Watching

by Michael Deery

As I sat below that maple, waiting, I remembered all the times I had seen the Watchers.

When I was little, I had seen them many times. No one else could do so and it had frustrated me that everyone thought they were my pretend friends. My father had built his tavern on the edge of our little village; near the forest. Sometimes I had seen them, watching, watching, always staring at us and at me. I never quite saw them the way one usually sees a thing. I only saw what they felt like, not what they looked like.

I used to think that they were some kind of Elves, or Fae; like in the old stories that my Grandpa told. He talked of knights and battles, Draegons and the Folk, as he called them; the Fae and the Elves. After Grandpa died, when I was six, I played out the stories he had told me while in the forest. Jumping through brambles, bushes, and out of trees; I slashed at the vile Orks, or whatever was attacking on a particular day, with my Majik sword. I found it odd, when I discovered the Watchers for what they were, that I had stayed naive so long, back when I didn’t know what was in these woods.

The day I found out what the Watchers were was a fateful day for my town. I had stayed up late, reading, on one cool spring night, and all of a sudden it was silent. The night birds that had been singing and the chirping frogs had all fallen quiet, waiting. Even the chattering squirrel, finding nuts he had buried, had gone completely still. I remember how hard it had been to breathe, as if someone was shushing me and I was barely able to disobey. By this time I was ten, and I wanted to prove that I wasn’t scared and to not run to my parents’ room. I realize now that if I had they would be alive to this day. I simply waited, and listened. Trying to fall asleep; pretending that there was nothing wrong. I didn’t sleep. By morning I was terrified but my pride kept me from going to my parents. I just opened my door, went down the hall, and creaked down the old staircase to the kitchen. I told myself that I was the first one up and that they must’ve slept in. But I was lying. Unable to wait any longer, I dashed upstairs, yelling to them. But when I tore into their room, there was no one there. Their clothes laid there though, my father’s pajamas and my mother’s nightgown; laying in the bed as if the bodies that should’ve been inside them had simply melted away into nothing. I backed through the door and then turned and ran outside. There was no one in the whole village. All my friends, the baker, the blacksmith, they were all gone.

I survived on the knowledge that I had. I ate all the food, tried to keep my room tidy, and generally convinced myself that everyone would be back. I lived as such for a year until the annual peddler came through town. I think that I scared him, running up and hugging him as I drenched his travel-beaten coat with my tears. But what might‘ve surprised him the most is that he couldn’t see me. And, that when I touched his skin, he was gone. Disappeared. After that I gave up hope. His coat might still lay there, waiting for a man that just didn’t exist anymore. I sat in the kitchen and read. I had raided the other houses for books, looking for anything that could tell me what had happened to me and to my village. It took me three weeks, but I found it. A mention of the Watchers by that name; that is where I first heard it. The book told me that they were Majik creatures; ones that could live forever. They always watched us, just as a hunter would study a herd of deer before shooting them full of arrows. They were predators, and they were good ones. The only people who could see one were other Watchers; and they didn’t qualify as people. To live forever they had to consume lives. Not flesh, but lives. The older the living animal that they ate was, the more years were added on their own spans. To mark a town for ripening, the book said, they would switch one of the human babies with one of their own, which they formed to look as a human did. A Changeling, the book called them. A changeling could be seen until the age of about eleven when the Majik from the Watchers wore off. They picked their attacking time to be just before this so the village wouldn’t be alarmed. They book told of several accounts of certain people surviving if their son or daughter had stopped the attackers, fending them off but dying for it.

Immediately I realized that I was a Changeling. What other option was there? They hadn’t eaten me, the peddler couldn’t see me, and I had taken his life. Sucked it right out of his clothes and him with it.

All of this had happened five years ago. Now I have given up. I can’t be around people; the slightest touch and they’re gone. I had tried to find other Changelings but I couldn’t. Now I know why. They all go insane. I have struggled with that fact for the past few days. If I can’t stay with humans, and the Watcher’s don’t want me, were am I to go? So I sat down. And waited. And I am still waiting, and perhaps I shall always wait or, at least, until my life runs out. I just sit there.

Waiting.

Watching.

Visit the Library Home Page                                                       Read the latest Library news in The Circulator