Everyone is afraid of something, and those fears tend to adapt and change as we grow older. Little kids are scared of bedsheet ghosts and Count Dracula; teenagers are scared of serial killers and mass murderers; adults are scared of the unforgiving harshness of day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck life.
For as long as I can remember, my fear has never changed. I’ve always been afraid of the No-Man.
The No-Man was an urban legend created for— and by— the kids of the small town I grew up in. The stories didn’t start spreading around until I was in the third grade, when Tommy Evans, a kid in the grade below me, vanished one day on the walk home from school. And when I say vanished, I mean he was gone without a trace. In most daytime cop shows, there’s always some crucial piece of evidence to get the heroes started: a single shoe left behind; tire tracks speeding away from the scene of the crime; a single dramatically-placed bloodstain in the center of the room. But with Tommy, there was nothing; as if he’d never existed to begin with.
As you might imagine, this practically upended our quiet suburban lives. Tommy lived a few blocks away from me, and our families were on good terms, even if we didn’t hang out much. His family was devastated by his disappearance, and so was mine; hell, so was everyone’s. The school shut down for a few days after the incident, with administrators correctly assuming nobody would dare let their child leave the house after what had happened. My parents used those days off from school to drill into my head the concepts I thought were common knowledge: stranger danger, and all that. I’m sure just about every kid in my school got that lecture, because when we all returned to school, each of us was more than a little rattled. That communal sense of confusion and unease, mixed with the naivete only a child can possess, led to the birth of the No-Man.
In simple terms, the No-Man was a boogeyman, our answer to what had happened to Tommy Evans. He was a kidnapper, a stranger, every kind of person our parents told us to avoid all rolled into one. What set him apart, though, was that, true to his name, the No-Man was untraceable. No name; no pictures of any kind; no birth certificate. But the legends we concocted went a lot deeper than that. You see, as the stories were passed from kid to kid, grade to grade, the No-Man’s level of anonymity became mythical. No hair; no fingertips… no face. He didn’t bleed, he didn’t leave footprints, there wasn’t a single thing that could be traced back to the No-Man. For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost, but we knew that wasn’t true: ghosts weren’t real, but something took Tommy Evans and left no trace. The No-Man was our collective coping mechanism. We didn’t have to spend our time wondering what happened to Tommy– we knew. The No-Man had gotten him; that’s why there was nothing to be found.
Was this a morbid way to treat the disappearance of a peer? Absolutely. Even writing this down, I can’t help but wonder to myself what the hell we were all thinking. But we were children, faced with a horrible reality that we couldn’t possibly be equipped to handle, much less understand. It was comforting to “know” what happened, even if the story we told was far too macabre for children our age; it beat not knowing, and potentially never knowing.
The tension surrounding Tommy’s disappearance never really went away; it was the biggest controversy our little town had ever experienced, after all. But as the years went by, the pain and discomfort began to dull, and stories of the No-Man were swapped less and less. Every once in a while, his name would be brought up jokingly whenever someone claimed to have lost something, and it was oddly comforting to know that even as we passed through middle school and high school, the kids in my class still held onto that weird urban-legend-turned-inside-joke. It unified us, and just as it had once been a relief to understand the No-Man, it soon became a relief to leave him and his world of mystery behind, as we all began our preparations for the next chapter of our lives.
Until it happened again.
The summer we graduated high school, nearly a decade after Tommy Evans went missing, the same exact thing happened to Lexi Hall: gone without a trace. Lexi was in my grade, but I had never really gotten to know her. I knew she was on the cheerleading team, and that she graduated in the top 10% of our class; I also knew that, like Tommy, her disappearance shook everyone to their core. We had just graduated— we had barely even taken our first steps towards the next part of life— and knowing that one of us would likely never see those days still puts a pit in my stomach when I think about it.
When someone passes away, you can scrape together the tiniest bit of solace in the fact that there is closure: that that person is no longer suffering. When someone disappears, the friends and loved ones of that person have no such luxury, if you could even call it a luxury. You’re left wondering what might have happened, and what might happen still: after all, that lack of closure means that just about anything is possible, from the best news to the most horrifying. As a recent high school graduate, my brain was significantly more developed than it had been when Tommy went missing, and I understood the ramifications of Lexi’s disappearance much better than I did back then. We no longer needed the No-Man to fill in the blanks for us: something bad had happened, and it wasn’t the fucking boogeyman that did it.
Another year went by. I’d gone to a local college, and I came back home that summer to find that Lexi’s disappearance did not fade away as easily as Tommy’s had. The streets were devoid of children (and entire families for that matter) the moment the afternoon sun began to set. By night, it was a ghost town: no shops stayed open late anymore, and the only cars on the road passed right through town, never stopping. For the people who’d built their lives there, my family included, it was a prison: for a bunch of college kids hopped up on autonomy and self-importance, it was a playground.
I don’t know what compelled us to do what we did that night. Like I said, it was probably the ego trip that comes with living on your own for the first time; thinking you’re an adult; that the problems of your little town aren’t really yours anymore. One August evening, under the empty cover of night, I met up with a group of my hometown friends: Jack, Sarah, and Ricardo. We’d all gone to different schools, but had stayed in touch to make summer plans: when we all got home and found out that the town was dead after dark, weekly midnight smoking sessions became routine. One of those nights, we admittedly got a little too high for our own good, and started tossing around ideas of ways to kill time.
“Let’s play hide and seek!” one of my friends (I honestly can’t remember who) threw out. The rest of us were quick to dismiss the idea at first… but it was compelling. With nobody else out, we could go practically wherever we wanted and do practically anything; the perfect ingredients for a game of hide and seek, or so my younger, higher self thought. We drew up a quick list of rules: anything outdoors was fair game, and to spice things up, that included backyards– so long as the person hiding understood that they’d have to avoid more people than just the seeker. We also set a hard 20 minute time limit, since the seeker would have to cover a lot of ground and would probably get bored before too long; after 20 minutes of seeking, anyone they didn’t find would have to come out, returning to a meetup point that we’d agree on in a group text after the fact.
One shitty streak of luck in rock paper scissors later, and I was up first as the seeker. I closed my eyes and counted to 60 as my friends scattered. I remember feeling uneasy as their hurried footsteps grew quieter, and I found myself alone on a darkened street. Scary stories from my younger days crept back into my mind, but I was able to keep them at bay: I was having fun with my friends, what could possibly be scary about that?
Jack never was good at hide and seek; I found him crouched behind a pickup truck parked not half a block away from where we’d started the game. He tried claiming that he intentionally didn’t put any effort into his hiding spot, but I could see a bewildered disappointment on his face that said otherwise. He jogged to the nearby park— where we’d all meet when the game was over— as I continued searching the empty streets for my remaining two friends.
By the time I found Ricardo, it had been about 10 minutes since the game started. His hiding spot, admittedly, wasn’t much better than Jack’s– he was laying prone under a bench on the sidewalk. Still, he’d had the good idea to run a lot farther than Jack did, so it took me a while to find him; once I did, I was just about ready to call it a night, even though I knew Sarah was still out there somewhere. As Ricardo made his way back to where Jack was waiting, I shot Sarah a discreet text, seeing if I could bargain my way into ending the game early. No response.
Fine, I thought as I kept walking, we’ll play the long game.
The long game, though, wasn’t very long at all, as 20 minutes rolled around much quicker than I’d anticipated. Eager to get back to Jack and Ricardo, I opened Sarah’s contact once again, going instead to a facetime instead of a text. As I waited, looking at my own shadowy reflection on the phone screen, I noticed something: very faintly, as if coming from a distance, I could make out Sarah’s ringtone under the repetitive buzzing of my own phone trying to reach hers. She was nearby! I kept trying to facetime her, following the ringtone’s tune until I watched a slim figure dart from behind a bush and clamber over a wooden picket fence, her phone buzzing all the way as she dropped down into the yard.
Gotcha!
I trailed slowly, not even caring that she’d ignored my call and that the game was going on longer than we’d planned; it was more fun now that there was an element of stealth on my end. I climbed over the fence as quietly as one can do such a thing, and I crouched low after landing on the dry grass of some rando’s backyard. It was your standard suburban yard: not necessarily vast, but open enough that there were few places to hide. I crouch-walked forward a little, not entirely sure where Sarah had gone… until I saw the hatch leading down to the house’s basement, flung wide open.
“Goddammit,” I muttered under my breath. We’d agreed that yards were the most risky we were going to get with our hiding spots, because at least then we’d be able to run away easily if we were caught by the homeowner; going into someone’s basement was the exact opposite of that. I had no choice but to assume that Sarah had zoned out when we went over that part of the rules. I looked up at the house: no lights were on, which at least seemed to be a good sign. Still, this was significantly more of a risk than I had wanted to take when I agreed to play this game. Moving as slowly as I could without standing still, I stopped at the edge of the hatch, peering down into the impenetrable blackness of the basement.
“Sarah,” I whispered through gritted teeth, “c’mon! I know you’re down there, so just come out before someone hears us!”
No answer; at least, not in words. After I whisper-shouted to her, I heard soft, shaky breaths coming from the basement, punctuated with a whimper that made my stomach lurch.
“Sarah…?”
Foregoing my better judgment, I rested one foot on the first step, wincing as it creaked under my weight. Still keeping low, and using my flip phone as a makeshift flashlight, I made my way down the basement steps, where I was immediately overtaken by a dank, musty odor that nearly made me gag. In a lot of the horror stories I’ve read, the main character realizes they’re in deep shit the moment they smell something horrible: the smell of rotting flesh, or metallic blood or something like that. What I was smelling wasn’t as immediately recognizable as a herald of horror: it just smelled like a poorly maintained basement, one I hadn’t expected to be breaking into that night. What really got me was when I held my phone out in front of me, only to be greeted by Sarah’s face mere inches from mine.
“Jesus!” I exclaimed, briefly forgetting that I had to be quiet as I fell backwards onto my ass. Sarah just stared at me, her lip trembling, tears streaming down her face.
“Are you ok?” I asked, much quieter now. She shook her head, gesturing openly at the room in which we found ourselves. My eyes were somewhat adjusted to the darkness at this point, and I could make out a workbench in the far corner with a mass of posters on the wall above it. I raised my phone to the wall, and my heart seemed to stop in its chest.
The workbench was covered in rusty, mistreated tools: a hammer, a drill, a pair of pliers. And on the wall above were dozens— maybe even hundreds— of photographs of Lexi Hall. Some were yearbook photos; some were promotional pictures of her and the rest of the cheerleading team; some were printed right off her Facebook account. They papered the wall, the smiling visage of the missing girl lending a horrifying implication to the tools which sat beneath her perverse altar.
“What the fuck…?” I whispered, more to myself than to Sarah, who let out another whimper behind me. Whoever’s house we were in, I was certain they were the one who was responsible for Lexi’s disappearance: what the hell else can you conclude from a scene like that?
Without saying a word, I grabbed Sarah’s arm and pulled her back towards the open hatch, squeezing her tighter as I heard the unmistakable sound of someone stirring in the room above the basement. It was only a matter of time before we were found out. We bolted up the stairs, the humid night air assaulting my face as I ushered Sarah towards the fence, back the way we’d come. After helping her scramble over it, I made it about halfway up the fence before my brain started screaming at me to turn and look back at the hatch. I’m not sure if it was morbid curiosity or survival instinct, but I felt the unexplainable need to look to see if we were being followed. I waited, sucking in huge gulps of air as the steps began to groan under the weight of our pursuer.
When I saw what came out of that basement, I felt like I was going to scream, but I didn’t– I cried. Tears streamed down my face as I felt myself reduced to a helpless child before him.
He was tall, and his naked skin was nearly pink with hairlessness. The tips of his fingers were blackened, and murky crimson soaked through the bandages wound tightly around his face.
No hair; no fingerprints… no face.
He was exactly as our stories had described him, and even though he didn’t have eyes to see me with, I could tell that he was looking right at me. He stood on his tiptoes as he approached, moving with almost cartoonish stealth, the way a spy would in a children’s show. Slowly, but surely, he was coming towards the fence; towards us.
“Alex!” Sarah called to me, having regained her composure since our escape. She grabbed the fence, and before I could utter a word of warning, she lifted her head over to see what I saw. “What are you waiting–”
Sarah, I suppose, didn’t have the same inability to express fear that I seemed to, because when she saw him, she screamed to wake the dead. She jumped down and grabbed the back of my shirt, nearly yanking me off the fence; now she was the one pulling me along as we raced down the street, never once looking back. There were no noises behind us to indicate that we were being chased, but Sarah and I knew better than to assume that meant we were in the clear. We ran all the way back to the park, not stopping until we nearly collided with our concerned friends. Ricardo was yelling something about being late to Sarah and I, but it sounded like a distant ringing in my ears, one I easily tuned out as I turned back to look at the park’s entrance.
There was no one there.
****
The house that Sarah and I had broken into that night belonged to Albert Evans, father of Tommy Evans. He was arrested that same night, after a neighbor had called in a noise complaint when Sarah screamed. According to his testimony, he had been obsessed with Lexi since his son had her over for a playdate when they were seven, the fucking pedophile. After police discovered a body buried in a hidden sub-basement of his house, Albert Evans was charged with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Lexi Hall… and of his own son, Tommy.
When my next semester of college started, I didn’t go back home for a single day, choosing instead to rent an apartment over the summer. Jack and Ricardo had the same idea, and since we graduated our respective schools, I haven’t seen them in decades. I haven’t seen Sarah in decades either, but we still keep in touch from time to time. She quit smoking and put herself through the police academy, now serving as the sheriff of my old hometown; ironic, considering how many run-ins with the law we used to have in our younger days. But I really am happy for her, and I’m glad she’s found a way to make living in that town bearable for herself; god knows I couldn’t.
Like I said, a concerned neighbor is the one who called the police, and only once Sarah and I were already making our escape; the only people who know that I was there in Albert Evans’ basement are Sarah and my therapist (and now you, I suppose). My therapist keeps insisting that what I saw was a manifestation of my old trauma response. My brain couldn’t handle the reality of what I’d stumbled upon, so it returned to the coping mechanism that once easily explained such a thing to my adolescent mind. It returned to the No-Man. She tells me that Sarah and I both saw Albert Evans that night,, but that we both substituted him for the No-Man as a way to spare our psyches the pain of the harrowing situation we were in.
I’m not so sure, though. I’ve turned that night over in my head countless times since it happened, and no matter how I look at it, there’s always some part or another that doesn’t add up. When I was in Albert’s basement, I found evidence of his crime: the tools and the photographs; the murder weapons and their victim. Albert’s… DNA was found in the body discovered in his sub-basement, which was eventually identified as that of Lexi Hall. All that is to say, Albert Evans was not untraceable. He left evidence so easily accessible that a trespassing teenager discovered what he had done before the police ever caught on.
But Tommy, though… To this day, there’s still no trace of Tommy Evans. From what I heard, police searched the whole house, not just the basement. Nothing. That’s the part that always rubs me the wrong way. If Albert really was responsible for both disappearances, why was one so meticulous and the other so sloppy? I believe that Albert kidnapped, tortured and murdered Lexi Hall– but I believe that that’s where his involvement in my town’s history of disappearances ends. It’s easy to tack the blame for Tommy onto him: it was his own son, and the lines between his case and Lexi’s were so clear that they practically drew themselves. So why was nothing about Tommy ever found? Why did he well and truly disappear?
I’m not writing this to try and convince you, or as a distanced reflection of a time long passed. I decided to finally write this all down because I’m trying my best to work through a phone conversation I just had with Sarah about an hour ago. We usually call every two months or so, usually so she can fill me in on the local gossip, even though I’ve long since stopped recognizing the names she drops.
This call, though, was different. She answered the phone in a shaky voice, telling me that she was calling from the station as she worked her way through a case that had just opened up. A young mother called the police earlier that afternoon in hysterics, reporting that her son had gone missing after she took her eyes off him for a moment at the park; the same park where I saw my friends for the last time. I held the phone in a trembling hand as memories began pouring back into my brain, all the memories I recalled here. I asked her a question that, in hindsight, I felt I knew the answer to as soon as it left my trembling lips.
I asked Sarah if she or her fellow officers had found any leads or evidence as to the missing boy’s whereabouts. Her answer, one simple word, sent a chill throughout my entire body.
“No.”