The Hatman. (a work of short fiction)

This is a short story about a real phenomena that has become known as The Hatman. Many people around the globe have been terrified by visitations of this figure for decades, and it is almost always a harbinger of some future doom or catastrophe. Most think it is a shared hallucination wrought by sleep paralysis, but others think it is something far more terrifying. Whatever it is, all agree that witnessing it leaves them changed, and scarred. Have you see the Hatman?

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   "Do you know the worst thing about women? The very reason that you have to stay away from them? Has anyone ever told you that before?" The tall seventeen year old boy interrogated the smaller boy, "Have they? Have they ever told you the cruelest thing about women, and why you gotta be real careful with them?" 

The smaller boy lowered his eyes and shook his head. These types of questions always embarrassed him.  

"Good!" The older boy answered with relish. The two of them were standing in the yard of a large farmhouse, so old that it was said to have been used as a hospital for Confederate soldiers during the Civil war. They were standing directly under the mock shade of a rusted old basketball goals rim, and the direct August sunlight that burned down upon them carried a heat index of something like one hundred and twenty. Despite a six year age difference, the two looked very much alike, which was not surprising since they were brothers. Both had sandy blonde hair that was always cow licked, stereotypical blue eyes, and both were underweight for their age. They were altogether completely unremarkable boys when it came to looks, you could see a boy like them on every page of magazines like "Grits" or "Boys Life." Their only distinguishing features at the moment was that the younger boy was burning a deep shade of red that had nothing to do with the sun, and the older boy was grinning the grin of a man about to graciously impart some spectacularly esoteric piece of wisdom on a lesser, clearly undeserving vassal, but does anyway out of the immense size of the his own great heart. The older boy paused for a moment dramatically:  "The worst thing about women," he began majestically, "Is that where you and me, inotherwords men, while we have a sex organ," (at the actual enunciation of the dreaded word the young boys blush turned nearly altogether purple) "While we just are equipped  with a sex organ, women ARE a sex organ! That's right, they are. Do you know what I mean by that?"

 The older boy bent down and placed his hands on his younger brothers shoulders, who immediately pulled away.  "I can see that you don't." He continued, "That's... okay. I don't feel like giving a anatomy lecture today. Just trust me when I say that I know what I am talking about. That's why God wants you to be so careful around women. What you have hanging between your legs is very special, God gave it to you to make babies with, so that we could pass our seed on and create more people to glorify His Name. And that is the ONLY reason he gave it to us." 

The older brother stood up and started shaking his head, as if he was severely disappointed. "But lotsa people think it is for other things," he said, "Things that have nothing to do with making babies like... well...." He took a deep breath, as if considering how to approach a very vile subject; "Some of your friends may start talking about how they like to ... touch themselves.. .and how it feels. Have you..."  

"Please!" The eleven year old boy wailed, he thought he must have been having something like an asthma attack, even though he had never had one before, his chest was all tight and he could not breathe right, panic was setting in. "Please!" he choked out again.  

"Hey it's ok!" The older brother said, suddenly aware of the younger boys discomfort. "It's okay. I know that you are a good kid. I know you don't do nothing like that and don't have anything to do with anybody who does. We don't have to talk about it no more. Just promise me you will be careful around women okay? It's never too early to start. Even little girls can get you into trouble. They start young sometimes. It's not that I don't want you to not ever have anything to do with a woman! You are gonna have to get married one day, you better to prove to God that you are not queer, because queers burn in the Bad Place you know, no, on the contrary, God put women here for a reason. He took that rib out of Adam for a reason, not only to have babies, but to give men companionship: but only one woman for one man you here? And never never never anything physical until your wedding night. People who have premarital sex burn in the Bad Place too you know. You know that right?" 

 The boy, whose breathing had almost returned to normal, nodded vigorously.  "Good," the older boy smiled, "There is nothing wrong with sex you know, in fact it's just the best thing there is, when it's done the way God wants it, between a husband and wife. Why I tell you, I cannot wait when..." The older boy stopped speaking and his eyes glazed over for a second, he stared into the distance at the fifty acre hayfield and the bales of hay he still had to move, although his mind was clearly somewhere else. After a few seconds he seemed to wake up and looked down at his little brother, looking up at him.  "For when I get married." He finished. "But until then, I am not touching any girl. I wanna be pure for my bride, like we are supposed to, and I don't wanna go to hell and be tortured by demons for eternity, and I don't want that to happen t you either, it would break my heart if it did."  

The eleven year old shook his head until he felt like it would come off. "It's not gonna!" He said. "I am not gonna touch ANY girl until I am married! No way am I going to hell!" 

 "Good boy." The older brother smiled. "Women have a strong sex drive because they are sex organs, they will tempt you, they can barely control themselves around me. You just have to be stronger in your faith than their hormones are, that's all."  

"I can do it." The younger boy nodded, "I am not scared."  

"I know you're not. Cuz God is gonna be with you all the time. Now I gotta go move that hay, you gonna be okay now?"  The younger boy nodded again.  "Good. I will see you tonight at supper."  

 The boy stood and watched his older brother walk towards the twenty year old blue tractor parked at the bottom of the hill, the one with which he would use to move the hay. The farm they lived on could properly be called a farm only by those who were from a city and not acquainted with rural living, people in their area knew it for what it was: their fathers hobby. There was only eighty five acres of land to the property, and a mere twenty head of cattle and one bull grazed from that property, and these livestock animals was all there was to this tract of land being called a farm.

 It did not matter however, as the boys father was a veterinarian by trade and a good one, and it was this and his other hobby which paid the family bills, and not the small cattle farm. In truth, he kept the cows not only to amuse himself but as a way of teaching his sons the virtues of hard work, and to make sure that they spent more of their time out of doors than in, and to this end the little farm had done its duty.  

His other hobby was as a lieutenant major in the army national guard, and it was this hobby that had taken him seven thousand miles from his farm and his wife and sons, all the way to Iraq where he sweated in the desert sun daily and wrote long descriptive letters. He had been gone for six months now, and not any of them had any idea when he would be returning.  Each morning the three of them carefully avoided speaking of the war at breakfast, and would discuss instead his latest letter or the trip they were planning when he returned. No one had dared to wonder aloud what they would do if anything happened to him.   The boy's mother spent her days following much the same routine as she had before her husband had left, cooking the meals, cleaning the house, balancing the checkbooks and paying the bills and the part time farm labor, and generally moving the three of them through their days like they themselves were the armored helicopters her husband described riding in his letters, flying so high above the dirt and turmoil below them that no amount of war, nor debt, nor anxiety could sway their unwavering focus from their ultimate and inevitable reunion with her husband, when the four of them would become a single Whole again and when she would no longer wake up to a empty bed and splitting stress induced headaches. 

 The mother had spent the second semester of the last school year subbing at the local elementary school for extra money, and when the next school year started her prospects looked to be fairly good to fill in often for at least two teachers, a fact that caused the boy some consternation at the thought of seeing his mother in the hallways and cafeteria of his school, but for now it was July and the new school year might as well be a million years away.  

The boy ran from the yard around the side of the old farm house. The house was wooden and getting very close to needing a paint job, with the paint peeling off in many places. He stopped to roughhouse with a black and brown spotted dog of questionable pedigree who appeared suddenly from one of his many resting places away from the sun and leaped joyfully around the boy. The boy found a sturdy enough stick, picked it up and threw it for the dog, and called in vain three times for the dog to retrieve the stick and bring it back to him. When it became clear that the dog had no intentions of returning the stick and intended instead to lay down and chew on it, the boy grew bored of the game and climbed up the brick steps in the back yard which led to the kitchen of the house.

 He entered and saw his mother standing at the sink, washing dishes and loading them into the dishwasher.  "Get too hot outside?" His mother asked as he stuck his head under the sink faucet and prepared to drink. The paint on the kitchen wall was peeling yellow, and tiny flakes of it dropped on his head as he drank. 

After he had gulped loudly he looked up to face his mother, "Uh-huh, really hot." He noted his mother stood with her purse and the car keys in her hand. "Going into town?" he asked.  "Yes sir I am, would you like to come with me?" 

 He shook his head. Mother in town meant a near mind boggling amount of things he could do without having to worry about adult supervision. It was the closest he could come for years to true independence. His mother smiled, knowing of course that he enjoyed her trips away from home as much as she herself did, each was secretly glad to be free of the other for awhile. "Suit yourself Mister," she said, " Just don't spend all day playing those video games."  The boy made a face. "I have been outside like all day already." He said.  She knew. He was not an indoor type of boy, and while he liked the games like they all did, he would never turn down the outdoors on a sunny summer day. 

In reality, he would do absolutely nothing different while she was gone than he would do while she was there, but he relished the thought that if he were to think of something different, he may be able to do it. That was the driving force behind summer vacation too.  His mother smiled. "Okay, I am gone then," she said, then paused, "your father is going to call this afternoon, four o 'clock sharp, so be sure and be inside."  "Definitely!" He would not miss it. The boy loved his father, and they shared a profoundly, almost abnormally good relationship. Certainly better than the relationship any of his friends had with their own fathers. His father spent as much time as he could with his boys, and did his best to avoid embarrassing them as much as possible. The boy had no idea where his older brothers religious fanaticism had come from, but it wasn't his father, nor his mother. Both of his parents were church going Christians, as was everyone else he knew, but they were not pushy about it, and they never talked about all that embarrassing stuff about women and hell with him. Even so, while they did not encourage his older brothers Puritanism, they did not discourage it either. Better to be into the Lord, they probably thought, than drugs or alcohol like a lot of teenage boys were. 

 The Mother left, and the boy went to the kitchen window that looked out over the hayfield and watched as his older brother maneuvered the blue tractor expertly, driving the hay spike into bale after bale, and moving them under the shelter of the barn where the rain would not rot them. After a minute or so, he went and turned on his play station, and immersed himself in the dangerous world of Call of Duty. As he pumped bullets into pixilated enemies, he pretended he was his father, defending America from terrorists. It was a role he thought he would probably play in real life one day, and he couldn't wait. 

The day lazily turned into the afternoon this way, and before he knew it his mother was walking through the door, back already. He quickly saved the game and shut it off so he could not be accused of playing it all afternoon. He helped her put the groceries away. They waited, each making an effort to not stare at the phone.  The older brother came in from moving the hay at ten till four. Wordlessly they all crowded around the phone. 

They waited. The minutes ticked. Three fifty nine was upon them, and each was silently counting to sixty in their head. The clock changed over to four and the phone did not ring. They now freely stared at it as if any moment expecting something profound to occur. Four-o-one and the phone continued its silence, as if frozen in time. The boy began to fidget, but the brother stood still like a soldier at attention. The boy noticed how stoic he looked, and tried to emulate him. The mother said nothing. Two minutes after four and the phone still was silent, the mother quietly cleared her throat and checked her watch, just to make sure. The boy was now pushing back all the terrible scenario that were arising unbidden and unwanted in his imagination: his father lying dead in a desert ditch, his father blown to pieces in a truck, his father as a hostage about to be decapitated, myriad grisly death scenes involving his father were trying to worm there way into his mind, and each passing second made it more and more difficult to keep them at bay. 

Three minutes after four and his brother began shuffling his feet, looking questionably at their mother, who had fixed an icy stare at the phone. Four minutes after four, time had never moved so slow. The boy had now gone beyond the death of his father and was seeing the funeral in his head, his fathers casket would be draped with the American flag, a soldier who looked a lot like The Rock Dwayne Johnson would give a speech testifying how his father had saved his life and how he was the bravest man he had ever known, at which point his mother would faint. The Rock would look straight at the boy and say "You have a lot to live up to young man." The boy would nod gravely, and accept a second American flag for his mother, who was too distraught too, his brother would have been in the background, of no consequence.  

At five minutes after four the phone rang, shattering the silence. His mother answered before the first ring was complete. It was his father. Relief washed over his mothers face, and she motioned frantically for his brother to set up the laptop to receive the Skype video call. This was their routine. Three times per week their father would call at four o'clock pm, then after establishing contact, would then use skype to video call them so that everyone could see each other. Within moments the skype call went through and his fathers smiling face appeared on the screen. As always his father said very little about himself, preferring to question his boys about what was going on their lives. By the time his older brother had finished telling his father everything about his current activities with the church youth group, his fathers time was almost up. The boy had just enough time to take the screen to show his father his latest drawings, all which depicted a US serviceman planting the American flag of freedom in desert sands. "The soldier is you" he excitedly told his father, who retorted that his actual activities in Iraq were a lot more boring that the boy was envisioning. "Dad, don't be modest!" the boy laughed, there was simply no room for discussion that his father was anything but a Great Man. His father had laughed and gently urged the boy to get his mother on the screen. The boy did and stood in the background then, only half listening to his mother and father talk about adult things that he had no actual concern for. The word "bills" was thrown around several times and something about "tightening up the budget" but he was used to that. He had been hearing such talk from them as long as he could remember.  

After his father had signed off, he had skyped his friend, and told him all about his fathers latest call. Mostly, he told his friend about all the great adventures his father surely must be having, but would not tell him because his father would not want him to worry. He spoke in a low voice, he knew his mother would scold him if she overheard for "lying", and it's not like he did not know that it was wrong to lie, but in all truth he wasn't worried in the least that he was lying. He knew everything he was saying, from how his father had blown up a enemy tank with a single hand grenade, charging it bravely and tossing the grenade at the final second, to how his father had gone down into one of the dangerous god-awful "spider holes" and single handedly drug out a top enemy leader to bring him into the light of justice--he knew these things had actually happened in one form or another, and he had no doubt that his father would tell him about them when he got older.  

His friend expressed the appropriate admiration at his father's adventures, and wished aloud that his own father were "over there" being a hero too. The boy relished this a moment, and then told his friend for perhaps the two hundredth time that he himself could not wait to be eighteen so he could be right there with his father. His friend then asked when his father would be back, and if he would return to the veterinarian clinic. The boys throat tightened at this. He did not like being reminded of his father's profession. His father was a vet only when his country did not need him, but right now he was a soldier. 

"I don't know" he said, paused, and then said "I have to go now, Mom's calling."  The boy spent the rest of that day alternating between drawing and playing play station. That night they all had pizza and watched The Lord Of The Rings movie. He took a shower at nine thirty and prepared for bed. His mother had watched him brush his teeth for a moment and then said in a odd way, "Son, you know your father is only in the National Guard right? You understand he is not a full time military man?" The boy had looked oddly at his mother and nodded. 

She stood a moment, seemingly considering something, "It doesn't matter" she pronounced finally, "I am so glad you are as proud of your father as you are."  She left him then standing in the bathroom with a mouth full of Colgate, which he spit into the sink and washed his mouth out. He then went into his bedroom, lay down in bed, turned the light out, and closed his eyes.  The next thing the boy was aware of he was startled awake, and he was wide awake, completely unquestionable awake, yet he was also paralyzed. Not a single muscle would move in his body. Even his very eyelids seemed to be plastered open, staring very intently and singularly focused. And what they were focused upon was a sight his mind was having great trouble processing as being real. For, standing next to the boys bed and towering above him was the figure of a man. A very dark man wearing what appeared to be a long back riding cape and a absurdly wide brimmed large black hat, yet the boy could not ascertain specific details, the figure was too dark. Even with the lights turned out and the room itself completely dark, the figure of the tall man in the wide brimmed hat stood out in stark profile against the darkness of the room, where the room itself was the bluish dark of nighttime the man was stark black, the deepest black there has ever been, and a strong negativity exuded from him. The boy was mortally terrified, a type of fear he had never known was upon him. he had been scared before, even to the point where he thought he was scared for his life, riding roller coasters and once jumping off of a tall waterfall, but it was nothing like this. This was a fear for his very soul, as he stared straight into where the dark mans eyes should have been he realized the mans face lacked features, it was completely and utterly smooth, and so black it seemed to absorb all light into it like some kind of black hole. 

The boy experienced an overwhelming fear for his very soul, which until that moment he had never even given thought to, it was more or less just an ambiguous concept that was discussed in church and Sunday School, but surely was nothing that ever could have affected his real life? Yet this dark man with the wide brimmed hat was here, towering at least eight feet above his bed and he felt that the creature intended to seize his very soul and drag it back to hell with him. The boy stared helpless at the figure, unable to move, and it regarded him with malevolence. After an eternity, it disappeared, and the boy could move and breathe again, but he lay in bed, traumatized, convinced he had been visited by something terrible and unnatural. He looked at the clock. It was four a.m. sharp. The house was silent, then it wasn't. Then the phone was ringing, and his mother was answering, then she screamed, and he understood that nothing was ever to be the same.