The Watchers

It started when Penny went missing.
Within three months after I graduated college, I was able to snag a position at a startup company not too far from my uncle’s old vacation house. He left it to my parents in his will, and a few years after he passed my mom and dad let me stay there with the agreement I’d pay rent and utilities.
It was a sweet setup: a fully furnished house, a beautiful forest surrounding the property, and a huge public lake just a quick jog away. Broke, 21 year old me was ecstatic. I was happily settling into my new, independent adult life with a job and a home, and this wasn’t without pleasant company.
My sister Vanessa lived in the same town, and she came over almost every weekend once I’d finished moving in.
“Damn April, you need a man to pop out some little ones to fill this place up. This house is too big for just you to live in,†she said with a cheeky grin on the first day she swung by.
I rolled my eyes and said, “I already have a baby,†while gesturing to the little dog sniffing curiously at Vanessa’s shoes. “Why don’t you move in with me? There’s tons of space, and I don’t have enough things to fill each room.â€
Vanessa let out an amused breath. “You know I would if I could, girly.â€
Whenever she wasn’t around with a movie to watch or some gossip to spill, Penny was always there to make sure I never felt alone.
Penny was my college roommate’s and my dog, a feisty Charles Spaniel mix with brown eyes so big and loving you could almost trip into them. We adopted her from a local shelter when she around four years old, and I decided to take her with me when I moved out of my shared apartment.
She disappeared autumn of 2016. She kept me company while I was out gardening that day. My backyard was surrounded by a wooden fence to keep wild animals from wandering into the property, and Penny had managed to dig underneath it. I discovered the small hole about twenty minutes after realizing she was gone, and I immediately called up Vanessa to go help me look for her in the forest.
My first instinct was to follow the trail Penny and I walked every other day to go to the lake.
“You think she’d know where to go?†Vanessa asked, out of breath, as she struggled to match my quick step.
I was walking at the pace of a slow jog. “I really, really hope so,†I said with a tremble in my voice, and I continued with a frantic ramble. “She’s just so small! Like, yeah, she’s a fighter, but who knows what kinds of things she can run into in the woods? There could be bears, coyotes—a ****ing raccoon could **** Penny up. And there’s so many ****ing trees! They all look the same and the forest spans for miles and miles! What if she’s lost? What if—â€
“Hey,†Vanessa said with a curt voice. I turned and saw that she had both feet planted firmly on the ground, about two yards behind me. “Calm down. Panicking won’t help us right now. Breathe.†She had a hard, but tender, expression on her face.
I stared at her for a few seconds, then drew in a deep breath before letting out a heavy exhale. I wiped my tears away and blinked a few times. “Right.†I cleared my voice. “Sorry. Let’s keep going.â€
We spent the rest of that day, and the day after, and the day after that, searching the forest until we could see our breaths in the cold, night air. But Penny never returned, and I was crushed.
“We can keep looking,†Vanessa comforted as she rubbed my back. I was in my bed, bundled up in layers of blankets, sobbing. “I printed out more posters to put up around town.â€
I sniffled. “Thanks, Van.†I had completely given up at that point, but I didn’t want to say it out loud. In retrospect, I think Vanessa already knew that, and yet she still had faith that Penny was still out there, waiting to be found.
I didn’t think she’d be right.
Weeks following the disappearance of Penny, I hardly left the house except for work and mandatory errands. Sure, Penny was just a pet, but losing her felt like the equivalent to losing a part of me. I lost my partner. My best friend. My calm whenever life felt like a storm, and I didn’t even have her collar to remember her by. I’ll never hear the little bell around her neck that jingled whenever she ran towards me, the little pitter patter of her claws tapping against the wooden floorboards, the warmth of her cuddling beside me every single night. She was just gone, and it was so hard for my heart to take. Losing her was my fault.
The days felt dark after that, but Vanessa made it a point to visit me more often throughout the remaining months of fall. She was a blessing, giving me space when I needed it and a presence when the nights were just too lonely. She even took me to a few parties to meet new people when I started getting back on my feet, but I still didn’t find a man to “pop out some little onesâ€, much to her dismay.
(I wasn’t looking for one.)
Then winter came, and Vanessa caught the flu, so understandably her frequent visits had to take a pause. By then I was pretty comfortable being by myself in my huge home, and the emptiness turned into peace. Every coming day felt shorter and shorter, and I found myself staying up a lot more, browsing social media or watching TV shows. I attributed this to the sun setting earlier that made my inner night owl take full form.
After a while of this, I started to notice my internet connection grow weaker. At first it was just an occasional disconnection every other week, until that turned into every week, and eventually became a daily occurrence. I restarted my router multiple times, but nothing seemed to improve the connection except literally moving closer to it.
One Sunday morning, when I grudgingly moved my desk beside the router so I can finish up some online paperwork, I made a mental note to call someone about this.
My router was situated in the corner of my living room, right below a wide window that faced the treeline in front of my house. I arranged my desk so that I could make use of whatever natural light that managed to bleed in, and then set up a little workstation that consisted of my laptop and a cup of tea. When I reached over my things to draw the blinds, I noticed something that seemed a little odd.
There was something off about trees. I knew that the forest practically surrounded the entirety of my property, save for my driveway and the only road that led from my house into town, but I didn’t remember the trees being so close. Closer than I remember, at least. It seemed that the treeline started just within a foot off the road, practically hugging the edge of the asphalt, arranged like a line of soldiers that surrounded my house to orchestrate a fancy coup d’etat. It was unsettling.
But I brushed it off as one of those weird instances where you remember something completely different than how it actually is, like how it’s actually Berenstain instead of Berenstein, or how Nelson Mandela didn’t die in prison.
I called my internet provider the next day and someone came over to see if they could diagnose my problem. Unfortunately, it was pretty much a useless check up. The guy they sent over reasoned that the most logical explanation for my ****ty internet was because of the foliage from the forest. The water in the leaves were most likely scattering my signal and slowing my connection speed.
“Wow, **** you too Mother Nature,†said Vanessa when I called her and told her about my issue.
“Right?†I groaned. “Anyways, how have you been? Have you been feeling better?â€
“Tons. This stupid flu is almost gone. I should be well enough to come over this weekend, I’ve been wanting to start American Horror Story on Netflix but I’m too afraid to watch it by myself!â€
I laughed. “You know, maybe you should be the one looking for a man to make babies with. You’re like three years older than me.â€
“I’m a free spirit, April. Let me be free.â€
I spent most of Saturday cleaning up the house and taking care of other chores before Vanessa got there. My phone rang around the same time I finished folding my laundry, and I figured it was my sister calling to tell me she was outside.
“Coming—â€
I opened my front door to an empty porch. Then I lifted my gaze a little higher, and mumbled, “No, that’s not right.â€
“What?†sounded Vanessa’s loud, confused voice through the speaker of my phone. “Hey, April, I’m on my way to your house but it looks like there’s something blocking the road, so I might be a little late.â€
“That’s fine,†I said quietly, not taking my eyes off the treeline. “No rush. Just give me a call when you get here.â€
“Gotcha.â€
The forest didn’t just look off, it looked wrong. I’m no ****ing tree expert, but they looked even closer than before, with some of the trunks clipping the edge of the road and sending cracks through the asphalt. No, I had driven on that road probably hundreds of times by now, and knowing me, I would have immediately noticed the treeline being so close to the edge months ago. Things like driving next to a railing or sidewalk gave me an annoying anxiety, so given my mild claustrophobia, why hadn’t I noticed this before?
There was something else, too, about the forest that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at that time, because something else had caught my attention.
It was faint, but I recognized it instantly. There was a soft, familiar jingling from a small bell, coming from just beyond the treeline.
Penny?
I bolted from my front steps, past my driveway, and across the road until I burst through the first row of trees. I followed the sound of the little bell, ignoring the cuts on my feet and legs as shrubbery brushed against my open skin. I was only wearing shorts and an oversized t-shirt that day, so I probably looked like a ****ing maniac running through the forest barefoot like that. It was Penny, I knew it was Penny from the unmistakable jingling. On some miracle bordering on the paranormal, my dog, who had been missing for months, made it back home.
And then I found her.
The sight of it made me reel back and catch my previous steps. I stood there mortified, seeing the lifeless carcass of my dog. She wasn’t decomposing, no, she was being absorbed by the massive tree trunk that engulfed itself around Penny’s body. The front part of her—her head, her two front paws, part of her torso—protruded out from the trunk, as if she had tried running directly through the tree and was only half successful. She still had her collar on, and the faint breeze that drifted through the forest lifted the bell around Penny’s neck with it, ringing it, sending the sound in all directions.
And for some reason, her body, bulging wildly out of the tree trunk like another limb, was about four feet off the ground.
I didn’t realize I had been backing up until I felt myself press against something hard, and I whirled around to face another tree trunk. Or, rather, I was face to face with another trunk, and I jumped back and screamed when I saw it in the bark. The swirls and ridges in the trunk were arranged too perfectly to pass off as pareidolia, with its eyes closed and bearing a solemn expression.
In the bark was a human face.
My face.
I ran as fast as my legs could take me. I paid no mind the stones on the forest floor that tore up the balls of my feet, or the shrubbery and tree branches that seemed to purposely obstruct every inch of my path. What I did notice was that the trees were getting denser and denser as I made it closer to my home, to the point where I had to turn to my side and squeeze past a pair of trunks until I finally made it to my property.
From where I stood, I realized the second reason why the forest looked so wrong from my front porch. Looking up, the trees surrounding the edges of my home were leaning inwards, extending their branches like fingers with too many knuckles, and closing the sky above my house.
I bolted through my front door and grabbed my keys, laptop, and chargers. After frantically loading everything into my car, I backed out of my driveway and ****ing booked it on the open road. I wasn’t even driving for a full minute until I saw a blockade of trees stretching through the middle of the path, so I held my breath and jerked my steering wheel to the left.
I swerved off the pavement and into the forest, maneuvering through the so little space I could find that my car would fit through. Leaves and branches flew into my windshield as I sped through, playing mental chess in my head to avoid being cornered by the trees. The farther away I drove I noticed the woods getting less and less dense, and I let out a cry of relief when the road on my right was finally free of obstructing trees.
My car lurched back onto the asphalt and I immediately recognized Vanessa’s truck that was parked just a few meters away. I then saw her figure standing beside her vehicle, arms up, signaling for me to stop. Thank god, I thought, tears welling up in my eyes. I was so ready to grab her, throw her into my car, and get us both the **** away from this nightmare until I came upon a scene that made me realize I was better off staying in my car.
Her body was upright, positioned to look like she was standing with her arms fixed above her. A tree sapling had erupted from the ground underneath her, impaling her, and traveled throughout her body like a trellis supporting a weak plant. Thin branches pushed their way in and out of her skull as they protruded from openings of her eyes and mouth, and the boughs that dug into the flesh of her arms, holding them up, made her look like a sick martyr.


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