It was such a simple, unremarkable scenario.
I was sitting alone on the beach, drinking a gin and tonic mixture out of a sprite bottle. (Don’t judge me, eh?).
It’s what I liked to do after work on Wednesdays. This was my idea of fun, apparently. Call it a mid-week escape.
Like I’ve stated, it was an ordinary day. So ordinary and uneventful in fact, that I ended up dozing off at some point. When I woke up, the sun was already setting. A lot of people don’t know this, but the sun actually goes down relatively early in LA. A little after 8 PM, to be exact.
I looked at my phone, which was had miraculously not been stolen at that point.
8:05.
It was late, but not time to head home just yet. The place was rather calming at night. When the overwhelming crowd noise was replaced by the distant, city din, and the moonlight begins reflecting off of the water, it really does feel somewhat serene.
9 PM. I’d leave at 9.
At 8:50, I decided to get up and start walking across the shoreline. The cool water brushing over your feet was a good feeling after having them on the hot sand for hours.
As I was walking, I noticed something shiny just ahead of me. When I got over there, it became apparent that it was just the label of a glass bottle reflecting the moonlight.
People who threw trash into the ocean always pissed me off. I moved over there and fished it out, planning on throwing it out where it actually belonged.
But… it was obvious that this wasn’t just somebody’s empty soda bottle. There was a rolled up piece of paper stuffed inside. In addition to that, it seemed to be wrapped in reflective tape. That’s why I saw it so easily.
A message in a bottle, I thought. Cute. Since it was dark outside, I decided to take it under a streetlight before reading it. I mean, it was probably just the messy ramblings of an elementary-aged kid or something. At any rate, I suppose that I thought it must have been interesting enough to take a look at before tossing.
But… what I read put me into a state of absolute incredulity. This is what was written onto the paper:
They were… coordinates, a date and a time. But I suppose what scared me the most was the actual message messily scrawled near the bottom.
“The man in black will be there, but please don’t go. There was nothing on the ship… there was nothing.”
Of course, this was all extremely hard to decipher. It looked as if the person who wrote this was rushing hard.
May 26th, 4: 00 AM, was the date written. That was today, I thought. Well, tomorrow actually, I suppose.
I simply stared at the paper for the longest time, trying to make some kind of determination regarding what the hell this was supposed to be.
But what was I supposed to think about this? A part of me wanted to simply forget about it. I mean, why should I care about some obscure message I found floating around in a bottle in the ocean?
But there was another part of me. The part that leads people into making bad decisions. We don't always fear the unknown. Sometimes, we're just curious about it.
That’s why I didn’t stop right there. I called up one of my buddies – Cillian, who I knew would be interested, and told him all about it. At first, he tried accusing me of writing the message myself in an attempt to trick him into this.
“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve heard in my life.” I remember telling him. Eventually, he relented. I guess he realized that his accusations were absurd.
At around 3:30 AM, we began heading over to the address. It wasn’t necessarily in a bad part of town. It was just in a relatively deserted part.
The address seemed to correspond to a small, abandoned strip mall that looked ready to be completely torn down. We parked all the way down the street, using nearby woods as cover as we made our way towards it. Eventually, we found ourselves directly across from the place, peaking at it through thick bushes.
In retrospect, this all should have seemed so childish. I mean, we were like kids spying on something restricted to us. However, we never questioned it at the time. The whole situation began feeling so… weird. The sensation of wrongness and ambiguous terror began mounting every second. I could tell that Cillian was feeling the same way. But none of us ever said anything.
So we just waited to see what would happen.
To our moderate surprise, a car pulled up on the other side of the street at exactly 4:00 AM. We watched as what we assumed to be a man hopped out.
Now… it was dark, so we couldn’t really make out the intricacies of his outfit. But he was probably in some kind of dark suit. What’s even weirder was that his face seemed… obscured, somehow. What I mean is that the moonlight should’ve illuminated at least some of his features. At one point, he even glanced in our direction (but not directly at us), for a few moments. But his face simply seemed to comprise of nothingness.
At the time we just chalked it up to the night. We simply couldn’t see his face because it was dark outside. I mean, that made sense, right?
However… the man stopped moving right after that. And I mean, he stopped. He was just standing, deathly still by his vehicle. This went on for what felt like an hour. In reality, it was only about 25 minutes. But still, who the fuck gets out of their car at 4 AM and stands still for 25 minutes?
Even weirder was the fact that he didn’t seem to be breathing. I mean, you could try standing as still as possible, but you can never be completely motionless, you know? Your chest would have to puff out intermittently, even slightly, from inevitable exhalation.
But he wasn’t doing that. It’s as if we were staring at a cardboard cutout.
At some point, it became less creepy and more disconcerting. Now, I’ve never heard about somebody passing out while standing up, but I suppose that strange things have happened (?).
Cillian says that we should go and see if the guy is okay. I call him a madman. After a brief argument, we hear something that breaks the silence. Footsteps.
The guy is walking towards one of the stores in the strip mall now.
Upon realization of this, we simply stare after him in sheer bewilderment.
So what the fuck was he just doing?
Even after the man has disappeared into the building, we still keep waiting. We weren’t ballsy enough to follow him inside, but we also weren’t scared enough to leave yet.
We were at some kind of shitty middle ground.
But after about ten minutes, we realize that we have no idea what the hell this guy’s actually doing in there. This meant that waiting for him to come out could be an overnight process. But I was getting tired. Work the next morning didn’t start until noon for me, but I still needed at least some rest.
We’re about to leave when a bloodcurdling female scream nearly makes my heart explode. It was… coming from the building. We’re in shock for the first few seconds, so we don’t take immediate action. It’s when the subsequent scream jolts us back into reality where we decide to dial 911.
“But what the hell are we gonna tell them?” Cillian asks me.
“Hell if I know.” I respond. “But we gotta do something, right?”
We make the call and the operator tells us that somebody will be over within the next twenty minutes. But the situation’s starting to seem more and more urgent.
“Please, help me now!”
Somebody’s calling out now. And it sounds like they’re in pain.
“Fuck it.” I hear Cillian mutter under his breath. He’s pulled a pistol out of his waistband.
“C’mon. Cops are slow.”
“Yeah, well I don’t have a gun, asshole.”
“Fine, then stay here.”
Before I can stop him, he gets up and starts bolting towards the mall. I realize that I need to make a decision within the next split seconds. So I run after him. Although he was an impulsive idiot, I didn’t want to see him wind up dead. Besides, I was pretty sure that he had no idea how to shoot that thing.
I caught up to him just as he was stepping foot through the entrance. The screaming and pleading was still going on, so we kept going deeper down the hallway. However, we had no idea where to go.
Wait. Why couldn’t we figure out where to go? The answer soon became obvious. The screaming had maintained the same volume ever since we entered. We couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Hell, I’m inclined to believe that the screaming was still as loud as when we heard it from the forest.
I think Cillian realized this at the same time I did. He dropped his gun for a second, and I could hear his breathing tighten. It was that exact moment where the screaming ceased altogether. Instead, it was replaced by a steady, rhythmic set of footsteps. But just like the screaming… we couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
Trying to create a better sense of direction in this suddenly claustrophobic space, I fumbled around in my pocket for my phone. Eventually I got it out and turned the flashlight on.
There was nobody in our perceptible vicinity, although I could still hear the footsteps. I mean, it sounded like they were coming from everywhere.
At some point, I managed to illuminate what appeared to be a message carved into the wall.
“WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?”
And then suddenly… we could see him. What I could only assume was the man in black.
He was wearing a suit. Black blazer, black shirt, black pants and black shoes. But… I couldn’t see his face. Not in the sense that he was wearing a mask, though.
In place of where his face should’ve been… there was nothing. I could see his ears and dark, slicked back hair, but his features were absent, covered by some kind of endless, empty space. It’s hard to acutely describe. But… that’s the closest depiction that I could’ve came to.
I could hear gunshots from behind me. Cillian was shooting at him. However… the bullets simply seemed to be consumed by the void taking up the "man's" head.
The man lunged forwards, but I managed to get out of the way just in time. Problem is… Cillian was standing right behind me. With seemingly inhuman strength, the man hastily grabbed and began dragging him down the hall.
I went after them, of course. But it seemed as if the two had quickly vanished into thin air. No more screaming, no more sounds of struggle, and no more footsteps.
I was left standing there, petrified to the core.
It wasn’t long after that until the police showed up. I told them what I saw. I have a feeling that they didn’t believe me. I was questioned extensively, but that yielded minimal closure.
They searched the entire place, but didn’t find his body. They didn’t find any bodies, in fact.
Cillian was declared missing. They tried to stick me with something, but ultimately couldn’t. I mean… I didn’t do it, after all.
The fucking man in black did.
However… they found him about 3 weeks later. Cillian, I mean. He was in the forest, clothes tattered and eyes bloodshot. They could barely get a coherent story out of him.
He simply kept saying that the man in black “took him somewhere terrible.”
That he would wake up in the woods every night, and that a strange woman would keep beckoning for him to come inside her cabin. He’d try running away from her, but the man in black would always be in his way.
In short, he’d gone insane. He won’t even talk to me when I'd go and see him. His crazed ramblings cease when I’m in the room, and he refuses to make eye contact.
I’m writing this because the man in black is still after me. I came home one night, to see my bathtub full. I only ever shower. I haven’t used it in years. There was a bottle floating on top of the water. A bottle with a message in it.
This time, it contained only a singular phrase:
“You follow me, and I’ll follow you."
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Credits
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