The Watcher

The Watcher, also known as the Entity, is the primary antagonist of The House.

In June 2008, all residents were exposed to a memory share that showed part of the history suggesting that the Entity was created on Saltburnt grounds and previously assisted in developing and maintaining the manor. However, he apparently began to demand the right to add his own room(s) and was violently expelled. After that, his physical presence appeared to cause vegetation to die around him.

Full Text

You've never seen this one before. No one has. It's nothing out of the ordinary at first, except the unsettling feeling of wrongness filling the air. The sky is slate above you, as if England's June weather has stepped out of season and into autumn. The estate is the same as it ever was, magnificent and tall, its windows lit and bright. But then you see it: fingers reaching through a fissure in the ground and the bare hand of a naked man as he heaves himself up, gasping and naked as the day he was born, onto the dewy grass. He doesn't notice you there — too distracted by staring at his own soil-caked fingers, the way an infant studies their hands for the first time. He turns them over, then presses them into the ground, rising on wobbling legs.

As if it's been waiting for him, the door swings open to welcome him inside. You follow behind him — and he's not hard to find, footsteps leaving crumbs of earth with every jolt forward, hands caressing over hallways empty of artwork and statues and every gaudy, rich piece you've known the Balfours to collect — and watch as he stops, pressing his forehead to the peeling paint. "Yes," he says. "Alright. I'm here."

The days pass the same, only he's learned to wear clothes, linens that feel stolen out of time from a period of history you can't quite place. In a series of seconds, you understand the habits of his days: he walks the perimeters, tends to the grounds, mends the cracks in the walls and the warped floorboards and the mouse-ridden holes chewing through. You see, more than hear, the house itself responds happily in little ways: the fire's hearth flaring brighter, the warmth in the room embracing you like a happy hug. The man in the memory sits contented in a chair, stroking over its armrest comfortingly. "I know," he says. "I won't let anything in. I know what I'm for."

You blink, and more time has passed. He's stopped tending the house — you can tell from the cobwebs that haven't been cleared, the wallpaper that's started peeling at the corners, the thin coating of dust on the furniture where it had been polished to a shine. The man is at the end of a corner, hand pressed to the wall, muttering something you can't make out until you creep closer. "A room," he says. "I want to build one. I know how it's done — I've felt you do it, I know what it takes, I know this house better than anything alive." He pauses. "So show me how. Let me do it." He holds his breath. So do you. Minutes tick by. Nothing happens — no giving way, no room where there was none before. "I have given you everything," he says, louder now. "Every year of my existence. Every room in you has been touched by my hands. You owe me this." Nothing, still. He stays there for longer than you can count, staring at his hands and the wall, expression hardened by hurt — and something more. Something you don't understand, until the next memory.

The cellar isn't damp or cold, the way you would expect a cellar to be. One might thank the heart at its center for that, beating with a warmth that surrounds you on all sides — the walls, the ceiling, the floors, all of them veined and pulsing like the very foundation of the house is beating and breathing, a living entity. A long time passes, the man staring blankly at the heart before he reaches, seizing it with both palms. There's nothing of the gentle man you saw in him earlier, resting happily in that armchair by the fire. "I know what you are," he says. "I found you in a field. I built you room by room, stone by stone, I have given you every year of my life, and I know every part of you. Including this." His grip tightens. "So I'm taking it. And you're going to let me — because without me you were nothing. You were dirt. I made you into something worth being, and this—" he pulls, hard, "—belongs to me. You don't get to say no to me."

For a moment, nothing happens. Your vision spins as the man is taken, and you're taken with him — both of your bodies dragged across the floorboards until the doors burst at their seams, sending the two of you sprawling across the treeline. In the distance, you hear the door slam closed with such force that the stone around it cracks, the house seeming to shake and tremble from it. From where you're standing by the forest, beyond the barrier you've come to know, the house looks like an impenetrable fortress. No open doors, no lit-up windows, no nothing that makes it seem full of the life you'd watched it hold. The man rises, blood pooling down his arms from the gashes in his wrists, but that's not what strikes you. It's the grass beneath his feet as he stands in it, yellowing and withering. Above, the trees drop each of their leaves, branches curling away from him. The hole he dug himself up from withers, blackening.

It looks at the house one last time. Then turns away, walks into the dark, and does not look back.

References

June 2008 event