Drifting. In and out. Room lit by the spectral glow of modern electronics. The shape of my wife a comforting weight beside me. I don't understand how she sleeps so peacefully, unafraid, but there she is. Breath even and measured, still in the dark.

I roll over onto my side, seeking that perfect spot that will allow me to finally fade out for the night. We have been out of town, up north, and I find only misery in the hated humidity I have had to return to. My eyelids slide down again and that's when I hear it. A furtive sliding sound from the direction of my closet. In the time I've been away I have once again grown accustomed to sleeping without a light on. My father's house, where we had been visiting, held no threat, safety even in the dark. Now... that sound.

In the split second that I hear it, my eyes snap back open. I am in no mood to deal with this tonight. Hot. Tired. I have felt nauseous most of the day, on the verge of vomiting and instead of lying in terror, as I would normally, I simply fling myself out of the bed. I feel him there, in the dark, but I don't care. Not tonight. I'm too tired, too sick, too depressed even over missing my family and the city I have, over the years, grown to love.

My wife is safe from harm. I don't know how I know that, but I do. It is only me he torments in this house, only my darkness he haunts, stepping through the spaces between my thoughts. I nearly trip on the fan cord, cursing, moving as quickly as I can to avoid not only hands which may grasp suddenly from the lightless corners of the room, but also waking The Wife.

Downstairs a light is on as it always is. The door behind me vibrates slightly in its frame, a faint scratching sound emanates roomside. Light or heavy, there would be no evidence of it in the morning. There never is. I grab a Dr. Pepper from the fridge, seeking solace in caffeine. The back door next to me thuds as if hit hard, the blinds bouncing, the glass rattling. This elicits a sharp scream which I cover quickly. I begin to suspect it is my terror he desires, and he has it now, but also my anger.

I turn, face the door, slam the fridge hard enough to dislodge items from the door inside. Breathing heavy, throat pinched closed with copper madness and I rage.

"FUCK YOU"

SLAM

"FUCK YOU"

SLAM

"FUCK"

SLAM

"YOU"

SLAM

"MOTHERFUCKER"

The door slams in its frame again as I drop the can of Dr. Pepper and reach, one hand for the knob, one for the deadbolt. I twist, I turn, I pull. The door flies open, as though pushed from the other side, barely missing my foot which surely would have been broken.

Framed in the doorway is only darkness. My back patio. The gate in the small fence closed. The cicadas drone on in the wooded dark. No stars shine, no moon can be seen, but nothing moves. The only sound the normal insectile buzz I have lived with so long I hardly hear it anymore.

"Fuck you," I say into the darkness and slam closed the door. The Wife, miraculously, has not awakened. The rest of the night passes without incident.

It is only in the morning when I check the weather that I realize the sky had been cloudless, clear, and should have been full of glittering stars.

Last night was a little different from my more recent experiences. It was more like that first night, when the shadowy figure sent me running through the house in hysterics. Except this time was a thousand times worse.
I was laying in bed again. I don't know why I still sleep there, or why I try to sleep at night at all; but I do, and so the story goes that I was laying in bed, huddled up under my blanket with the window closed, even though it was eighty degrees. It's funny the things you'll do for a measure of security. Not that any of them actually help. The light streaming in the window from the security lamp out back was shining in my eyes a little brighter than usual.
Restless and feeling watched, I got up and looked out the window. The back yard was flooded with light ... but for one patch about 100 feet away from the house. It was about three feet in diameter. A seemingly perfect circle. I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to grasp the strangeness, then looked again. The shadow had moved, now about fifty feet from the house. Where it had been, the bats were having a heyday swooping down at something. I closed my eyes and swallowed, looked again. Twenty feet from the house, and the bats now swooping at the area fifty feet away, as well as the first area.
Fingers of fear were ticking across my brain and digging in. Gone was any need to swallow; my mouth was as dry as it's ever been. Afraid to look away again but afraid, also, not to, I was rooted where I stood, shaking like a leaf. As hard as I tried not to blink, I couldn't do it. The circle was gone, and bats spread the hunt to where it had been once again. I couldn't see it at all now, but the sense of being watched was monumental.
I turned to survey my room, my eyes landing on the doors of the closet to my left. They were closed, but they're the slatted type, and I knew in that way that only experience can explain that it was in there, watching, waiting for something. Another blink. Suddenly, spiders began to pour out of the closet from between the slats in waves, and I ran screaming from the room, down the stairs, outside, to my car, and just drove.
I must have been on the road for an hour before I realized I had nowhere to go and pulled over into a brightly lit and busy truck stop. I came home when dawn arrived and finally snatched a couple hours of sleep on the couch before sitting down to try to write this. I'm not sure how I'll spend the night tonight, but I'm pretty sure it won't be sleeping.

-J

Lying in the dark, the light from the cracked closet door leaks out and provides enough illumination that I can see. I need to be able to see. If I can't see him, he will surely be there.

Outside my window I hear the snaps and thuds of something lurking. I tell myself it's simply one of the local strays, but somehow I can't quite make myself believe it. It all feels too deliberate.

I've noticed an increase in insect activity around the house. It's summer, of course, but I don't recall it being quite this bad before. They seem more aggressive. There was a big cockroach the other day. Fast and flighty. A jumper. You don't see them act like that often. When I hit him with the bug spray he leapt straight up in the air about four inches and then came right for me.

I finished him off with an errant flip-flop my wife had left lying about.

That kind of aggression is rare though. I wonder if it means something.

Before bed I had that "bug crawling through your hair" feeling and when I reached up it turned out to be just that. An inch and a half long brown insect whose species I could not identify. After hurling it away from my head I hunted it with help from Calypso, my paranoid cat, and dispatched it with the same flip-flop.

I admit I hit it several more times than was strictly necessary.

I lie here next to my wife, who sleeps soundly and without worry, and listen to the lurking noises outside. I drift off. Fear sets in and I snap awake again. Any moment now I'm sure when I open my eyes I'll see it. The pale luminous face that I have always been sure will be the last thing I see in the world.

Since that first night, I've been having experiences with this shadow being, or 'Slender Man' (as he is apprently called) off and on, but even when some time has passed without anything happening, I always feel his presence. Or its presence. Whichever.

Even on a bright sunny day, he lurks. Out shooting pictures of birds a few days ago, I snapped off this shot before I turned-tail and ran. Some might think I'm jumping at shadows, or matrixing, but when what you fear most is a shadow and can matrix himself - or itself - from thin air, this sort of becomes a moot point, doesn't it?

Thefirst shot is as I took it. The second is cropped for better detail.

-J

So many times these last months, I have sat down to journal and failed. I had been so hopeful of finding help, of bringing my nightmarish experiences to a conclusion; but I hadn't been to the Slender Man site yet. My naivete became apparent to me soon enough. There was no help to be found here; not the kind I had let myself hope there would be, anyhow. And no one here was going to bring this hell to an end; they were, in fact, in it themselves. The blank white screen and blinking black cursor only seemed to mock me when I would try to sit down and write about it.

I allowed myself to become lost in grief and terror for a good long while. My husband took the kids and left. At one point, I even began to doubt my own sanity; maybe the doctor was right, maybe I really was just hallucinating. But no anti-psychotics would stop it, or even lessen it. I wish with everything I have that they would. I'm still taking them. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that I am quite sane. I say unfortunately, because I have also come to the conclusion that being a nut job would be a hell of a lot easier.

Emergency medical services personnel and some of the military have a slogan that I have rather come to like: "We are not extraordinary people, we are ordinary people put into extraordinary situations." It is by coming to grips with all this that I am once again finding myself able to do something with myself and write about it again. The good people here at Slender Man Chronicles have asked me to create a blog profile of my own, so that I might become a regular contributor and post my own things. So, it is with this that the previously anonymous 'Patient 4077212'
becomes the somewhat less anonymous Jessica Nelson. We'll be seeing more of each other, I'm sure.

-J

It's been awhile.

I thought maybe it was over, maybe he had decided to leave me be. It has been several months since I have felt that absolute surety that he was out there, waiting in the dark. I long ago stopped looking out the kitchen windows at night. I fear seeing that dark shape silhouetted against the security lights out there, beneath the spreading branches of the Louisiana live oak that shades the patio. Last night I am sure he was there. I got up to wash the few dishes I had to do before bed and as I reached for the light switch, I felt it. That malevolent aura that I've never been able to properly explain.

The back of my apartment faces an empty field and small wooded area. A small chainlink fence overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle separates the apartment property from the field, but it is no great barrier. The children of the complex routinely scale it to go into the woods to play in their own little slice of Terabithia, as have many before them. The woods are small, and traditionally have held no danger. 

But he was out there last night. He has been out there many nights, I think. Out in the woods, wandering that old circular path, just far enough away that I do not sense his presence.

Or is it just me? Am I imagining this hunted feeling? I seem to be the only one that senses it here. The others never seem to notice anything out of sorts. It could be that they, like myself, simply choose not to mention it, but I don't think so. So is it just me? Is it because he is singling me out, targeting me for his baleful intent? Is it only me that feels his presence just outside the boards of my patio fence?

Or am I simply going mad?