The Tall Man in the Brimmed Hat Stands Where My Closet Used to Be

I have moved twice since the first time I saw him, and he moves with me, which is the detail that keeps me up now, more than the freezing, more than the fear.

Let me go back. The first apartment had a closet in the bedroom with a door that never shut right. I mention it because for a while I thought that was the whole explanation. I would wake in the night unable to move, that classic locked feeling, and there in front of the closet would be a tall figure, a man shaped darkness in a wide brimmed hat, standing with what looked like his hands folded in front of him. Patient. Just watching. And I thought, it is the coats. It is the coats on the hook and the door left ajar and my half asleep brain making a bogeyman out of laundry.

So I cleared the closet. I hung nothing on the door. I even took the door off its hinges one weekend, feeling foolish, and leaned it in the hall.

The next time I woke frozen, he was standing exactly where the closet had been, and there was no closet, and there were no coats, and he still wore the hat.

I need to describe the freezing for anyone who has not had it. You surface into your bedroom, everything correct and familiar, and you go to sit up and discover there is no you to do the sitting. The command goes out and nothing receives it. Your eyes rove because eyes still work, but your neck is stone, your arms are stone, and your chest has a pressure on it like a hand testing how much you can take. And in that state, unable to run, unable to shout, unable even to close your eyes, you are made to look at whatever is in the room with you.

What is in the room with me is the man in the hat.

He does not lunge. In three years he has never come closer than the far wall. That is almost worse, because it means whatever he is doing, he is in no hurry to finish it. He stands. His hat is wide, the brim low, so that where the face should be there is only a deeper dark. His hands, if they are hands, stay folded. And he watches me not move.

I have read the forums. I know I am not the only one. That is the part I cannot make peace with. Strangers across the world, people I will never meet, describe the same tall figure, the same hat, the same folded stillness at the foot of the bed or against the wall. The tidy explanation is that the human brain, thrown into paralysis and terror, reaches for the same primal template, a watching man, a predator shape, and dresses him the same way. I find that explanation genuinely comforting at two in the afternoon.

At three in the morning it comforts me not at all, because at three in the morning he is right there and he is specific. There is a notch in the brim of his hat, front left, like it was crushed once and never fixed. My brain did not invent a notch. My brain does not do detail work like that. The notch is the same every time, in every apartment, and it has followed me across two moves and a hundred and forty miles.

The last time, in this apartment, the newest one, I tried something. I could not move my body but I found I could move my eyes deliberately, and I stared straight into the dark under the brim, into the place where a face should be, and I held it, refusing to look away, thinking maybe if I confront it, it breaks, maybe eye contact ends the spell.

The dark under the brim shifted. Just slightly. The way a head tilts when it is pleased you finally looked.

Then my body came back and I was alone and gasping and the wall was just a wall.

I keep a notebook now, by the bed, and every time it happens I write the date and one line. Same man. Same hat. Same notch. The list is getting long. I am not writing it as evidence for anyone else. I am writing it so that on the night he finally takes a step, I will have a record of exactly how many years of standing still it took him to decide I was worth the walk.