The silence Parrish left behind in the woods was more deafening than any sound. Eleanor stood alone at the back door of the old house, the warmth from the ceramic shard in her hand incongruous against the night's chill. It wasn't hot, but a constant, unnatural warmth, like a stone kept too long in a pocket. A living warmth.
The euphoria of victory had long since faded, leaving behind an exhausted emptiness and the icy echo of Parrish's final words in her mind.
You have been seen.
Too drained to even take off her mud-and-salt-stained shoes, she stumbled upstairs and collapsed onto her bed. The hidden recess yawned open like a silently screaming mouth. She didn't care anymore. The contract was void. The house was just wood and stone now. She fell into a dreamless, near-comatose sleep.
Morning sun stabbed her awake. Her head throbbed, her mouth tasted of copper. But the sunlight was real, streaming through the west-facing window onto a clean floor. No teeth. No arranged shoes. The house held only dust motes dancing in the light, a dead quiet.
Normalcy. This was what she wanted, wasn't it?
She forced herself up, showered, the hot water unable to wash away the strange tightness under her skin. Making coffee downstairs, she tried to check her phone—to see the news, to see if the world was still turning. But her focus wouldn't hold. Her gaze kept drifting to shadowed corners, her ears catching every minor sound: the distant groan of plumbing, the scrape of a branch against the outside wall. She was no longer a prisoner here, but she had become its sentinel.
During the day, she tried to resume some semblance of life. She drove into town for groceries, sat in a café for a while. People chatted, laughed, life went on. But she felt she was observing them through thick glass. Their world was full of ignorant, noisy vitality; hers was preternaturally quiet, full of… waiting. For what? The threat was gone.
And yet, the ceramic shard. She'd left it on the kitchen windowsill. It maintained its eerie constant warmth all day. Occasionally, when her back was to it, she'd feel a faint prickle on the back of her neck, as if a gaze had settled there. She'd spin around, only to find the blue fragment, quietly gleaming in the sunlight.
The first night, insomnia found her. Not the anxious kind, but a sharp, alert wakefulness. Each time she was about to slip under, her body would jolt awake as if electrocuted, heart hammering. As if some primal instinct was screaming: Don't sleep! Don't close your eyes!
The second night was worse. Lying in the dark, her sense of time began to warp. The clock's tick-tock stretched into agonizing lengths one moment, then buzzed with frantic speed the next. Once, she was certain she had only blinked, but the sky outside had shifted from ink-black to deep blue—hours had vanished. She hadn't slept, she swore she hadn't. Time had simply… skipped.
The anomalies began during the day. Subtle, almost dismissible. The milk in the fridge, which she distinctly remembered finishing the night before, had a splash left. A book she was sure she'd left on the nightstand was on the dining table. At first, she chalked it up to stress, faulty memory. Until she noticed the mark on the wall.
In the hallway, near the ceiling, a small patch of wallpaper was slightly discolored, a shade darker than its surroundings, irregularly shaped. She fetched a chair to look closer. It wasn't a water stain. It looked like… a faint handprint? But it was positioned too high for anyone to reach. And the mark was faint, as if made years ago and only now becoming visible. When she ran a finger over it, the paper was dry, but the area around the mark had a strange, almost imperceptible graininess, as if mixed with very fine… grit.
Not grit. Clay. Dry, white clay.
Her breath caught. The clay pit. The Source.
She wasn't being followed. She was being marked. The "Witness," or its lingering will, the "gaze" it had cast, was leaving impressions on the house. It wasn't trying to kill her. The contract was null. It was merely… observing. And its observation itself was warping her environment, seeping into the cracks of reality.
That afternoon, she decided to clear the overgrown weeds in the backyard, craving physical labor to quiet her mind. The sun was good, the sound of shears satisfyingly normal. Until she reached the wild rose bushes near the tree line and heard a sound.
A soft, steady chewing.
Parting the thorny branches, she saw a goat. A pure white goat, tethered to a rotten wooden stake driven deep into the ground at the very edge of her property. The goat chewed placidly, its amber eyes meeting hers, ancient and deep. It wore no tag. There were no farms nearby.
A chill, colder than the night air, swept through Eleanor. Where had it come from? Who had tethered it? It looked so serene, so… placed. Like an object deliberately positioned.
She thought of ancient rites. Scapegoats. Sacrifices of witness.
She didn't approach. She backed slowly into the house, locking the door. From the kitchen window, she could see the white goat, a pale, motionless sigil in the gathering dusk.
Parrish had said attention, once given, was hard to withdraw.
She finally understood. The midnight ritual at the clay pit hadn't ended things. It had merely shifted her status from "tenant with rent due" to "an entity that has drawn a certain kind of attention." Her life wasn't being claimed, but she was paying a different price: her normalcy, her anonymity, the thin veil of being unobserved that separated her from reality.
Night fell again. Insomnia arrived on schedule. This time, within the warped sense of time, she heard a sound from downstairs. Very faint. Not footsteps, not an object moving.
A scraping sound. Slow, dry, repetitive. As if something was gently, methodically, dragging a rough surface across the wall of the sitting room.
She lay in bed, clutching the warm ceramic shard, staring at the ceiling until dawn broke. The scraping stopped before sunrise.
She knew the days were safe, for now. But the nights belonged to the "marked gaze." And she wasn't sure how many more of them she could endure.