The Chromatic Watchers

Marta had always been attuned to the unseen. As a child, in the creaking farmhouse on the edge of the Bitterroot Valley, she’d glimpse flickering silhouettes in the periphery, or hear whispered conversations in rooms where she was alone. The most unsettling incident was when she had a long conversation with her great-uncle Josef, who had passed away years before she was born—his corporeal form as vivid as any living person’s, though he smelled of damp earth and old tobacco. These experiences faded as she grew, or at least she learned to suppress them, to rationalize them away. But after she moved to the city for a job as an archivist, the phenomena returned with a vengeance.

It began with the faces. Every night, as she drifted toward sleep, behind her closed eyelids, she’d see them: disembodied visages, each tinted with an unnatural hue. Some were a sickly blue, others a putrid green, a few a fiery red. They were not human—their features were too elongated, their eyes too wide, their mouths fixed in silent, agonized screams. They would flash in rapid succession, each one lasting only a fraction of a second, but leaving a vivid afterimage burned into her mind. She tried everything to stop them: sleeping with the lights on, wearing an eye mask, taking melatonin, even visiting a therapist who suggested she was experiencing visual hallucinations from stress. But the faces persisted, growing more distinct each night, and with them came a suffocating sense of being watched.

The feeling was strongest in her apartment, a small studio on the top floor of an old building. The previous tenant, a recluse who had died alone, had left the place with a lingering musty odor and stains on the carpet that no amount of cleaning could remove. Marta began to notice that the faces were not just random—they seemed to correspond to objects in her apartment. The blue faces appeared when she looked at the tarnished silver mirror in the hallway; the red faces when she sat at the worn oak desk; the green faces when she opened the antique cedar chest at the foot of her bed. She started to feel as though the apartment itself was a gateway, and the faces were pressing against it, trying to break through.

One evening, as she was cataloguing a collection of Victorian-era letters for her job, she came across a peculiar description. It was a letter from a woman to her sister, describing a phenomenon she called ‘the Chromatic Watchers.’ The woman wrote of seeing faces in her mind’s eye, each colored according to a specific emotional state: blue for sorrow, red for rage, green for envy. She claimed they were not hallucinations, but residual impressions left by a malevolent entity that fed on these emotions, and that they would eventually drive their host to madness and death. The woman had included a drawing at the bottom of the letter—a series of faces, each with a color, and beneath them a caption: ‘They come for those who see.’ Marta’s blood ran cold. It was identical to what she was experiencing.

She tried to dismiss it as a coincidence, but the next night, the faces were worse. They didn’t just appear behind her eyelids; they began to overlay her vision even in the light. She would see a blue face in the reflection of her computer screen, a green one in the windowpane. Her chest tightened, and she felt a paralysis creeping over her limbs. She knew she had to leave, to go back to the farmhouse where she had once felt safe, even if it was now empty and falling apart. She called her boss the next morning and took an indefinite leave, packed a small bag, and drove through the night towards the valley of her childhood.

As she drove past the familiar landmarks—the twisted pine that had been struck by lightning, the rusted gate of the old Miller place—she felt a sense of relief. But when she finally reached the farmhouse, it was in worse shape than she remembered. The porch sagged, the windows were boarded, and the air inside was thick with dust. She made do, clearing a space in the living room and setting up a cot. The first night, she slept deeply, without any faces. She thought she had escaped them.

The next day, however, she decided to explore the attic, where her grandfather had kept his old journals. She had never dared to read them as a child, but now she felt a desperate need to understand. Among the moldering papers, she found a diary from the 1920s. In it, her grandfather described his own encounter with the Chromatic Watchers. He had seen the faces, same as she, and he had traced them to a local legend. According to the story, a reclusive painter had lived in the area, a man who believed he could capture the souls of his subjects by painting them with bold, unnatural colors. He had created a series of portraits, each one imbued with a different emotional essence. When he died, his house burned down, but the paintings were never found. It was said that the painter had hidden them, and that whoever discovered them would become a conduit for the trapped souls, forced to see their faces until they themselves were absorbed.

Marta realized with horror that her grandfather had been such a conduit. He had spent his whole life oppressed by the faces, eventually going mad and dying in a mental institution. She was next in line. The only way to break the cycle, the diary hinted, was to find the paintings and burn them. But where were they? The diary gave a clue: ‘They are where the eyes are always open.’ Marta puzzled over this. Then she remembered the old well in the backyard. It had been sealed for decades, but the stones around it were arranged in a pattern that looked like a giant eye. She grabbed a hammer and a crowbar, uncovered the well, and climbed down.

Inside, she found a hidden compartment. There were the paintings—nine of them, each depicting a face she recognized from her visions. But as she reached out to touch them, the faces began to materialize around her, their colors swirling and merging. They were not just faces anymore; they were monstrous, with elongated limbs and gaping maws. She screamed, but she couldn’t move. The faces seemed to be pressing into her, trying to tear her soul apart. She fought to raise her arms, to strike the paintings with her hammer, but the effort was immense. She managed to smash one, and then another, but she was weakening.

With a final surge of will, she pulled the paintings into a pile and ignited them with a lighter she’d found in her pocket. The faces shrieked as the flames consumed them, and the colors bled into the fire, producing a sickly rainbow. The pressure on her disappeared, and she collapsed to the ground, gasping. When she climbed out of the well, the sun was setting, casting long shadows across the yard. She felt lighter, as if a great weight had been lifted from her soul. She knew the faces were gone.

That night, as she lay in the farmhouse, she closed her eyes and saw only blackness. No faces. But just before she drifted off, she thought she saw a single eye open in the darkness, a colorless eye, watching her. And a voice, not quite human, whispered, ‘The colors are gone, but the watchers remain. They wait for the next one who sees.’ Marta’s breath caught in her throat. She realized that she had only destroyed the recordings, not the source. The entity that had created them was still there, dormant, waiting for the next person to pass through. She wondered if she could ever truly escape, or if she was doomed to carry the knowledge with her, a sentinel against something that could never be destroyed. She sat up in the bed, staring into the darkness, knowing that she would never feel truly alone again.