The town of Marlowe was the kind of place where the days stretched quietly, and the nights seemed to press down heavier than anywhere else. Nestled between low, wooded hills and sluggish rivers that swelled brown in the rains, it was a town of cracked pavements, rusting fences, and neighbour's who knew too much about one another. The church bell tolled every Sunday, whether the people filled its pews or not. In Marlowe, silence wasn't just the absence of sound — it was a presence, a living thing that clung to the houses and the people who lived inside them.
For Elsie, that silence had always been a weight she could never quite shake. Because when people looked at her, they didn't just see Elsie. They saw her father. They saw the story of the night he was taken away.
She had been seven then. Old enough to remember every detail, too young to understand what it meant.
That night began with shouting. Her father's voice had risen suddenly, cracking through the little kitchen like thunder. Elsie remembered how his hands shook as he pointed to the window, his eyes wide and frantic.
"They're here again!" he had cried, his voice breaking with terror. "Watching! Can't you see them—right there in the dark?"
The men who came wore white coats and carried clipboards, speaking in tones that pretended calmness but carried impatience underneath. They moved like people who had done this many times before. Elsie remembered their hands on her father's shoulders, guiding him gently yet firmly as he struggled, pleading with Mary, pleading with Elsie.
Mary, Elsie's mother, had stood stiff and silent, her jaw clenched. She didn't cry. She didn't beg them to leave him be. She simply folded her arms, as though she had already known this moment would come and had braced herself for it.
Elsie hadn't cried either — not then. But the house had seemed to collapse into silence after the door shut, after her father's desperate voice faded down the street.
And though she was only a child, Elsie had felt something hollow open inside her, as though the walls themselves had leaned in to listen.
The people of Marlowe didn't let her forget. They never said it directly to her face, but she heard it in whispers, caught it in stares. At the market, women shook their heads when she walked past with Mary. Poor girl. Poor Mary. Cursed family.
Children repeated the story with wide eyes and lowered voices: Elsie's father went mad. Said the shadows were alive. Said the night had eyes.
She grew up in the shadow of those whispers.
Mary, perhaps trying to shield her, rarely spoke of her father at all. She filled their little house with the smell of starch and soap from her long hours at the tailor's. She kept her hands busy and her lips tight, as if silence could erase memory. But Elsie could still hear it in the walls at night — the echo of her father's cry, They're here again. Watching.
But the man the town remembered wasn't the man Elsie remembered.
In her mind, her father's face was not always twisted in fear. She remembered his laughter on bright mornings, the smell of butter frying as he hummed a tune in the kitchen. She remembered the wooden animals he carved with his pocketknife — a bird, a fox, a rabbit — each so carefully detailed it seemed they might leap from the sill and run.
There had been nights, too, when he carried her on his shoulders to the orchard outside town. She remembered reaching high to pluck an apple, the sky bleeding red and gold as the sun sank, her father's voice strong as he sang a half-forgotten song. Back then, he had seemed unshakable — a giant, a guardian.
How had that man crumbled into the trembling figure the men in white coats dragged away?
Elsie clung to those brighter memories, though even they began to warp over time. Because when she looked back, she noticed things she hadn't understood then: the way his eyes lingered on the tree line after dark, the pauses mid-conversation when he tilted his head as though listening to something only he could hear.
Those cracks frightened her most of all.
Now Elsie was older — seventeen — and the whispers had shifted. No longer poor girl, but that's the one whose father went mad. The glances she received on the street weren't cruel, but cautious. Pitying. As though madness were something that might pass down like freckles or hair color. Some crossed themselves when she walked by, as though superstition itself might ward off her father's shadow.
She hated it.
At home, Mary worked herself weary, often too tired for conversation. The house was tidy, the meals simple, and silence was still its ruler. Elsie sometimes wondered if her mother's silence came from strength… or fear.
Because at night, when the crickets fell quiet and the trees rattled against the windows, Elsie thought she felt it too — that waiting, breathless presence. A stillness in the air, as if the world itself leaned close.
She would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, her skin prickling with the sense of eyes she could not see. And in those moments, her father's words returned, unbidden, curling in her ears like smoke:
They're here again. Watching.
That night, as she sat at her desk tracing the worn edge of one of her father's old wooden animals — the bird with the crooked wing — the silence in the house deepened.
Then, from the kitchen, came the faintest sound.
A clink.Soft. Sharp. Like porcelain shifting against wood.
Elsie froze.
The house was still again.
She told herself it was nothing. The wind. A settling board. The house was old, after all. But her heart thudded in her chest as she stood and crept to the doorway, her bare feet soundless on the floor.
The kitchen was dark, moonlight stretching across the counter.
And on the table, one of the cups sat near the edge — trembling, as though it had only just stopped moving.
Elsie's breath caught. She felt the air change, pressing in heavy, as if the silence itself leaned closer.
Her skin prickled. The tiny hairs on her arms rose.
The feeling of eyes returned. Watching.
She turned her head toward the window that faced the woods.
The curtains stirred gently, though no breeze entered. And in the deep black of the trees beyond, she thought — just for a moment — that she saw something move.
A darker shadow within shadow.
Still. Waiting.
By the time she blinked, it was gone.
But Elsie's heart was already racing, and though the room looked exactly as it always had, she could not shake the terrible certainty that she was not alone.