The Watchers

by A. M. Shine

  Mina didn’t want to imagine the horror that lay behind her. She had witnessed how the watchers moved. She had seen the nightmarish shape of their bodies. Standing tall, they were still and sinister as a snake waiting to strike. But when they ran – on all fours with those monstrous arms pulling them forward – their speed was inescapable. Were they already coming for them? Mina looked to Madeline, too terrified to find out for herself.

  ‘Are we going to make it?’ she asked, but even she could hardly make sense of her words.

  ‘Take the oars, Mina,’ Madeline said, ignoring the question.

  Mina could hardly keep her head up. But Daniel hadn’t died for nothing. And she mustered the strength to prove it. Through her grief and exhaustion, she took Madeline’s position in the centre of the boat and rowed as hard as she could, eyes tensed shut, suffering through the pain. Ciara had tried to help, but Mina was having none of it. With the river’s flow as her ally, the boat soon picked up momentum, and with every groan that Mina made they were edging further and further away.

  ‘Keep going, Mina,’ Madeline said, gazing at the treeline as it shrank into the distance.

  ‘Are they still chasing us?’ Ciara asked from the far end of the boat, cringing from the unrelenting chaos that still sounded so close to them.

  ‘We’ll know any moment now,’ Madeline replied, but only Mina heard her.

  The river dipped and the current quickened. Mina rowed with all her strength, but she had little left to give. The natural rush of the water was taking them south, and it was doing so without her backing. Soon all they could see were the tops of the tallest, oldest trees, like ghostly spectators all gathered to see them off. And then there was only sky, and stars dashed like glitter across it.

  They all watched the horizon. Mina still tried to work the oars, but the water felt viscous now, her arms too limp to make a difference. Even if the watchers caught them, they would die knowing that they couldn’t have done any more. The moonlight rippled through the river in silver strands as every second brought them closer to home. All the while those distant voices grew fainter.

  With their pets lost, the watchers would have ransacked the building. Kilmartin’s bunker – so neurotically organised – would have filled with their bodies, their stench, and their savagery. They would have destroyed everything, eradicating all evidence that he was ever there. But Mina’s sadness and all that lost time, that would live on until she took it to the grave with her. She would never shake the sight of herself, night after night, reflected in that mirror, with their eyes watching her from the dark – the same room where Kilmartin had stood, dizzy on curiosity and lethal ambition, where he had watched them mimic his dead wife’s face, twisting it and making it theirs. Maybe they knew the effect that it would have on him. Maybe it’s for the best that the damned thing lay in ruins. It was a bad place, and it was home only to bad memories.

  Kilmartin didn’t say it, but could it be that the water was the key? What if the watchers had sniffed like hounds around the burrow where the oars had lain like doomed lovers? Maybe they had followed the boat’s trench through the earth, only to lose the trail there. Whatever the reason, Mina didn’t care. She listened out for any sound to the north, but there was nothing. No screams. No gallop of bodies. There was only the tired creak of their boat amidst the silence, and Ciara’s tears intermingled with the river’s flow.

  For months, Mina had been denied the stars and the cold calm of a winter’s night. Because of the coop’s nocturnal state, it never really seemed like night-time. It was an unnatural place of flat surfaces and tired reflections, where time bore no relevancy and the moon was never seen. It might as well have not existed. Now and again, Ciara would jolt up, and the boat would shake uneasily. Maybe they were safe, and what they thought they heard were but echoes of the horror that was.

  Mina listened to the water’s calming burble, homing all her thoughts and unease in on that one sound. She felt every motion. The cold air brushed her cheeks with the lightest touch, and her rosy nose sniffled, not from the dust of the coop’s concrete as was always the case, but from the raw, open country. Her toes curled against the damp wood and she shivered under her blanket. The water had seeped through its every thread. Heavy clouds had moved in, obscuring the moon and snuffing out most of the stars. Even the water ran black. The eyes struggled in the absence of light. They had adapted to those long nights in the coop. And now, looking at the lands around her, Mina couldn’t discern a single detail that wasn’t her mind’s invention. The watchers could be running silently along the riverside, and she would have been none the wiser.

  She could hear Ciara quivering from the cold, sharing in the unspoken pain that played not only on their fears, but also on their bodies. Not like this, she thought. They had survived too much to succumb to the elements. These were Mina’s friends who she genuinely cared about. She thought of calling out to them. But she couldn’t draw the words from her lips. Mina couldn’t bear the thought of losing another. To call out and to receive no response – that was now her greatest fear. She kept the parrot’s cage tucked inside her shawl, hoping that what little heat her body still held might keep it alive. She prayed that it was sleeping, for it didn’t make a sound. Madeline seemed unaffected. She still stared back into the darkness like a scarecrow watching over them. Mina couldn’t gauge what the woman was thinking. With her eyes placid and bright beneath the stars, she almost looked sad. Mina hated when she referred to the coop as their home. But for Madeline, maybe that’s what it had become.

  In time, the night’s depths – where the land and sky divide – began to pale. Weak at first, like a daub of white in a black pool. It spread slowly but steadily, merging upwards, diluting the darkness with light. The surrounding lands came into sight as though they journeyed towards the new day, leaving the night and its nocturnal creatures behind them. Mina found it all so familiar. This was the same unremarkable terrain that had led her to the woodland when she had cursed the very sight of it. But now, with the dawn breaking, she saw it differently.

  Wild grasses of green and fiery amber flared up from the earth. The sunlight washed over the distant hills where soft contours of stone shimmered like fresh snow. Nothing was dead or dying. Not anymore. Even the air was alive, infused with the morning’s bouquet of unfolding petals, and herbs softening from their first touch of warmth.

  ‘Hey,’ Mina whispered, to which Ciara stirred wearily beside her, ‘wake up!’

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked; her voice hoarse and half asleep.

  ‘I’ll be fucked if I know,’ she replied, ‘but we’re a long way from the coop – that’s for sure.’

  ‘There’s a bridge ahead,’ Madeline said, squinting into the distance.

  The woman spoke as she always did, with no inflection of feeling. She was sat, huddled in her blanket, those tight lips set straight when those around her were smiling. A bridge meant that there was a road, and that was all they needed – a path to lead them home. Whereas Ciara strove to arouse some feeling in her bones, Madeline was already perched high like a heron. So thin was her hair that it trailed like cobwebs in the breeze. The sunlight exposed her every crease and blemish. The woman hadn’t slept. She had watched over them all through the night. Ever their guardian, and ever their Madeline.

  The bridge was built of mismatched rocks, held together by their own weight and whitewashed after a long life of Irish weather. Mina couldn’t understand how it hadn’t fallen apart. She could only guess that someone more recently – with some cement and a trowel – had reinforced their ancestors’ labour.

  ‘Mina,’ Madeline said, ‘you can take us onto the land now. I think we’ve journeyed on this river for quite long enough.’

  Mina rubbed some feeling back into her fingers before she returned them to the oars. Her palms still stung where they had worn away the skin. But she was secretly proud of her wounds. They were proof that she had played her part. After a few failed attempts she worked out how to co
ntrol the boat’s course. And as they neared the shore, Ciara reached out to the chubby tufts of grass and drew it in.

  Mina was first to clamber up the embankment. Her sudden, clumsy motions awoke the yellow one. And as Ciara passed its cage over to her it fanned its feathers like golden petals unfolding in the sunshine. A road led away from the bridge, stretching off into the horizon as far as the eye could see. But the eye saw nothing. There was no end in sight.

  ‘What was it you said?’ Ciara asked her. ‘All paths lead somewhere.’

  To simply walk as far as where the road drifted out of sight could take hours, and they were each exhausted. Madeline joined them on the road. This was what they had wanted – some link to civilisation. But all they could see was more of the same – the vast emptiness of Connemara, too many miles from home. They didn’t even know what direction led there.

  ‘We can’t walk that,’ Mina said. ‘I can barely stand.’

  Madeline frowned, and looked her up and down as though searching for some physical sign of tiredness. Mina’s stomach was empty, and she could feel the blood pulsing around her skull like a crown of thorns. She heard pebbles scratching beneath Ciara’s shoes as she lowered herself onto the road to lie on her back; every movement mired in discomfort. They weren’t walking anywhere.

  ‘We can just wait,’ Ciara said, staring up at the sky. ‘Someone is bound to find us eventually.’

  ‘Yes,’ Madeline replied, after a long, thoughtful silence. ‘Look at the road. Its centre is coarser than its sides.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ciara said, sitting up and shrugging her shoulders at Mina. ‘What?’

  ‘Vehicles come this way,’ Madeline explained, ‘probably every day. You’re right. We can wait.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ciara said, smiling like a child who had just passed an exam, ‘okay.’

  And so, with little other choice, they waited. A few swarthy clouds had teased a downpour but the shadows kept their distance. On the ground, ducked low enough to dodge the breeze, Mina turned her face to the sun like a spring daffodil. It was the warmest she’d been since December. Ciara was panned out like a body washed up on dry land, listening to the tinkle of the yellow one’s cage as it danced again on its perch. Eventually, even Madeline sat on the chalky road. Unlike the others, however, she watched the distance; her patience brass-bound and unyielding. Mina kept glancing to where she imagined Daniel would have been, most likely constellating around Ciara’s orbit. What she wouldn’t have given to hear his voice, and to know that he was there, looking out for them. Not a boy, but a man.

  ‘Listen,’ Madeline said eventually, tilting her neck. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Mina sat up and rubbed her eyes. Again, she couldn’t tell if she had slept or not, nor did she know how much time had elapsed since they had abandoned the boat. She couldn’t hear a sound.

  ‘There,’ Madeline said, ‘something’s coming.’

  It was a bus or maybe one of those larger air-conditioned coaches that brought tourists on sightseeing trips around the west. Whatever it was, Mina couldn’t take her eyes off that black speck in the distance.

  ‘We’re going to be okay,’ she said, placing her hand on Madeline’s shoulder, squeezing it gently.

  The woman flinched and shifted quickly away, gleaning only discomfort from Mina’s touch. Even now, after all they had been through, Madeline still couldn’t muster a smile.

  Heaven knows what the bus driver thought. They must have looked like trolls that had crawled out from beneath the bridge. Mina stood in the centre of the road, barefoot and filthy, her blanket held wide like wings with a golden conure between her legs. And she wasn’t moving.

  FEBRUARY

  23

  Life after the woodland was never going to be the same. Mina was sat by her window, watching the street below, like a home recording of happier times. The cushion on the ledge had been tossed to the floor. Her bones had conformed to the coop’s concrete, and comfort just wasn’t comfortable anymore. Mina’s black coffee was cold. Only a sip had been taken, and even that was swallowed through a grimace. It was too bitter. Nothing like she remembered. The same could have been said for a lot of things.

  Mina observed couples walking, hands held, all toothy smiles as they shared in the diehard optimism of new love. Children were play-fighting over small change; skinny, harmless things with too much energy. There were straight-faced men and women in suits striding with a profound purpose that was almost convincing. Given the hour, they were most likely going for lunch; wraps and rolls from the delicatessen. Two women sat outside the café across the road, sipping cappuccinos in massive bowl-sized mugs. Their coffees were nowhere near as hot as the gossip. One spoke incessantly. The other nodded her head, absorbing every word, occasionally gasping when it all became too much.

  Mina was back in the world again, but she didn’t feel a part of it. Traipsing through the trees to collect water from the spring seemed a whole lot easier than crossing the road to buy a proper cup of coffee. Her window was on the third floor. Only the birds could reach it. But she still felt so vulnerable. Its glass was too thin.

  It wasn’t long after midday. The sun blazed in a sky of unbroken blue and shimmered across cold slates and chimney pots; that hidden place where pigeons and seagulls consort away from prying eyes. Mina was hypersensitive to every sound – luggage wheels rapping on cobbled stone, car doors slamming, bicycle brakes screeching, and, of course, the voices. Every laugh and shout caused her to flinch as though some invisible, cruel hand was constantly pinching her. There were only two people that she felt safe with, and they had left her, alone, sitting beside a window that would never keep the monsters out.

  She would never forget the sheer stupefaction on the driver’s face. The mere sight of them would have encouraged most to switch up a gear. He had one of those tightly cropped white beards that always made Mina think of Father Christmas, and after he fumbled to remove his sunglasses, she saw that he had the kindest eyes. They shone silver in the sun. Maybe common sense had told him to drive on. But he wasn’t the kind to leave anybody on the side of the road; even them, in all their squalid glory. The bus slowed to a halt and let out a gassy hiss before its door slid open.

  ‘Jesus,’ he had said, looking Mina up and down, his confusion tarrying for a moment on the parrot. ‘What’s happened to you, dear?’

  He was the first one to ask that unanswerable question. Mina would have loved nothing more than to tell him the truth, to spread the horror a little thinner. That would have certainly kept him alert during the journey. Or perhaps he would have driven her straight to the loony bin. Instead of glass and concrete she’d be imprisoned in a room of padded white walls, where shrinks would sit with her every morning, between her first prescriptive cup of pills and a makeshift continental breakfast. They would nod their heads and encourage her to tell them what happened, all the while their safety pencils would scrawl out the word CRAZY, underlining it whenever she mentioned the fairies that kept them as pets.

  A memory flashed across her mind like a strike of lightning. Mina saw again those things standing around Daniel, their circle closing like a mouth devouring him. She lifted the cage up into her arms and steadied her breathing.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ she managed to say, as if his destination mattered.

  ‘Back to Galway,’ he replied. ‘I think this crowd in the back have taken more than enough photos for one day.’ Here he winked towards the coachload of tourists, all now staring at Mina, barely resisting the urge to reach for their cameras. ‘You’re welcome to hop on, if you want? There are some bottles of water by the bin there, and I’ve some crisps on the seat behind me. You’re free to help yourselves. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look more than a little famished.’

  They clambered up and into the front seats, and there they sat, in uneasy silence as though they didn’t belong amongst other people. Voices buzzed behind them like a hive of bees. Mina couldn’t bring herself to look back at them. She kne
w they were watching her. And being watched was something she had never grown comfortable with. The door closed, and the hum of the engine returned. Mina turned her face to the window. She swallowed back the tears as the river disappeared into the distance. Somewhere – half on the bank and half in the water – was Kilmartin’s boat. It was unlikely that anyone would find it before the rot spread. But if they did, Mina hoped they had the good mind not to row it upstream. She knew from personal experience that some people are just that unlucky.

  ‘You’ve had a tough time of it, I’d say,’ the driver said to her, their eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I’ve had better,’ she replied, letting her body sink into the seat, ‘but it’s over now.’ She gazed out towards the distant hills bathed in sunlight, sparkling like spilled sugar, and after two or three blinks she fell asleep.

  It was night-time when Mina awoke. Streetlamps flashed overhead, rhythmically bathing her body in peels of orange and staining her eyes with restless speckles. Cars or vans or other buses drove by. She couldn’t see them and couldn’t tell what they were; these mechanical monsters that patrolled the city streets. They startled her forward in her seat, enlivening familiar fears in a now unfamiliar world. The colours and lights all bled together. She felt a swelling ache behind her eyes just trying to process it all. Everything outside was disorderly and loud. Bodies rushed along the pavement, an arm’s reach from vehicles that roared impatiently forward, stealing any space they could. A car’s horn blasted through the air. Mina could hardly contain the scream it roused.

  None of them knew where to look or what to do. Ciara had her face buried in her hands, hiding from the myriad sights and sounds that engulfed them like a warzone. No doubt had Daniel been with them, he would have held her in his arms, keeping Ciara safe. Mina could imagine him mesmerised by it all, his mouth lolling open with the streetlights dancing in his pale eyes. They were, as always, divided by glass. Madeline scrutinised everything, horrified by the discord of it all – the gaudy colours and the immutable din. She wore her frown like a woodland souvenir and hadn’t spoken for the entire journey, not even to criticise. The woman held her shawl tight against her chest, seeming older and frailer than Mina remembered.