YOU MAY HAVE ESCAPED... BUT YOU'LL NEVER BE FREE.

After her terrifying experience at the hands of the Watchers, Mina has escaped to a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. She obsessively researches her former captors, desperate to find any way to prolong the safety of humankind.

When Mina encounters a stranger near her home, she fears the worst – for she knows the figure is not what it seems. Soon, people she has encountered start to disappear.

Mina knows the Watchers' power is growing. She flees for her life, but when she reports her fears she finds her sanity questioned. Can she convince people that the Watchers are real, and ready to strike – or will she suffer the fate she has dreaded since she first encountered those malevolent beings?

Excerpt

Mina

The tide had retreated late that evening, laying a ledge of grey sand in its wake where all else now sparkled in the dusk like a desert of broken glass. For too long this was all she’d dreamt of – a sky pruned of black branches and a sun whose departure wasn’t chased into the night by a thousand screams. But nowhere was safe. Not anymore. The darkness, the light, even those grey areas in between reminded her too much of the coop’s cold concrete and those still, twilit moments before the light clicked on.

Mina’s growing repertoire of anxieties kept her tethered to the cottage’s open door. But she’d stretched her leash over time, leaving longer trails of footprints with each passing day. The sand was nothing like the soil. Its silver grains left no stain that she couldn’t dust away with her fingers. And when the sun shone, the shore resembled some magical seam holding the last fraying threads of her sanity together.

She touched the mug to her lips, breathing in more warmth than she drank as her wary eyes scanned the whole beach; from its southern caves to where the rocks beetled out into the bay like a bed of black broken teeth on the far side. Mina had the good sense to drape a blanket over her shoulders; the massive, tasselled one that she toasted by the stove before the sun and the temperature began their nightly nosedives into the ocean.

It had become a ritual of hers to face the night, to force down those memories that were forever tearing their talons around every moment. In the woodland there’d been an echoing list of chores and duties to keep her mind occupied. But here her fears grew restless, and though the waves washed ashore with the calmest whisper, the world as she knew it never ceased to tremor.

Mina swallowed back a mouthful, wincing as it passed her throat. She’d come to loathe the taste of it. But the whiskey hit her like a hard slap, and sometimes – on those nights when she upped her dosage – it’d even knock her into a dreamless sleep, though these blessings were rare and too hazy in mind and memory to really be appreciated. Either way, she sure felt the impact the following morning; that familiar bruise on the brain, pulsating like a beating heart about to break.

Mina’s phone performed a nervous jolt in her pocket. She prised it out as she padded her bare feet along the sand, taking care to keep in the dry.

‘Do I need to ask what you’re up to?’ Ciara asked, her voice on loudspeaker.

‘You should see the sky. It’s beautiful this evening.’

‘It’s always been beautiful, Meens. We just forgot.’

Ciara was the only one who understood what Mina saw when she closed her eyes at night, when the silence was at its most fragile and the softest breeze sang like a scream. She’d asked her countless times to call an end to her impromptu exile and come live with her in the house that she and John had built – the home she refused to abandon, like an altar to the dead man’s memory. But the watchers had been following her in the city. And Mina knew without being told that they were following her still.

‘How are you holding up?’ Ciara asked.

‘Could be worse, I suppose.’ Mina sighed wearily through a smile. ‘Still alive. Though my neck aches from looking over my fucking shoulder.’

Ciara chuckled as a steel pan clamoured over the line.

‘What are you making?’ Mina asked.

‘I’m stir-frying some vegetables. What have we got here? Peppers, some red onion, those baby sweetcorn things, and a few tomatoes.’

‘Oh, wow, very healthy.’

‘I know, right? I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them.’

‘You eat them, Ciara.’

‘You know what I mean.’ She giggled.

Her voice washed over Mina like a balm, cooler and more comforting than any wave the ocean could offer. The implicit purpose behind their nightly conversations was to soothe and support and to help the other process the past into something that would someday crawl into a pit and die. But there were too many groggy mornings when Mina couldn’t recall a single word shared between them. Alcohol made the nightmares more tolerable but it didn’t exactly make her the most riveting company. She was meant to be an emotional crutch for Ciara to lean on. But there were times when Mina could barely stand herself up, never mind support another.

‘How’s the yellow one?’ Ciara asked.

‘Yeah, he’s good,’ she replied. ‘I brought his cage outside earlier but some of the seagulls started having a go at him, so we went back in.’

‘And I take it there’s still no sign of Madeline?’

Mina detected that familiar diffidence to her voice, the reluctance to ask a question that she’d already guessed the answer to. It’d been over a month now since she’d fled as far west as she could without getting her feet wet.

‘Not yet. But she knows where I am, kind of.’

Ciara chuckled. ‘Do you even know where you are?’

‘No idea.’ That last day in the city had yet to find its focus. It was as though Mina’s mind had intentionally flicked a switch, some failsafe to keep her from revisiting those horrors before eventually there’d be no way to escape them.

They’re everywhere. They’ve been watching you.

Madeline’s eyes – once so stark and secretive – had smouldered with an eerie uncertainty as she’d gripped Mina by the shoulders, seeming in that second more human than ever before. For the first time, the woman looked afraid, and Mina remembered the feel of her long fingers trembling like tender, windswept stems.

She still couldn’t cleanse her dreams of the sight of them, watching her in broad daylight, breaking the one rule that she’d learned to live by. As Madeline had told her once – they were leaner and they were longer. But on that street, standing amidst the unknowing crowd, they were also so terrifyingly convincing. It was as though they wanted to be seen. There was no soulful illusion to their expressions, only a burning intensity around the eyes.

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About the Author

A.M. Shine writes in the Gothic horror tradition. Born in Galway, Ireland, he received his Master's Degree in History there before sharpening his quill and pursuing all things literary and macabre. He is a member of the Irish Writers Centre. His debut novel, The Watchers, has been made into a major motion picture produced by M. Night Shyamalan.

Follow him on @AMShineWriter and www.amshinewriter.com