Beauty and the Beast, Watcher

I’m not so sure I’ll be any good at this.  I’ve never kept a journal more than a few days, its not so much that I haven’t got the patience for it or anything like that, it’s only I always seem to find myself recording all the little comings and goings of my life in other ways.  Only, that’s not really important now.  It may be later, but not now.  So I shall try, you will forgive me future readers for this inexperience I hope.  It may sound strange and fantastic beyond all belief, but it is true, I swear it is true.  I am doing my best to make it understandable.  God, what else can I say…
I fell into all of this seven years ago, when I was only 17.
Chloe and I had been left alone again, another week during which our parents had to flee to another conference.  They have been speaking, presenting and writing since before I was even born. Both of them authors and historians and as far as conference invitations might indicate, they have always been very good at it.  When Chloe and I were younger we were taught by my mother.  Our parents doted on us and hardly liked the idea of leaving their “little ducks” at home week after week.  I believe no school could have provided me with such a varied and encapsulating education.  We read in hotel rooms, soaked every night in chlorinated oasis’s, visited museums both small and strange and large and entertaining across the country, making friends who lasted for only a weekend and the rare few who lasted longer.  However by the time I was fifteen my mother was too highly in demand as an orator and we were enrolled in the high school closest to our rural home.  
There is nothing worth noting, at least not in this context, of my high school years, aside from the fact that I was awkward, bookish and generally shy about boys.  I thought myself than, and still do a tad too plain to attract and keep any boys interest and there really weren’t any I liked in a romantic way in the small school I came from.  I had a few good friends whom I surrounded myself with, but generally found the environment stifling, and was subsequently “sick”, quite often.  I didn’t dislike the other people at school, it’s just, well, I felt better employed and engaged with my own company most of the time.  I have always liked my own company, no offense meant to the rest of the world.  
At that time, I had just graduated and the world had for a brief time slowed to a trickling, honey sweet pace.  There was a week between my graduation and the beginning of my summer job, watching the desk at a small used bookshop, than there would be college in the fall, and after that…well I had my hopes but who knows.  But for that week I was free and without any obligation other than to make sure my younger sister Chloe ate dinner and breakfast, made it to school on time, got home safely and went to bed before ten.  The days were quiet and warm.  I read, I cooked, I wrote, I drew; generally I was having a rather pleasant run of it all.  
Chloe was another matter entirely.  She had been rather irate and anxious for most of the time.  Snapping at me over minor things, and locking herself up in her room almost the entire time we were home.  Usually she was a non-stop chatterbox, a person could hardly get a word in edgewise, but as I took her to school and brought her home in the family car she sat quite and tense, staring intently out the window.  I assumed it was some kind of childish spat she had decided to take up with me, she had been the more…petulant of us two ever since we were little.  It was not uncommon for her to decide either I or my parents had done something heinously unfair and than to sulk for about a week before either forgetting why she was angry with us, or exploding into a vicious spat.  
"Let her sulk", I thought, "I refuse to let her spoil my golden week, I won’t be dragged down because of her."  I thought wrong.
There were so many signs that things were desperately wrong with my sister, but I didn’t see them.  Forces watched her intently which were much grander than either of us.  I was not able to recognize them than but they were there, pointing ominously towards the great, tumultuous change that would soon occur in our lives.  So I thought nothing of the strange things going on all about me and my sister and ignored her curt behavior, allowing myself to continue on in a dense, dreamy stupor, watched by strange forces without much interest.  After all…I was not the one who had opened it…