The Watcher

Lachlan spent the better part of an hour rearranging the paraphernalia around his desk. Three A4 sized prints of the Scottish Highlands, because he had read somewhere that dramatic landscapes encouraged creativity, a framed photo of himself (his life-coach's idea - it felt a little unnecessarily narcissistic to him), a bottle of water, a ceramic ashtray in the shape of Ireland, a comprehensive dictionary and thesaurus that weighed almost as much as he did, and a vanilla candle with several wicks that was already beginning to annoy him despite its promise to both calm and inspire.

He spent much of the hour that followed staring unproductively out of the window, pining for the parallel universe that he had discovered the day before: his first day of freedom. A good pint in a comfortable seat, staring out of the Iron Horse's windows onto a frenzied High Street rushing with people possessed of less than sixty minutes in which to
achieve all that they could before returning to harshly lit boxes and someone else's time.

Twenty minutes into the third hour, Lachlan felt compelled to close the curtains. Before he thought too much about the conifers that needed pruning in his back garden, he opened his laptop, switched on the power, opened a new document, and typed: ***Chapter One:***. He most probably would have spent the rest of that hour, indeed much of what remained of the afternoon, consumed by a sudden and vicious panic whose only outward
symptom was a barely blinking stare at the stationary flashing cursor, had it not been for the candle. At some point during the ***God, what have I Dones?*** and the ***What if everyone at the depot had been
Rights?*** Lachlan fell asleep.

When he awoke, he dragged an epiphany behind him. Hunching over the laptop, he typed for ten seconds and then leaned back with a grin. Write about what you know, they always said. By this philosophy, Lachlan
doubted that many postal workers had become bestsellers. He felt sure that the advice was allegoric - after all, he knew enough about the baseness of human nature, and the internet could take care of anything
else. He re-read the sentence with excited satisfaction: ***The Beginning - A Martian call to arms***.

For more than half an hour he typed without break, without interruption, without plagues of self-doubt or cold sweats about money (or rather its impending disappearance). When the drilling started on the other side of
the fireplace, his concentration was initially only interrupted, and he returned to what was literally another world without much difficulty.

Ten minutes later and he was back to staring at the malevolent cursor, a tic worrying at his left eye while he pretended to be taking a break: puffing furiously on a Marlboro as the drilling intensified to the accompaniment of much singing, shouting and hilarity through less than one foot of wall. A week ago, the skip that had sat outside his front
window had registered only as an eyesore. Now, it felt a lot closer to home.

With an exaggerated clearing of his throat, he stood and wrenched opened the curtains, squinting at the light. Across the street he thought that he saw old Mrs Hartshorn's nets twitch. He pantomimed a scowl. The old
bitch had made much of his recent foray into self-employment. Before he had even left his job, she had somehow gotten wind of his plans and had invited herself over, her beady eyes taking in his (at that stage), disordered desk.

"We Day Folks," she had barked, pushing her spectacles the length of her nose so as to impress upon him the gravity of her purpose, "Take a little more neighbourly responsibility for ourselves, Mr Gemmell. We
have to, as I am sure you will come to see - living side by side, day by day." She had glanced around his front room with open disdain. "In these chicken coops."

Lachlan had ventured an ill-conceived smile of amity that had been swiftly glared down.

"And just so that you know, Mr Gemmell, we Day Folks have also come to rely upon a little more than just good will. We have someone who-" Here, Mrs Hartshorn had looked uncharacteristically reticent. "Who.oversees
our policies. You might even say that he enforces them."

When Lachlan's response had stretched into a snort, she had sucked much of the air from his front room in an angry inhale of breath that had left him in little doubt of her displeasure.

"I do not doubt that The Watcher will be paying ***you*** a courtesy visit within the next day or so." Mrs Hartshorn might even have tipped him a spiteful wink, although Lachlan now considered this unlikely.
"Consider that advance warning, Mr Gemmell."

Surprisingly enough, no such ***overseer of policies*** had subsequently appeared at his door, and as the drilling next door became compounded by the reverberations of an industrial sander, Lachlan could only conclude
that the rules of the ***Day Folks*** clearly did not apply to tone-deaf building contractors.

The following day, he awoke at seven and was at his desk by half past. Not because he had planned to be, but because the drilling had moved upstairs. By lunchtime, he had the first chapter finished and celebrated
this milestone by having a beer with his toasted sandwich. When he considered having another, he knocked that thought straight on the head. He was hardly likely to set the publishing world on fire, nor prove his
ex-colleagues wrong, by indulging in afternoon drinking sessions. Two of those in three days were more than enough.

When the doorbell sounded, Lachlan was back at his desk and struggling to get past the words, ***Chapter Two:***. Had this not been the case, he most probably would have ignored the shadow beyond the small square
windows, but as it was he was grateful for the interruption.

The first thing he noticed when he opened the door was the weather. He had closed the curtains again that morning, and now he realised that a proper storm was brewing. The sky was slate grey yet the air somehow
yellow, settling around him in a heavy shroud that smelled faintly of copper. It was very quiet. He noticed his caller as an afterthought - not so inexcusable, as the gentleman in question was both small in
stature and curiously diffident, his head bent and hands clasped before him.

Lachlan glanced at those hands first: slender and without any rings, and at the bowed head second: dark hair thinning towards the crown, parted in a meticulous line and smoothed with pomade. The fellow was wearing a
belted trench coat that was far too long and dark trousers that were far too short, below which pointed a pair of brown wing-tips, with faded sprats spanning the deficit between. At his feet there squatted a battered briefcase.

"Sir," Lachlan ventured, ever polite yet firm. His voice sounded oddly muted in the air. "I am sorry to say that I am not interested in-"

The man suddenly looked up, fixing Lachlan with the brightest of stares; his eyes blue and huge and somewhat alarming when framed by such an insubstantial head. "I assure you, that it is not-"

Lachlan glanced away from those eyes and down at the briefcase again. "I don't wish to appear rude, Sir, but I am far too busy to indulge in idle chit chat or hour-long demonstrations of the latest innovations in
vacuum cleaners and the like."

The little man's eyes flashed again and a pained smile pulled at the edges of his mouth. "Again, I assure-"

"And I assure ***you***, Sir, that no matter which way you care to slide it, I am a man that can always tell when a spade is a spade." Lachlan was beginning to enjoy himself. He had never assumed this much authority
whilst sorting through sacks in a mail room. When thick drops of rain began splattering against the pavement, Lachlan moved to shut the door. Quick as a flash, his caller thrust a wingtip inside the closing gap.

"Sir! There is no need to use such clumsy tactics on me." Lachlan spread a hand beyond the door to distract his companion. "Out there is an entire street brimming with retirees and lonely housewives. Be off with you!"

"Mr Gemmell!"

Afterwards, Lachlan would find it a lot more difficult to dismiss the ground-trembling tremor as thunder. Afterwards, he would remember that the caller's eyes flashed brighter with lightning, and that the thunder rolled in many seconds behind.

"I believe that Mrs Hartshorn has already mentioned my imminent visit, Mr Gemmell."

Lachlan recognised a strange inflection in the Watcher's voice that hadn't been there before. Maybe it was south coast; they were known for being a bit strange down there by all accounts. As the sky grew darker
and the wind stronger, Lachlan also saw that The Watcher's stance had grown bolder. All of a sudden he looked neither obsequious nor comic. Lachlan took his hand off the door, cleared his throat and nodded.

"The Day Folks have few rules, Mr Gemmell - but those that they ***do***_have are without extenuation." The Watcher showed small and pointed teeth as another flash of lightning lit up the street and then
again his eyes. "Upon any weekday between the hours of nine and five, there should be shown to one's neighbours the utmost consideration in terms of both noise and personal invasion. At no point, for example, should any unannounced visits be attempted; raucous gatherings or attempts at DIY be indulged. At no point should your vehicle be run up
and down the street, nor left idly running at its space for hours on end - and it goes without saying, I am sure, that any attempt to clean it should most definitely be left to the weekend."

"I don't have a car," Lachlan found himself trying to say, but sudden instinct counselled against interrupting.

The Watcher smiled indulgently. "And of course these rules work both ways, Mr Gemmell. I am equally charged with ensuring that your needs are met." As the rain ran rivers down his small round face and onto his lapels, The Watcher leaned closer. "You may have noticed that the builders next door have finished work early today."Lachlan had not - and was a country mile from grateful. He smiled inanely.

In a momentary lull of wind, The Watcher stepped back onto the path. His head bent forward again and he reached into a pocket before re-clasping his hands. "I have said my piece, Mr Gemmell. Abide by the rules and you
and I shall have no argument. Should you ever have any cause for complaint yourself, my services are always at your disposal."

Lachlan flinched from The Watcher's outstretched hand until he saw the printed business card. He took it as if he suspected that it harboured disease. The Watcher showed his teeth again before turning towards
Lachlan's gate. "You know my office hours, Mr Gemmell." His chuckle drifted back on the wind even when he had gone. "Welcome to the neighbourhood!"

When Lachlan closed the door and sat at his desk, he realised that a power surge had tripped the downstairs fuses and crashed his laptop. Given that he had typed only Chapter Two:, this was no great loss. After crossing to the kitchen and taking a beer from the fridge, he returned to the front room, rebooted his laptop, and worked through the worst of
his shakes by chain-smoking three cigarettes, whilst staring at a Loch Leven Sunset by the light of his vanilla candle. When he felt calm enough, he reopened the only file in his Documents folder, and typed: ***Chapter Two: Interstellar Alliances - and Leery Plots***.

Over the following seven days, Lachlan achieved a lot. After spring-cleaning much of the house (including the attic, which had not seen a dustpan and brush since the day that he had moved in), he made an
enthusiastic start upon the back garden, although the pruning back of the prolific conifers had proved a little beyond him. Despite taking great personal care not to play Wake Up To Wogan too loudly on his
radio; the same applying for any televised repeat of Quincy or Columbo, Lachlan otherwise failed to grasp the opportunity presented by the suddenly silenced builders next door. In a week, he had written not a word.

Only when he received a snippy letter from the bank about his mortgage, did Lachlan return to the front room and to his carefully ordered desk. He reread both chapters. The Martian colonists were preparing to rise up
against both the corrupt legislation of the Intergalactic Council and an unlawful influx of cloned Venetian immigrants. The suspense was building nicely. Lachlan executed a page break and typed: ***Chapter Three:***.
The cursor blinked at him. He got up and closed the curtains.

When the doorbell rang, Lachlan almost shouted aloud in alarm. He crouched low to his desk and held his breath. The bell rang again, and he tried to hunch even lower. When he inched his head towards the small
frosted squares of glass, he saw with a start that the shadow on the other side had pressed itself up against the door: arms bent, hands cupped, so as to see inside. Lachlan tried not to breathe.

"I can bloody see you, Scotch!" The shadow shifted, and even despite Lachlan's relief, his heart still sank. "You're right there!" A finger stabbed at the glass. "I can bloody well see you!"

Lachlan lurched towards the door and pulled back on the chub. Phil Morrison's scowling face broke into a grin that showcased the fourteen carat front teeth that he had bought himself for his fortieth. "And how
do you fare, next door neighbour?" Phil shot out a fist that met Lachlan square in the chest before he could reply. "What are you doin' in there anyways, Scotch? A man of leisure is it these days, eh?" Phil tried to crane his neck around the door.

"I could say the same for yourself," Lachlan said, trying to smile despite his lips sticking fast against his teeth. "Not working down the garage today?" He hoped to God that the hooligan had not taken holidays.
Two days a week in close proximity was just about all that he could stand. Phil lived on the right side of Lachlan's house: the side that had no chimney breast to dull the eternal racket that Phil existed to create.

"Better than that, Scotch - are you blind?"

Lachlan only noticed the scrawled stookie that enveloped Phil's leg from knee to ankle because Phil kicked him with it. His mood plummeted even further.

"Got absolutely bladdered down the Cambridge Arms on Sunday - you know how it is. We can be men of bloody leisure together, eh, mate? Playin' the Playstation, watchin' Richard and Judy, gettin' pissed by
lunchtime." Phil made another unsuccessful lunge for the threshold. "If there's only one thing you Scotch are good at, it's getting' wellied, eh? You watch the game? I've got the '66 World Cup champion-"

"I'm actually working, Phil."

Phil's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Oh yeah?"

Set upon a path that he wished he had never begun, Lachlan sighed. "I'm writing a book."

Phil's guffaw was not unexpected. He tried again to push into the front room. "Give us a butchers then, Scotch. What's it-"

"I'm working, Phil," Lachlan said again, and then shut the door in his neighbour's face.

Phil battered on the door for more than ten minutes afterwards, an inexhaustible assault of expletives accompanying his fists. Lachlan went into the living room and pretended to watch a chat show, until eventually he heard Phil's front door open and then slam shut.

For the rest of the day, Phil clattered and stampeded around his house (and Lachlan had to marvel at the man's energy given his impediment), singing football chants and playing bad music: mostly Status Quo and Iron maiden, far louder than he needed to. Lachlan gave up writing for the day without too much regret, settling into his armchair with the
newspaper and a glass of good whisky, and listening to Chopin through turned-up headphones.

Three days later, and his circumstances had altered somewhat. True to his word, Phil had taken full advantage of his unexpected holiday. Every day, the western walls of Lachlan's house reverberated to the pantomimed
sounds of hilarity. The Playstation did not get much of a break, and Vice City seemed a favourite, so that Lachlan had to put up with the very worst of scenarios: loud music, loud cars, loud guns, and loud other unmentionables even more offensive. Raucous laughter and much chinking of bottles always began early on in the day, degenerating into
drunken singing and shouting matches and what sounded like competitive bouts of wrestling later on. Heavy footsteps thundered up and down the stairs at all times of the day or night, so much so that Lachlan's ceiling lights frequently swung around on their chains - and Lachlan knew well enough that the owners of these clod feet were under implicit
instruction from Phil.

On the second day they began pushing items through Lachlan's letterbox, so that he now boasted a collection of bad gay porn, a children's book entitled "How to.Write!", (which was almost witty by Phil's standards), and the emptied contents of two bags of flour and one of sugar.

Lachlan knew that there was a finite limit to this torture; that eventually Phil's cast would come off and he would return to a less than honest day's toil down 'Dodgy Dave's'. But the wait seemed interminable. Even with earplugs and every reserve of concentration, Lachlan could not write a word. And far from being discouraged by the lack of reaction,
Phil and his chums appeared delighted by it: stepping up their campaign as though the destruction of Lachlan's sanity were the noblest goal in the world. Their shouting of: "Scotch! Scotch! Scotch!" through the wall of the front room was relentless. And horribly effective. Clearly they did this in shifts, because at no point in an entire twenty-four hour
period did it stop. Not for one second.

On the fourth day, Lachlan wandered bleary-eyed through the living room in his pyjamas, knackered yet unaccountably relieved that the shouting had stopped. The video player flashed 05:00 as he reached the door to the front room and snapped on the light.

Phil had delivered what looked like a couple of ***stones*** worth of dog shit through the letter box. The stench was incredible. As Lachlan backed out of the front room, swearing under his breath, he heard the
whispered titters on the other side of the wall. He slammed the door just as the shouting resumed - far louder this time, because all of the bastards were joining in.

"Scotch! Scotch! Scotch!"

Lachlan stumbled over to the phone, and had picked up the card, dialled the number, made his complaint and hung up before he even realised his intention. The Watcher had said nothing at all.

Eleven hours later, and he was still scrubbing the floor and walls around his front door; he had read somewhere that dog excrement carried more disease than even a rotting corpse. Two citronella oil burners had taken over the work of the defeated vanilla candle. Next door, shouting had evidently lost its appeal, and Lachlan could hear the monotonous
roar of a Grand Prix circuit, interrupted by the occasional cheer, bellow, or thump at his wall.

When he heard Phil's doorbell (it played a squeaky ***Jerusalem*** that never got past the first verse), Lachlan was on his feet in seconds and craning around the side of his curtains. It had grown dark outside and
he could only see the shadow thrown by the caller. When he heard Phil lumbering towards his front door, Lachlan snapped the light out and crouched away from his own.

At first he heard nothing above a murmur of voices that rose and fell in stereo. This was something of an anticlimax, until Phil's laugh suddenly rang out on the other side of the light switch. Lachlan crept closer to the wall, still skirting around the glass windows of his front door. He knew that laugh only too well. It invariably precipitated the kind of
foulmouthed diatribe that only a cretin like Phil could deliver.

Now Lachlan recognised the voice of The Watcher. It was calm and unhurried; reasonable and pleasant. Lachlan doubted that Phil would be perceptive enough to recognise its threat. He pictured the small,
ludicrously dressed man with his clasped hands and bowed head - and wondered precisely what he ***could***_do. Perhaps he knew people. He had looked the type to know people.

Lachlan had strained his neck during his frenzied bout of cleaning, and now he rested his forehead against the light switch without thinking: ears pricked and mind still wandering. Phil's laugh came again, although now it sounded a lot less amused and a lot more threatening. The Watcher's next affable suggestion was met with an abrupt bellow of fury
that smacked Lachlan's forehead against the switch itself, leaving a dent. When another angry voice joined Phil's, and then yet another (the Grand Prix evidently poor distraction), Lachlan pressed still closer to the wall. Phil's front door suddenly creaked back on its hinges, and Lachlan was halfway to conceding defeat when there sounded an abrupt
thud that stopped the door's squeak. Lachlan's smile was small. The wing-tip.

The following cacophony of shouts and shuffles confounded Lachlan's eavesdropping, and it was not until Phil's front door abruptly slammed shut that he was able to regain any perspective. Judging by the unabated clamour, The Watcher had managed to get inside Phil's house.

Lachlan was excited now. Although he could not hear The Watcher's amiable voice anymore, he could still make out Phil's indignant shouts above those of his posse. He sounded a little less certain now. His bravura had been replaced by a blustering fury that was far less coherent. Lachlan smiled, and then in a momentary lull, he was finally able to make out The Watcher's voice. It had neither altered volume nor pitch.

"Be quiet."

"Be quiet?" Phil's incredulity was almost comical. His shout rattled even Lachlan's front door inside its frame. "This is MY HOUSE!"

And then it all came apart. There was a curious thud, and then the shouts and roars grew louder - climaxing in an explosion of outrage that Lachlan shrunk backwards from, fearing for not just The Watcher's safety, but for his own. Lachlan was glad that the house next along from Phil's on the terrace had lain empty for months. He was even more afraid of what might happen if the police were to arrive.

Another two of these curious thumps dulled the cacophony not at all. And then there suddenly came another. One that impacted against the wall between the two houses, and was followed by a queer sliding sound that started at the front door and ended at the living room, as though someone were dragging a board along the plaster. Phil's scream was
blood-curdling and drawn out over the span of at least twenty seconds.

Stepping again away from the wall, Lachlan clamped down on his teeth, his fingers creeping towards his mouth. Phil's scream was cut off by another thud and then a sickening snap: the amplified crack of an egg
dropped on linoleum. Even Phil's companions grew quiet as Lachlan watched the invisible muffled decent of something (and Lachlan knew perfectly well what), slide from standing height to skirting board.

When Phil's friends recovered, they starting running. Lachlan crept back to the wall, leaning against the frame of the living room door as they shouted and stampeded all over Phil's house. Lachlan counted five. The Watcher took care of the three that thundered towards the kitchen first, presumably because the back door was the most obvious route of escape. They were silenced swiftly and with little preamble. The same could not be said for the two who had unwisely chosen the stairs. Lachlan heard them stumbling about, screaming and begging and sobbing, for more
minutes than he cared to count. His foot started up a nervous twitching kick against the skirting board.

When the last of the screaming had died down, he moved away from the wall on trembling legs. He started wondering whether The Watcher would need to call on him now that his complaint had been dealt with, and this horror started up a trembling in his limbs that sent him sprawling to the floor, his shoulder bouncing off plaster.

Face down in the carpet, Lachlan at first dismissed the faint scratches as being a symptom of his panicked mind. By the time he had managed to sit up, they had grown much more insistent, although they were still too vague to pinpoint. Against his better judgement, Lachlan crawled back towards the wall, cocking his head towards the skirting. The scratches had grown more frantic: like nails scraped across a-

Lachlan clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle the moan that rose up from his belly. A voice, barely recognisable as much for the feeble hope of its tone as the ragged ruin of its function, whispered to Lachlan through ten inches of chipboard barrier.

"***Scotch***?"

Lachlan scuttled backward into the centre of the room, anchoring himself to a leg of his desk with one hand, while the other still fought to contain his shriek behind his teeth. When he heard The Watcher's politely muffled tread upon Phil's stairs, Lachlan's foot resumed its twitching kick, this time against the trunk of his new swivel chair.
Although the desperate scraping of Phil's fingernails against the wall grew suddenly louder, Lachlan tried not to listen - until there came another dull crack and what might have been a slow sigh.

"Be quiet." The Watcher's tone was far from genial now. It was triumphant. It was the voice of a man who more than enjoyed his work.

Lachlan worked so hard to stifle the sounds now queuing up to escape his mouth that he failed to notice their sentiment relocating to his foot instead. It banged against the heavy plastic of the chair in ever quicker thuds that echoed through the silence.

"BE QUIET!"

This time, Lachlan did scream - but only long enough to let it go. He was not that stupid.

Things seemed a lot brighter the following morning. He woke up at the far more respectable hour of nine thirty, got dressed, and then had his breakfast whilst listening to Wogan on low. When he felt strong enough to open the curtains and peer outside, he saw that a For Sale sign had appeared overnight in Phil's front garden. Lachlan exhaled a breath that he had not realised he was holding. He had been a little worried about what happened next. Clearly, everything was in hand.

He glanced at his laptop, and then moved the chair back to the desk. With only a little apprehension, he leaned over and turned on the power. The internal fans whirred into life. In the kitchen, the faint hum of the fridge competed against the low clunks of awakening radiators. The trickling refill of the cloakroom toilet echoed against wall tiles. It
was curious really, how loud even quiet was. When you listened. As the laptop booted up, Lachlan headed for the bathroom, passing the fridge on the way. He stopped and took out a beer. It was only one.

When the phone went, Lachlan dove for it, even although he had turned the ringer to its quietest setting. As soon as he had picked it up, another fear took over.

"Hello?" There followed a pause that seemed infinite in its threat before he heard a muted belch and background laughter. Again, he let the air out of his chest.

"Mr Gemmell?"

"Yes?"

"Couple of months ago you contracted us to cut back your fir trees, mate. It's your lucky day - you've finally made it to the top of our list. We can be there any time before five o'clock, pal. When d'you want us?"

Lachlan stared at the phone for a few seconds before putting it back to his ear. "That won't be necessary, thanks." He replaced the receiver even as the gardener set about cursing Lachlan's tight-fisted heritage with gusto.

As he wandered back to the laptop, beer in hand, Lachlan tried to stifle an inappropriate grin. He sat at his desk, lit a new vanilla candle and took a swig of his beer. It was unimaginably quiet.

Lachlan hunched over the laptop and tapped at the keyboard with both index fingers. When he had finished the heading, he leaned back again and rewarded himself with another swig of beer.

He had typed: ***Chapter Three: The Bloodbath - A Martian Victory***.