Dark Watchers by Jane Yager

We live at the foot of Mount Monkshood, where our town ends and the wild land rises sharply beyond. Our backyard looks out onto the mountain, which is a problem, because the mountain watches us.

Monkshood lures adults outside on moonlit nights: my dad, who sleepwalks naked into the backyard, then wakes up locked out of the house. Our freshly paroled next-door neighbor, who lurches onto his back porch drunk, shooting his gun at the moon. “That bastard wouldn’t be able to see me if it wasn’t for you,” he yells, “that bastard” being the mountain and “you” the moon. 

When I’m eight, my parents build a second-story addition, a rarity in this town of low-slung stucco ranch houses. They say it’s because my brother and I are getting older and need our own rooms, but I know the real reason: it’s so the mountain can’t see them. Their new upstairs bedroom has no back-facing windows.  

When my parents move upstairs, me and my brother are left alone downstairs. I never thought the mountain had much interest in kids, but I feel its unnerving gaze on my first night in my own room. I can at least sleep; my brother can’t. Late at night he runs through my door, terrified because the mountain is watching him so bad. A thought occurs to me and I say it out loud: 

“It isn’t the mountain itself watching, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Then what?” he beseeches. 

I part the thin curtain at my window: Outside in the too-bright night, a boulder gleams halfway up Monkshood, like a craggy second moon lodged in the mountainside. It’s always been there but I never considered it before. A cave. 

“Woofs,” he says mournfully, his word for wolves.

My brother imagines yellow-eyed wolves streaming out of their cave and down the mountain to jump through his window and devour him. He can’t stop imagining those wolves, won’t go back to his own room, and when I fall back to sleep he’s still sitting upright at the end of my bed, vigilant. In the morning he’s on the floor of my room with his pillow and blanket, curled in a catlike crescent. The next night I wake at 1am, and there he stands beside my bed, staring at me, his face illuminated by more light than ought to be able to get through my curtains. 

“Real woof monsters,” he whispers.

I don’t like to look at the mountain anymore, even by day. I know brown grass is what covers its rocky contours, but it has begun to look like the rippling folds of an animal’s hide.

I ask around at school to learn what I can. Kids who hike say the wolf cave isn’t really a cave, just a large rock, and there are no wolves in this county anyway. On the tetherball court at recess one kid says on Monkshood you never leave the trail because there are rattlesnakes and another says nah, the rattlesnakes are just an excuse, it’s really because of the Dark Watchers. Nobody will tell me what exactly a Dark Watcher is. 

My parents come from Back East, from a mountainless place with snow and fireflies where the houses have two stories. Sometimes it feels like they don’t actually know anything about California, but it turns out my dad has heard of the Dark Watchers. “Old local legend,” he says, “more or less a ghost story.” My mom says stop, this’ll make my brother more scared, there are no mountain ghosts, but my dad says he doesn’t see how wolves are the less scary option.

My dad’s sleepwalking has been cured by moving upstairs and now my brother is the one tormented by the mountain. The circles under his eyes grow darker until the day my mom gives him a blank, sealed envelope filled with powder. This is wolfsbane, she says, and he must never open it. If he puts it under his pillow, it will keep the wolves away, repel them. The wolfsbane works and my brother can sleep again. He stops haunting my room.

One evening my dad is drunk and lingers at the table after dinner, chatting at me while my mother and brother are out of earshot. He tells me it was brilliant of my mother to put cocoa powder in an envelope and call it wolfsbane, look how it’s cured my brother.

A few days later my brother and I are in the backyard, and he won’t stop bothering me. I’m making potions, and he kicks my buckets on purpose, knocking them over. I grow furious and tell him his wolfsbane isn’t real, it’s just cocoa, a trick for babies. He says that’s a lie. I can’t stand to be called a liar, so I run into the house and grab the envelope from under his pillow, run back outside waving it. I will eat it to prove I’m right. 

“You’ll die,” he shrieks. I rip the envelope open and pause to check the brown powder inside. It is dense and velvety like cocoa mix, but where are the dehydrated mini-mallows? The sugar granules? I plunge my finger into the envelope anyway, then take a lick of powder. It tastes bitter. He’s right: poison. It clings to my tongue, chalky. I lie down to die. The grass prickles my legs, the last thing I will ever feel. My brother stares down in horror. 

We wait.

I don’t die. It’s only poisonous to wolves. Wild with relief, we eat it all, ignoring the repellant taste. We lie on the grass amidst white tatters of envelope. The moon hangs faint in the midday sky, its surface pockmarked from our neighbor’s bullets. Fortified by the power of wolfsbane coursing through us, we shade our eyes with our hands and watch the mountain. Now we’re not afraid to stare back.

Jane Yager is an American living in Berlin, Germany, where she works as a translator. Her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Paris Review Daily, the Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere, and was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025. You can find her at janeyager.com.

22 August 2025