Watchers of the Night

Watchers of the Night

  By Matthew Keith

  Copyright © 2013

  Editor: Karen Bauer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system without the written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WATCHERS NOVELS

  WATCHERS OF THE NIGHT

  THE RISE OF INDICIUM

  THE FALL OF ASTRALIS

  DREAMPIRE

  ALSO BY MATTHEW KEITH

  SWAY

  FOR MY WIFE

  Who has always encouraged me to do what makes me happiest above all else. Without her, I would not be the man I am today.

  Thank you, Wendy.

  Thanks so much for giving my work a chance. If you would like to hear about new releases, you can join my mailing list at https://bit.ly/1li0lcL.

  PROLOGUE

  The muted glow of street lamps shone down on a main intersection of small-town southern America. It was late, long past midnight. The streets were empty of traffic, which only served to accentuate the oddity of the lone figure sitting on a bench at one of the four corners. He sat with his head bowed and his hands in his lap. It was a bench he visited often, and always at night. On extremely rare occasions, people passed by on foot. Even more seldom, they would stop and sit down next to him. At such times, he treated those passers-by and tourists-to-his-bench with absolute indifference, knowing that any attempt at acknowledgement would be ignored.

  But not tonight. Tonight was different. Tonight, he felt like talking.

  So when a man sat next to him with a tired sigh, digging in one pocket for God-knows-what, he gathered his thoughts, studying the man with detached curiousity. The man was bleary-eyed, swaying from side to side as if the bench were a gently rocking boat. At this time of night, it seemed likely that the last words the man had heard were, ‘last call.’

  He didn’t know the man, but that didn’t matter. Tonight, he would have spoken to anyone who’d stopped.

  “I don’t know why I’m bothering to talk to you,” he began. “I know you won’t be any help. I know you won’t answer me.”

  He stared intently, waiting for some flicker of acknowledgement, something… anything.

  Nothing.

  So he continued almost helplessly, with long pauses between each sentence. “It’s the same every night. I know this is a dream. Not like one of those dreams you wake from and think, man that was crazy. Not even close. Everything is far too normal.”

  There wasn’t even a flicker in the man’s eyes. Not even a squint like maybe he’d heard but was trying to ignore this annoying nobody next to him.

  Absolutely nothing.

  “I know I’m asleep and I know this isn’t real, but knowing doesn’t make any difference. And why should it? It isn’t like knowing changes anything. It’s not like I could make it better.”

  Sighing, he turned toward the man, tucking one leg up under himself and leaning forward, as if he had a chance to really explain. “But then, ‘making it better’, that’s not really a fair way to describe what I’d like to do with this dream. There’s no real way to measure it.” He paused, searching for the right words, even though he already knew what he wanted to say. “It’s not a good dream and it’s not a bad dream—it’s just the same dream. Sure, there’s some variation here and there, but more or less it’s always the same dream and it always will be. Nothing I can do will make it any different or stop it from happening.”

  Sweeping his arms in either direction to encompass the street and the corner where they sat, he said, “Every night, this is where I end up. At this bench. In fact, I’m here so much now that I think of it as My Bench. You know? With a capital ‘M’ and ‘B’? Get what I mean?”

  He gave humorless chuckle and stood up. He began pacing back and forth, as if he were lecturing.

  “Every night I get out of bed, leave my house, and come into town. For the first few months, back when the dream was still new, I wandered a lot. I kept trying to find someone, somewhere that would talk to me—maybe tell me I was crazy—but no one ever did.

  “Now? Now I wander this town from sundown until sun-up, ignored by everyone. Just like you.” He squinted reproachfully at the man. “I just sit—sit and watch people like you go about your evening the way normal people do.” He shook his head. “And it makes sense. Of course I know what normal people do at night, so why would seeing you do those things seem strange?”

  The man belched and scratched under his jaw. He got unsteadily to his feet, looking both ways down the street.

  “It isn’t strange,” he told the man, staring him in the eye, almost whispering. “Of course it isn’t. But then again it is.” Raising his voice, he yelled directly into the man’s face, “Because I shouldn’t be here! Not like this! Not watching people do what I suppose they’d normally do!”

  Ignoring him, the man turned and stumbled away, the night swallowing him as he walked away, indifferent and unaware.

  Sighing as he watched the man fade from sight, he sank back down on his bench. It was pointless.

  The problem wasn’t that things were any different than what he would imagine a normal night in a small Kentucky town to be. It was that he, himself, wasn’t normal—because even though he spent every night among people he’d known his whole life, only on rare occasions did he have the chance to spend an evening with any of them.

  Everything seemed so ordinary in his dream, but that just made it seem even more unreal. His only clue that he was dreaming was a slight shade of gray that washed everything out. Just a little. Almost like the world had been doused with dirty dishwater and left to drip-dry.

  Of course, the fact that no one ever spoke to him was definitely a red flag too. And really, not being spoken to was the worst part. It was like he wasn’t there. No matter how hard he tried, people just looked right through him. Even in his own head, in a dream of his own making, he couldn’t make himself important enough to be noticed. It wasn’t that he wanted to be important, that wasn’t what mattered. Just being noticed and accepted would have been enough, but he couldn’t even get that far.

  Unfortunately, he knew that his lack of remarkability carried right through into the real world as well, because no matter how resolved he was upon waking to make changes that would make him more noticeable, more substantial to the people around him, that resolve always faded. He retreated back to being the anonymous person on the bench, as if his dream was the determining factor in what characterized him as a person. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t break free from his curse of introversion and blandness.

  Breathing a deep sigh that no one heard, he punched the wood planking of his bench in frustration and faced east, waiting for the dawn.