The Watchers: A Spine-Chilling Gothic Horror Novel Now Adapted Into a Major Motion Picture by A. M. Shine

Author:A. M. Shine
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Speculative
ISBN: 9781801102155
Publisher: Head of Zeus -- an Aries Book
Published: 2021-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

18

His eyes squinted back at them, raw against the monitor’s light that fell flat on his cheeks. His beard was a nest, blindly trimmed, with stray tufts reaching out from its sides. The bald head was rounded as the moon, and just as pale. The camera recording him was functional, but of poor quality. Everything was too bright or too dark, with no textures to define either. His shoulders were slumped, and around his chest hung open a woollen cardigan. The room behind him appeared unchanged from where they now stood, staring at this stranger – the one responsible for it all.

‘Well,’ he began, his voice gravelly and low, as though he hadn’t spoken for some time, ‘if you’re watching this, then I’m probably dead.’

Here the man stared not at the camera’s lens, but somewhere else, almost distracted. With a large left hand that slipped into focus he squeezed the clump of hair around his chin and exhaled sadly as one facing a fate unwanted and yet inescapable. He obviously hadn’t planned what he was going to say, or maybe – now that he was recording – he wasn’t sure if he should say anything at all.

‘No one knows about this,’ he continued, ‘what I’ve done and why I did it. Everyone who helped me, well, they’re all dead.’

Again, he hesitated, pausing to reassess what he was doing. His eyes looked anywhere but at the camera or the monitor, as though he couldn’t even face his own reflection.

‘Fuck it,’ he said, sitting back, ‘I’ve nothing to lose. Not anymore.

‘Many men are dead because of me. I needed to build this, you see,’ he said, glancing around him. ‘I promised them more money than they would ever see in their lifetimes because I knew they wouldn’t live to receive it. Jesus, how many were there?’ he whispered, rubbing his sore eyes. ‘It took a few teams. Some of the men had families. Some were just boys looking for summer work. It had to be the summertime. I needed the long evenings.

‘All the vehicles broke down outside the forest. Getting this container here was the hardest part. It took a few attempts. Each time I hid in here and left them all outside in the dark. I listened to them being slaughtered – these men I had lied to and brought to this godforsaken place.’

Mina looked to Madeline. The woman’s face was stolid; a bust that betrayed nothing of her feelings or fears. Both of her hands rested on her lap. Their fingers were interlaced, as the hands of the dead are set for the long slumber. There was no way of telling what she was thinking.

‘They built it exactly as I asked of them,’ the man said, ‘and worked so fast that it was almost as though they knew what was coming, racing against the clock. Each team picked up where the last one left off. They shared the same job and the same fate.

‘So much of it was for nothing,’ he said thoughtfully, his eyes looking up towards the eight monitors.

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