by A. M. Shine
‘What the fuck, Ciara!’ she screeched in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Keep away from the window.’
With the curtains closed, the dark was never so menacing. Their breathing – panicked and short – was too loud. The fear of making a sound made silence impossible. Their eyes searched hopelessly for a break in the black. But their blindness was absolute. Mina fumbled around for Ciara’s hand. She seemed so far away, but then every step into the unknown was immeasurable. She pulled her towards her, fastening her fingers around her hoody, and together they sat on the edge of the bed, listening.
Time’s meaning and purpose were forfeit. The second and the minute ceased to elapse, and there was instead the immovable present. There was no knowing how long they sat there, sweaty hands held, searching for some sound to betray what was to come. Could Madeline be reasoned with? Should Mina call out to her now, to plead with her for mercy? Then they heard her.
It was torturous to listen to – that rapid succession of scrapes and scratches, of a body scaling the side of the house. So quick was the action, so effortless. She had passed close by the window to Ciara’s bedroom. For a heart-sinking second Mina thought she was angling her body towards it, that in the darkness she would find them, smashing inwards amidst a hail of glassy shards. But instead, she climbed higher.
Footsteps thudded across the slate roof. How could she be this heavy? And how could she be so strong? A shriek filled the sky; bone-chillingly identical to the watchers’ cry. It was the same voice that Mina had heard so long ago, when her car had broken down, before she ran into Madeline’s arms for safety.
‘Oh God,’ Ciara cried, to which Mina squeezed her hand tight.
Was Madeline really like those things, or did she yearn to be human? Mina had seen her recoil from the watchers’ stench. No matter what vile body churned beneath her disguise, maybe she no longer considered herself one of them – an exile and a changeling. What other possible reason could she have had for living amongst them as a human being?
The bird in the room below started to screech, the way it often did when Madeline was nearby. The cage could be heard lifting and tapping down on the coffee table. The poor thing was frantic. Mina willed it to quieten down, for its own sake. She knew now that she had done the right thing. If she had brought it with them, Madeline would know exactly where they were.
When the watchers besieged the coop, Mina had prayed for morning. The daylight had been their saviour and their guardian. But Madeline was the creature that gave the late professor cause to doubt his mind. Removed from the nocturnal shackles that bound her kind, she was free to face the sun. The morning wouldn’t save them this time.
There was a sudden slam against the slates. Ciara bit down on her knuckles to keep the scream contained. Some tiles trickled down the roof, dancing like musical bones all the way to the gutter. Then there was an almighty smash of feet on the gravelled driveway below. Pebbles scattered like shrapnel, skipping off stone and glass. Whatever guise Madeline had assumed, she now scuttled towards the sitting room window. Was she listening with an ear pressed to the pane?
The bird fell quiet. Maybe it could sense that she was out there, as the fly feels the silver thread tingle from unseen legs. Upstairs, both bodies were as stone. Only the blood within them moved. The wooden floor had already proven itself untrustworthy. A single unlucky step – one creak, however delicate – would alert Madeline to their whereabouts.
Madeline would have seen the taxi’s headlights from miles away and heard it even sooner. Mina wondered if she had finally smiled at the sight of her running to the front door; the only two people in the world who knew what she was, together, with nowhere to run.
The window shattered, spraying the room with grains of glass. Mina could only listen, imagining the scene below. The curtain hooks popped from their sockets and Madeline touched the floor, her neck twisting towards that which had snared her senses – the bird that stared defiantly from behind the bars of its cage. The glass was slow to settle, tinkling atop the wood like chimes. By the fire’s ebbing glow, Madeline breathed in the scent of her prey; one she knew so well, one she had nurtured and protected. It was strongest by the coffee table, and led into the hallway, towards the stairs, where candlelight flickered from the draught of the open window frame.
Mina listened with mounting horror to the glass crunch beneath Madeline’s feet. Sounds travelled unchecked through Ciara’s home. It was possible that she already knew where they were. Although they strove for silence, Madeline’s hearing was acute. It was a hunter’s trait; inherent and honed.
She was coming. Escaping via the stairs wasn’t an option. Mina eased herself off the bed, and gently drew the curtain aside. Was there any other way? The drop from the window was too high. All below was unforgiving stone. Ahead, the moonlight cast its cold sheen over the open country. Even if both of them landed like limber felines, with all bones intact, where could they possibly run to? Madeline would always catch them.
Ciara’s nervous fingers touched the torch that she had left on the bed, resisting the urge to turn it on. Would it have made any difference at that stage? Madeline had them cornered. They concentrated on her footsteps across the maple floor, picturing her movements. She had entered the hallway downstairs, where the cinnamon candle burned in its jar. Was its scent fresh to her senses? Had she paused to breathe it in?
Mina and Ciara stared at each other in the moonlight of the room. Mina with a finger over her lips, safeguarding the silence, and Ciara with her mouth open, anticipating and dreading in equal measure whatever sound was to come next. Was she still there? There was no crackle of glass. There was only torment in the silence. The grim promise of the inevitable. Don’t come up, Mina thought. Don’t come up. Then she heard the creak of that step on the stairs. Madeline was already halfway there.
Ciara swung around to face the door. Her sweaty hands were shaking as they clutched the warm brass of the fire poker. Whatever was she going to do with it? This was a fight that they could never hope to win. Mina took the torch from the bed. There was no point in hiding in the dark anymore. Madeline was out there, at the far end of the corridor. Whatever her intentions towards them, Mina needed to see how she really looked. What was she without that mask?
‘Stand back,’ she said, stepping forward, tightening her fingers around the door handle.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Ciara asked, moving up behind her.
‘Just let me talk to her. Maybe it doesn’t have to be like this.’
Mina eased the door open, little by little, ready to slam it shut at any moment. For what it was worth, its laminate timber might buy them a few seconds. Standing in the hallway she saw Madeline’s tall, blanketed silhouette, framed by candlelight; stoic, and staring from the darkness, as though she’d been waiting for her.
‘Mina,’ she said in her usual impassive voice, as if they were still sat side by side in the coop, ‘I haven’t seen you this scared since the night we met. It doesn’t suit you.’
Mina had expected to be met with a monster – the kind that races up walls, all claws and snarled teeth. But it was just Madeline. Strands of hair hung like fine mist from her skull, and though her face was lost to the dark, it was always the same. It was the skeleton within the cloth that Mina couldn’t imagine. She had seen them at a distance, that night they had made their escape, with only the moonlight to betray the truth behind their horrific form. Could Madeline really be like them?
‘I see you’ve taken over responsibility of caring for Ciara,’ she added. ‘I suppose someone had to.’
Ciara nudged in behind Mina, her breathing fast and heavy. Stay, she thought. Stay where you are. What the hell was she doing?
‘I do hope you don’t intend on using that,’ Madeline said. ‘Yes, I can see you. I’m surprised you have survived this long without me.’
As Mina suspected, she could see despite the darkness. Nocturnal creatures have all the luck. The advantages were hers to hold. Cornered and blind,
it was a wonder that Madeline hadn’t killed them already.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Mina said. ‘We won’t tell anyone. I promise.’
‘Maybe you won’t. You were always the strongest of the three. To be honest, Mina, I thought you knew. The way you used to watch me, always studying my face as though I had let it change quite by accident.’
‘I knew you were lying about something,’ Mina said, pressing her weight into Ciara to keep her steady. ‘But everybody tells lies, Madeline. Maybe the professor taught you how.’
‘He taught me so much,’ she replied, her words evincing the softest sorrow.
Her pensiveness came to Mina as some surprise. She had never contemplated how Kilmartin and Madeline had interacted. Regardless of who was watching who, how close could they have come with a wall of reinforced glass between them?
‘I watched those men toil away,’ she continued, ‘carving their path through the forest. Their machines all fell silent, and so they worked the animals to the bone. At first, I thought they brought war to us. Unprovoked contest after such a prolonged spell of peace. But no, I was mistaken. They knew nothing of what was beneath them. All those eyes in the dark, divided by a few feet of soil, listening to the havoc above, waiting. Not only were we banished, Mina. We were also forgotten.
‘I watched Kilmartin crawl into his cell as the dusk darkened in the sky. More men came each day, like offerings. Fearless, innocent lambs primed for the slaughter. And the professor met them with a smile. He shook each of their hands. He thanked them for travelling so far. They worked deeper, digging ugly scars through the earth – our earth – until he called on them to stop. The pit was dug, and the container was buried. Cement was poured on deep. Walls were built. Glass was locked in place. I knew when their labour had finished because the peace returned. The last men were abandoned to the night. Some of them hammered on the hatch, thinking that their employer was hiding from his debt owed to them. They soon learned what it was he hid from.
‘We learned fast, he told us. Like infants, we absorbed everything. He taught us how to change. He gave us back that which we had forgotten. But it didn’t change them. They loathed the very sight of him. He was their prisoner, and their plaything. And they would never let him leave.’
‘You speak like you’re not one of them,’ Mina interrupted.
‘That’s because I’m not,’ Madeline snapped back. ‘The daylight doesn’t burn my skin. I don’t spend my days buried underground. Can you possibly fathom how long I walked that place alone?’
‘So, you didn’t kill the professor?’
‘I played no part in his death,’ she replied. ‘I urged them to spare him. He still had so much to teach us. But it made no difference. By the end, Kilmartin craved death more than anything else. Escape was impossible. His injuries were too severe. And the means in which they bedevilled the man – distorting his love’s likeness – it broke him utterly, and completely.
‘I watched him every day, Mina, but I didn’t approach him. Not once. I could imitate only two faces – that of his wife, and his own. The poor man was fearful enough during the night without losing his days.
‘It was Kilmartin who wrote on the wall, the same day he stood by the middle frame, waiting for the night, watching the forest around him darken for the last time. He had committed to his death long before the deed was done. Stay in the light. I believe he wrote that for me. He knew I was watching him. And so, I did just that. I lived as he did, above ground, in the home that he built for me.’
Madeline let that thought linger. The coop was hers – a gift from its architect. She had always treated them like unwelcome guests. Now they knew why. Though Mina saw it as a prison, it was Madeline’s home; the only one she’d ever known.
‘You knew about the safe house all along,’ Mina said. ‘You’re the one who sealed it.’
‘The professor taught me how to be human,’ she replied. ‘Why should I suffer under the earth like the others? It was his wish that I live in the light, Mina. I buried my memories of him in that tomb. Safe until the day you discovered it, when you awoke the machines and showed me his last request.’
Madeline hadn’t seen the professor’s recording until they had all stood around her in the safe house. She was from a different time, oblivious to the technologies that Kilmartin had left behind him. No wonder she buried the room. It was evidence of everything she was not; a constant reminder that she wasn’t human.
‘You went to the university today, Mina,’ she stated as fact. ‘I trust that the professor’s research has been destroyed?’
‘You followed me?’
‘Answer the question, Mina?’ she pressed impatiently.
That’s why Madeline had come for them – to eradicate all artefact and memory of the watchers’ existence. And this was the only reason they were still alive.
‘If Kilmartin’s papers were gone,’ she replied, ‘then we’d be the last loose end, wouldn’t we?’
No response. The candlelight burned behind Madeline’s silhouette, and she moved not an inch.
‘I knew you were smarter than the others,’ she said eventually. ‘Always searching for answers to questions you couldn’t understand, and constantly scheming in that book of yours. I thought you were going to present a problem for me.’
‘Then why didn’t you do it?’ Mina asked.
‘Why didn’t I do what, Mina?’
‘Kill me,’ she replied. ‘It’s not as though you didn’t have your chances.’
During those bleak months when they had suffered side by side, Madeline could have taken any of their lives. But she never raised a hand against them. Their shortcomings evoked in her only a sense of disappointment, not violence. Madeline had trained them how to survive, like pets, and Mina knew that without her guidance they would never have escaped that place.
‘You took care of us, Madeline,’ she said when no response came. ‘You’re the reason we’re still alive.’
The black silhouette didn’t move, and yet Mina heard bones splitting, like cracks racing through thin ice. Only when it ceased did Mina realise where it had come from. She turned on the torch, gripping it in both hands to keep it steady, and shone it towards Madeline’s face. But it wasn’t Madeline’s face anymore.
Her skin shone – creamy and unblemished – in the torchlight. The face was the perfect heart shape. It always seemed so ordinary in the mirror. Pedestrian, like an extra in a movie. The eyes looked as sad as ever, and that was without the eyeliner. The lips still didn’t work. No surprises there. Smiling for Mina had always been difficult. For Madeline it was impossible. Had it not been for the limp hair that trailed by her ears, the imitation could have passed for perfection.
‘I needed to study you,’ Madeline said in a voice that was indistinguishable from Mina’s.
She was chilled to the spot. The white light from the torch fluttered across the walls. Mina’s hands couldn’t keep it focused. The face that she had deemed worthless to the artist had been stolen. Compared to the mask that Madeline had worn for months on end it appeared, in that instant, beautiful. She wanted it back, appreciating it only now that another had taken it from her.
‘Don’t worry,’ Madeline said. ‘I have no interest in being you, Mina. I can change any aspect of your face that I so please.’
Mina’s legs nearly gave way. It was all too much. Fear, anger, and sadness had been stirred together so violently that she wasn’t sure how she felt anymore. She was just drained and defeated. The voice, the appearance – Mina was talking to a mirror image of herself, but her copycat didn’t speak as she did. Madeline would always be Madeline, no matter what face she wore or what voice she spoke in.
‘I was content to stay in the forest,’ she said. ‘My home was there. And during the day there was peace. But when I saw Kilmartin’s recording, and heard his last wish, then I knew what had to be done. So, I’ll ask you again, Mina, and this time you would be wise to answer me. Has his research been dest
royed?’
Ciara’s breathing was growing more laboured behind Mina’s shoulder. She could hear her knuckles cracking as she wound them around the poker. Mina pressed her hands against either side of the doorframe, blocking her in. Whatever she was planning, it wasn’t a good idea.
‘And what happens to us?’ Mina asked. ‘What if I told you that all of his maps and writings were gone? Would you…’
Ciara suddenly barged her way into the corridor, colliding Mina against the wall and slipping the torch from her fingers. Its light died to the sound of batteries skidding across the wooden floor. Ciara’s sudden charge had caught her by surprise, and she was out of her reach before Mina realised what she was doing.
She had never witnessed this side of her. In lieu of the kindliness that defined Ciara’s every thought and action, there was only grief and anger; two devils that Mina had encountered before. It was the loss of John and Daniel, and the realisation that Madeline could have saved them, but instead did nothing. She could have sought out John and brought him back to her. She could have raced to Daniel and pleaded with her kind to let the boy live. Everything that Madeline had done to blend in with humankind proved her undeserving of the species, and Ciara wouldn’t rest until this watcher shared her pain.
Before the light of a single flame, Ciara raised the poker above her shoulder. A few quick, blind steps had brought Madeline within her reach, and she was primed to strike. But the bray of her voice was cut short. Her weapon fell clattering to the floor as Madeline’s long arm extended, and her hand seized Ciara by the throat. The shawl slipped from her shoulders. Delineated by the candlelight, Mina watched as her silhouette lengthened, unfolded into its true form, and she pinned Ciara against the wall, leaving her feet flailing.
‘Madeline!’ Mina screamed. ‘Don’t hurt her!’
Ciara choked and spluttered, trying to pry Madeline’s fingers open. One arm – sinewy and stretched – held her aloft. Her strength was monstrous. It was as though Ciara weighed nothing.
