The first time I saw him I thought it was a man walking away from me. It was late. The street was quiet. He was at the far end of the block, moving away — or appearing to move away — and I thought nothing of it. I went inside.
The second time was three nights later. Same end of the block. Same direction. But I watched him for a few minutes this time, and something was wrong with the motion. He was moving backward. Not stumbling, not drunk. Deliberately, fluidly backward, as if forward and backward were the same to him, as if the distinction had never occurred to him.
He never turned around. I watched him move from one end of the block to the other without turning around. He passed under a streetlight and I saw that he was dressed normally — dark clothes, nothing remarkable. I could not see his face because his face was pointed away from me and never pointed toward me.
I went inside and didn't think about it too hard.
The third night I started to count. I estimated the distance between us when I first saw him — about two hundred feet. I watched him for twenty minutes. He moved at his slow, fluid, backward pace. At the end of twenty minutes, I estimated the distance at about one hundred and eighty feet.
He was closer. Barely, but measurably closer.
He had never turned around. He had never seemed to move toward me. But the distance was wrong.
I mentioned this to my neighbor, an older woman who has lived on this street for thirty years. She didn't ask me to describe the figure. She just nodded and said, yes, she knows about the man. She says she has seen him since the 1990s. She says he is always at the far end of the street. She says she stopped watching a long time ago.
I asked her why.
She said: "Because the longer you watch, the closer he gets. And I don't know what happens when there's no distance left."
She suggested I stop watching from the window at night. She suggested I leave the porch light on. She gave me no explanation for either.
I left the porch light on for two weeks. During those two weeks I did not see the figure.
Then I forgot one night. I was tired. I went to bed without checking the light.
At 2 AM I woke up. I don't know what woke me. I lay in the dark and listened to the quiet street.
Then I heard footsteps on my front porch. Slow, measured. Moving backward, I somehow knew. Moving backward across the porch toward the front door.
I turned on every light in the house. I did not open the door.
By morning there was nothing on the porch.
I leave the light on now. Every night. I do not look out the window after dark. I do not count anything. I do not look at the far end of the street.
I do not know how close he got before I turned the lights on.
I do not want to know.