It was 5:55 when Parsy stepped off the bus, a block away from home. He was half-way there, when something queer did happen, just as the police suspected a few hours later.
A group of perplexing people confronted him from goodness knows where. There were 4, to be exact. They were all wearing long, black cloaks that reached their feet and buckled over their faces, and had hoods stretching up over their faces. The only parts of their faces that Parsy could see were the eyes and nose (the hoods reached down just below their eyebrows and a flap buckled over their mouth). It was as if they would have been freezing if they hadn’t been wearing the cloaks, though it was the same temperature as it is at 9:00 P.M. in the summer—fair, not cold. All of their clothing was black; their cloaks, as aforementioned, and their shoes were clearly regular walking shoes painted black (though some walking shoes are black, they are never pitch black, as these shoes were), and Parsy could see, as one of the people’s cloaks were a tad bit too short, that the socks were also black.
“What do you want?” asked Parsy.
“We want you to come with us,” said one of them.
“We think you would fit in very well with us, in our little town of Sepps,” said another.