The discovery of The Watcher in my childhood photos felt like uncovering a cancer that had been growing in my family for generations. It wasn't a sudden haunting; it was a legacy. I spent the rest of the night in a feverish state, organizing the cursed photos chronologically on my floor, creating a timeline of our shadow.
It was always there, at a distance, a stain on our happiest moments. But the photo with Aunt Carol at the fair was different. The contact changed everything. The question now was, why her? And who was next?
As the first grey light of dawn filtered through my blinds, my phone chimed. It was a message from my mother. My parents had been on a cruise for the last two weeks, blissfully disconnected from all of this.
"Just got service again! Missing you, sweetie. The trip was wonderful, but I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt of your Great-Aunt Silvia. She was standing in her old house, just pointing at the wall. So vivid!"
A cold knot tightened in my stomach. Great-Aunt Silvia. My grandmother's sister. She had passed away when I was a toddler. I only knew her from stories. And from the photos.
I scrambled through the piles on my floor, my heart pounding. I found the album labeled "Family Reunions - 1980s." There she was. A tall, stern-looking woman with kind eyes, standing on the porch of a rustic, green-painted house. I squinted, my breath catching. There, in the upstairs window of the house behind her, was the familiar, tall shadow.
But my mother's message... the dream... the old house.
I called her. "Mom, the house in your dream. The one Silvia was in. Was it green?"
A pause. "Yes... how did you know? It was her house up in the mountains. We sold it years after she passed. Why?"
I didn't have an answer for her. Not one she would believe. After promising I was just curious and that I loved her, I hung up. The name of the town was etched in my memory from old addresses. Crestwood. A quiet, mountainous place hours away.
It felt like a sign. A direction. This wasn't just in our photos; it was tied to our places, our history. If I wanted to understand how to stop it, I had to start where it might have all begun.
I spent the day packing a bag with a frantic, desperate energy. I printed out the key photos—the graduation, the fair, the one with Silvia's house. I was going to Crestwood. I had to see that house for myself.
Just before I left, I did one last thing. I opened my laptop and logged into the old, mostly forgotten family tree website my Uncle Dan had started years ago. I needed context. I needed to see the line of lives this thing had followed.
I scrolled through the names and dates, a digital graveyard. My eyes scanned the connections, from my parents up to my grandparents, then to Great-Aunt Silvia and her siblings. And then I saw it. A pattern I hadn't been looking for.
It wasn't random.
The Watcher's focused attention, the "touching," didn't happen to everyone. It seemed to follow a specific, chilling order in the family line, skipping generations in a way that felt deliberate, not random. A pattern of selection that was now, according to the timeline I had laid out on my floor, pointing squarely in one direction.
I closed the laptop, the unspoken truth settling in my bones like a deep cold. I was not just an investigator. I was the next subject. The next one to be touched.
And as I picked up my car keys, a faint, coppery taste filled my mouth, like I'd bitten my own tongue. I hadn't. I shrugged it off as stress, but the metallic tang lingered on the drive north, a subtle, persistent wrongness I couldn't explain.