The Man In The Shrubs

Close to our school there was a large terrain of nature, consisting of lawns and wood-like shrubbery. With the exception of the shrubs surrounding the actual school buildings, the shrubs in the surrounding parks of our little suburb were off limits during school hours. Of course, this did not prevent us from lingering in the Forbidden Shrubs after school, with the perfect excuse that we absolutely had to cut through them in order to not have to do a completely meaningless detour around them. It was during one of these afternoons in the shrubs (annoyingly enough, on afternoon when I was not part of the lingering committee) that the legend of the Dark Man emerged.
The name did not come from this supposed man’s complexion (no one had actually seen his face, as he, according to the tales, wore a large hat, and his face was all covered in soot) but because he wore black clothes bottom-to-top with the exception of an orange back pack. Apparently, three of my class mates were playing in the shrubs (or, according to the official version to the grown up, just cutting through) when this scary character, half man half creature, had jumped out of nowhere, causing all children to scatter faster than you could imagine possible.
I remember that the grownups didn’t seem to take too much notice on these first reports. Maybe they figured that it was just a figment of these children’s imagination, or maybe they just didn’t really think it was too important. In any case, the first sitings of the Dark Man were quickly forgotten. That is, they were forgotten by the grownups.
In the realm of the nine-year olds, however, the news spread like fire, and within a few days there had been even MORE sightings of this terrible, almost supernatural creature. The stories had the peculiarity of escalating as more of them emerged. One girl swore that he had approached her in the shrubs, hissing something in a strange, foreign language. A few boys claimed that he had exposed his thin, razor-sharp fangs at them. A few other children claimed that he had spent the night at their tree house, leaving the place full of ritual-type offerings of small animals. In short, this Dark Man was the author of all the nasty and abominable things a pack of nine-year olds can come up with.
The element of panic was eventually when news of these happenings came to reach the ear of the mother of one class mate of mine (Chairman of the PTA, housewife and an extremely devoted mother). This mother had a few months before distributed a dodgy-looking pamphlet (today known as chain-mail) warning children not to accept candy from strangers, as these could be part of this new gang of organized dealers, straight from the United States, specialists in hooking young children on drugs. In other words, if we ever saw a dodgy-looking character with some kind of foreign accent (American), insisting that we accept sparkling candy with dodgy names like “Fizzy Magic” we should run screaming the other direction.
Anyway, one evening, this mother got told by her kid at the dinner table (who probably, and completely unsuspectingly, told her mother, expecting the same “ooh”, “aah” reaction as she has gotten from the children at school) that there was some Dark Man running around in the shrubs just outside of school.
Panic.
Now, knowing how children can be, knowing how our sleepy suburb usually was (the biggest factor of danger was dying from boredom) she would probably have done best in actually filtering the information her child was presenting to her at that time.
But there is also the point of view that one can never be too careful.
The next day we woke to face a completely different world. The PTA had mobilized a so called “telephone chain” to inform parents that it was not safe at this time to let their children walk alone to school. To my delight (and my mother’s infinite irritation) I was driven to school that morning. In school, we were given yet another pamphlet to the attention of our parents, detailing the description of this Dark Man (Person? Creature? Crazy Shaman in search of victims?) and the encounters, experienced until present date (without the gory details in the nine-year-old version, of course).
The following few days all dodgy-looking persons scouted in the surroundings were under suspect, including the harmless hobos that probably had been hanging around, sitting on their park-benches by the supermarket longer than we had been drawing breath. Some parents I think chose to deem it all to be an exaggeration (my mother being one of them), and would still let their children play outside, and walk to school. Some parents didn’t. The police was phoned a couple of times (I remember a girl screaming that “we would all be heroes” when we saw a Local Police vehicle patrolling the area around the shrubs).
Us children found all the excitement very thrilling and were happy to continue to contribute more stories to the ears that wanted to listen, until it became a must to have seen the Dark Man (those who hadn’t were losers). As for me, the only thing I ever saw was an old mattress amongst the shrubs that could have gotten there for a million other reasons. In my version, I had found the Dark Man’s secret lair.
What’s more, I lived to tell the story.