There is a small village out on the countryside. Where exactly it lies is of no significance for this story, nor is its name. In this village all houses red wooden houses with white window frames. Inside these red wooden houses with white window frames the inhabitants of the village live; happy, social persons with no troubles whatsoever.

In one of these red wooden houses with white window frames you could find four men; Mike, Alan, Pip and Pop. Where these names origin from, or even if these were their real names nobody knows; when they rarely came out, they never talked much, and these names have just always been there. People talk, not much, but occasionally. They talk often enough for everybody to have their own opinion about these very queer men; Mike and Alan liked each other very much, and Pip and Pop, the twins, had never been seen separated from each other.

Should you come to ask any of the inhabitants of the village how long these men had lived here, the answer will most probably be ”as long as I can remember”. The elderly widow who lives in the red house with white window frames opposite to them – the house where the flowery curtains always are drawn – told me that she used to run around on their yard when she was a child. They rarely saw her, and when they did, they didn’t seem to care. “Those men have not aged one minute for 60 years, I tell you”, she told me when I came over to see her. “They still look exactly the same way as they did when I used to peek in on them as a kid”.

Once a week – every Thursday at eight minutes past eleven, to be more exact – two of them used to come in to the grocery store and buy some groceries. Nothing special really, just some milk, bread, meat, butter, and chocolate if it was Pip and Pop, or blueberry cupcakes if it was Mike and Alan.

One Thursday, when Mike and Alan didn’t show up at 11:08 as they used to, the people started talking again. You could hear the whispers all the way down to the graveyard – what could have happened? At first the whispers seemed uncertain, then inflamed, then scared. Then they pitied the grocer, who had – as he always did every second Thursday – made double up of the blueberry cupcakes. After a few days the whispers died down, but when the next Thursday came, and Pip and Pop didn’t show up at eight past eleven, the whispering started again, in the same way. The people of the small village figured that something needs to be done. So – in a gathered group – they marched down to the red house with white window frames, where Pip, Pop, Mike and Alan lived. They voted out a person to go and have a closer look – a sixteen year-old boy, son of the grocer. On unsteady legs he neared the door, not knowing what to find behind it. He knocked – once… twice… thrice… Nothing happened. He looked through one of the windows, but he couldn’t see anything. He turned around to the waiting mob, and shrugged. They told him to try to open the door. He did, and it opened without any key. He went in, and after ten minutes he came out.
“It is empty”, he said
“Empty?” asked his father, the grocer.
“Nobody has lived in this house for a very long time”