by Phoebe Locke
The Tall Man takes daughters, she thought often, alone in the house, but what does he leave behind?
She swung the car into a space down the street from the school. Another kindness of Miles’s; it had always been his preferred method of killing. And so she had the car each day while he trotted dutifully to the station to catch his train to work, satchel slung across his body like a paperboy and extra-large travel mug steaming in the milky morning light.
Climbing out of the car, she couldn’t help thinking of those long walks to public libraries, the clunky old computers with their dial-up internet. She had watched over her family, she had. Even if she would never let them know it.
There was no other traffic around and a scream rose out of the distant burble of playground sound. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands and walked towards the school, listening, as she always did, for small footsteps behind her.
At the fence, she clung to the chain-links and watched the figures in the distance as they mooched and stumbled around the playground. She tried to seek Amber out but her gaze kept catching on others – on girls with their heads tipped back in violent laughter; on boys with their hands thrust in their pockets, shoes scuffed moodily against walls.
‘Fascinating, aren’t they?’ The voice smooth beside her. The skin on her arms prickling into goosebumps as she turned.
It was a woman’s voice and this was new. She was small and thin, dark hair cut sharply around her jaw. Beige capri pants and a Breton top, her Birkenstocked feet flecked with grass. The bangles around her wrist tinkled as she took a step back and returned her gaze to the playground.
Sadie blinked at her. ‘I—’
‘Which one belongs to you?’ The woman smiled. The Tall Man takes daughters.
She scanned the playground, finally finding Amber on a bench, clicking through her phone while a girl beside her tried to get her attention. ‘Amber,’ she said, pointing, though whether she was confirming it for herself or this stranger she couldn’t be sure.
‘Oh! How strange,’ the woman said, the bangles jangling again as she smoothed her hair behind one ear. Sadie waited for the inevitable warning. She’s mine now, perhaps, or That’s not a girl there, can’t you see? But no – she was gesturing to another girl on the bench. ‘That’s Billie, my daughter.’ The tall, dark-haired girl from Amber’s birthday. Sadie watched as she rose, offering a tube of sweets to Amber, who took one without looking up from her phone. When she looked back, the pale hand with its bangles was extended towards her.
‘I’m Leanna,’ the woman said.
‘Sadie.’ Her own hand felt clammy and hot in the cool grip of Leanna’s. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ These phrases and social routines were slowly coming back to her, a language she’d learned that had become rusty with misuse.
‘We’re new in town,’ Leanna said, her hand returned to her and her arms folded across her lean body. ‘I worry about her, I know that’s silly. Sometimes I like to just check up on her – I don’t make a habit of peering through playground fences, I promise!’
Sadie laughed because it felt like she was supposed to, the sound jarring against the glittering of the bracelet and the far-off roar of the children. ‘Amber forgot her key,’ she said, surprised at how easily the lies still came. ‘I dropped it off at reception for her.’
The bell rang then, the more eager of the kids streaming into the school’s buildings while the others drifted across the playground. Sadie took an uncertain step back.
‘You know,’ Leanna said, ‘it’s been such a relief that Billie’s found a friend like Amber.’
Sadie wished that her first reaction wasn’t Really?
‘Have you moved far?’ she asked instead. The two of them had, by unspoken agreement, started to walk away from the school.
‘Yes, from up north,’ Leanna said. Her voice had a trace of several accents though Sadie – who had had her own fair share – could not pick out and follow the thread of any of them. ‘Listen.’ She stopped walking again, suddenly looking uncertain. ‘Maybe this is a strange thing to ask, but would you like to come over for a glass of wine tomorrow night? Billie’s having Amber over for a sleepover – I’m sure she already told you – and, well, I don’t know any other women in town yet. I’d love the company.’
Sadie looked around, though they were in a patch of bright light, no shadows to be seen. It was possible, of course, that Leanna had heard the rumours, that she wanted to get up close to crazy and have the story to tell. But her face was earnest, nervous even, and Sadie thought of the eager way Billie had bounded after Amber outside the leisure centre. She thought of Miles’s gentle suggestion, the other day at breakfast – perhaps this woman really did want a friend. She thought of those early days alone, that damp cottage, and how she had ached for company. She had been good, then, in those first towns. She had not allowed herself it.
‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘I’d love to.’
10
2018
Amber is late, just as she was late yesterday. She’s also decided that today, day four of the shoot, she does not want to be filmed in her room. So Greta, Tom and Luca wait in the windowless lobby, its chairs upholstered in wet-looking velvet, the wallpaper glimmering in the dim light of the pendant lamps.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Luca says, after they’ve been sitting there for thirty minutes. ‘I’m going for another smoke.’
Greta and Tom watch him leave, the door letting in a brief chink of bright light before it’s sucked shut again.
‘Think we should have a word with her about timekeeping?’ Tom asks.
‘We could ask Federica to. But it’ll probably only alienate her, telling her off about stuff.’
Tom shrugs, reaching down to check through one of the pockets on his camera case. ‘I get the impression she hasn’t had much of that, the last couple of years.’
‘No.’
‘Also not sure there’s much point asking Federica to play Mum from five thousand miles away.’
She grimaces. ‘Yeah, there’s that.’
He leans back in his seat, satisfied that he has whatever he thought he’d forgotten. ‘It’s really harsh, by the way, her leaving you to sort all this out.’
‘Well. I guess I should make the most of it. See it as an opportunity or something.’
‘Yeah, as long as you can get her to give you the appropriate credit at the end of it.’
She smiles a humourless smile as they both consider the likelihood of that. ‘Hopefully the schedule today will mean we get some better footage. It’s hard interviewing her when she’s just come off a talk-show set – it’s impossible for her to answer without sounding really rehearsed.’
‘Mmm.’ Tom scratches the back of his neck, the edge of a tattoo she hasn’t noticed before peeping out from his T-shirt sleeve. ‘The stuff we’ve shot so far hasn’t come across as particularly natural, no.’
She sighs. ‘We’ll get there. I hope. Hey, I listened to that band you were talking about yesterday, by the way. So good.’
‘Yeah? I thought that was your kind of thing. They’re pretty cool, right?’
‘They’re amazing. I love all the sampling they use. And the sax! The sax player is awesome.’
He grins, a dimple appearing in one cheek. ‘I remembered you saying you liked jazz, thought you’d like his vibe.’
‘It was definitely an uplifting accompaniment to my Tall Man research.’
‘Bet he loves a bit of jazz, that guy,’ he says, the dimple disappearing as his smile turns mischievous. ‘A legend on the sax, I heard.’
‘I see him as more of a double bass man myself,’ Greta says, and even though she knows it’s wrong, it feels good to joke. It feels good to hear him laugh in the airless lobby with its slick tiled walls.
‘You’ll have to ask Amber,’ he says, and just like that, she doesn’t feel like laughing any more. He glances at his watch. ‘She really is taking the piss now.’
Greta wonders if it’s
wrong to hope Amber doesn’t show up; as if they’re at school and the lack of a substitute teacher will mean they can wander out and into the sunshine. She imagines diving into the overly chlorinated pool back at the motel, imagines collapsing on to one of the crappy plastic loungers with her book.
But then she imagines reading the first review of the first episode of this series, imagines adding it to her CV. Imagines telling her parents that another project she worked on has won an award. ‘I guess I should go up there,’ she says.
Tom pulls a face. ‘Get the receptionist to call up again. I’m sure Amber can put her own shoes on.’ His phone starts buzzing on the coffee table in front of them and he glances down at it. ‘I should take that. I’m going to go and find a paper and possibly another coffee too – want anything?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘OK if I leave all the stuff here with you?’
‘Sure.’
He answers his phone as he strides across the lobby, his greeting eaten up as he pushes open the door to the bar and restaurant. The door swings shut silently and then it’s just Greta and the receptionist, her long nails clacking against her keyboard.
Greta checks her own phone for the fifteenth time. For now, her inbox is quiet. Instead, she opens the browser and looks through some of the pages she bookmarked during last night’s research session:
The legend of the Tall Man can be traced back as early as the 1970s. An urban legend which began circulating around schools in England, it has several variants – the most popular is that of a man who murdered his disobedient daughters. This version of the Tall Man can be sought out by ‘good’ or ‘special’ girls – the legend goes that girls who offer presents and subservience will be rewarded with gifts of their own. In some versions of the story, these gifts are powers, while in others, they are guardians – often said to be ‘sent from the shadows’.
Nothing new here; Greta has read plenty of these summaries over the last six months. She clicks on to another one.
The first recorded instance of the Tall Man story is from a primary school in the north of England in 1972. It was written by a seven-year-old girl, Julie Young, who during an exercise about Father Christmas described him as ‘the tall man who comes in the night and gives presents to good people and takes away the bad people’. Her elder brother, Jonathan, thought this highly entertaining, and at Christmas that year, produced a handmade comic about the evil Santa, who he called ‘The Tall Man’. It was a single copy, passed around a couple of friends and joked about within the Young household – Jonathan and Julie were from a big extended family, and their cousins had great fun teasing their younger siblings about the Tall Man coming to take them away if they didn’t do what they were told.
She’s read similar accounts before, although none quite so detailed. She adds a note to one of the many memos on her phone to look into Julie and Jonathan Young, wondering how likely it is that she’ll be able to track down the original handmade comic. Federica will almost certainly ask; she might as well get the ball rolling now if she can.
This page also has several links out and Greta looks through them. One is a forum where people have posted their own Tall Man stories, pages and pages of them.
my bro sed tall man killd 2 girls on our street b4 i was born. dey found em in they treehouse an if u go there at nite u can hear em cryin
Anyone seen this story from Australia? Mother killed her daughter while she was sleeping – surely TM involved here?
my sister went missing when i was three. i think the tall man took her. i want to get her back.
Dis friend of mine acting so weird. How can u tell if TM changed sumone?
She moves on to the next link, an essay published in a psychology journal about the legend and several case studies of its effects on preteen girls. Its opening section focuses on Stow-on-the-Wold, a case from 1977 that Greta is also pretty familiar with now. A wave of children in the town suffering from the same recurring nightmare of a dark figure standing at the end of their bed, sometimes accompanied by another child. She’s also read the article that made the incident more famous – ‘Terror Comes to Town’, published in a popular cult magazine in 1989. Greta has been trying to get hold of the author, Gina Slater, once a resident of Stow-on-the-Wold and now a journalist at a respectable home and garden magazine, for weeks – only this morning Federica announced that she was going to give her another call; another piece of important legwork that can be carried out from the balcony.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ It should be impossible for someone with heels as tall and thin as hers to sneak up on someone in a tiled lobby, but Amber seems to manage it every time.
‘Not to worry,’ Greta says, standing up. ‘You all set?’
Amber’s hair is freshly blown out, big seventies-style waves falling around her face – though it remains a glossy beachy blond, Amber clearly having thought better of her more drastic bleach plans. Her lips are a matte melonish peach, her dress a pretty white gypsy style, one strap sliding down her arm. She smells of floral perfume but there is an undertone of something ripe and cloying. Greta wonders if the abandoned breakfast trays are still collecting in the corner of the room.
‘Anything interesting?’ Amber asks, nodding towards the phone clutched in Greta’s hand.
‘Just emails.’ Greta glances over Amber’s shoulder, hoping for Tom. No luck. ‘Did you sleep well?’
Amber shrugs. ‘I never sleep well.’ She looks at Greta and laughs. ‘Oh, not like that. Not because of . . .’ She shrugs again, glancing at her reflection in the mirrored back wall before returning her attention to Greta. ‘I’ve had insomnia since I was a kid. I hardly ever sleep. Not unless I’m drunk.’
‘Oh. That must be tough, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m used to it.’ Amber runs a nail around the edge of her top lip, gaze on the mirror again. She holds the nail up to her face, examines the excess lipstick caught under it. ‘So. Let’s go. What is it today? I swear, I did look at the schedule, but . . .’
‘You have your interview with Rolling Stone,’ Greta says. ‘Before that we thought we could maybe walk around, get some shots of you by the beach. Sometimes it’s nice to have footage of you just, you know, doing normal stuff – we can put some of your interviews in as voice-over that way, so it’s not always you looking at a camera.’
‘Cool.’ Amber takes a step closer to the mirror, the nail scraping into the corner of her mouth. ‘That sounds easy.’
‘Morning.’ Tom comes back through the concealed door to the bar, a paper folded under his arm. His Vans squeak on the polished floor, the receptionist looking up from her screen.
‘Hey, Tom.’ Amber turns away from her reflection, hair swirling out behind her. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes, thanks. You?’
‘Yep.’ Amber glances at Greta, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
‘Great.’ Tom looks at Greta too. ‘You ready?’
‘Yep. Let’s get going.’
As they step out into the sunlight, Greta tries to focus on the shoot; on the angles and the light and the thousands of variations Federica could decide she wants at any one time. She tries to remember that Amber is an eighteen-year-old girl who has recently been found not guilty of a murder charge, now capitalising on the notoriety that has brought her a seven-figure book deal and a media tour in the States. That Amber is being paid a generous sum of money to be filmed by their cameras, is not someone in need of looking after or protecting. An interviewee, a subject, a star. Not something to be afraid of.
But her mind keeps returning to a clearing in the woods, to a house full of shadows. To a photograph taken by a passer-by and splashed across the media, Amber with her clothes soaked black with blood, a police officer cuffing her hands in front of her. A dark space in the trees behind her, the light catching the bark of a dying tree and casting it as the edge of a face of bone, a toothless grin.
11
2016
Silly, really.
When Amber came down, she smiled at her mother and said: ‘Ready?’
And Sadie nodded meekly and took her keys from the table. It was easier than arguing, she told herself, and certainly did not mean she was afraid of a teenager. In the car, she glanced at Amber; freshly washed hair shining over an expensive-looking leather jacket that Sadie couldn’t remember seeing her wear before (this, though, did not generally mean that she hadn’t).
‘It’s weird that you’re coming,’ Amber said, looking over at her. ‘What are you even going to talk about?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sadie said, starting the car and trying for a joke, ‘probably you two.’
Amber raised a laconic eyebrow and turned to look out of the window.
‘What’s she like?’ Sadie asked. ‘Leanna, I mean. Have you spent much time with her?’
‘She’s nice.’ Amber glanced down at the phone clutched in her hand and began typing furiously, her nails clacking on the screen. When she was done, she resumed her vigil of the passing houses. The road ticked under the wheels, the old car groaning through its gears, and Sadie wondered if she should turn the radio on. She wondered if the silence felt as heavy to Amber as it did to her.
‘What are you girls going to do?’ she tried.
‘We’re going to watch this sick horror movie Jenna downloaded.’ Amber glanced over at her again and grinned. ‘Don’t tell Leanna, though? Please? She’d freak.’