The Protectors

Part 1 – The Watcher

I do not sleep. I have never known the taste of dreaming. Instead, I wait. Waiting is my marrow, my pulse, my only inheritance.

They painted me long before the children of this house learned to walk. I was nailed into the corner where the hall bends into shadow, set upon the wall with black eyes too wide, too endless. They called me decoration but never thought to ask if I had a mouth, though I do.

They never wondered if I had a hunger.

I’ll let you fill in the rest.

From my perch, I see them. The family. The girl with ink-black hair, clutching her schoolbag as she runs past me each morning. The father who avoids looking at me, though he feels me every time. Like cobweb silk dragging across his skin. I can’t deny that I like that power. Then there’s the mother who dusts my frame with quick, nervous motions, whispering to herself as though she suspects what I am.

But they do not know. Not truly.

I count their breaths in the dark. I know when the house sighs, when the walls expand and contract with weather, when the pipes mutter. I know when silence is only silence, and when it is something else.

Last night, I heard something else. It was not me. It was heavier and too close for comfort. The girl stirred in her bed as a shadow bent across her floorboards. I wanted to call out and crack my painted mouth wide and shriek, but my voice is locked in the brushstrokes of the artist who trapped me here.

So I watched. That is all I do. That is all I am allowed.

But although I cannot move, I feel the paint along my jaw beginning—just beginning—to split.

I think I am learning how to smile.

Part Two — The Keeper

I am older than they think. They measure me in bricks and mortar, in deeds signed and papers shuffled. Now called home, they paint my walls, scrub my floors, whisper their secrets into my stairwell. They believe I belong to them, but it is the other way around. I cradle them in my rooms, I memorize their footsteps, I collect their arguments in my rafters.

I do not forget.

Yet something has entered me. Something not my own. A shadow slipped beneath my door last night, and I tried to hold it back, but it knows how to move where nails do not bite and where mortar has cracked.

It passed through me as though I were nothing but smoke.

And I hated that. I hated the way it touched the girl’s room, the way it bent the air above her bed.

I am her shelter. I am supposed to keep her safe. But my beams creak with age, and my voice is nothing but the wind sighing through broken chimneys.

I am weakening.

And in my weakening, I feel the Watcher stir upon my wall. The painted one with varnish for skin and an artist’s curse in his mouth. His smile is widening.

And I fear, before long, I will not be the master of myself at all.

Part Three: The Creeper

I do not speak in words, yet you feel me in the corners of your mind, brushing across the edges of thought. I am the sigh beneath the pillow, and the sliver of darkness that lingers after the candle is snuffed. They call me the Creeper, as if that is all I am. But I am more. I am the longing behind your heartbeat, the ache you cannot name.

I slip through cracks and keyholes, silkier than smoke, heavier than velvet. The girl stirs beneath the covers, and I taste her fear like honey, but I do not hurt her. Not yet. I am patient. I am always patient. Her eyes flicker beneath the lashes, and I wait.

I have waited longer than even the Keeper could remember. I have wandered through rooms unnumbered, through years uncounted. I remember every hand that has trembled before me, every heartbeat that has skipped when I leaned close. I remember the painter who made the Watcher and left him with varnish lips and a frozen grin. He thought he captured me in brush and oil, but he only gave me a place to continue my whisper.

And when the girl finally wakes fully, blinking into the dim, she will not see me. But she will feel me. I will bend around her shoulders and linger in her breath and she will not know if she can escape.

Because I am patient. I am eternal. And oh, how I am hungry.

Part Four: The Seer

I do not merely reflect. I know. I catch the tremble of the heart, the shadow of thought, the brush of breath against skin. They think they look into me, but I look deeper. I see what is hidden beneath the curves of the walls, beneath the varnish of painted smiles, beneath the surface of their lives.

The girl stirs, and I drink in her fear and her longing alike. She does not know I see the Watcher’s painted grin stretching, cracking the varnish. I watch the Keeper tremble as it struggles to hold the intruder at bay, feeling its bones bend beneath the weight of its own memories. And I taste the Creeper as it coils, brushing across corners like a silk curtain.

I do not judge. I merely reflect.

But tonight, something changes. The Watcher leans closer than he should, his wooden lips splitting into something hungry. The Keeper shivers, causing its pipes to groan in protest. The Creeper stretches itself thin, gliding across the floor, scenting the girl’s pulse like a predator in slow dance. And I - oh, I - catch it all in a single breathless frame.

I show the truth to the girl, though she cannot see it. I hold her reflection still while everything else moves, twisting the ordinary into something uncanny, and if she dares to meet me fully, she will see not only herself, but the eyes in the wall, the walls themselves, and the hunger slipping beneath the door.

And when the first scream cracks the night, she will know - that which waits, that which watches, that which whispers – they have always been here.

I do not blink.