It was a sunny day at the beach. My son, Tyler, was out playing in the waves. I could hear his laughter from my spot under our blue-and-white umbrella.
Suddenly, I heard my son shriek. He was pointing at something out in the open waters. “Tyler?” I exclaimed, fear jolting my body into a half-standing position. “Ty, what’s wrong?”
“There’s a bad man,” the six-year-old yelled, facing me now. “There’s a bad man in the water.”
“I don’t see anybody,” I tried to reassure him. “There’s nobody out there. It’s okay.”
He turned back to the water. “Oh. He’s gone now, Mommy,” he said.
“See? Nothing to worry about.”
I turned my attention back to George Orwell’s 1984, the novel gripping my attention until, about five minutes later, I heard Tyler once again cry out. “Mommy! The bad man’s coming closer! He said he wants to hurt me!” He ran back to snuggle close to me, his damp little body quivering.
I tried as hard as I could to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing out there. Nothing except some seagulls and the gently heaving waves. My child, however, looked extremely agitated. “Tyler,” I sighed, “do you want to go home?”
He nodded. “The man’s gone now,” he mumbled. “But I wanna go home.”
“Alright.” I ruffled his salty hair and set about cleaning up the site.
It was only three minutes later that I felt a chill run up my spine and Tyler whispered, “Mommy, the bad man is right behind you.”
Needless to say, I picked up my son, dropped my picnic basket, and ran for it.
At the gate at the top of the steep sandy hill, an old man stood watching us. “Ah, another one saw him,” he chuckled wheezily.
“W-what?” I panted, trying to catch my breath.
“Didn’t you know? Thirty years ago the murderer of fifteen children drowned here, when one of ‘is victims dragged ‘im down with ‘em. The guy used to drive ‘is boat out into the middle of the waters, grab ‘is victims, weigh ‘em down, and drop ‘em in, but the story goes that one of the kids grabbed onto ‘is coat and pulled ‘im in as they fell. Since then, there ‘ave been stories of kids who ‘ave seen this man coming for them, and some ‘ave even heard ‘is threats.”
I shivered. “Come on, Tyler. Let’s go home.”
We walked back to my car. I clutched his hand a little tighter than usual.