Chapter One:
There's something living in my backyard. I'm not sure what it is. Sometimes I hear it in the middle of the night, playing with the windmill in front of my window. I don't dare open the curtains. I'm afraid. But I hear it, tiny footsteps with a wide gait climbing up the metal framing with sounds so different from the clackity-clack of the windmills blades. The windmill shouldn't be working though.
We had tied it up with rope. It doesn't make a sound in the day and the rope stays taught. But in the night all existence of the rope vanishes as the owner of those tiny footsteps continues to play with it, again and again with that clackity-clack, clackity-clack. The windmill has such a stark contrast against my house, painted with light yellows and flowerly indigos. The windmill is brown, rusting, blackening. When we first moved to the house everything had looked so different and run down. There had been rotting trees and the smell of dead things.
When the doors of the cottage next door had been opened there were snakes on the floor, trampled and crushed. The only one that had survived was the biggest, its hollowed skin had been left behind hanging from a hole in the ceiling like a welcome banner. We cleaned up the bodies of the dead snakes and placed them in a bag, intending to take them to the tip the next day. The bag was gone the next morning. We laughed about it, of course we did. People steal garbage all the time. But why didn't they take anything else we'd placed nearby? The old garden stool, or the plant boxes? That stinking bag with its rotting contents was all they took. The windmill was not the only thing rusting on our property. There was the shed, the wide old shed that could fit more cars than we would ever own in our lifetime.
Iron beams and rusty corrugated walls, I liked to take a stick and run alongside enjoying the dull metal thumps, getting to the end and jumping up to hit one of the beams with its higher pitched ding. But when I finished my play, as I walked away I thought I heard the same sounds again, like my game echoing back.
Or someone was copying me.
I played the game more after that, listening intently for the echo, or trying to catch the somebody who seemed to want to play, but whenever I leapt out at the noise growing closer down the wall, there was nothing but silence. It was when I grew tired of the game that the windmill began. Every night, those tiny footsteps and then that clackity-clack. I could never get used to the sound, but nobody else seemed to hear it. It was only ever me, until we rented the cottage next door out to a newlywed couple. During their stay things were quiet and I found rest. It was then our new neighbor's dog disappeared.
Our property is on a slope of a valley, bush land on one side and rainforest on the other where the creek runs. It's not a scary place, it shouldn't have to be. The road is a long one and the land-scapes changes drastically the further you go. There are a lot of places for a dog to hide, but even after all those weeks, our neighbors' never gave up hope. I was the one that found it. As I went exploring in the bush land up the hill from our house, in the small dam hidden from view, there was a long metal pipe sticking out on the shore. The dog had been skewered.
With putrid entrails hanging out and dangling into the water, its mouth hung open wide with a tongue torn in two. It wasn't the sight of the dog's body that scared me though. It was what I saw in the mud. A single pair of tiny footprints. Weeks later, our neighbors' wife would come to tell us they were moving. I listened from my room as she sobbed to my parents. Something was disturbing her here and she didn't know what.
It wasn't just the discovery of the dog, but something else she couldn't describe. It made her feel unwell and unable to work. My parents weren't sure, but they nodded sympathetically and said they'd help them pack the next day. It was that night I felt that something. It made my throat dry and thirst for water. I stumbled into the kitchen and turned on the light. Through the half-opened blinds of the long windows I saw it – standing in the garden, surrounded by the jasmine.
It stood there and watched me, and I stared back. I stared back at the Tall Man, dressed in his suit and tie, but whatever face he had I could not see it. All I saw were the outstretched arms that were too many to count, spindly and crooked like withered branches. Stretching out to me. The blinds closed themselves. I don't think he wanted to be seen. The windmill creaked again from that night on, that clackity-clack playing over and over. And even now that I've moved I still feel like he's there at night, and I keep my blinds closed.
I'll be afraid to open them, because I saw him, and he knows.
(New York, New York, 6:45pm)
Detective Keller was a single father trying to raise his daughter in the worst city in the world. He should know, he got to write up reports on the what the scum bags in this city did. He worked from three in the morning until five at night. So the last thing he wanted to come back to was his six year old little girl talking to the women who lived in the apartment across from them. The women reached into her pants pocket and pulled something out and gave it to his little girl. Then just like, she walked back to her apartment and shut the door with out so much as a sound. Detective Keller ran the rest of the way and looked down at his child.
"Daddy, look it what that nice lady gave me!"
"What did she give you, Amy?" Keller asked.
"Alice gave me a necklace!" Amy chirped and held it out for her father, with his fading hairline, to see. Keller grabbed it and looked at it. It was a simple necklace, a lumpy green stone with a hole in the middle, and a silver, gold and black braided string through the middle.
"Why did…Alice give you the necklace, sweetheart?" Keller asked.
"She said it was to make sure the Tall Man didn't get me." Amy said as she reached for the necklace. Keller put it in his pocket and shooed his daughter back into their apartment. He heard the toilet flush and Jill came out of their bathroom. She looked up and then smiled at the two of them.
"Hello, Mr. Keller. Did you have a good day at work?" Jill asked.
"Yes, but did you know that Amy opened the door for one of the many people living on this floor?" He asked her.
Jill looked at him with a look of confusion.
"No one knocked on the door, sir. I swear. I was only in there for three minutes."
"Really? Then how did Amy know how to answer the door?"
"I wanted to open the door, Daddy." Amy spoke up. Jill licked her lips. Keller reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet and gave Jill the twenty bucks.
"Thanks for watching her, Jill. Get home safe." Keller said. Jill took the twenty bucks and thanked him. She locked the door behind her. Keller threw his coat off and walked into the kitchen. Amy ran after his coat and fished inside his pockets for her new necklace. She smiled when she found it.
"What do you want for dinner, sweetheart?" Keller called.
"Mac n' cheese!" Amy called out. She slipped the necklace over her head and watched as the little stone, no bigger than a pebble, land over her heart.
"With mashed potatoes and green beans?"
"EW!" Amy said.
Keller laughed to himself and began to work his magic.
Once dinner was done, and Amy had her shower and out into bed did Keller shut the door behind him and go across the hall. Before he even knocked on the door it opened and Alice looked at him with tired and tentative eyes. He noticed two things when she opened the door. One, that she looked ready to run at any second and that she had two different colored eyes. The left was blue and the right was grey.
"Hello, Mr. Keller." Alice said, her voice was horse and sounded like she had been screaming for hours.
"Hello, Ms…"
"Mar." Alice supplied him with her last name.
"Ms. Mar." Keller said, "Can I ask you why you gave my daughter that necklace?"
Alice licked her lips and then poked her head out and looked down the hall twice before she looked him in the eye.
"The Tall Man is in the building. I don't want anything…bad to happen."
"Bad? In New York? Really?" Keller asked her and folded his arms.
"You don't understand. The Tall Man…he can take them away so fast, that you won't have time to blink before their gone."
"Before whose gone?"
"The children." Alice whispered to him, "He takes them away."
"What does this have to do with the necklace?" Keller snapped at her and Alice flinched. It moved her platinum blonde hair out of her face and he noticed long fingernail scratches on her. It ran from her left temple to her chin. "Alice? Did your husband hurt you?" Keller asked her. Alice smiled at him and laughed.
"I'm not married." She said. "The Tall Man did this to me, a few nights ago. So now I want to make sure nothing bad happens."
Keller looked past her shoulder and into her apartment. It was covered in similar little trinkets like the one she gave Amy. She was even wearing two of them around her neck.
"I put them up this morning." she said.
"Why?" he said as he looked her in the eye.
"So he can't get in." Alice said. "Take my warning to heart, Mr. Keller, so long as Amy wears that necklace, or has it, then he can't touch her. She's safe."
"Safe from what?" Keller asked her.
Alice slowly began to close her door.
"Do you want her face to end up on the missing children board at the local grocery store?" She whispered and then slammed the door shut. Keller pounded on the door for ten minutes, but Alice didn't answer it again.