There were clear skies and a cool breeze, the day They started watching me.
With the benefit of foresight, it makes sense they’d choose what would’ve otherwise been a perfect day, for every grasp I have of peace or complacency is anathema to them. I can only wish that I’d had the sense to cherish what I had before it was stripped from me — but youth is wasted on the young, is it not?
My memory of the day is like a vivid dream, one so clear that I can still taste the spry dew of the morning upon my lips, feel the sun flow through the wisps of my hair and beam warmth upon my pale skin. But like all dreams, it is interesting only to the one who experienced the depths of its emotions, who’ve personally felt that surreal poignancy beyond what words can express… and to all other ears, it sounds like any other story.
Emotions are fickle things themselves, and in time, the passion of a dream fades even in the memory of its dreamer, until at last it is dull, lifeless, like a vibrant field of color turned to grays. Yet even now, I cling to this memory breathlessly, as if the moment I waver, the moment my grasp weakens, it will be unmade.
We were picnicking, you see, in a field only we knew: a sunny hill, wild grass adorned with daffodils and azaleas, flowery bushels like splatters of paints in reds and purples and yellows upon a deep green canvas. It was the caliber of beauty that a poet would wax philosophical about in classical times, but I was oblivious to it; I was more concerned with rumors and gossip at work, and those dreadful stories I’d been hearing on the news, and those little tells my husband had been demonstrating that all the self-help books claimed were surefire signs that our marriage was doomed (and could be salvaged only by purchasing more self-help books, of course).
My life had been a miasma of petty squabbles and fleeting pleasures, moving from experience to experience, consuming product after product, sucking them dry of their novelty before moving to the next. It should’ve, by all accounts, been miserable; but my failings hardly mattered, as happiness came to me so easily then. I didn’t yet know what it’d be like to have to fight, to zealously defend every scrap of contentment or hope against the burning embers… until at last, I felt a pair of eyes settle upon me.
It had only been a creeping feeling, at first. I could not see Them then, only sense Them — looming from the bushes, peeking from the shadows between blades of grass, staring from the clouds and the trees and the flowers. At first, it had felt merely rude, as if they had committed some impropriety and would soon realize their mistake and politely avert their gaze… but the feeling remained.
As the feeling continued, questions plagued my mind. Why would They be watching me? To ruin this perfect autumn day? Was there something about me They wanted to know? When the feeling grew intolerable, I confessed it to my husband, but my words themselves only seemed to go unheard; but his brow furrowed, as if he’d only heard the tone of my voice, and knew it pertained to something which would inconvenience him. Only through hours of persistence could I earn the right to any support.
“It is merely the stress wearing down your mind, my love,” my husband told me. “You will take time off of work, and that will be the end of it.”
I was relegated to a townhouse along the moors, a brick building choked by the dust of passing cars, the only human interaction one could find in such a place. While Their gaze never wavered, I at first could find some solace in my leisure, throwing myself into my passions and my hobbies in some vain hope of keeping the creeping dread at bay. But Their terrifying gaze was like daggers upon my psyche, a cloud that loomed over every passing instant of every day and surely burned away any reprieve, any distractions between us until their presence became ubiquitous to me.
I could see Them, now, with gradual regularity, peeking out from bushes, from the cracks in doorways, from windows with the curtains drawn back late at night, from cupboards and beneath the stove and down the basement stairs — always the same milky white eyes and beady little black pupils, above a pearly smile, held aloft upon figures made of a stygian, swirling black. What I could once call a home was now a prison to me, built as if to mock the meaning and safety that this place once symbolized.
“It is merely your brain playing tricks on you, my love,” my husband told me. “We will take you to the psychiatrist to be diagnosed, and that will be the end of it.”
It is only upon emerging into the open world that I realized how deeply They had sewn their roots. The hospital, with its blinding whites and cacophonous beeps and cries and whispering, was clearly designed for my personal torment, and it was too obvious that the patients in the waiting room had been placed there to stalk me, that each doctor and each security guard had been carefully positioned in my path to dismay and intimidate me.
The psychiatrist spoke, but his words were a dull blur, neutered by apathy; even if I could not see the malice hidden in his eyes, his true allegiance would’ve still been betrayed by the presence of one of Them behind him, their cool smile looming over me as they puppeteered the psychiatrist’s every movement along blackened strings. I could not trust any of them. Even in my addled state, all I could be certain of that they were part of some grand machination designed to doom me; but my husband did not listen, and I could only sit quietly and endure as I was poked and prodded, examined and analyzed, interrogated and scrutinized, until at last I could return home with a bill of health. Yet my husband had grown cold to me, and in the coming weeks, his disposition only worsened.
“It is merely a matter of mental delusion,” my husband told me. “We will double your daily dosage, and that will be the end of it.”
The pills were the most obvious tricks, and the most easily evaded; the moment they touched my tongue, I could taste the poisons they were laced with, the concoctions no doubt designed to dull my mind and blind me to the veil that was being lifted. My eyes were being opened for the first time, and I could not let that be taken from me. I took my medication dutifully beneath my husband’s prying eyes, only to retch the vile taint into the plumbing once his gaze had passed.
Yet despite my every precaution, They only grew more fearless, more daunting. My nights were long and sleepless, as I could feel Them skitter across my room like cockroaches, gently surrounding my bed as I closed my eyes and whispering foul blasphemes into my ears, words of pure malevolence I cannot bear to recite here. For weeks my nights would be monopolized by bouts of screaming, of thrashing, of desperately fighting at the air where They had once stood, and my days were tyrannized by the sightings of Their execrable forms whenever I felt like my mind may finally be calming. All the while, my husband languished.
“It is merely a way of provoking me — a means of seeking attention,” my husband told me. “You will stop being so childish and dramatic, and that will be the end of it.”
But this was not my husband. My husband had the most gentle eyes, like channels of a flowing love I could retreat to after a strenuous day. My true husband’s eyes weren’t so full of malice, of disdain, as the man who currently bore his name and wore his skin; this family was not my own, but some pitiful reproduction of those whom I once loved, replaced with wardens who stalked my prison and punished me with their cold and distant gazes.
They were loathe to so much as be near me, and I hated them in equal measures, for I could see Them guiding their every footstep, looming over their shoulders as They commanded them like puppets, taunting me with beaming smiles as if daring me to react. It was unconscionable, and before long I told them everything; told them I could see clearly that they weren’t the same people I had once loved, exposed them as the pale replicas they now were.
“It is you. You are some sort of monster, some demon sent to torment me,” the thing that called itself my husband told me. “You will never speak to me or my children again, and that will be the end of it.”
That home is long behind me, now, replaced with a new prison they call a group home, overseen by therapists with dead eyes and fake smiles. They claim they only want to help me, but I can see the forces that puppeteer them, that guide their hands and pry their lips apart into those knowing grins. In the world outside my window, those who are puppets loathe me, and those who do not pity me; but it is I who should be pitying them, for they are the ones unaware of the peril creeping upon them, sleepwalking through life just as I did until it is their turn to finally have Their gaze settle upon them.
For those few who are unburdened by the truth, and who may happen to read this, I have but one warning; nothing beyond your own senses can be trusted, not even the words of this very account. For even as I type this, I can see blackened strings poking out from the skin along my knuckles, some unseen force guiding my hands.