Keeping Watch 4

Keeping Watch 4 

Denvil Caldwell stared out over the rim of his old round glasses at the back of his son as they rode towards the bend on the path to his own cabin. The still smoldering ruins they were riding from were enough to make any man go mute, but Denvil suspected the door had also thrown his son’s thoughts into a chaotic storm.

The door had lain as naturally in that bough of the oak as if God himself had allowed it to spring from the leaves. Denvil knew God had had no part in putting it there, though. The burnt husk of a cabin, Tom and Jessy gone, and the twisting of his guts at seeing his boy look so lost told him that. 

Corvin was a silent thinker, so Denvil would never know the particulars of what was going through his head until Corvin had come to a conclusion and informed him of anything. He had been that way since he was little. He had once declared that he wanted to be an adventurer, and Denvil assumed that he would grow out of it once he was older. But one day, Denvil had come back from town and found Jane sobbing over his letter stating he had left home to see the world, with promises of returning.

Four years later, he had returned home with tales of his adventures, money to share with the family, and what had caused a real stir in the community: an Irish bride. She had skin as pale as moonlight, long and dark Raven hair, and the greenest eyes that Denvil had ever seen. Denvil thought she was as pretty as a flower, but as twitchy as a bird.

They had built her a cabin south of his own and had included a lot of her odd requests in its construction. Denvil once asked Corvin about it, but Corvin had just waved the questions off and laughed. The Irish are still a superstitious lot, he had said.
Once the house was built, she seemed to settle down a little, and they started having kids. Corvin’s Younger brother Thad had become a bit envious and decided to strike out and find himself an Irish gal, and departed soon after.

But now, after last night’s events and this morning’s discovery, Denvil wondered if there had been a reason for her twitchiness that they had been unaware of.
Denvil looked up at the smoke drifting over the trees ahead.

“Ma looks to be cooking up a storm, Cor,” He said. “They might be up there having some breakfast while waiting for us.”

Corvin didn’t say anything, but Denvil noticed he quietly heeled his horse to move faster, and he disappeared around the bend.

“Goddamn it! Pa!”  Denvil heard him cry out. “Pa!”

Denvil kicked at ol’ Luke.

© Jeremy L. Heath, 2026. All rights reserved

Keeping Watch 3

Keeping Watch 3

    Thomas sat awake with his back leaning against his father’s chair, his stomach felt like it was in a knot. He faced the door and the window beside it. His eyes bounced from one to the other, half expecting the deer looking demon creature to lunge through the window or force the door open, crossing its threshold to do God knows what to him and Jessy.

    On one hand, he was jealous that Jessy was able to fall asleep in front of the fire so easily. Yet, on the other hand, he was glad that she wasn’t awake to share the same fear that gripped him.

    She lay curled up under a half-finished quilt that Ma was working on. Maybe its warmth, and the warmth of the fire had lulled her to sleep.

    A lullaby that was withheld from him.

    Try as he might to close his eyes and keep them closed in the attempt to force himself into sleep, they wouldn’t stay closed.  After a moment or two, he would swear that he heard something, and they would flutter open and focus on the window and then the door.

    He had put the bar on the door and pulled the rifle from the mantle. He was ready for anything that dared to come in. Or dared to gaze in for that matter.

    A loud thump came from above him on the roof, and he sat bolt upright, scooting further back against the chair as if he were trying to disappear into it. The thump was followed by what sounded like a pair of hooves slowly and deliberately walking across the roof to the south side of the cabin, before going silent right over the door. He looked up, holding the rifle close, not sure whether to shoot blindly at where the sound had seemingly stopped, or to hold his breath.

    He held his breath, ears straining to hear anything over the pounding of his heart in his own chest and the crackle of the fire. Swallowing hard, he pushed himself to his feet. He crouched down, and walked bent over towards the window as quietly as possible. Pushing himself against the wall beside the window, he peeked out. There was nothing on that side that he could see. He crawled under the window to look out the other side. Nothing.

    The outside was well lit by the moon’s silver light, but he couldn’t make out anything out of the ordinary.

    Until he heard it.

    It wasn’t the hooves on the roof, though. It was a gentle and yet earnest rustling that he heard. Not of leaves or weeds, but something else. Something he couldn’t quite place, though it sounded familiar. He pushed the side of his face into the cool wood of the wall as far as he could, straining his eyes as he looked every which way out the window that he was able to as he tried to see where the sound was coming from.

    He saw it as it rounded the corner of the cabin and came into view of the window. He squinted at it, blinked, and squinted again. He had no clue what he was looking at. It looked about as tall as their old Billy goat, but it moved across the ground with the poise of a bob cat on the hunt. Thomas couldn’t see any legs on the creature, but rather root like tendrils fluttering back and forth on the grass pushed it forward. It’s body appeared as a mass of clumped up silt, and out of its back were a heap of reeds and cattails. A knot of reads and dripping algae formed a head roughly the shape of a dog with elongated muzzle, two blue glowing orbs flickered and danced within its head like small fires. As they slowly danced from one side to another, Thomas understood that these were its eyes.

    “What the…” Thomas whispered.

    The creature stopped moving and dropped to the ground so quickly that if Thomas had not been watching it, he wouldn’t be able to tell where it went. Even it’s eyes dimmed to the point that he didn’t know if the orbs were still there, or if it was the glimmer of the moonlight shimmering on the mess of reeds.

    An ice-cold wave of nausea washed over Thomas. What had once been prowling just outside looked like it had been there all along. He swallowed hard and allowed his eyes to drift around the window a bit to see if there were any other clump of weeds or reeds in a place that he did not recall seeing them before. He heard the rustle again, and his eyes flashed back to the creature, that was now slithering slowly in his direction, tendrils spinning out, as if growing and retracting as it pulled itself forward. Its pale blue orbs no longer dancing but fixed upon the window.

    Thomas pulled his head back from the window and pressed himself against the wall.  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to steady his breath. This was not real. No more real than the deer demon he had seen earlier.

    “Just a dream…” he whispered through clenched teeth. “Just a bad dream…”

    At his words, the rustling stopped again.

    Thomas forced himself to slide his face to the corner of the window just far enough that he would see with one eye a mass of weeds and reeds sprawling on the ground just in front of the porch railing. He slammed himself back against the wall. Trembling, he pulled the hammer back on the rifle. He didn’t know whether or not a bullet would do anything to whatever this thing was, but it was the only thing he had.

    He took a breath and stepped away from the wall and turned towards the window. He almost dropped the rifle before he could bring it up to aim. The reed creature was at the window, its muzzled “face” now flattened as it pressed against the glass, its orbs trained on him and flickering fast.

    He stared at it for a moment, unable to think, or move.

    A hole appeared between the eyes and a godawful and warbling screech came from within the creature, its reeds and weeds shaking and vibrating with the screech as if amplifying the sound.

    The window cracked and snapped Thomas out of his stupor.  He screamed and brought the rifle up to bear on the creature, and pulled the trigger.

***

 © Jeremy L. Heath, 2026. All rights reserved

Keeping Watch 2

 Keeping Watch 2

Corvin leaned against the charred porch post that once had his name carved into it, and looked out over the smoldering ruin that had been his cabin.

That had been his home.

They had broke camp and rode through the night towards the flickering orange glow, hoping it wasn’t the cabin.

The only thing left standing was the brick chimney. Once red, now blackened by the fire that had consumed everything else that he loved.

And maybe everyone that he loved.

“They may have gotten out, Corv.”

He turned and looked at his father, still sitting on his horse. His voice was gentle and reassuring, but Corvin noticed the old man’s eyes kept darting from tree to tree, and he never took his hand off his gun.

Corvin didn’t say anything but walked to where his door used to stand. Brigit had begged him to use an unbroken piece of oak and then had him carve the intricate image on the front of it. Loops, and circles that went on and on in one continuous line, with a bulky and odd looking cross in the middle of it all with a shamrock in the middle of it.

He had never been terribly religious, and it wasn’t a traditional cross, but Brigit had been insistent and said it was named for the saint who she was named after.

So he sweated from the labor, and the fear of messing up the carving under her watchful eye. Between her drawn lines, and his steady hand, he was able to get it done to her satisfaction. He then at her insistence nailed horse shoes over it.

And now it was gone.

The horse shoes blackened and scattered in the mess all that remained of the doorway. He stepped through the openness where the door had once stood, his boots crunching on the still smoldering wood. His eyes scanned the floor, around the fireplace, and in the kitchen. Twisted items that he could identify, some he could not, but none of them were Brigit or the kids.

“You seeing anything, Corv?” his old man hollered out.

“No,” Corvin replied after a long sigh. “I..I don’t think they were here.”

“We probably shouldn’t stay too long.”

“I ain’t going nowhere till I find ‘em.”

“That ain’t what I meant, son.”

His dad looked at him, and Corvin knew that he was right.

“Alright, I just…”

He paused, eye catching a glint in the charcoaled rubbish. He knelt down and carefully plucked it from the ash. It lay in his palm, surprisingly cold given the heat coming up from everything around it. He rubbed his thumb over the medallion modeled after the Brigit’s cross that held her initials. His old man had made the medallion, and Corvin had given it to Brigit the night that Tom was born. She had given it to Jessy when she turned five.

“What’s that?”

Corvin almost jumped at his father’s voice. He grit his teeth and slid it into his chest pocket as he stood up.

“Best get to your place and get some supplies, pop.”

He mounted and as they turned the horses to ride towards the old man’s cabin, he pulled his horse up short and stared up into the tree line where his cabin door, lay in the boughs of the oak tree.

The door looked as though it had been plucked from the cabin and positioned carefully in the tree, its iron hinges and handle shining in the morning sun.

“How in tarnation…?” His old man followed his gaze. “How ya reckon that got up there?”

“I don’t know,” Corvin said. “But I damn sure intend to find out.” 

© Jeremy L. Heath, 2026. All rights reserved

Keeping Watch

Keeping Watch

“Momma said it was an omen,” Jessy said softly.

“Weren’t no omen, Jessy, just some angry old owl,” Tom replied. “Or maybe a bobcat.”

They sat hunkered down by the fireplace, waiting for their mother to return from their grandfather’s cabin just up the way.

Jessy set about combing and recombing her doll’s hair, and while she was distracted, Tom walked over to the window. He peered out from behind the shabby curtain, hoping to see his momma walking up the footpath, or maybe even Papa coming back.

The only thing he saw was the pale moonlight silhouetting the trees as their boughs swayed gently in the wind, and their leaves shimmering silver with a ripple of each gust like a giant fish circling their cabin in the night.

He almost missed it. It was blending in with the branches of the swaying tree limbs, but it wasn’t moving, and that’s what drew his eye. They looked like a deer’s antlers, but the were too long, too thick, and sat too high.

In fact, they sat atop a head that was nearly double the size of the biggest buck he had ever seen, and it stood a few feet higher than a proper deer should.

He squinted at it, trying to figure out how the tree was making that shape, but the more he stared, the more it seemed to come into focus. It had a human-like shoulder, and an arm…not a leg, but an arm from that shoulder was bent to what looked like a large and very clawed hand that was holding onto the tree.

“Is it out there?”

Tom jumped back and almost tripped over his sister behind him.

“What…You… You can’t sneak up on me like that, Jessy!”

She stared up at him with wide eyes.

“Is the banshee out there?” She whispered.

Jessy tried to ease back the curtain to take her own look

“Ain’t no banshee out there,” Tom shot back pulling the curtain down and trying to nudge her back to the fire. “Weren’t out there when momma said she heard one neither.”

He tried to sound certain, but that…thing…outside made him wonder.

“Then why did momma say to keep a watch out?”

Tom shrugged. “We barred the door. She wants us to watch out for Pa coming back, or if she comes back before Pa so that they aren’t stuck out there all night.”

“Then why hasn’t momma returned?”

“Maybe ol’ buck slipped his tether again, and her and grandad are trying to get him back before she can ride back down. You know what a wanderer he can be up the hill. With all grandad’s horses, he thinks he’s in heaven.”

“Well,” Jessy said slowly. “How come Pa hasn’t come back from hunting?”

“Probably just got a late start back,” Tom said. “It happened last time I went with him. Remember, we didn’t get back till almost midnight!”

Jessy had returned to sit beside the fire. She was quiet, holding her dolly close as she stared into the fire. He thought that he had reassured her until he saw the tell-tale glimmer of a tear sliding down her cheek.

“Listen, Jessy,” he tried. “Pa says Momma still believes in the stuff she grew up with back in the old country. She heard an angry old owl and wanted to go find Grandad to search for Pa since he’s late.”

Jessy nodded, and curled up next to him on the floor, her dolly now serving as her pillow. Tom quietly got up and looked out the window again.

Nothing but darkness with small breaks of moonlight.

He double checked the wooden bar on the door. It was tight and proper.

He walked back to the fire, threw some wood on to keep it burning, and returned to his place on the floor. He kept his face towards the window and the door to keep vigil for his parents, or morning, whichever happened to come first.

 ***

© Jeremy L. Heath, 2026. All rights reserved