Four Blonde "Men"

We don’t know what they want. We just need them to leave. No, they’ve done nothing wrong, per se, but what they do seems ominous. I see no more children playing outside since their arrival. No one smiles and says good morning when walking down the street anymore. Everyone just seems so tense and scared. Yet, they’ve done nothing but watch and take notes. That’s all they seem to do, just observe with blank eyes and faces and write things down in their little notepads. We all feel like we’re part of an experiment no one consented to, and we just want it to end.

They arrived last month, on the 18th, I think. They moved down the street from me, the devils, and I didn’t think anything of it. We’d been getting a lot of expats from the city, tired of the fast-paced New York lifestyle and ready to settle down. Three new families had moved onto my street in the last year alone, so seeing moving trucks on my morning runs was a common occurrence. My neighbor Andrea and I usually baked cookies or brownies and brought them over to new neighbors to break the ice, and I made a note to do so when I saw the trucks that morning, assuming another family had moved in. Luckily, Andrea and I decided to wait a few days, to give the new family a chance to settle in. Who knows what would have happened to us if we had gone over to that house.

No one saw the new “family” until two days later, at the weekly farmer’s market. Four men, all of average height and build and dressed in identical navy blue suits and coke bottle glasses, walked together, looking at no one and writing in four identical red, leather-bound notebooks. They looked like quadruplets, all pale and blonde with the same slicked hairstyle, until you got close to them and saw their induvial facial features. I haven’t gotten close to them, but Andrea said their hair looked like it had been recently bleached, with white roots a few shades lighter than their hair. She had tried to say good morning to them and make small talk, but they only stared blankly at her, continuing to write without even looking at their notebooks, until she grew uncomfortable and walked away. She said it felt like they were examining her rather than looking at her. She wondered if they spoke any English, the way they stared at her.

They continued exploring our town since that day, either together in their group of four or split off into groups of two. They spoke to no one, giving anyone who tried speaking to them that same blank expression. Sometimes their writing would grow more furious as they stared, until the person backed away. Other times, they would stop writing all together, and whoever spoke to them was given the feeling that they had interrupted something important. None of the men ever spoke, not even to each other, and no one heard them cough, sneeze, or even utter a sound until last Thursday.

The kids in our town had started making fun of the weird men in suits, occasionally throwing paper or other harmless items at them in an attempt to provoke a reaction. The men either ignored the taunting and objects that hit their backs or didn’t notice them as they continued to scribble away, staring at cars, trees, houses, and other everyday objects with intense interest. That day, a small group of kids in my sister’s class, bored after having been let out of school for the day, decided to take the taunting to the next level. I watched from across the street as ten-year-old Joshua Thompson, egged on by his friends, ran past one of the men in suits, who happened to be staring at a mailbox, and grabbed the little red notebook out of the man’s hands. To the kids’ surprise, the man turned, mouth agape, and uttered an eerily inhuman noise of distress, his face remaining blank besides his open mouth. The man stared, dead-eyed at Joshua, who was now frozen in place with the notebook dangling from his hand, and keened like a deer in distress. Joshua dropped the notebook and fled, the other kids trailing behind him. I watched as the man walked over to the notebook, picked it up, and continued writing in it as if nothing had happened. Suddenly, he and the other men in suits looked up from their scribbling at the same time to stare at me, and began writing faster. I could feel their dead-eyed stares on my back as I turned and ran in the same direction the kids had gone.

I told my parents what happened that night, and the following night all the parents in the neighborhood met at my house to discuss. I told my sister to keep an eye on the younger kids and joined the adults. There, it was decided that no kids would be allowed to roam the neighborhood until we learned what was going on. A makeshift neighborhood watch was also set up to keep an eye on the men in suits and report any strange happenings to the rest of the neighborhood. I was volunteered by my mom to drop off some of the kids to school on my way to class in the mornings at the local community college, but I accepted the responsibility readily. After what I had seen the day before, I was worried those creeps might not be content to just observe anymore. Yet, even with these measures in place, none of us could stop what happened next.

Yesterday morning, when her mother walked into her room to wake her up for school, it was discovered that six-year-old Ava Townsend was missing from her bed. Her bedroom window was open, and there was no sign of a struggle. This was especially odd, because the Townsends have a security system, and the sensor on Ava’s window, which would have gone off even if opened from the inside, appeared untampered with. When the police, after receiving their statement, tested the system, all seemed to be in order. When they tested it, sensor on Ava’s window was working just fine.

It just gets stranger from there. Ava reappeared this morning. The police, urged on by most of my neighborhood, knocked on the door of the house belonging to the men in suits. Without a word, Ava was pushed out onto the porch of the house, seemingly unharmed, before the men slammed the door in the faces of the two officers. What happened next, I’m not sure of exactly. I just know that, according to Aisha Butler, the town busybody who of course checked on the Townsends and Ava, said that Ava’s parents refuse to file charges or even acknowledge that she was missing. The two policemen who brought Ava home went back to the house of the men in suits and were seen going in by my father, who happened to be driving by on his way back home from the gas station. My mother just told me that both have resigned from the force and refuse to talk about what happened in that house. She received a call from one of her friends on the force, who needed someone to talk to with all the strangeness going on as of late.

I don’t know what is happening in my town. I just know that we have to get rid of these strange men before something else happens. But, if even the police don’t want to deal with them, I don’t know what hope we have. What worries me even more is that I just got a text from my friend who moved to Arizona for a job about her new neighbors, "four blonde men in suits and black-framed glasses." Whatever is going on might not be unique to my town. It might be spreading.