May I come in?

The story happened to one of my online friends. I’ll tell you everything from his words. It was a couple of years ago in the town of Fordwich which is situated in the county of Kent. It’s hard to call it a “town”, but, although Fordwich has had this status for quite a long time, it looks like a greeting from the past. 

So, I have a summer house there. I decided to go there with a girl whom I had met not so long ago. Upon arriving there and bringing in food and drinks, we decided to go for a swim. We had been swimming until it began to rain. The clouds appeared in a minute, and bright sky suddenly became completely black. 

I crawled onto land and started gathering our belongings, and the girl would have never got out of water if I hadn’t scared her with lightning that could strike the lake. And then in the corner of my eye I saw a man standing next to a tree and looking at me and my girl. Interestingly, he wore dark suit, shirt and tie and even a hat (which he almost immediately took off as soon as I saw him), even though it was somewhere around +25-26 C! But soon he turned away and we hoofed home. 

When we entered the house, the rain was drumming full and it seemed to be hail. It got colder at once and we had to turn the gas heater on. We decided to spend our evening, watching movies on DVD. Long story short, somewhere on the third film we were already tipsy from wine, and she and I started to get sleepy, so we turned off the player and began kissing, but we were interrupted by the doorbell. I must say that the rain didn’t stop, but rather intensified. The storm started and poured water drops on the roof with eagerness. I wondered who else could it be, maybe my parents who suddenly decided to come to the summer house? I approached the door, looked out the window and saw the man standing in the doorway, the one that was on the shore! Carefully opening the door, leaving only one latch on a chain, I asked this gentleman what he wanted from us. 

After dumbing out for five seconds, not even lifting his head, he looked at me and said: 

- May I come in? 

Under his wet hat I could only see his lips and chin, he had very fair skin, not tanned, like that of a man who spent his day behind closed curtains 24/7. 

I freezed for a second from such a request, and answered: 

- No, you may not, who are you anyway, and how did you pass the gate? 

In a soft voice the man replied that the gate wasn’t locked, and then I remembered that most likely it was true. My girl came up to me and said what I had to tell him right away - we don’t want any guests, please go home. 

And then this guy said something which gave me creeps. 

- But it's my house too, could you at least give me back my umbrella, it’s right in the corner behind you. 

I slightly freaked out and turned my head to look back, and my eyes became round like baseball balls! For real, black umbrella-cane with a curved handle was standing in the corner. I purely mechanically closed the door, locked it and took my girlfriend into the room where we had been watching TV and told her to sit there. 

I called my mother, but, as always, she didn’t pick up, so it was decided to call the police. I got through to them, they said that they would come. Their station was at the other end of town, in the old market, probably about a 15-minute car trip away. They told me not to open the door. We’d been waiting for them for a long time, but the man kept standing motionless at the door, looking into the window and mumbling something. I moved closer to the door and heard what he was asking to come in again. I lost my temper and shouted to get the f*ck out of there ‘cause we’d called the bobbies. And then I heard my girlfriend screaming from the room where he was sitting. I ran there and almost ran into her in the hallway. She said that the man was standing near the windows there and knocking on them. But a moment ago he was at the door asking to come in! 

From the living room, we immediately went to the bedroom and locked ourselves there, taking a bottle of beer with us (not to drink, to be able to hit the man in the head, if anything). Ten minutes later police car arrived, and they began to ring the bell. When I left the house, there was no strange man near the windows. We went around the house with bobbies, and I told them my story, about having seen this guy at the lake, about what he’d said, and showed them his umbrella. The bobbies decided to look around the house and found an old suitcase covered with rags in the hallway. I’d seen it too but I thought it was ours. They opened that rubbish in front of me and there were clothes which smelled strange, they were clean, although old-fashioned. There was a towel covered in dark spots in some places, there were old sunglasses, brown pants, a pair of bright shirts, several ties. 

They took it all and gave me the phone number of the investigator. They asked me to come to the station the next day and call if the man suddenly appeared again. As far as I understood, they made a couple of laps on a car around the lake, I saw their car a couple of times from the window. 

Any cuddling was out of question, the girl had been sulking with me all evening (as if I was to blame for anything). She kept saying that she wouldn’t come there anymore, that she was going home the next day and that she’d like to never see me again. 

Somehow we fell asleep, and in the morning I was woken up not by the alarm on my cell phone but by mother’s call. She saw that I’d called her the day before. I told her everything, assured her that everything was fine with us, said that I was going to the police station. I saw my girlfriend off to the railway station, kissed her (she barely let me) and went to the police. I came to the investigator, he asked me to tell what had happened the day before one more time. He typed it all into an old computer. The stuff that had been taken from my house earlier was in the corner of the room (I thought they couldn’t do this to evidence). When he finished writing his report, he gave it to me to read in a printed form, I put my signature and he began to tell me his story. 

It turned out that drunken people had been disappearing near the lake for the last 2 months, even those who were in the company of friends, both girls and boys had been missing. Corpses weren’t found, but neither were these people. Someone found a couple of things (bag and shoes, I guess) that allegedly belonged to a girl who’d disappeared, but it was somewhere far away, on the road, closer to another town. They say that the man was seen more than once, usually near the lake, sometimes near the school (it was right near the lake). 

I didn’t know what to think, but then the girl wrote me a jocular message saying the man had looked like a vampire with his belongings from a bygone era, from the 50s. After this phrase I suddenly shivered. You know, there is a legend that vampires can’t get into someone's house uninvited. And who knows what would have happened if I’d behaved politely...