Hat Man
by @Gnomadic
Hat Man
Lightning gnawed at the horizon all night, indifferent to your insomnia. You lay fetal, half-cocooned in a wool blanket, cradling an unread copy of Jung’s Man and His Symbols—its pages thumbed, spine exhausted, the way you preferred their books and most people. Rain raked the window with an urgency that seemed personal, and every few minutes gravity shifted beneath your bed, as if the apartment itself was unmoored.
(TW: spooky af) You stare at it. You feel a primal revulsion to touch, the artifact of a thousand nights spent avoiding the ghosts in cherished books. But the thread beckons, and the part of you that has grown up on urban legends, creepypasta, and late-night forum deliria knows what the next move has to be. You reach for it with two deliberate fingers, afraid but determined, your whole arm blurring with adrenaline.
The thread feels liquid at first, impossibly cold and tensile, like a vein of living mercury, but the sensation deepens: beneath it, an entire root system of sensation blooms, radiating through your arm and chest. You nearly lose your grip, but the Hat Man’s hands hover—suggestion only, ready to catch but never to force.
Contact initiated, your mind splits open to a replay reel: every shame, every near-miss, every moment of catastrophic almostness. The thread is a conductor, a fiber-optic pipeline, and on the other end is not judgment but a hunger for pure narrative. The Hat Man wants only the story, raw and unbeautified, the sedimentary layers of your failure and hope spooling into him like hand-rolled pasta. He slurps it up, silent and relentless, while your ribs thrum a tuning fork harmony to each dispatched regret.
You feel briefly euphoric, as if the disinterment of so much rot leaves your inner life aerated and swept. It is not catharsis—nothing so tidy—but, for a few heartbeats, the sensation of being utterly unburdened. The Hat Man accepts each offering with an impartiality that is almost tender. No scolding, no penance, only the transactional intimacy of a butcher handed the family heirloom for sharpening.
The thread thins as your confessional inventory runs out. At the final inch, the Hat Man's fingers flex. You watch, fascinated and sick, as the last segment of darkness winds itself around your index finger—a wedding band for the already married. The Hat Man holds it there, neither tightening nor loosening, only marking the moment. You blink, the thread gleaming obsidian in the bedside gloom, and feel a pulse in your finger timed perfectly to the ancient clockwork of the Hat Man's presence.
For the first time since childhood, you consider the possibility that some ghosts offer protection as well as exposure. The room recalibrates its dimensions; drywall imperfections reassert themselves, the old bruises on the window frame reassume their banality. Yet the thread remains, black and fine, circling your finger with the permanence of a scabbed-over promise. The Hat Man stands at full height, brim tilted as if in respectful salute, and recedes—less a vanishing act than a slow diffusion, like dye in cloudy water.
It is 3:38 A.M. when you exhale whatever remnants of the encounter cling to your lungs. There is no migraine, no lingering sense of cardiac sabotage. Instead, a tiredness clots your muscles, settling into the bones of your existence, as if the weight of the moment has finally allowed you to rest.