‘I’m going to have to confiscate this.’

Gilly watched as his manager took the radio from his work bench. It hadn’t even been loud.

‘Racks forty-seven to fifty. Finish up. Then you can lock up.’

His manager threw the keys to the factory down beside Gilly’s sewing machine. Then he hitched up his trousers, locked the radio in his second-floor office, and left, though not before turning out all the lights in the factory.

Gilly was left alone surrounded by hundreds of other workbenches, each of them empty. Aside each bench lay racks of garish spandex, of rubber and latex. The only light by which to sew a little lamp at the end of his workbench.

He pulled it closer not daring to look up. He was the only soul left in Seldom’s Factory, a factory made especially for outfitting Seldom’s pimps, for outfitting his prostitutes.

It was then that he caught the shine of yellow-stain teeth smiling there at the edge of the lamplight. He saw a figure there. It sat back within the shadowy darkness of the factory. Gilly watched the figure’s feet kick and dangle like a bored child from one of the empty workbenches.

He put his head down and tried to continue, only to grimace as the figure began to whistle. The silence of Seldom’s Factory came apart like a torn thread. When Gilly tried to ignore it, the figure whistled again.

Slowly Gilly began to raise his head. This time he saw two jaundiced eyes lean forth from the darkness, there above those yellow-stain teeth.

Gilly’s voice came out a whisper, pleading ‘Please leave me alone.’

The Watcher only smiled.  

***

Gilly locked up somewhere around midnight. Standing outside the factory he looked like a scarecrow, or a phantom. For a while he stood alone, stooped and smoking. The orange-ember glare bathing his face and showing where his eyes were sunk, and the freckles against his cheeks, and his hair a shade of old carrot left out to mold. Tonight, he just let his cigarette burn down to his lips. Didn’t even smoke it. Then he left by the main gate waving a shy goodbye to Todd the security guard. There was pity in Todd’s eyes. There’d been pity in Todd’s eyes ever since Gilly had arrived. That had been years ago.

Nothing had changed.

***

The city of Paradise Rise had been rotten for a long time now. It had been two decades since Seldom had taken over the city. He owned everything from judges to the police. One of his first acts had been to legalize all forms of prostitution on the streets. Peddling drugs was done openly without fear, and his syndicates owned every part of the city. The police in Paradise Rise were no longer a symbol of protection but puppetry. The legal system was his. The financial system was his. He owned everything. A total monopoly of Paradise Rise and everything in it, right down to the people. In truth Seldom had taken Paradise Rise, bent her over and raped every last shred of dignity from between her legs. Then he’d left the satisfaction of his pleasure dribbling against her thighs.

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At this time of night there were gangs on the streets, and the hookers in their brightly coloured materials straight from Seldom’s own factories. Gilly avoided them all, keeping always beneath the streetlights as the rain began to fall. Most of all Gilly avoided the darkness. He avoided alleyways and corners and places where the lights had gone dull or dark or broken. He knew what lay waiting in the darkness.

Yellow-stained eyes. Yellow-stain teeth.

Gilly had once, a long time ago been foolish enough to tell his doctor about what he saw. The doctor had passed him through a series of psych evaluations, the result of which two schizophrenic medications and some anti-depressants to top it off. For a while Gilly had even tried them.

In the end they just left him numb, and still The Watcher was there, smiling as ever. He threw them in the bin after that and decided to close his mind to everything.

To the world. To the factory. To The Watcher.

To everything he knew he closed his mind.

Everything except Little Daisy.

***

He found her asleep on the couch, the rain lashing in through an open window.

There’s was an apartment on the fourth and highest floor, Apartment Two-Six-Nine. It looked out on a cross-section, above which an old, rickety monorail passed between a series of similar four-story apartments. They were all of them run down, just like himself.

Sometimes Daisy would sit there by the window waiting for hours until he returned home. Not tonight. Tonight, she was tired. She said that sometimes her teacher Miss Velasquez would give the kids detention for no reason. He wondered if she’d been given detention tonight.

His bones creaked and popped as he lifted her from the couch. She was only seven-years-old, small too. And yet already she was getting difficult for him to carry. He supposed that was just what happened when you sat around all day stooped over a workbench. You got old. Fast.

She was still in her school clothes when he tucked her in.

‘That bad manager didn’t pick on you today did he…?’ It was half-mumbled. She didn’t even open her eyes.

Gilly smiled, ‘Not today.’

After which Daisy rolled over, and slept.

For a while he just sat there watching her with the lamp on. Her hair was blonde, except for a thin streak of midnight black that sprang wild from her roots. When she was born the doctors said it would disappear with time. It didn’t. It was one of Gilly’s favourite things about her. That and her size. Daisy after all was smaller than most kids in her year. She made up for this with a healthy dose of sass, a quality that made her size largely irrelevant, especially when shouting in a small place like their apartment. She had eyes like honeyed hazel too. They were just like Gilly’s, only brighter and with all the spark that had long since departed his own.

Once, years ago he’d actually had a wife. She would leave their little apartment every night back when Daisy was still a bairn. He knew where she was going. Down to Seldom’s clubs, dressed in her nighttime best and all so she could lavish her time on other men. Years later she would come home saying she was leaving. She’d found what she wanted. A better man. She wouldn’t be coming back.

When her mother left Daisy had simply slammed the door.

‘Good riddance.’

After that Daisy became Gilly’s rock. His reason for living.

Little Daisy.

It was that same thought that carried him back toward Daisy’s sleeping face, and then again to where shadow pooled in the corner of Daisy’s room. It was there he felt The Watcher smiling. There from where the shadow grew thickest. And, when finally he turned the lamp out on Daisy he saw that same figure standing there. The same that had watched from within the factory.

Those yellow-stain teeth.

Those yellow-stain eyes.

After that he quickly left the room.

As he closed the door he didn’t look back.