9

Mina called Ciara’s phone throughout the drive, despairing as it rang out every time. After all she’d been through – that traumatic baggage that would burst the seams of the strongest mind – this journey ranked up there with the surrealist of them all. There were moments when she’d zoned out entirely, doubting her reality, as if she were held captive in a particularly cruel nightmare and her eyelids would snap open at the next turn. But the road and the night kept on coming.

The white cone of the headlights. The black nothingness on either side. The yellow bird on the back seat and the rattle of his cage at every bump in the road. That feeling of being so utterly and hopelessly lost. Any moment now, the night’s sky would be scarred with treetops and the lights on the dashboard would darken. Random bursts of laughter escaped her mouth; she’d no control over them. A few mental screws must have finally popped out of place. The emotional tempest that swirled inside her skull was spitting out its broken parts – tears, giggles, even a few short screams.

These watchers weren’t like those that had rallied night after night to the coop’s glass. They’d learned to imitate humankind so perfectly. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. Ciara’s only saving grace was that she’d avoided the city since learning of their presence there. Without a scent to guide them, maybe they hadn’t followed her home. Lost or found, alive or dead, Mina would know soon enough.

‘Okay,’ she whispered back to the yellow one, ‘it’s up here somewhere.’

Mina cut the headlights. The road was narrow – a straight chute that she could follow blind. And the grassy ditch would catch her wheels if she strayed like a bowling ball towards a gutter. Ciara was safe, Mina had to believe that, otherwise what was she doing there? But if anything was amiss, hopefully she’d detect it on a single pass. An open door. Smashed glass. Some gangly fucker peering in the window. Mina didn’t know what she’d do if her fears were realised. It was impossible to ideate too far into the future when the present moment was so sick with uncertainty. But together they could stay on the road, head to a port, get off the island. If only they’d done it sooner, but maybe it wasn’t too late.

Mina knew the house’s layout intimately, having spent so much time there in the aftermath of the woodland, when they’d licked their wounds and ganged up to bully the past into leaving them alone. Ciara always drew the curtains before sundown; Mina knew that for a fact. The woman shared the same aversion to her own reflection, especially with the night as its backdrop.

‘The curtains are closed,’ she announced to the bird on the back seat.

So far so good. If a watcher had crept into her home, it was unlikely that it’d cover up the windows to keep the heat in and save on the electricity. The security light was on, too, making the front door glow in the darkness. There were no signs of a disturbance that Mina could see as she crawled the jeep past the open gate. Everything was as she’d hoped it to be. But an ominous silence held the night in its hand, and there was no knowing yet if it bore claws. A wing fluttered on the back seat but was tucked immediately as if by means of apology. Now and then a stone would crunch beneath the tyres, but there was no other sound to hint at the horror that caused Caroline’s jumper to hug Mina’s body like a damp cloth. She kept on driving, thinking it safer to leave the car out of sight, facing the main road that couldn’t have been more than a few miles down the laneway. The key could rest in the ignition while she was gone. Like old times, tomorrow was no longer a certainty.

‘I won’t be long,’ Mina said, reaching back a hand to the yellow one’s cage, watching him thrill at her fingers poking through the bars. ‘I’ll come back for you once I know everything’s okay. I’m sure it’s fine,’ she whispered unconvincingly, more so to herself than the bird.

The night’s air was breathless as Mina began her short walk back to the house. She’d forgotten how calm it could be but knew better than to trust it. The woodland had always been at its quietest right before the light clicked on. She paused by the gate, taking a moment to scan again for anything she might have missed; no easy feat considering how the watchers could now stroll up to a door and knock on it. Lights were on, upstairs and down, though with the curtains closed she couldn’t tell who was at home. But it wasn’t so late in the night that Ciara would have gone to bed. Mina had no reason to assume the worst just yet.

She stepped under the security light and drew the peacoat tighter around her shoulders, like a knight fastening her armour, the adrenaline hardening each breath before a battle. She’d no choice but to go through with it. Ciara wasn’t answering her phone. The windows were covered. And with her ear pressed to the door, there wasn’t a murmur from within. Mina stabbed the bell and forced herself to stand there, awaiting her fate like someone who’d just spun a lottery wheel with an even odds chance of death.

‘Come on, Ciara,’ she muttered, glancing anxiously around the moonlit silhouettes of her long-neglected garden, ‘don’t be fucking dead, please.’

She heard footsteps on the wooden floor. Someone was walking from the kitchen to the door. Mina let out a sigh of relief and smeared the sweat across her brow. Ciara had probably been frying more vegetables or something, and here was Mina having a full cardiac arrest on her front step.

With a soft click, the door opened.

‘Mina,’ John said, ‘what a lovely surprise.’

The whole world darkened – a cosmic eclipse born from the sight of a single face; identical to the photographs taken on the dead man’s wedding day. She’d never met him, but through Ciara’s memories – stories and photos woven together into a tapestry of John’s life – she felt as though she had. His jaw and cheeks were chiselled to perfection; those same contours that his widow still swooned over. They’d even applied the lightest five-o’clock shadow. This was John, but he was leaner and he was longer, and the man’s eyes were unnervingly vacant as his lips curved into a smile.

‘Please, come in out of the cold,’ he said, guiding her into the hallway.

Somehow, ushered in by blind instinct alone, Mina did as the watcher asked, and entered. Why run? It would catch her. Why scream? She would be silenced in the swiftest second, as a guillotine slicing down from the night’s sky. Her only option was to play along, to buy a few more seconds of life, as horrific as they promised to be.

‘Who is it, honey?’ Ciara called from the kitchen as Mina watched the door close.

It was so similar to her voice – the accent, the timbre. But that wasn’t Ciara.

Gone were the scented candles that she would light each evening, with their bouquets of vanilla and sandalwood – a homely air, welcoming as it was warm. Instead there was a putrid taste in the air, like old bin bags and layers of rotted leftovers, each one leaking down into the next, merging their livid mould as one. It was nauseating to breathe and yet this thing masquerading as Ciara’s dead husband seemed unaffected by it.

‘It’s Mina,’ John replied, and she’d almost flinched when his hand touched her shoulder, imagining the length of those fingers and the claws sheathed inside them. ‘Why don’t you have a seat and wait for us,’ he added, directing her into the sitting room. ‘We will be into you in a moment.’

It knew her name. The fucking thing had recognised Mina the second it laid eyes on her.

She seemed to float through the doorway, so aware of the necessity not to advertise her panic that her subconscious hit the self-destruct button to prevent her from doing just that. She moved mechanically, acting as maybe Mina would if she weren’t traipsing around Ciara’s sitting room with two watchers a few paces up the hallway. The room was dirtier than she’d ever seen it, but there were no signs of a scuffle. Maybe Ciara had given up without a fight. Mina wouldn’t have blamed her. Above the fireplace were the photographs that the watchers must have studied, carefully arranged by occasion; a timeline of Ciara’s happiness before the devils of fate summoned them to the coop.

Mina’s eyes settled sadly on a picture of the two of them: a selfie she’d taken at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine plonked between them and their faces aglow in the early evening light. Ciara rarely indulged in more than a glass, but she had that night; gulping back so much fizzy rosé that she couldn’t keep herself from burping. There was giggling at first as they shared the same tried and tested stories that they knew would make each other smile, and then the tears came shortly after. They’d held each other close, taking turns to ramble on and to listen. Mina had sketched a portrait of Danny at Ciara’s request, taking care to capture his bravery, his innocence, and that perfect, crooked smile. He’d only ever wanted to be loved, to be part of a family. He should have been there with them, hands stuffed in his pockets, too shy to speak lest he should say the wrong thing. Without Danny, they’d never have escaped into the light, and yet life without him would always be that shade darker.

Would the watchers take Mina’s face too? Was she doomed to become another mask – a ghost of flesh and blood? She imagined a hollow version of herself standing on a busy street corner, watching its many strangers like she used to, only now with the coldest and darkest of eyes. There were other friends and relations of Ciara’s exposed on the mantel too – a fucking pick ’n’ mix of facial features. These things could impersonate anyone they pleased. But they weren’t creating new personas from stolen pieces of the old. Instead they were replacing them, taking lives, homes, maintaining routines as a means to blend in unnoticed. But why?

‘Mina,’ Ciara said, appearing in the doorway, dressed in her baby pink bathrobe and slippers. ‘How nice it is to see you.’

She glided into the room – this photocopy of her best friend, as youthful as the day she was wed, with red hair tumbling in ringlets down to her shoulders, framing a face cleansed of blemishes. But those emerald eyes didn’t glimmer, and the smile that had carried Mina through their hardest times was chillingly absent. So uncannily perfect were those lips, it was as if they’d never opened until that night.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ Ciara said, turning her head to stare blankly at the armchair.

‘Okay,’ Mina stammered, casting a crestfallen glance to the door.

She lowered herself onto the chair, trying to work her limbs as naturally as possible, but the terror had starched every moving part of her. John entered the room, closing the door behind him like a coffin lid. Mina hid her clenched fists between her thighs and pressed both feet into the floor to keep them steady. She was trapped. John joined Ciara as she sat on her side of the couch, and not by coincidence. The watchers knew her habits.

‘How have you been, Mina?’ she asked, hands clasped on her lap.

Mina willed her eyes not to examine them. A single glance could arouse their suspicions. But even out focus – in that forbidden periphery – they were too large, their fingers too long. The signs were there, those that she’d trained herself to identify, and yet she could do nothing about it. She was an insect, caught and cocooned, and helpless to free itself from the web that she’d walked right into.

‘I’ve been okay,’ she replied, trying to wrap her words into a voice that might have passed as normal. ‘Same old, you know.’ The scream was on the tip of her tongue.

‘It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you,’ John said. ‘Where have you been, Mina?’

They stared at her across the silence of a room, awaiting her response. These watchers may have perfected the human face but they were poor actors when it came to glossing their characters with personality.

‘I was on holiday,’ Mina replied. ‘I needed to get away for a while.’ Her jaw clamped shut. She was lucky to even get those words out.

‘It’s nice to have you back again,’ Ciara said. ‘We have missed you very much.’

Their heads turned in sync to look at one another. It was as though they were communicating psychically, deciding her fate.

‘How is your family?’ John asked, as their eyes resumed their feast of her.

Mina guessed the sinister purpose behind their line of questioning. They needed to know who would miss her and who in her life could discern the weaknesses in their disguise. There was only Jennifer and her father, a man so in thrall to the bottle that he’d drunk his body to near oblivion, and still there wasn’t a day he didn’t wake up thirsty. Since her mum passed away, he’d picked up a few dicey habits too. Horses, greyhounds, it didn’t matter so long as they had odds to their name and a bookie willing to see them through. To a loner such as he’d become, it was a pleasure he could pursue without the need for anyone else. So, too, were the cards. The only time Mina knew her father to enjoy the company of others was when he was sat around a poker table – where conversation was mostly prohibited, and his silence was finally construed as a strength.

It was sad to think that he’d struggle to tell the difference between them. The alcohol had dulled his days and nights, depriving their hours of significance. His memories had darkened too, though that had been the man’s plan all along – to drink until there was only the mystifying moment, and no past to put it into context. Mina had pitied him for that. But she’d come to understand why he did it. History doesn’t sink over time. Tears keep it afloat.

‘They’re okay, thanks,’ she replied, each word settling like dry sand her mouth. ‘I haven’t seen them for a while. But I hope I will soon.’

‘How is your father?’ Ciara said, her eyes flashing from brown to blue to a devilish red before returning to green.

The watcher was oblivious to these faltering details in its disguise, and it took all of Mina’s will not to react.

‘He’s good,’ she replied.

‘And where does he live?’

‘Abroad,’ Mina replied, the first lie that crossed her mind. ‘Far away from here.’

She couldn’t run. Before her fingers felt the door handle some fleshly part of her would be splashed in ribbons against the wall. They were using her for information – to use her identity as a living, breathing parasite that would infect the lives of those she loved. That’s the only reason she was still alive, and that was the only hope she had of staying that way.

‘And your mother?’ Ciara asked, in a tone as monotonous as it was unsettling.

Mina knew better than to divulge the watcher’s mistake. The real Ciara knew how much she missed her mum; how the grief still perched on her shoulder, tightening its claws whenever she thought of her.

‘She’s okay,’ she replied, unable to control the quiver to her voice. ‘She was asking after you both.’

‘That was nice of her,’ John said. ‘And you must forgive me, but I do forget many things, Mina. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘No,’ she replied, nervously shaking her head, unable to keep her eyes from glancing down at the floor. ‘I don’t.’

‘But you do have friends,’ Ciara said. ‘You have us.’

The skin below the watcher’s left eye began to slowly droop down, its tautness of form so compromised as to reveal a semi-circle of red flesh. Mina squeezed her lips into a smile that she couldn’t hold. It was only a matter of time before they realised what she knew. She slapped her hands around the pockets of her coat – the well-known gesticulations of one searching for something close at hand, but one that made both watchers’ eyes lock on her with an eerie, unspoken confusion.

‘Would you mind if I popped outside for a cigarette?’ she said, looking anxiously to the door; that last remaining lifeboat drifting out of reach.

The real Ciara knew she’d quit.

Neither responded, sitting side by side like a married couple long divorced from any feelings for one another bar loathing and undistilled disinterest. It was the ultimate desecration of their memory, that Ciara and John – so blindly devoted – should be staged around their own home like two lifeless, loveless puppets.

‘I’ll just be two minutes,’ Mina added, ‘and then I can tell you all about my friends in the city. They’ve been asking me to visit them. Maybe we could all go together?’

‘Yes,’ Ciara replied. ‘Two minutes. I would like to hear about your friends, Mina.’

Before she had chance to rise from her chair, the watcher brandished her teeth; those ripe lips lifted unnaturally high above the gum, revealing a blackness that was anything but human.

‘Then we can talk some more,’ John said as Mina opened the door, ‘like friends.’

She glanced over at him as she stepped into the hallway. His smile was so freakishly wide that it stretched his face across both sides, bending cheekbones out of shape and squeezing his eyes into sickly little slits that watched her like a nightmare gifted life. Every fibre of her being burned to scream. But she swallowed it back, as she’d trained herself to do when these fucking things had used her for their own nocturnal entertainment. Mina held her breath as she passed across the hallway. The urge to throw up was eager enough without inhaling that spoilt air. The most horrible suspicion wormed its way into her mind – what if it wasn’t rotten food she was smelling? What if Ciara’s corpse lay atop the kitchen counter? A feast for the flies and all those hidden teeth waiting to sprout at any given second should they realise the lie she’d told them.

All was quiet in the sitting room as she opened the front door, gulping back the fresh air that she thought she’d never taste again. Neither watcher had come to keep an eye on her. Shy a cigarette and any other ideas, that would have snapped the curtains shut on her life for sure. Beyond the security light, the surrounding fields were lost to the darkness. But the jeep wasn’t far, and it would be a straight run once she turned down the laneway. She pressed the door back into its frame; its click was subtle, but she didn’t doubt that they’d heard it.

She slipped off her boots and laid them gently on the front step. Their heels weren’t her highest but given how she couldn’t keep her legs from quivering, there was no guarantee that she could run on the tips of her toes as far as the jeep. Again, the sensations of old had been renewed, and the past champed at her toes with an icy bite that reminded her of the last time she’d made a run for her life. It was now or never; her two minutes were nearly up. She dropped Caroline’s peacoat from her shoulders, making her body as light – and hopefully as fast – as possible. A few stormy breaths filled her lungs, and she ran.

The darkness was disorientating – making Mina dread that each step would be her last, that a third watcher had lain in wait for her, anticipating her deceit – but she willed herself through it, stealing what light she could from the stars above to unriddle the road ahead. The soles of her feet landed hard on stones, but their pain was trivial and nothing compared to what would come should the watchers perceive her absence. A shape formed ahead of her – a thin resin of moonlight glowed atop the roof of Peadar’s jeep. The watchers were still awaiting her return. She pictured them on that couch, sitting perfectly erect, staring at the door.

‘Hey,’ Mina whispered to the bird as she climbed into the front seat. ‘I’ll explain later, okay? Right now, we need to go.’

The watchers must have thought she’d walked to Ciara’s house. There’s no other reason why they’d let her out of their sight; on foot they could track and catch her before she could reach the next nearest house. But as soon as the engine made the slightest purr, they’d come for her. Their predatorial senses were too sensitive to ignore the slightest disturbance in a night so still. Mina patted the dashboard as Peadar had done.

Her fingers found the key. ‘One more time,’ she said before taking the next great gamble for her life. ‘Please, get me out of here.’

With a sharp twist, the jeep groaned to life in an instant. No spluttering. No time wasted. Peadar’s ghost must have been looking out for her, charming the old girl into behaving herself. But before Mina could believe her luck, she heard the door of Ciara’s home smash from its hinges; the crack of wood was like a monstrous bone breaking behind her.

They were coming.

The jeep chugged into first gear. Every instrument at Mina’s disposal felt clunky and stiff, and the panic had caused her feet to forget themselves. The starting pistol had already fired and she was still fumbling in the paddock.

‘Come on,’ she shrieked, slapping the wheel in frustration to which the yellow one began to lash about in his cage; he’d sensed them too.

The jeep was picking up speed but it felt weighty as a barge battling a strong current. Mina would have been faster had she kept on running. The white of the headlights revealed only so far ahead but the main road had to be close. Over the thunder of the engine, there was a sudden surge of gallops – so loud, so quick, the slap of skin on stone and the scrabbling of claws clicking closer and closer. The watchers were pursuing her on all fours like wolves at a pace that was inescapable.

The rear window exploded, spraying Mina with a torrent of glassy splinters that sent the yellow one into a frenzy. The shock caused her to swerve a tyre onto the ditch and the whole jeep rattled as she struggled to steer her course back onto the road. A slash screeched through the panelling – steel sliced open like supple skin – and the back bumper fell away, clanking and rolling onto the road, but the watchers hadn’t missed a step, clearing it like a low hurdle. Their snarling breaths continued to close in behind her, all the louder now with the window exposed, their savagery escalating as their claws reached hungrily for their prize.

‘Come on, come on,’ Mina screamed, jamming her foot harder into the accelerator.

She braced for every impact, holding the jeep as steady as she could like a sea captain tied to the wheel in a tempest. But still she faltered from left to right, barely keeping her tyres off the rise of the ditch. One mistake and Peadar’s jeep would have surely flipped into a stream of bone-crunching somersaults. Mina couldn’t look back. She couldn’t take her eyes off the road.

The drumbeat of their feet suddenly shifted; closer, faster, loudest by Mina’s right ear. One of the watchers was pacing with impossible speed alongside the jeep, barging its body into the door, striving to drive her onto the grassy verge. As the wall crept into the beam of her headlights, promising impact at any second, Mina did the only thing she could. She wrenched the wheel to the right, battling against the watcher’s weight, terrifyingly aware of the door buckling inward toward her hip. She waited for it to tear through and wrench her out of place, but so long as she maintained her speed, the watcher’s need to gallop on its four limbs would keep her safe, or so she hoped. A hand suddenly flashed by the window to her side. Claws perforated the door like tinfoil, gripping it, their bones clenching like a vice until it was ripped from the hinges holding it in place. Such was the speed of the jeep in that second that the door whipped back like a battering ram, knocking the watcher off balance and sending it tumbling backwards. Though, now exposed in the driver’s seat, there was no way she would survive a second assault. Mina manoeuvred onto the other side of the road, where the bare stone wall now flashed past her in the freezing wind.

Sheer frustration invigorated the watcher to regain the lost distance, even if that meant flaying muscle and sinew from its skeleton just to latch a claw into Mina’s neck. The other was quickly making moves on the left side. It’d obviously seen its accomplice flounder and knew not to repeat the same mistake. Mina could hear it gnashing at the air as though it liked the taste of it. Claws ticked across stone as it positioned itself to strike, lurching the bulk of its bone and weight into the passenger side, and again Mina had to hold hard on the wheel to keep from being driven off the road. With her own door gone, she could see tufts of grass whipping inside by her legs. She was inches from the edge, exerting whatever strength she had left just to hold a straight line.

Both watchers suddenly shrieked as one – their combined voices piercing the night like a klaxon. The main road was coming into sight. Blinking the sweat from her eyes, Mina saw the distant lights of other drivers, white and red candles in the all-consuming black, switching left to right, oblivious as to what horrors were thundering towards them. The watchers wouldn’t risk revealing themselves in front of others. Not here. Not when there was every chance that a witness could put their foot to the floor and live to tell the tale. A claw carved across the left side. At a glance, Mina saw its knife-like tip drag across the length of the jeep, as though the fear of losing their prey had evoked a mindless desperation. Was it trying to claw its way inside, to slash her to bloody shreds in the driver’s seat?

It didn’t matter what foul fucking plans it had for her. She was going to make it. Mina didn’t press the brake until all four wheels had touched off the laneway. Only then, blinded by incoming headlights, did she grind the jeep to a halt on the hard shoulder, mere feet away from the wall ahead. The sudden jerk sent her flying, and she crashed her shoulder into the dashboard like a rag doll thrown by a child from the back seat.

There was the screeching of tyres and the clatter a hundred broken things resettling. And when all was still, the sound of Mina’s breathing came as some proof that she was still somehow alive. The watchers had retreated.

A car door slammed shut, and then another. Voices were heard getting closer.

She was safe.