Interloper

It began when Kiernan was a child of five or so, or at least that was his earliest memory of it. Presumably it had happened before, stirrings in the gloom beyond his cradle, but his short-sighted infant’s eyes had not made out what was before them, or else had taken it as another of those shapeless dreams that children had, strange and unpleasant, but quickly pushed from the same small head that had devised them.

The phenomenon that Kiernan came to live with was not a dream, however, being that he would always wake from sleep to witness it and could not easily return to rest afterwards, at least without some supplementary measure. Nevertheless, he would be told by doctors—both medical and psychological—that what he perceived was some leaving from a dreamer’s path, a mental image rerouted through ocular means until it briefly entered waking life.

Kiernan knew better. Even at five or six, watching from between fanned fingers the interlopers in his childhood room, he understood that though not real in the way that he or his parents were these figures did exist, and had come to watch him until he switched on the light.

Often after it began Kiernan would go to bed with every lamp in the room set up like guard posts in each corner, only to find they’d gone out as he slept, letting his unwanted visitors in again. A light sleeper, Kiernan did not believe his mother or father had come in to turn the lamps off as they frequently did if he dared keep the overhead bulb at its full and comforting shine. No—they, the night watchers, had put out the electrics themselves as though suffocating a flame.

Sometimes it surprised Kiernan when the sun came up, fearing that it, too, would eventually be their victim, bringing down an unending night.

As it was, the interlopers continued to come only when day had ended, and always in the same manner as when Kiernan was small.

In each wall of his bedroom new windows would appear, all of which looked out onto a landscape that did not exist beyond the house. It was as though the entire building had been stolen away to some bleak and horrible field, itself turned nearly black by the colourless quality of night.

Before that view, against the windows’ glass, figures in silhouette would press, looking in, their hands upon the panes. All of them appeared to stand unsupported by any ladder or platform, though Kiernan slept on the upper floor of the house.

No matter how close he ever dared come to those portholes into the weird beyond he could not see the watchers’ features, nor any aspect of their skin colour or clothes.

Like the alien field, the dark made them anonymous, and all that Kiernan could ever see in the shadow of these figures was the slight detail of motion: the working of their jaws around language he could not quite make out.

Sometimes, as he had in that first recollected incident, Kiernan would hear a low chuntering, none of it distinct. Other times there would be a muffled shouting that, again, seemed to have no words to it, only noise, and on these nights Kiernan would scream out in certainty that they were full of hatred. His parents would come running, or—later in life—lovers would awaken and inevitably turn on the light.

Only one would ever see what Kiernan had: a boyfriend he’d met at college, who had broken from a sensitive and deeply religious family, but had still retained much of their ways.

Between three or four o’clock in the morning one Christmas Kiernan had rattled his lover fiercely by the shoulder until he’d opened one eye, smiling slightly, thinking the sentiment of the day ahead had kept Kiernan awake.

Then he had seen, and he had heard, and like a fledgling startled from a bush the boy had leapt from the bed onto the carpet, clawing, half-naked, for the door. Still on his knees he’d scratched at his coat dangling from its hook for his car keys, pulling the whole thing down with a desperate force.

He had driven away in the night, and had not spoken to Kiernan again except to appear, pop-eyed with nerves, at his doorstep to present him with a copy of the bible, so new that it was still sealed in plastic like a bouquet of flowers.

Kiernan had laughed and taken the book to a charity shop the following day. Let someone else have it, and hopefully benefit from it; it had never done him any good.

After his parents, alarmed by the nightly disruptions, had taken Kiernan through every medical, therapeutic, and holistic option, they had inevitably sought out religion. This was a last resort, being that they themselves were atheists by choice and had no knowledge to fall back on, nor any particular belief in its ability to help them. Kiernan received conflicting advice from leaders of various denominations and differing belief systems, none of which disrupted the night visits whatsoever.

That a long ago boyfriend had perceived the watchers and their windows rather than any priest led Kiernan to believe that they were, in fact, entities of a kind. That they could only be experienced by those whose minds, in some subtle way, were genetically prone to supernatural perception.

This gave Kiernan no comfort, however, for it only meant that that few people could see them to confirm their existence, let alone explain what they were or in any way assist him.

From childhood Kiernan had taken to wearing eye masks and earplugs at bedtime, deciding wearily that if he could not end this haunting then he could at least protect himself from suffering it. But he would still wake in the night at the exact moment of its arrival, would sense the dread of those watchers at the windows and begin to fear that they would somehow enter his room through them and catch hold of him.

What they would do when they achieved this he was never able to imagine, which was, to Kiernan, more frightening than if there was some end he might anticipate. The closest Kiernan came to conceiving one was an image of them standing over him, and death coming as suddenly as the eclipse of a dream.

Kiernan began to purposely wake himself in the night to meet the interlopers and strain his ears at their language; he had once attempted to record them, but nothing had registered of sound or of the windows, the footage, when he watched it back, capturing only a dark room, leaving him disappointed.

All he was able to do was attempt to untangle the meaning of their words himself, but no matter how many times he listened, sweat-soaked under the shirt he slept in, he could not understand, nor when he approached the windows in hope of discerning, at last, the shape of lips, and with them words.

He only tried this once, jumping back with a kicked-dog yelp as the figure he’d examined knocked furiously at the phantasmal glass.

In frustration Kiernan ultimately attempted to call the old boyfriend he’d had, but each time Callum heard Kiernan’s voice on the line he’d hang up and block him from contact. Finding no other alternative Kiernan got on a train and made the slow, complex journey across several trams and buses to the house in which his past lover now lived.

There was graffiti up one wall bearing some indecipherable legend, a neighbour in high heeled shoes retching clear bile against another. Children like wizened goblins kicked a deflated ball back and forth in the litter-choked street, warily dispersing as Kiernan darted up a narrow set of steps to knock at Callum’s front door.

His housemate answered, wet hair smothered in a ragged old bath towel, a loose fringe of it dripping into her scowling face.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” she snapped, her expression registering no surprise that Kiernan had traversed such a distance, only hostility. “He’s seeing someone, you know.”

The loneliness of Kiernan’s life struck him, then, the partners he’d frightened off with his apparent nightmares, taken as a persistent and untreated illness of the mind. He looked down at his clothes, travel stained and smelling lightly of body odour, and for the first time in years Kiernan’s exhaustion overcame his fear.

“I’m not after getting back together, Marsha,” he said. “Did Callum even tell you what happened, back then?”

Marsha tapped a wide, bare foot at the floor, unshifting in her disgruntlement. 

“He said he was scared, that’s all. He won’t talk about it. Whenever your name comes up he just—closes up. So I know you did something. Something to hurt him.”

Sighing, Kiernan considered turning back and pushing home again, back to the room that felt like nothing less than an execution chamber, and likely would become so if he could not learn to sleep. Insomnia had worn down his health until chronic disease had made it impossible to remain awake no matter how passionately he attempted to sit up and force off the haunting.

Returning home without an answer was no better than slitting his wrists. A defeat.

“Is Callum in?” Kiernan asked. “There’s something I need to know. He saw something. Heard it. Probably both. In my house, when we were together. He knows something I don’t. All I want is for him to tell me, and then I’ll be off again. Alright?”

Peering over Marsha’s shoulder Kiernan made out a second figure in the house, its eyes like those of the children in the street, fearful and crazed. Marsha turned at the sound of footsteps and sighed, pushing the mound of her sopping towel back until water ran along her hand like clear blood.

“For God’s sake,” she said. “Talk to him, them. Then you can go.” 

Marsha vanished sullenly into a room overhead, banging viciously about in outrage at the intrusion.

Callum sat on the far end of a stained couch that had belonged to previous tenants, looking at the television set, which seemed to play nothing but endless advertisements. A dull, green-toned film. A fast food restaurant. Baby formula, seeming thick as paint in rubber-nippled bottles.

Once, Callum had left the room groaning whenever there was a break in a programme he’d been watching, lacking the patience for repetition, the loud voices and obnoxious jingles.  Even when he was sitting in front of the set he was never still, his body all twitching, lively energy, a hand tapping an armrest, a foot stretched out on the coffee table, crinkling the sole. 

Now all that moved were his eyes, blinking again and again in a pained reflex.

Callum was not as he’d been when Kiernan knew him, lessened, somehow, the shine worn off him by the rub of life. It shocked Kiernan deeply. After his other relationships had ended he had looked in on each boyfriend after they’d given them up, bitter that they’d thrived, had children, married, moved on. Glad to be cut from him.

In this last point, at least, all his lovers were alike.

“So,” said Callum with a flat petulance. “You couldn’t leave it alone.”

“You’re the only person that’s ever seen anything,” said Kiernan apologetically. “I had to come.”

Callum got up abruptly and turned off the television at the set, the remote missing somewhere in the mess of the house.

“You couldn’t just sleep in the day?” he asked. “Work nights? At a different house?”

“It’s not the house that’s the problem,” Kiernan protested. “It’s me. I’ve slept in hotels, spare rooms, on fucking sofas. It’s always the same. Jesus, Callum, you think I haven’t tried everything by now? I was mad on the drugs for a bit. Drank enough coffee to have killed a man. But I couldn’t keep it up. I’d nod off at work, and there’d I’d be, screaming and making a fool of myself. How the lights would all be off I don’t know, but they’d go, and after I’d be on sick leave for my mental health. Seeing things, they said I was. So I’ve done it all, believe me.”

Kiernan watched tensely as Callum rooted about in the fridge, which in the jumbled layout of the rooms was, inexplicably, by the couch. Something in the machinery whined like an undiscovered instrument. Its shelves were thinly stocked with open packets of ham and half-finished condiments, pasta pots that looked to have been days old, condensation gathered on their lids. In the end Callum shut the refrigerator door, empty-handed, and stood with his palm pressed against it, thinking.

“I just want to know what it is I’m seeing,” said Kiernan gently. “Can you tell me?”

“I don’t know what they are,” said Callum. “I’ve seen things, here and there, since I was young. Never like that, though.”

“You gave me a bible,” said Kiernan, almost accusatory. “You thought I was messing around with demons or something like that.”

Callum’s shoulders went up against his neck in an embarrassed shrug.

“No. Well, I don’t know what I thought at the time. But they’re not that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I heard what they said.”

Turning his back to the fridge Callum leant against it, his face aside so all that Kiernan could see of it was one twitching eyelid and the sinking of his cheek as he swallowed.

“You mean you understood it all?” asked Kiernan eagerly.

“For a minute I did,” said Callum. “That’s why I ran off the way I did. Lord, I’ve never been afraid like that. Like looking into the eye of—not God. But something like that. And I had to go. I couldn’t be with you anymore. Not when I knew what those things at the windows were saying. I couldn’t stand it.”

Kiernan stood up from the couch and seemed to feel the floor glide out under him like a cruel magic trick. He held onto a sticky side table for balance, his innards rolling.

“Tell me,” he croaked. “For fuck’s sake. “Why is it me? What do they want? What are they saying?”

Callum turned to look at him, and his expression was a killer’s guilt.

“I don’t remember. I swear to God, though, I knew, for a second. Realised something about you. Who you are, or that’s going to happen to you. But the second I was out of that room, away from you, I forgot every word. Still, I remembered the feeling. Knew I had to get away.”

Kiernan saw Callum almost put a hand out, then quickly draw it back, held uncomfortably at his side. Vestigial. No longer of use.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You could have just told me,” said Kiernan dully. “Instead of making me come out here. Leaving it so long.”

To this Callum had nothing to say, or if he had he would not speak it. He sloped off into another room, and the housemate descended from her upper chamber like a celestial guardian, ousting Kiernan into the street again.

*

Kiernan spent another four nights waking, blind beneath his sleep mask, to the presence of those impossible voyeurs. The following week he tried to remain awake, mouth rank with coffee, nostrils stinging with powdered stimulants, attempting to convince himself that, like dreams, these beings could be shrugged off and forgotten.

Each night he would inevitably doze off, the apparent key to the creatures’ entry. 

In daylight hours Kiernan would have neither strength nor will to leave the house, feeling like a shadow of Callum in that second tomb, so many towns away.

But then Callum, at least, had the housemate, and the unnamed partner; Kiernan lived alone, his parents having gone back to Ireland, from which they seldom called. His friends, few they were, had mayfly memories, seeming to recall Kiernan only when his listless presence was physically brought to their attention.

He had no work, losing jobs as quickly as he took them on. Nothing to occupy him but mulling over the torture that was his life’s only certainty.

Kiernan began to drink the way he once had as a boy of thirteen, then drinking for the secret joy of it in fields or empty construction sites, now in an effort to dull his awareness of the watchers at their posts.

One summer night, returning from a corner shop with a bottle under his arm, Kiernan stopped in a yard of dirt scrub behind a row of terraced houses and stood, drawing from the vodka until his eyes swam.

It was not yet dark, but the knowledge of its coming had driven him out on this pitiful quest, and now it held him here, considering the scattered growth of old grass, the soil the heat had made soft under his shoe soles.

It occurred to him that the times he had slept under the sky when he was young he could not remember waking to his interlopers, only assumed that he had, the memory eroded by bad pills and liquor. But then perhaps he had not woken at all. Perhaps they had not come.

Kiernan lay down, chuckling, amused to think that this may be the answer to his struggle, to sleep rough as he would already have done, had his parents not paid for his house. The yard, which someone had once intended to turn into a vegetable allotment, had been given up on, abandoned; no one was likely to come by and wake him, at least until the sun came up.

There was light in the sky overhead, and would be through the following hours from nearby houses and the street lamps hanging over them like night-time policemen. It may well be enough to keep him safe, and besides, there were no walls close by in which any window could form, nor faces behind them, nor foreign landscape to expand beyond.

Sleep came like a clap of the hand, sudden and sharp. It would have gone on until morning, only Kiernan hadn't quite drank enough to sustain it. The stirring of movement near him was enough to break the peace that he'd so briefly claimed.

Even before he'd fully opened his eyes Kiernan felt a change in the space around him, the flattening of fences, the vanishing of houses, the spread of that unfriendly landscape, so strangely without colour. Kiernan knew that there was no light left upon it, done away with by the presence that could end it at will. 

A low grunt emerged from somewhere under Kiernan's lungs, and as he sat up he saw four figures bent over him, no longer bound by glass, and still without a single feature, whether they wore clothes or were made of other stuff than flesh unclear to him.

They did not touch Kiernan, only stood with their hands out as if to ward him off, not to attack, as he had always thought. Then as the last of sleep and drunkenness dropped off him Kiernan saw, at last, the faces of these things that came to him.

Though he had never glimpsed them before in life something in him recognised their features, knew who they were. Their purpose.

Then the language they spoke seemed fluent to him, distinct, blunt and terrible. The words were the same, again and again, a passage that like some prayer at a hated man's funeral came in an agitated rhythm. Then as Callum had once done Kiernan knew why these observers—once neutral—had come to hate him. What they would have him know.

With a raw shout of terror Kiernan sprung up within the circle of faces, and the street lights and the windows of houses beyond the yard went up again in acrid amber light. The figures were gone, as immediate as the vanishing of a flipbook animation from one page to the next, and as Kiernan turned, looking for them, he noted that he remembered all of what he'd seen and learned.

He had forgotten nothing, knew precisely as Callum had what he should expect of life, and why he was abstract from connection within it. It seemed then that he had always known it, and had only brushed it off him like the torn spoke of a web.

A pain struck at Kiernan's chest, so acute that he wished with a feverish excitement to die from it, swiftly and with a kind of backhand mercy, relieved of his fate.

Surely it was what these beings wanted, as well.

But Kiernan did not die, only stood with his hands on his knees until the pull in the muscle of his chest declined. Then he brushed the filth he'd slept in from his clothes and ran off through the night streets, imagining—though he never looked back—the watchers looking after him, perhaps making new windows in the walls of each alley he passed through to spy on him as he fled back to the house he'd left.

Kiernan never slept rough again, after that; there was no point to it anymore. Instead he endured the interlopers, as he had often done, wore an eye mask and plugs in his ears so that he would not see or hear their portals appear in his room any longer.

But he would know without seeing or hearing them that they were there, knew that, as he did, they waited, all of them coenobites to a darkness in him that would, in time, overcome every night there was in the world.