Promises To Keep

Ch1 pt.2 - The Tall Man

**TW's – mild-ish gore mention, depiction of a panic attack, description of a trauma flashback**

They rounded the building and Maura's breath caught in her throat at what she saw, she grabbed blindly at Holly's sweater and pulled her back into the shadows under the building's awning, away from the sparsely functional streetlamps that lit the dock.

Maura pressed back into the cool stone of the wall, her mind spinning wildly. At the end of the dock, there was something impossible, an iridescent, glowing, horror. It floated several feet in the air, two smoky spires twisting and writhing, and spilling downward, as something like arms frantically tried to keep it together. It was a nauseating moment when it finally clicked in her mind. He bisected himself. The luminescent ghost of Henrik Bouchard writhed in the air as he frantically struggled to keep his insides from dripping to the dock below. She closed her eyes a moment desperately trying to keep her last shred of calm together. We were right.

A few feet below the spirit's thrashing legs, resting on the wooden dock, was something vaguely circular in shape gleaming off-white, as the glow of the nearest streetlamp reflected off of its surface. She wondered with a morbid fascination if it was a skull. Standing before it swamped in shadow just out of the shelter of the light was a man, tall, and broad, in a looming, towering way. When he spoke, his voice lilting and tinged with an accent she couldn't quite place, "cleaved in life, and split in death, twine together what has been two, but once was one." The tormented floating spirit gave another shrill scream as luminous strands spilled forth from the man's outstretched fingertips, twisting elegantly through the air before darting forward like striking snakes, piercing through the ghostly figure, tugging and stitching him back together.

She turned to Holly in a daze of shock and wonder, but the look on her best friend's face illuminated by the dim light of her phone screen still carelessly clutched in her hands, sent a shiver of icy fear down her spine. Holly looked terrified in a way Maura hadn't seen since they were small. Her eyes weren't focused on the glowing babbling ghost of Henrik though, she wasn't looking up at all. She was looking straight on towards the tall man at the end of the dock.

Holly felt her chest slowly constricting. The sight of the ghost had punched the air from her lungs, but ever since she'd spotted the shadowy figure, she hadn't been able to catch her breath, That voice. The words were strange but the tone, the lilting of his accent, the way the words filled the air. That voice had haunted her nightmares since the day her parents left the house with a tall shadowy man. 'I'll be seeing you again little dearie." He'd said, and she'd never forgotten, she had never forgotten that voice. That looming tall man that had come and taken her parents away from her. They'd never come back.

'The Tall Man is gonna take you away!' she'd sobbed to her Auntie every night for months after going into her care. She'd drawn enough pictures of the dark silhouette of a man looming through doorways that it had scared her teachers. She'd cried her heart out during the wee hours of the morning until her Auntie had called Maura's dad to prove they all hadn't been taken in the night.

She was holding Maura's arm so tight her knuckles had gone white, but she couldn't let go.

Her ears were ringing and there was a haze of white twisting at the edges of her vision. That voice was still talking. Maura was pulling at her, and she let herself be led. That voice got quieter and then there was something cold against her back and then there was nothing but Maura. Her hair tickling Holly's face and her hand gently pressing against her sternum. The smell of her cherry lipgloss as she spoke. Her voice "Breathe, breathe Holly, okay? Breathe with me."