The Watcher

Every night I see its eyes.

They bore into me like iron pokers that have been left to fester in the glowing hearth. The large, yellow-hued eyes of the owl that perches outside my window each evening watch as I go about my nightly routine. The unblinking, attentive nature of them leaving my gut swashing with uneasiness.

The first night I had noticed its presence was a week ago now. I woke from the most horrible of dreams to find it outside my bedroom window, watching me in that unnerving way of its. After calming my racing heart, I rolled over and tried go back to bed, the desire to forget my troubling dream pushing me back into the depths of my sweat-drenched pillow.

Yet, I felt its gaze on me, keeping me from finding the peace I so desperately yearned for. Begrudgingly, I threw the blankets off myself, my old bones protesting as I pried myself out of the comfort of my bed. I trudged over to the window with a scowl directed at the troublesome owl, annoyed by its decision to make its nightly entertainment by pestering me.

“Go away!” I shouted at it, striking against the glass in an effort to scare it away. The large, white owl just continued staring at me, seemingly unfazed by my demands. It simply tipped its head to the side, as if studying me, leaving me feeling naked under its eerie gaze.

“Shoo!” I yelled out with another strike against the window, this time the force of my banging leaving the sheet of glass rattling in its frame. Still, it refused to move.

Growing weary of the fight, I instead grabbed hold of the curtains, pulling them over the window with a huff. I shuffled my way back to bed and submerged myself under my covers again, but no matter how hard I tried to keep my eyes closed that night, sleep evaded me.

The owl had disappeared from my view, yet even through the thick layer of fabric hanging over the window, I still felt its presence. After hours of tossing and turning, I had grown to my limits with the nocturnal creature.

“Go bother someone else!” I shouted to the darkness, only to be met by the same prolonging silence.

Every night after it came.

It would happen the same way. I would wake from the midst of a nightmare to find it there, perched on the cypress tree outside my bedroom window. It would watch me as I watched it, the anxiety that had filled me during its first visit now joined by a growing sense of frustration and anger at the cumbersome creature that refused to leave me be.

Every night its eyes would follow me. Every night I would yell at it. Every night it refused to budge. Every night I lost more sleep than the night before.

I had brought my nightly visitor up to a friend of mine in an effort to understand the strange occurrences, yet he had laughed it away. “Don’t be absurd!” his amused voice had drifted through the telephone line, as if it was all some humorous joke on my part. “I think your mind had finally run away with you, my friend! To harbor such conflict with an owl!” he had said with a chuckle. "What a foolish thing to worry over!"

I wondered if perhaps he was right. Perhaps my mind truly had cracked. Perhaps the owl was all nothing but a figment of my imagination. Afterall, that seemed far more likely than the notion of being stalked by a barn owl. Margaret had always said I was more mad than genius. “That was why she had married me.” she had told me once. But then again, I have a flickering memory of her giving her own complaints over a watchful owl. I had thought it the ramblings of her own fissured mind, the radiation having given her a wild imagination. Yet here it was, pestering me now.

Had we both gone mad? Or was this owl set on driving me there?

One afternoon, while working in the garden bed under that particular window, I came across something that solidified its presence in my life; a small white feather, nestled in between the rows of lilies Margaret and I had planted together the year before. As I plucked it up and caressed it between my fingers, stroking the pad of my index finger down the length of it, the evidence of the owl’s existence became impossible to ignore.

I sit on the edge of my bed now, sleep long forgone, watching for the thing to return. It’s feather rests between my fingers as I sit waiting, no longer able to handle the harassing nature of the bird any longer. After an hour of waiting, having been pulled deep into my darkening thoughts, a white streak catches my eye. My gaze snaps up to the window just as the owl flutters down onto its favorite perch. It flaps its wide wings as it balances itself, before tucking them in against its body, resuming the same stance it had taken every night before.

I push myself from my mattress then, lumbering over to the window in determination. I quickly pull the window open, ready to end things between us once and for all. And although it may seem a silly thing to do, my mouth falls open to berate the animal, as if it were a person I could speak sense to.

“Every night you’re here outside my window!” I begin in a grumble, knowing full-well that arguing with a bird was preposterous behavior to take part in. In my defense, however, the bird had started with the preposterous behavior.

“Every night you come to watch me, and every night I lose sleep!” I tell it in frustration, finding myself angry that it had chosen me as its sufferer. “What do want? Why must you come here to bother me so? Surely there are others out there you could bother! Just leave me be, you damn bird!”

By the end of my rant, my cheeks are burning red, and I can feel myself shaking with anger. If I had had neighbors, surely they would have thought to call the police in concern for my mental state. Luckily though, or perhaps unluckily, it was just the bird and I, alone in the isolated woods I had built my home in.

“What do you want, huh?!" I demand of it, smacking my withered palm against the wooden sill. "If I give you food, will that suffice you?! If I were to go out and find you a field of mice, would you leave me alone then? I would give you anything if it meant your leaving me alone!” I try pleading with it, desperate for a just a single night of reprieve.

The creature just stared at me after my outburst, as it usually would, before it blinked in one slow, drawn-out motion. That was the most response I had ever gotten from the creature, so in a spur of encouragement, I press forward.

“Why me?!” I asked it, the anger and confusion swirling inside me seeping out my eyes in the form of bitter tears. “Why are you watching me?”

The bird stretched itself out as high as it could go, making its body appear larger than it had before. “I watch all.” came a whispered response, emanating from the depths of my mind.

I reel back from the window, for the voice has startled me into a state of shock. I stumble away before crashing onto the floor with a painful thud, my joints aching with the impact as my eyes blow wide in fear. This owl, coming into my life and turning it upside down, has me grappling with reality. Surely the owl could not have spoken to me, I think to myself. It was impossible. Though, the creature’s nightly presence in and of itself seemed impossible, yet there it was, watching as the tears trek down my cheeks in response to the terror it has instilled in me.

“Why won’t you let me be?!” I bellow up at it from my position on the floor, fear taking hold of my heart, sending it shooting up into my suddenly dry throat.

“It’s time.” came its impossible voice again, sounding as calm and soothing a mother trying to comfort her child.

As my terror subsided enough to relinquish its hold on my frozen form, I scrambled back up to my feet, sharp pains shooting through my aching body as I rush towards the window in a panic. I slam it shut again, wanting to put as many barriers between me and the creature as possible.

“Leave me be!!” I cry out as I grasp hold of the curtains, pulling them in front of the window once again, forcibly blocking the creature from view. I retract from the window fearfully then, rushing to my bed where I pull the covers over myself, as frightened as a child trying to hide from the monsters erected from within their own mind.

As I sit trembling under the covers, an array of confounding thoughts spinning through my head, I hear its beak tapping against the glass of the window, the creature refusing to let me ignore its frightening presence, though I desperately wished to. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“I don’t deserve this torment!” I yell out, clamping my hands down over my ears, futility trying to block out the noise. “GO AWAY!” I bellow helplessly, my screams echoing through the empty house, going unheard by anyone other than me and the nightmarish creature who was deaf to my pleas.

It never left that night, just as it never did.

I kept the curtains drawn and kept them that way every night thereafter.

Every night it would come. Every night it would watch. Every night it would wait. And every night I would hide under the covers, refusing to look upon it.