The stress was beginning to show through his veneer of composure. Anyone who knew him could read the signs, the tired face that smiled less and frowned more, the edge of intolerance that played harsh disharmonies in the voice and the temper only reined in just before it broke. Of course there were signs that only he saw and knew in himself, waking in the dead hours of night for no reason, that niggling worry ever in his mind. So what was his problem? He was Eamon Ducane and he knew that he was being watched.
Upstairs his neighbour clumped across the floor like Godzilla tap dancing.
“Friggin’ noisy cow.” He snarled quietly and followed the noise with the barrel of the pistol. The hammer was cocked back, the door upstairs slammed, as it always did, the hammer fell, for the first time.
Click, empty chamber, they all were. Yes the stress was showing badly today, he could never have contemplated pulling the trigger, even of an unloaded gun, in normal times. But now his dreams swam with images of bullets flying, crashing through wood and brick, flesh and bone, a thunderous termination of the noisy feet and their indifferent owner. It would only take six of those chubby little cylinders to turn the fantasy into reality, six little silencers and all would be still, dead quiet.
He looked at the gun in dismay, how could such a petty irritation bring about such homicidal thoughts?
The stress.
The Watcher.
Eamon brought the pistol round to stare down the dark barrel; there was eternity down that short tube, for someone. He put it down on the table and moved his head so that the light made new shapes in its shiny curving surfaces. What the hell was becoming of him? One moment he was ready to kill and the next playing a childish game with light and shade.
The stress.
When had it begun? He closed his eyes and shut his mind to the external sounds, reeling back the days, the weeks, the months, the years! The years, the realisation groaned within him, the years under the stress, under the Watcher.

It surprised him how easily and clearly he could review his life back to the time when he first became aware of the Watcher, it was like scrolling through entries on a screen, all recorded in crystal clear letters, black on white. The incident had been whilst he and a friend were playing a rough and tumble range game, hiding in bushes and pouncing on each other, great fun. He had been six at the time and reality was the game. His friend had ambushed him from under a dark rhododendron’s cover and toppled him close to the edge of a steep bank. Like in a thriller Eamon was held on the edge of the precipice, his adversary only had to give him a little shove and it was all over. In fact the drop was not sheer and it was only six feet but it became distorted out of all proportion in his young mind. That was when he became aware of the Watcher, quite suddenly he felt it, felt its eyes locked onto him and more, totally cognate of his state, his reality. His friend had his hands firmly dug into his shirt and gave him a little push but then stopped him from actually falling over the edge. The terror was an exquisite dagger in his mind, so thrilling but so frightening that it felt like life and death in that instant as he railed and thrashed in his friends sure grip. There was a twinkling in the air above him and then a darkening about him; his friend plunged over the edge while he was lowered to the ground just back from it. He felt drained by the experience but a sharp cry of pain came from below him and his friend had come to rest at the bottom. He had a few minor cuts, some bruises, par for the course in such a game but it brought it to an end. For Eamon the stress had begun.
Of course it hadn’t seemed like stress at the time, for he never suffered the knocks and bruises that other boys routinely self inflicted or directed at him. Careless limbs never connected with Eamon, snowballs never hit him, wooden swords skimmed away. But gradually this aura of invulnerability began to work against him, few wanted to play football against someone who seemed to be armour plated in any tackle. Eamon responded by withdrawing from such team sports that involved any form of contact and putting his energies into solo sport and other pastimes. Yet even this adaption was not enough, Eamon was just too lucky and it hung about him like a cloak of strangeness. This then was the price, few ever made friends with Eamon Ducane, they knew him but they didn’t want to take it any further. Compound this isolation with the dawning awareness that he had an ever-present invisible associate and you had the stress, the Watcher.
No matter how benign the surveillance, it becomes intolerable for it requires the consent of the watched; today that point had been passed. Eamon pulled on his coat, grabbed up the gun, swung the cylinder out, rammed the bullets home and swung it shut again. He was fully loaded, overloaded and ready to blow. Time for revelation, time for confrontation, time for termination.

The pistol was an anonymous bulge in his coat pocket as he trudged along the street towards the waste ground. An ideal site for a showdown, it had been an old industrial works here in the decaying east end of town but recently most of it had been crudely levelled. A few pieces of gaunt wall remained standing, awaiting the wrecking ball with time worn indifference, just the place where a few shots in the concealing dark would go unnoticed. Eamon clambered over the rubble piles that the distant street lights cast only a weak glow over, almost blindly seeking the perfect arena for the final act in his personal play. As he entered the jagged shell of an old building and stopped in the middle of the empty floor a shifting of the rubble caught his attention, was it the Watcher? He froze for a moment, his hand reached into his pocket and clenched clammily around the pistols grip, but the sound had ceased and he was alone with the distant white noise of the city. Looking up he could see the low clouds, lurid orange shapes drifting past the dark edges of the wrecked walls, where was the Watcher? The rubble shifted again, closer this time and Eamon could see a silhouette enter the arena on predatory feet.
“Who are you?” Eamon demanded, he wanted to know who his tormentor was before he despatched him.
“I’m the tollkeeper come to collect.” The shadow chuckled evilly and a flash of steel caught his eye. “Yeah, come to collect.” It menaced nearer now.
This was not the Watcher, it was an opportunist mugger and panic began to mount in Eamons gorge.
“The wallet man or I carve you.” The knife blade wove evil designs in the air as it approached, filling Eamon’s vision. “Give!” The shadow demanded only an arms length away.
“I…” Eamon gagged.
It happened just like so many times before. The air shimmered with a barely perceptible light that swiftly became an ominous darkening and the Watcher struck. First the knife was plucked from the assailant’s hand and before he could react he was slammed backwards with irresistible force to sprawl heavily on the cracked concrete many feet distant.
“No more damn you!” Eamon found his voice rebelliously. “From today I take care of myself!” The pistol slid out into the cool night air raised its deadly snout and with a finger twitch loosed off a round thunderously.
The shot was wild, not directed anywhere but the flash and report scared the mugger even more than his previous disarming and knockdown.
“Shit!” He scrabbled up and bolted away into the enveloping night like a whipped cur, he wasn’t waiting for some gun mad vigilante to put a bullet into him.

He had fired the gun in anger for he wanted to kill the Watcher but his sheer inexperience made it unlikely he could succeed. But he had stated his claim to his own life, to live it free of his half seen keeper.
“No more, hear me?”
Silence, but the darkness in the air was still there with him in the arena.
“You’ve been on my tail too long.” Eamon growled at it and very deliberately aimed the gun at it. “Now bow out. No more snooping, no more little tricks like just then. I want my life back, I want you gone!”
It persisted, perhaps even grew a little more solid to his sight but was still less than a shadow.
“I’m not joking.”
The hammer clicked back under his thumb. Now all it would take was a little pressure from his finger and all those years under stress, under the Watcher, weighed heavily upon his digit. Inexorably the weight squeezed.
Somewhere in his mind a small rational thought was desperately flagging for attention, he was pointing a loaded gun at a patch of air, wasn’t that just a tiny bit weird? But Eamon wasn’t operating rationally, he was in a state of high emotional instability caught between fight and flight and the past was riding roughshod over the present. The pistol roared once, twice, five times more before the hammer fell on an expended round and it was quiet, deathly quiet. Wobbling on his feet in his adrenalin high Eamon saw something that quenched it like a ton of ice. Five bullets hung in the air before him then fell like a light metallic rain.
He freaked out, turned sharply to run away from this terrifying reality but his co-ordination was shot and he began to fall towards the unyielding concrete, arms flailing. The shadow was under him within a heartbeat and now it was more solid than the ground, he was no longer falling but he struggled to be free of that massive invisible safety net. He wanted to be free to fall but he was not.
“Why me? Why me?” He wailed as he was swung upright once more and he failed to notice that this time something new was happening. The orange light of the city faded to complete black and the white noise of constant motion was lost in the silence of total immobility. Only the timeless, sensation-less limbo was left to him and Eamon suddenly realised that the only thing he was aware of was – nothing. Had the Watcher killed him?