He was sitting in line with the chimneys, he was sitting up. I saw the long stretched body, his top hat at chimney height, just another chimney pot I thought at first, one with a thicker stack. But this stack had thin arms crossed around it and long legs drawn up, had a long body and, most terribly, a stretched face. Before he had always been in the dark or at a distance, but now there he was a few small steps away, keeping still amongst the chimney stacks. Waiting. Biding his time. It was then, with him so close, that I saw him properly for the first time. The horror of it.

The long thin man wasn’t a person.

He wasn’t a person at all.

He, it, it was a great collection of things. It, it was made of metal, of pipes and springs, of gears and pistons, a mechanical being consisting of so many, many things brought together, with some sort of engine inside it. Its top hat was a long pipe with a lid and a little steam was coming out of it, and there were many small objects attached to its larger metal pipes, like barnacles upon a ship’s hull. There was a corkscrew, a clay pipe, there was a magnifying glass, there was a ball of string, an apron, a great hook hanging down from its hat swinging before the face like a monocle. I could see quite clearly what its face was now, it had no real face, the face was a polished brass plate, and the plate had writing upon it: UNDERWRITERS LABORATORIES INSPECTED, 5 ½ GALLON HAND FIRE EXTINGUISHER, CLASSIFICATION NO. 650859 – this stamp I had mistaken for eyes. What I had taken for the mouth in much larger stamped letters read: TO PLAY ON FIRE TURN UPSIDE DOWN. What previously I had believed to be the long man’s nose was in fact the hose of the fire extinguisher, a length of thick black piping and at its tip a bronze nozzle. This then, this terrible collection, this was the long man and I stood right before it, appalled – appalled and fascinated. Has it stopped, I wondered. Is it broken now? Surely it was never really moving, surely I had just imagined it. Whether it moved before or not, it was certainly very still now. There, I told myself, your imagination has done this to you. And I put a finger out to prod it. And as I did it started up again.

The nozzle began to move, to sniff so it seemed to me, and with the sniffing I could just make out a whirring coming from inside the creature and a thumping. It began to stand up.