The Watched by Richard M. Ankers

Faces at the window, pale in the tungsten twilight, the girls watched. They always watched. I passed them each evening on my way home from work, their house set back from the road behind wrought iron gates whose black paint peeled in an unfelt breeze to flutter around as so many obsidian moths; it chilled every time. 

The house itself stood as dilapidated as it had since childhood, my mother's warnings to never enter, not even knock on the door, had stuck with me through adolescence to the years where I should've known better. Throughout all that time, all those countless evenings, those accumulated moments, the girls had watched. 

Rarely did I stop to look back for fear of never turning away. On the few occasions inquisitiveness overcame me, it was always the same. Both girls, apparitional pale, almost bone-white, their hair long and straight sat against their slim faces like poured milk, looked wet. As though dipped in liquid porcelain and left in the window to set, the girls awaited a drying sun, but for them, it had never quite appeared. When they breathed, it was they that misted not the window glass almost as if each expelled breath lessened them, diminished their souls. But, it was their eyes which haunted most. Dark and unblinking like black holes sucking in their surrounding universe, the girls stared in vacant ebony. Even in the summer when the nights drew out, the parallel lines of cherry blossoms adding a subtle pink to our road’s architecture, their house stood in shadows, the window, the room it guarded, and most of all the girls within, mired in obsidian. 

Some people were scared of snakes, some spiders, others more mundane things like water, cats or broccoli. More still constrained their fears to those great levellers famine, pestilence, war and death. Those two little girls scared me even more than the latter although I often felt it the same. 

Nobody entered their house, its long, winding gravel drive enough of a deterrent without the imposing gates. Two great willows flanked the drive itself and moved like water regardless of the weather; they flowed, always. I’d catch sight of them out of the corner of my eye beckoning in shabby wisps of green. They lured, enticed, drew the eye, sent saving shivers down an observer’s spine; they always jolted one awake. Twisted guards of eternal morbidity, I even saw them from my bedroom window clean over the top of the high wall that skirted the house’s perimeter; I was never certain if it was to keep us out or them in?

If ever life became uncertain, troubled or becalmed, the girls at the window were a dependable constant. With the predatory certainty of sharks in an ocean, the girls watched me through childhood, adolescence and beyond. They never aged, and I never questioned it.

The night I stopped outside the girls' house and wept into the rain was the worst of my life. “I’m sorry,” the doctor had said and hung his head as though in shame at his inability to cure me. “Cancer, the bad kind,” he’d whispered. I’d wished the words softer still so I might never have heard them and it might never have been. But it was. And I had.

Unaware of what I was, who I was, or what I might become, that was the night I stopped to cry. I didn’t care who saw me or if anyone was even there. I wasn’t even sure where I was? My eyes red and heart aching, I clutched those gates and squeezed as though I might choke the iron out of them and yelled into the rain. When I looked up, the girls were there. That was the night they waved.

Richard M. Ankers is the English author of The Eternals Series published by Next Chapter.  He has featured in DailyScienceFiction, Bunbury Magazine and feels privileged to have appeared in many more. Richard lives to write.