The Dot ted Man
By the bestselling author, and winner of 2017 Booker Mann Prize, Seb Rogers
When I was a child, my mother told me stories about a man. A man with a red face and long, sharp nails. It scared me. I would always lie awake at night. My mother, Judith, was a cruel woman. My brother, Jonathan, and I were afraid of her, she used to be nice and caring to everyone, but then our father died, and everything changed. My mother was strange and always whispered under her breath. She talked to herself a lot and smashed all the mirrors in the house. The time had come where I and my brother had to go to school, it was a relief to get away from that monster of a mother. We boarded at school and the days were long and hard, we didn’t have a lot of money and it was the only education we could afford although every day in the afternoon my friends went to play cricket in the fields.
It had been almost four months since me and my brother left home. I had no news of my mother until February 22nd. My mother was dead. Me and Jonathan had to go back for her funeral, we didn’t want to, even though she was our mother we never liked her one bit. She used to beat and hurt us. We arrived at the cemetery a few hours later, we said a few words and so on, but something didn’t feel right. There was something wrong. No one at the funeral knew how she died. I didn’t know half the people there, some were old, some were young, but there was one individual that stood out among the rest. It was a man, a very tall one, around seven foot I’d say. His face was almost invisible to me all I could see was a slight tint of red.
Later that evening, I told my brother about what I had seen, I said it looked just like what our mother had told stories of. We were scared, we had no idea what to do. We went back to the school. All the other boys asked us how we were how we felt, it was tiring and tedious. I washed my face in the sink at looked up at the mirror. I saw my face was covered in blood, I quickly washed it off to find that there was nothing there all along. I thought I was going mad. It kept happening, I kept seeing things that weren't there. Every mirror I looked in I saw something horrible. I saw death, I saw pure evil. In the morning I had English and math. I hadn't had much sleep the night before and I was very tired. I hadn't had much sleep since my mother's funeral. Nights were the worst. Every time I tried to go to sleep, I saw the man. The man with a red face and long fingers. He stood over me at night. He crept into my dreams, turning every one of them bad. It was like a living hell.
One day I was playing cricket with my friends. I saw the man standing in the corner. I ignored it and kept on playing. I whispered underneath my breath “go away, you are not real, you only exist in my head.” I couldn’t stop it. It was torture. Every day it got worse and worse. It started to become not only in my head. I woke up with scratches on my face and cuts in my skin. It was painful. There was blood trickling down my shirt, and I had to hide it from the others. I was scared and had no idea what was happening. I was going crazy. I had to make it stop. I smashed the mirrors in my room and I locked myself in for days on end. The teacher tried to burst in, but eventually stopped and let me off as my mother had passed away recently. No one had seen me in three days. They brought food up to my dormitory and let me eat it in there.
Everything was dark and painful for so long. I could barely breathe. I was only thirteen years old. This was hell. I could hear voices in my head. He said only one thing. “I am the dotted man.�