, knocking Mina onto her back. The yellow one screeched and ricocheted against its bars. The sound seemed to shake the very earth; echoing, lingering, and festering long after it was released like a nightmare that refused to be forgotten. It travelled up the tunnel’s throat like a gust of wind, breaking the surface and shaking the branches above, spreading terror like a murmuration of winged devils. Mina scrabbled away from the pit, her feet slipping, digging ruts in the soil as Ciara seized under her arms and dragged her to safety. That shriek felt near to her as that first night by the window. But back then, its intent had been to startle her, to reduce their latest prisoner to tears. This somehow sounded worse than that; crueller, angrier, more terrorising than before. They weren’t the watchers’ pets anymore. The days of being toyed with were over. Their intention was clear as that voice still ringing through Mina’s ears – death, and the unspeakable pain that precedes it.

  If one of them had seen her, then their position was known to all those tearing at their nocturnal chains to chase them. What had she done? How could she have been so reckless. Had the sound of their footsteps alerted the watchers’ ears to listen? But they had never ventured so far from the safety of the coop. The parrot’s cry might have covered their tracks. A bird had flown close to its death, that’s all. Every possibility remained that the watchers would return to the safe house first, buying them more time and a few extra moments of life before all hell broke loose upon them.

  Together they ran, following the wreckage of Madeline’s efforts. Mina stared skyward at the slivers of ebbing light, like dim fractures in the ceiling of their prison. She could feel the darkness growing around them, creeping out from the lowest leaf and spreading under boughs like black fungus. Madeline turned as they approached her. Mina got the impression that she was taking a head count, her eyes snapping over them but resting on Daniel a little longer. Whether she was surprised to see him, or relieved, her face gave nothing away.

  ‘Night is coming much faster than you know,’ she said. ‘We should have reached the open by now. Spread out. Find the quickest way through. Call to me if you lose your bearings. Go, now!’ she shouted, so loud as to betray the fear that she hid so well.

  Even the yellow one understood their urgency, screaming at them like an overzealous mascot as Mina used its cage as a battering ram to break the undergrowth. She would apologise if they made it.

  ‘This way,’ Daniel’s voice shouted from somewhere unseen. ‘There’s a clear run through here.’

  In every direction that Mina turned, it all looked the same. Nature’s undead things had veiled their course with delusive copycats, tricking them into losing their way. Daniel’s discovery drew everyone to his side where they raced through a rare gutter of open earth, too clear for nature’s chaotic design; one perhaps carved by the watchers themselves. A fine mist lined the way, seeping up from the caverns below like ghostly spies tracking their movements. It was always this way before the coop’s light came on.

  ‘Are we going to make it?’ Ciara cried, and her tearful desperation made Mina reach out to comfort her, but no words came in that moment.

  Nobody voiced their acknowledgement. They just ran, tripping and floundering, holding anyone up whose legs had spent their last. Ciara had fallen behind, but Mina could he
ar her panting, so tired at that stage that she loved her all the more for not giving up. Trials such as they had endured would break the body and mind of the strongest, most able-bodied. And when they’d abandoned the coop, they were, none of them, at their best.

  ‘We will,’ Mina called back to her, hoping to spur her on. ‘Ciara, we’re going to make it.’ But the lie sounded so unconvincing that she regretted it immediately.

  Could they have covered more ground? Mina’s shoulder ached as though her arm had popped out of its socket. She had been so stubborn, like a petulant child acting out. Madeline knew the bird would slow them down and yet Mina hadn’t listened. The yellow one could have flown high above the trees to safety, its feathers shining golden in the sunlight. They didn’t all have to die in that place. Mina decided there and then, if the watchers found them, her last act on this earth would be to release the fifth member of their party – the one that never complained and smiled when all those around it had forgotten how.

  Ciara’s sudden shriek almost tripped Mina up. The mind can frame a million horrors in an instant. She had been taken; dragged underground as the watchers’ first meal before sundown. Or else an injury had befallen her, one so tragic as to bring her journey to an end. Could Mina and Daniel carry her if that were the case? Would Madeline leave them behind? She had threatened to do so if they slowed her down. But no, she stopped like the rest of them, gripping her compass in frustration as they all turned to face whatever had brought their flight to a standstill.

  Ciara was wincing on the earth, her weak arms straining to lift her up. A root had snagged her foot, sending her crashing forward. The shock of it no doubt derailed her more than the fall itself. Beneath the forest floor were a hundred hands, and their race south had been too desperate and blind to mark the pits they could reach from.