The Man with the Sack

The train crawled through the fog like something old and tired, its metal bones creaking as it took each bend. Linh pressed her forehead to the cold glass and watched the landscape bleed past: dark forests, fields of dead grass, a scatter of stone houses with steep roofs and shuttered windows. The afternoon light had already turned dim, flattened into shades of ash and blue, as if the world outside had been drained of warmth on purpose.

She checked the screen of her phone for the time. No signal, no data. Just the same stubborn “No Service” mocking her in the corner.

“Perfect,” she muttered in English, though the complaint in her head came out in Vietnamese. Má mà thấy chắc lại nói: sao con hay đi lung tung vậy con…

Outside, the sign marking the station blurred by: GRIMHAVEN in flaking black letters on a white board, nailed crookedly to a warped post. Linh shoved her notebook into her backpack, slung the strap over her shoulder, and stood up as the carriage jerked to a reluctant stop.

The doors hissed open with a breath of wet air that smelled faintly of coal, damp stone, and something indefinably old, like rotting wood beneath fresh paint. Linh stepped down onto the platform, her boots echoing in the emptiness. Only a handful of people disembarked: an elderly woman in a black coat, a man carrying a violin case, a pair of teenagers with matching scarves.

The station itself looked like it had been built a century ago and only half modernized. Tall, arched windows filmed with condensation leaned over gray tiled floors. The high ceiling had once been painted a bright color, but now it was stained and mottled, the colors drowned in dust.

Linh pulled her scarf tighter around her neck and wheeled her small suitcase after her. Her breath fogged in the air, and each exhale felt louder in the silence than it should have.

At the far end of the platform, a narrow café glowed dimly, a yellowish square of light in the gloom. She headed toward it, half for the warmth, half to give herself a moment to adjust before she stepped into the town that would be her home for the next year.

The bell above the café door chimed weakly as she pushed it open. Inside, the air was a little warmer and smelled of burnt coffee and sugar. Wooden tables sat close together, their varnish worn away at the edges. The walls were crowded with old framed photographs of Grimhaven: parades, snow-covered streets, the main square filled with market stalls, a river swollen with ice.

A woman behind the counter looked up from the newspaper she was reading. She had gray hair braided into a neat bun and a face finely lined, like a map folded many times.

“Good afternoon,” the woman said, her accent thick, the consonants rounding off in unfamiliar ways. “You just arrived?”

“Yes,” Linh said. “From the city.”

“Exchange student?” The woman’s gaze traveled over her backpack and suitcase, to the university crest on her scarf.

Linh nodded. “I’ll be studying at the university here. Art history.”

The woman’s eyes softened, though her mouth didn’t quite smile. “Welcome to Grimhaven, then. Coffee? Tea?”

“Coffee, please. Black.”

As the woman turned to the old machine behind her, Linh’s attention drifted to the photographs on the wall. In many of them, children stood in the foreground: stiff-postured school groups, kids dressed in costume for some festival, a line of solemn faces peering at the camera. Their clothes suggested decades passing—woolen coats, sailor suits, patterned dresses, bright plastic jackets—but almost all of them shared one common thing: none were smiling.

Her grandmother had always said European children in old photos looked haunted, as if they had seen too much.

“Ở bên đó lạnh lắm,” Bà had told her once, sitting in the dim kitchen back in Saigon, the ceiling fan ticking overhead. “Trời lạnh, nhà lạnh, tim người ta cũng lạnh. Con mà qua đó học, nhớ cứ nghe tiếng trẻ con cười là quay lại nhìn nhe. Ở mấy nơi đó, không có nhiều tiếng cười như nhà mình đâu.”

“Here.” The woman set a chipped white cup on the counter. The coffee inside steamed, dark and glossy.

“Thank you.” Linh wrapped her fingers around it, letting the heat seep into her skin.

“You are staying in town?” the woman asked. “Or at the dormitory up the hill?”

“In town. I rented a room on Brauer Street. Number… fourteen.” Linh fished a folded printout from her pocket and smoothed it. “Attic room.”

The woman’s fingers, which had been idly wiping the counter with a rag, slowed. “Fourteen Brauer Street,” she repeated, as if tasting the words for something sour. “At the end of the street?”

“Yes. Above a bookshop, I think.”

Now the woman’s mouth did tighten. “Old house. Very old.”

“I like old houses,” Linh said quickly. “They have character.”

The woman stared at her for a heartbeat too long, then glanced toward the window, where fog pressed against the glass in fat smears. “Character,” she murmured. “Yes. That house has… many characters.”

Linh forced a small laugh. “Is it haunted?” She meant it as a joke, but the question hung in the air like breath in the cold.

The woman’s gaze flicked back to her, sharp and oddly assessing. “We don’t use that word here,” she said. “Stories attract what they describe. Better to leave some things unnamed.”

Linh took a sip of the coffee to hide her discomfort. It was bitter and a little burnt, but it chased the chill from her mouth.

“I grew up with a lot of stories too,” she said after a moment, trying to sound casual. “In Vietnam. My grandmother told me about every ghost under the sun.”

“Vietnam,” the woman repeated, again as if rolling the word between her teeth. “Far away.”

“Far,” Linh agreed. “She used to warn me about a… kind of bogeyman.” The English term felt clumsy. “We call him Ông Ba Bị. The man with the sack. He takes children who don’t behave.”

The rag in the woman’s hand stilled completely.

“The man with the sack,” she said softly.

Linh nodded, suddenly self-conscious. “Yes. My grandmother said if I stayed out too late, he’d put me in his sack and carry me away. It’s just a story, of course.”

“Of course,” the woman echoed. But her eyes had gone distant, turned toward something only she could see. “You should not speak his name so easily, mademoiselle.”

Linh blinked. “Sorry?”

The woman leaned over the counter slightly, lowering her voice.

“Here,” she said, “we have other words for him. We say Der Sackmann. Or we say nothing at all. But the story is very old. Older than this town. Older than the station. Older than the church.” Her fingers tapped the wooden counter in a slow rhythm, as if marking time. “Children, they get told stories. So they will come home early. So they will not wander into the fog. But sometimes…” She paused, considering. “Sometimes, the story comes first. And the fog only follows.”

Unease slid down Linh’s spine, feather-light but undeniable.

“It’s just a coincidence,” she said, though even her own voice sounded uncertain to her. “Every culture has a monster to scare children.”

“Every culture has a name for him,” the woman corrected quietly. “Sometimes the names meet each other.”

The bell over the café door chimed again as the elderly woman in the black coat shuffled in, stamping her feet against the cold. She glanced at Linh, then at the owner, and gave a curt nod. The café owner straightened, the moment broken.

“You should go before it gets dark,” she said, picking up the rag again. “Fog is thick tonight. Brauer Street is not far, but the lamps there…” She shrugged, as if the sentence wasn’t worth finishing. “Be careful, mademoiselle. Tonight is the first Thursday of the month.”

Linh frowned faintly. “Is that important?”

“In Grimhaven, it is.” The woman’s eyes flickered to the photographs on the wall, especially to one in the center—an old image of a procession at night, torches raised, shadows long. In the corner of the frame, almost swallowed by darkness, was a tall figure carrying what might have been a sack over one shoulder. “On first Thursdays, he walks.”

Linh gave a small, uncertain smile. “Ông Ba Bị?”

The woman flinched very slightly at the name.

“I told you,” she said, her tone sharper now. “We do not say it.”

“Right. Sorry.” Linh put a few coins on the counter, the metal clinking too loudly. “Thank you for the coffee.”

She turned away from the counter and toward the door. Her reflection looked back at her in the glass: a young woman with straight black hair tied into a low ponytail, a thin face, dark eyes, the strap of her backpack cutting a diagonal across her coat. Behind that reflection, layered faintly over her shoulder, was the warped image of the old procession photograph.

For a moment, the shadowy figure with the sack in the picture seemed closer, as if it had taken a step forward inside the frame.

The bell chimed as she pushed the door open. The cold met her like a wall. Outside, the station platform was emptier than before. The train had pulled away, leaving only twisting tracks stretching into the fog.

She checked the address again, then followed the cracked stone steps down from the station and onto the main road. Streetlamps rose at intervals along it, their glass heads fogged. The town sloped gently downward, houses crowding together, their roofs like hunched shoulders against the gray sky.

“Brauer Street,” she murmured to herself. “Fourteen Brauer Street.”

Her boots clicked on cobblestones as she walked. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolled five times, each note slow and heavy.

On one corner, a group of children jumped rope, their breath fogging in little white bursts. They were chanting something in the local language, their voices sing-song and eerie.

Linh slowed as she passed, catching a few words here and there from the phrasebook buried in her memory. She stiffened when she thought she heard a familiar pattern in the melody—even if the words were foreign, the rhythm tugged at something from her childhood.

She paused. One of the girls glanced at her, the rope slapping at the stones in a snapping rhythm. The girl’s eyes were a pale, unsettled blue.

“What are you singing?” Linh asked in careful English, then repeated the question in clumsy German.

The girl tilted her head, as if listening for something behind Linh rather than to Linh herself.

“We sing about him,” the girl answered in accented English, her voice oddly flat. “The one with the sack. You should know. He’s following you already.”

The rope slapped the ground again. Another child giggled, but it was a oddly joyless sound.

Linh forced a shaky smile. “Very funny.”

The girl only watched her for a moment longer, then turned away, rejoining the circle. The chant resumed, rising and falling in a rhythm that echoed too closely the lullabies her grandmother had whispered long ago, the ones that always ended with the same warning:

“Nếu con không về nhà trước tối, Ông Ba Bị sẽ tới bắt con đi.”

If you don’t come home before dark, he will come for you.

A gust of wind tugged at her scarf and made the streetlamp above her flicker.

Linh turned, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. The street behind her was empty, just a long gray corridor of fog and stone. But for a heartbeat, she could have sworn she heard something else behind the wind: a slow, dragging sound, like a heavy bag being pulled along cobblestones.

She swallowed, adjusted her grip on the suitcase handle, and walked faster toward Brauer Street, telling herself it was just the echo of the children’s game.

Behind her, the dragging sound came again—soft, almost polite, keeping pace with her steps.