When I was a little girl, my parents weren’t what you’d call “happy” in their marriage, so I ended up spending a lot of time with my uncle. Whenever it looked like a fight was brewing, my Uncle Noah would sweep in and take me for a week or two while hurricanes Jack and Twila threw down. It spared me a lot of the stress most kids suffer in a breaking and broken home; I got to skip the fights and still come back for the reparations. Many an ice cream dinner and surprise game system came from this fractured dynamic, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized how unhealthy my family was.
And that was only after Uncle Noah disappeared.
Uncle Noah was a collector. He had the usual obsessions like art and artifacts, but he had limited the scope of his interests to the occult, which made his collection especially intriguing to a child raised on Tales from the Crypt and Goosebumps.
He had athames with intricate hilts displayed behind leaded glass; a deck of tarot cards locked in an airtight and bulletproof case; a crystal goblet nestled in a case of Bristol Blue glass filled with argon; and countless books—in piles, on shelves, and locked up in iron-banded chests. It was a mystical paradise.
Every time I’d visit he’d have a new piece for the collection and a story to go with it.
“This is a portrait of Mother Shipton,” he’d said of a painting he’d acquired when I was ten. “A clairvoyant from the 16th century. It’s the only known portrait of her to exist in the world.” I’d recoiled from the exquisitely disfigured woman detailed on the canvas, but listened with rapt attention as he’d recounted what he knew of her life and prophecies.
His house was filled with glass cases, locked shelves, and curio cabinets packed full of arcane objects and the tales to go with them.
The only case he never filled before his disappearance was the one he had reserved for what he called his “white whale”.
“This is for The Witness,” he’d said, gazing into the brightly lit interior of a tall glass box. He’d built it in the middle of the library. I caught him staring at the case on many occasions, his eyes distant, as if imagining the piece he would one day display inside was already gazing back at him.
Because that was what the Witness did, he’d said. It watched the world as great events unfolded. “Great” being vastly subjective and somewhat misleading from a human perspective. The Witness, he’d said, only seemed to appear when “our plane intersected the path of something ‘greater’, which would briefly flicker into our experience just long enough to destroy everything in its way.”
The Witness observed. My uncle knew not by what forces, or why, only that it did, and that it appeared to do so from a fixed location. He believed if he could just gather enough data regarding the nature of the Witness’ intersections, he could reproduce the conditions and create a sort of “window” around it. And that was the box; his unfinished “window”.
Unfortunately, it would remain just that; unfinished.
He disappeared one cold, rainy night in November. It seemed he’d chased one too many fringe cults into the wilds, and much like Ahab before him, he vanished. In a mythical Roanoke-style mass exodus from a condemned church outside Merlin, Oregon, he had reportedly wandered into the forests and never returned.
I never saw my uncle or his collection again.
I spent a good deal of time making calls and pushing for the case to be reopened, but it went cold fast. After that, his estate went to his estranged wife. It would have been mine, my parents later informed me, had they not absolutely insisted he leave my name out of his will. As a result, piece by piece, his collection was dismantled and sold off to the highest bidders.
All I had left of him was an old silver pendant he told me would keep us connected, no matter the distance, and a collection of non-occult books he’d gifted to me over time. At ten, I believed the pendant was as magical as anything else in his collection. At twenty, it was harder to believe, but having it gave me comfort. Especially once his estate was gone.
I left home a short while later. I was off to college, and when that was done I had an internship waiting for me in Portland. I didn’t stick around to feel the effects of my parents and their slow descent into madness or divorce. I got birthday calls from them, separately, and if I came home for Christmas, I spent more time with friends than family. My uncle had been the only family that mattered, and with him gone it seemed like there was little point in pretending. A reality my parents never tried to contest.
After college, when I had quiet moments to myself again, I thought of him. He was with me whenever I picked up a new book about the supernatural, or stopped by an antique mall to browse. It was silly, but I always hoped maybe some piece of his collection would resurface. I knew nothing would—I knew everything had gone to private collectors like him and that no collector in their right mind would part with anything they’d managed to get ahold of—but the act of looking, of feeling like the next stall over might have some familiar artifact of occult significance, helped fill the void he left behind. All it would take was an afternoon trailing my fingers over countless mixed antiques—the silver pendant warm beneath my other hand—and I could feel him with me again, his memory lingering in my mind like an oversized hug.
And I’d give the silver pendant a little squeeze, like I was hugging him back.
After that, I’d spend the rest of the day in a hazy afterglow of bittersweet nostalgia nestled in a bed of inner peace.
I was caught in one such haze, curled up on the couch with a brand new book of paranormal essays my uncle would have loved, when I realized I was being watched.
I don’t know when it happened—I saw no movement, heard no sound. I just … became aware of him crouching in the corner behind the old black-iron wood stove in the corner, his head resting against the rough stone surround at an uncomfortable angle.
And he watched me. With vacant, lidless eyes far too big for his pallid face.
“He”, I say, though I have no way of knowing. It looked humanoid in the vaguest possible sense—all his proportions were wrong; his head was too round, his torso too long. His fingers, which sprouted from a hand the size of a platter, curled delicately over one narrow shoulder, looking for all the world like the legs of an enormous, sickly spider lazily basking in the light. He was too blunt and strangely angular to be much of anything definably human, but saying “he”, even to myself, was more comforting than either “it” or, somehow, “she”.
He sat opposite me, silent and unmoving. And thin—thinner than a man ought to be—with skin sallow and bleached. The waxen flesh, stretched tight across his wiry frame, was the color of missing teeth and old, broken bones. Only the papery thin rattle of his own shallow breathing told me he was anything close to “alive”.
He was just as my uncle had described him.
The seconds ticked between us, counted by the old grandmother clock on the wall, and he did not move. Minutes came and went in silence. Then, all at once, he let out a tremendous wheeze, startling me as his whole body shuddered and drew inward as if he were on the verge of imploding. I waited, tense and horrified, for the wet crunch of snapping bone, but it never came. Instead, he slowly relaxed back into his former position, his eyes never straying from mine.
Nor mine from his. I was as much frozen by curiosity as I was genuine terror. If this was my uncle’s “white whale”, then I was in the greatest and most existential danger of my entire life. If it wasn’t … then I had no clue what I was facing, and that was just as overwhelming to contemplate as whatever he might have been there to witness.
Something about him struck me as familiar, though. Maybe it was because Uncle Noah had spent so much time regaling me with stories of the creature, filling my mind with so much information that I couldn’t help but feel as if I knew him on a deeply personal level. I don’t know. But whatever it was, in the hours we spent locked in each other’s gaze, I felt a bizarre surge of unexpected affection for him. Something in his protruding eyes sparked it within me. And though my anxiety never diminished, I fought the urge to run into his spindly arms and never let go.
And maybe I imagined it—maybe I wanted it to be true so I dressed the memory up to suit my desires—but I thought for a moment his hand had shifted, as if resisting the urge to reach out to me, too.
Night descended and only the wan light of a table lamp continued to illuminate the two of us, throwing the jagged contours of his face into sinister relief. Some primal instinct screamed at me to flee, igniting my nerves as shadows crept outside my window, darkening the living room around us.
The floorboards shifted behind me.
For the first time since I’d noticed him, his gaze left mine, settling on a point somewhere behind my right shoulder.
I lived alone. No pets. No lovers. No guests beyond the Witness curled behind my stove.
But we were not alone.
In the thundering silence that followed, he finally spoke.
My uncle never mentioned him speaking, or even being capable of speech. And if he was at all capable, then it didn’t sound like it was natural. His voice came out like a swollen window forced to open against its will, offering me just one word, just one warning:
Run.
So I did.