The site has been dormant. I haven't heard from the others in awhile. I myself moved across the country and have had no experiences or even thoughts about him in awhile, but this... this could change things. I don't know if it could make them better or worse. A feature film could increase awareness too much, bring the story to too many idly curious who do not know the truth.

What truth?

Fiction is reality.
Reality is fiction.

It's only real if you believe in it. Remember that is the first rule. It's existence relies on the thoughtform not dissolving. Thought alone sustains it. It is a creature in kind with the Ludovician. It's home of loose pages and innocent photography, ones and zeroes of data.

Will this film further entrench it's dissolving existence here as more and more come to believe in it's fictional nature? Fiction is our armor, our defense. Belief in the fiction of the thing makes its fiction stronger, it's reality weaker.

But there is that chance isn't there? Some tiny chance that instead of reinforcing the fiction it plants that oh so tiny brainworm idea that maybe, just maybe in the dark recesses of our minds it can become a living thing. A malicious teasing beast who feeds best on terror only taking the meat when every last drop of fear is wrung out of it.

Plant enough of those worms, let enough of them grow, and it could bring us closer to its breast.

Money for safety.

Money for madness.

Let's bet.

I'm floundering. Really floundering. There's so much here ... There's just so much I want to say, but it's all based in hate and rage and fear. I put the words down, then strike them out. These are all the secret things. What lives in my dark hallways. I need to spell them out, but they need to remain unwritten. So hard I've tried ... so hard I've tried to build a stable home. So hard I've failed, so far I've fallen. When everything I've created lies bleeding on the kitchen floor, what will I have left? Memories. Regrets. Tales someone else has written. This is not me, this life divided. But it's the only me there is. Hiding from the bogeyman. I search for every light in the darkness, but no matter which way I turn, it's always the same. I'm lost.

-J

Define reality. Define real.

There's an itch behind my eyes. The whole house has begun to smell like something between rotten turkey and burnt hair. I don't know if that even makes sense, but it's the best I can do. There's nothing in the house that should be making that smell, but it's there anyway. The nosebleeds are getting worse. Bright arterial red drips from my upper lip onto my shirt. The red haired girl lies in my bedroom. She herself stinks of overripe meat, a different smell entirely from the one I smell now.

I didn't call the EMS because I wasn't sure what to say. I took her pulse and though she breathes from time to time, there is no beat beneath her chest. Her skin is room temperature. I'm not sure if I should call the paramedics or a coroner.

I take a sip of Dr. Pepper. There is roughly three ounces of rum in the glass, and my head begins to buzz pleasantly even as my gut spews burning acid back up my esophagus. It has a chalky, yellow, bilious taste to it, but I slam down the rum and ignore it.

In the next room, she makes a rattling sound. I screw my eyes shut, tears leaking from the corners, and try to think. I take another pull on my glass and I stare out the window over the television. A shadow passes over it. Human in shape, a clearly defined shape of head and shoulders. The window is high up, a man would have to be over seven feet tall to walk past it that way. I squeeze my hands tightly on the arm rests of the chair I'm sitting in and the urge to vomit crawls up behind the burning feeling of bile in my gut. The glass shivers in its frame.

From the next room I hear a thump and rise to check on the red head. She's standing in the doorway, a black rope of liquid hanging thickly from the corner of her mouth. Syrupy and pendulous, it swings and I am transfixed by it. She's still dressed in the jogging outfit I found her in, but the top is now stained maroon and black in places. Her eyes are unfocused but as she comes toward me her mouth twists into a grin.

She is nearly within grasping distance of me when the spell breaks and I run for the kitchen.

Speckles of maroon on the porous asphalt remind me of childhood woes. I see the spatters that remind me of my old life and I wipe my arm across my nose, leaving a red streak staining the hairs there. I don't quite smile, because the memories are too sharp, but I come close.

There's a red haired girl walking through the trees nearby and I stop to look at her. The sidewalk is empty but for me and the girl's eyes are empty and staring into nothing. I think I've seen her before, an elective class, maybe humanities. She looks like one of the girls that argued against me when I claimed the Christian god wasn't a universal truth. It's difficult to tell from here.

She stumbles to one knee, and stops where she is and I move toward her. Drunk, drugged, something, she seems helpless and though I have my questions about the origins of the world, I still know right from wrong. If she's in trouble, I want to help.

As I approach, a sound begins to escape her throat. It's a low rattling sound, a gagging, tearing noise that seems to imply she can't breathe. I begin to run, and grab her face, pulling her jaw upward opening her the air passages as best I can. A glistening rope of saliva seeps from the corner of her mouth. The sound of her suffering is beyond my capability to deal with.

I lean in, close, to listen to her breathe. Her breath is ragged, difficult to hear. I turn my mouth to hers in an effort to deliver CPR but the smell rips up out of her lungs and hits my nose with the force a week old corpse.

She's dead inside. I can't tell how I know this, but the breath from inside her has the sickly sweet smell of rotting meat. She stinks like a brisket left in the sun for a day. My nostrils wrinkle at the scent.

I draw back. Not sure what to do. Her eyes leak black, which I had assumed was her mascara running but now I am not sure. They remain closed despite whatever attempt I make at opening them. The best I can do is a sliver of bloodshot white as I struggle with the lids.

A sound from the trees, a low and slow chuckle, makes me look up. There's nothing there, only trees, elm and maple, magnolia and fir. I look back at her face and notice the orange red curl of hair that traces the line of her jaw. There's a tingle at the bottom of my gut and despite myself I scream when she coughs a spray of arterial red into my face.

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?

December 10, 2009

            She finally called. The nurse. She finally called. She said her name is Tammy. She didn’t call sooner because she had ‘an emergency’ in her family. I’m sitting here thinking I’m losing my damn mind and my husband won’t talk to me unless he has to anymore, and she couldn’t call because it was ‘inconvenient’ … fuck that. Fuck her. I’m holed up in my library and I haven’t slept in days. Bits and pieces here and there when my eyes simply wouldn’t stay open anymore; that’s it. But she was ‘busy.’ Whatever. I got what I needed.

            Tammy said these people she mentioned are online. They actually post their experiences on a website. I suppose, like me talking to my computer, it gives them a way to talk to each other. The best part is even though they can talk about it, right there in the open, no one thinks they’re crazy for it, because those who don’t believe simply don’t take it seriously. And those who know better; well, those who know better get validation that they aren’t the only ones.

            Anyway, Tammy said she gave one of these people parts of my file from Thanksgiving but not to worry because she had taken out the identifiers. She said this guy was interested in my story and wanted to talk to me, so she gave me the web address for this site and an e-mail address. I sent an e-mail right away and the guy got back  to me even as I began my diary entry about it. I’m going to send him my diary entries so I don’t have to waste time telling everything again.

            Maybe … maybe everything’s going to be okay. Maybe they can help. Maybe it’ll stop now. I can’t wait to go look at the website after I send all this.

            -J

December 6, 2009

            Can’t stop crying. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Trying to cry quiet. In the library. Can’t let him hear. He’ll bring me in again. Can’t let him hear. Can’t go back. Not crazy. Too real. Too, too real. Why haven’t I heard from the fucking nurse?! What the fuck?!

            Breathe. Have to calm down. Need to talk. Need to be coherent. Breathe. Calm. Calm.

            Okay. We were in bed. Everyone was sleeping. I got up to go to the bathroom. This sounds crazy even to me, but it was too real not to be. Too real. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I was standing in front of the sink, looking in the mirror. I look like hell. I’ve always had insomnia, but it’s gone from bad to worse.

            As I stood there, I started to get the creeps. I don’t know what else to call it. Like I wasn’t alone, but I could clearly see that I was. The light was on, and it’s just a small half bath. Toilet. Sink. Mirror. Shelf. That’s it. I felt like I was being watched, and my bare feet were starting to sweat on the tile from my nerves. And I felt a cold hand on my left shoulder.

            All of a sudden the hand was gone and I was in a deep cave. It had a circular tunnel like a hobbit hole. I have no idea how I got there. I was just looking in the mirror a second before. It was cold. The rock was mostly brown with some white marbling to it, and it was very wet. At the end of the tunnel was a wider space, with a strange sound coming from it. It was almost like a small room, except where there should have been a wall opposite the tunnel there was a large opening in the rock, like a window, barred with stalagmites and stalactites. The sound was coming from the other side of the window and was much louder here. It sounded like water.

            I became aware of other people with me, but … not. I don’t know how else to say it. It was more like I had a vague knowledge of faceless shadowy forms rather than actually seeing people directly. And when I looked, it was as if they dimmed. I was terrified, but I couldn’t go back to the tunnel because they were behind me too. Just standing there. Not moving.

            I went to the window to see if I could get out that way. Pressing my face between the rocky bars, I was looking down into a larger opening with more stalagmites and stalactites all over the other side of it but only smaller ones in the middle of the ceiling. Glancing behind me, the shadowy figures still hadn’t moved. God, they were creepy. I looked through the window again. The larger room was deep. I had to look way down to see an underground lake with a small but powerful underground river to the left flowing into it, although the lake water wasn’t rising.

            Wiping tears from my eyes, I notice that what I first thought was large rocks in the river weren’t stationary. It was carrying … I still can’t believe it. People; bodies; corpses, floating like logs in a log-jam into the lake, where they simply ceased to exist. Into my mind came a close-up picture of the face of one of the corpses. It was a man. His short brown hair was wet and plastered onto his pale, slightly bloated face. His face was crudely made up and rouged like they used to do in the old west, yet I could plainly see that there were odd circular red spots scattered over his skin. Each spot was about the size of a dime, and the skin of each spot looked raw and sore, almost like cigarette lighter burns, though I’m not sure what they were. The image flew from my mind like a photograph thrown Frisbee-style, down to the river and attached itself to a body.

            And I was standing in my bathroom again, blinking from the harsh suddenness of the light bulbs overhead. I wondered if I’d dozed off standing there, but I realized the vinyl tile under my feet was ice cold. I couldn’t have been standing there long. Shaking, I opened the door to the bedroom and peered over to the clock on my nightstand. There’s just no way. It was five minutes earlier than it was when I got up to go to the bathroom. Five minutes earlier. There’s just no way.

            -J

There's a bubbling sound. I don't know where it's coming from. It's dark in here and the ground is rough. I can't see anything but I can feel a breeze on my skin and I know I'm naked. The sound is coming from somewhere ahead of me. I reach out to either side of myself and my right hand touches a wall, rougher than the floor. Feels like stone. Granite maybe. Impossible to tell in the dark. The dark. It was oppressive.

The last thing I remember for sure is lying in bed. I had kissed The Wife goodnight as I went to lay down and she headed off for work. The light in the closet was on because even at this age, the darkness worries me. More so in the last few months than in the last twenty years combined. I see things in the half light, shapes in the corners. Like a child, my mind makes monsters of the mundane.

I slide my feet slowly along the rough floor. A sweeping forward step, my feet never truly leaving the ground, to ensure I step on nothing sharp or trip over something in my path. I do not rush, though the blood in my veins is doing so. Pounding in ears. I'm terrified of this dark, of not knowing, of finding out. I don't really want to move forward, but I see little good in standing here, alone in the black. So forward I move, towards the bubbling sound and further into the unknown.

The ground slopes downward slightly. That much I can tell. It occurs to me that I ought to be moving up instead of down. Up usually denotes out when you are underground, which I think I am. Still, there's that sound and afraid or not, it's the only real landmark I have in this place. If you can call it that.

A hundred feet further on (I think though it's hard to say) my feet reach liquid. Cool, and lapping gently at my toes as I stand stock still. Water in the dark. Another small terror. Black inky water full of who knows what ready to swim up and take interest in me. Underground, in the dark, at the water's edge. This place seems tailor made for me to be afraid of. I'm paralyzed here. Unable to move forward. Back the way I came and up is my only option. I turn and begin to shuffle back carefully.

There's a whisper in the dark up ahead. I'm not even sure I heard it at first over the bubbling sound coming behind me, but the second time it happens I'm sure. It's a papery sound. Cloth sliding against itself. I stop. This sound is somehow worse than the water. It's an insectile sound and if there is one thing that makes me shake more than water in the dark, it's the idea of being set upon by... doesn't bear thinking about. The sound is individual, a single thing. Certainly not the horrible swarm of crunchy brown bodies my mind wants to conjure up.

When the hands close around my shoulders I scream. I can't help it. It is so sudden, so quiet. I never knew there was someone else in here with me. When a second set of hands close on my thighs I realize that the word someone may not actually apply here.  They're strong. So strong. I struggle and scream but they just lift me up. I'm in the air shaking, writhing, screaming to get away when suddenly the arms holding me heave me back, then forward again. I sail through the air, the strength behind those arms throwing my weight easily a hundred feet through the air where I splash bodily into the blackness behind me. The water is deep where I land. Too deep to reach the bottom and I am swallowed up by it. Disoriented. Flailing. I don't know which way is up and I suddenly realize that I may be swimming deeper instead up towards the surface. My air is running out. I force myself to stop and let the air in my lungs do what it does naturally. Rise.

But there isn't enough in me. I'm not going up and what I have isn't enough to sustain me down here in the dark. I'm not rising, not falling. Neutral buoyancy. My body is screaming at me to breathe, my mind is screaming at me to move...

And I am screaming in my bed. The wetness on my body is not water, but sweat. I am not drowning, not suffocating. I am... fine. I rise shaking and stumbling and make my way to the bathroom where I vomit in the tub because it is the first thing I reach before I can hold back my rising gorge no longer. I stand there, heaving. When the urge passes I wipe my mouth and stumble to the mirror. My hair is askew, my eyes are bloodshot. Honestly no news there. I turn on the faucet and cup my hands, drinking the water to rinse away the taste of bile. It's then that I really notice them. The marks on my arms. They're on my legs as well. I step back to see them better. Finger marks as though something grabbed me, squeezed as tight as it could. What ought to be bruises, but aren't exactly. They aren't black or blue or even that greenish yellow that you get after they've begun to heal a bit. No.

They're livid white.

The following is one of three of patient 4077212's journal entries made shortly after release from Northwest Medical Center. Given to us by 4077212 herself after contact was made between her and us thanks to the nurse that sent us the original case file excerpt. The entries cover 4077212's stay at NMC during her observation period as well as events leading her to contact us. We here at the Slender Man Chronicles have only made changes to any names in order to protect the identities of those involved. In the interest of brevity, we will be posting them one at a time. Read about her first night in the NMC after the jump.

The copper taste of fear in the back of my throat is the first sign that something is wrong. It rises up in my gorge suddenly. So suddenly it takes me a moment to realize what it is. I didn't even realize I was afraid until I tasted it. It's a bitter taste that makes me want to cough and it's very presence makes me suddenly paranoid. The taste, the vomitous horror of it, plagues me on my walk home and I know he must be there. Watching and waiting just around the corner, just out of sight.

It's cold out tonight. One of the coldest nights in some time, though not quite as bad as last night. Last night it snowed, which I know isn't a big deal to a good portion of you. It's normal to my brother in Minneapolis or my cousin in New York or a half Mexican dude in Philly or a little red haired girl in Colorado but on the Gulf of Mexico it's relatively rare. The white flakes fell and I didn't for a moment think of the watcher in the dark though he certainly must have thought of me.

Today, though, things were different. Today I decorated the tree. Today I watched The Godfather. Today I walked to a friend's house and on the way home a few hours later, I felt it again. That sense of being hunted that leaves me feeling half blind. Halfway home I looked at the pool as it glowed a quiet blue-green and I knew. He was behind me. It or him or whatever. It was there somehow and though when I spun around I saw nothing but the normalcy of the buildings behind me at 3AM, I still knew. I ran, ran for home and I slammed the door behind me and I shuddered.

I flipped the deadbolt, I made a drink and I made a sandwich and I began to watch some television but I knew. If the curtains hadn't been there, I would see him. I know he's out there. I know he's watching. I'm too terrified to open the blinds to check but I know he's there, waiting. Watching. Hungry.

I need a drink.

I'm just getting to bed. I've been here a couple of hours now. Lying in the forced darkness of my room the black curtains provide. The house is empty but for myself and the cat, who does not care to be near me and so stays in my daughter's room. It is almost quiet. Almost but not quite. A vague tapping sound from somewhere in the house keeps making my nervous system jump. All is quiet and calm and then every synapse is lit up like Times Square. Just... tapping.

I've got that feeling again. Watched. Seeing that shadow shape from the corner of my eye. I haven't slept properly for days and though I'm tired now I still cannot drift off without feeling as though something may be waiting. That if I close my eyes for too long it will just be a matter of time till I feel bone thin fingers scraping along my skin in the dark.

There is little I can do, of course. As a wise man once said, "you don't fuck with the infinite, man." And if it is waiting for me, let's face it... it can wait forever.

So to pass the time I lie here and I type on the tiny keys of my phone. I lie here and hope that this time isn't my time. I hope that if it is, I simply don't wake up.

Sometimes I think I should hope for madness to take me. Other times... I fear it already has.


-- Posted From Somewhere in Time and Space

Northwest Medical Center
Subject: [REDACTED]
Case No.: 4077212

Patient's distress is evident. Physical appearance indicates lack of sleep but there is no outward indication of psychosis. Patient was brought in by husband after what he described as possible night terrors. Patient was hysterical at time of admission but seems to have calmed since then.

The following is a transcript of patient's description of events leading to admission, quoted on this page for quick reference.

"Last night, I lay in bed alone. As I was curled beneath my blankets, thinking about the next day's dinner, I suddenly felt I wasn't as alone as I'd thought. Sure it must be my imagination, I rolled onto my left side. I burrowed further under my blankets and began to contemplate whether or not I would make Christmas cards this year and if so, for how many. 

That's when I felt it. A cold, thin hand resting lightly on my bare leg, just above the back of my left knee. Under my blanket. I screamed and sat up, flinging my blanket off my legs and pulling it up under my chin and clutching it to my chest all at once. The bottom half made a dull thud as it fell to the bed next to me. I was alone. 

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement near my dresser. A shadow stepped away from it and moved silently across the room. Dear God, was it fast! But how could it be so quiet on those ancient hardwood floors? I reached for the lamp on my bedside table and pushed the thumb knob just as it reached for the doorknob. 

That's when I saw it. There was no one there, but there was still a shadow! I could barely believe my eyes, but I know what I saw! In an instant, it slipped quickly down the wall and out under the door. I ran to the door, then down the stairs, screaming and flipping light switches as I ran through the house. My terrified shrieks and the sudden bursts of light woke the kids in their rooms and my husband, who was asleep in a living room recliner, but I found nothing else. All the doors and windows were locked. 

Honestly, I don't even know what I was looking for. Where can shadows not hide? What flimsy lock or thin pane of glass could keep it in or out? 

And that ... That's why I'm here. So you see, this is all just a misunderstanding. Can I go home now, Dr. Lee? I'd really ... I'd really like to spend Thanksgiving with my family."

Patient, while possibly delusional, does not appear to pose a danger to either herself or others, but an observation period of no less than three days is recommended. Anti-psychotics to be prescribed for hallucinations.

It can be safely assumed (as much as things of the nature of “The Slender Man” can ever be safe, or for that matter, assumed) that what we are dealing with is a multi-dimensional entity. If the Slender Man is capable of appearing to simultaneous witness, vanishing and appearing at will, trans-mutating his bodily shape (notably his limbs) and dragging his victims into another dimension, it is abundantly clear that he is not obeying the laws of physics. Hence, a “safe assumption” (there’s that sticky phrase again) would be that The Slender Man comes from a place outside what we define as “consensus reality.”

Or does he?

One of the strangest categories of unexplained phenomenon (as well as theoretical physics, for that matter) concern “time slippage.” Although skeptics will have you believe that it’s an “alleged” phenomenon (“alleged” being another dirty word) it’s important to remember that science is making confounding discoveries every day, including the fact that the mere THOUGHT of looking at an atom will alter it’s behavior. If modern science has proven, under laboratory conditions, that the mind can alter, or perhaps even create matter and control it’s behavior, who’s to say that the Slender Man isn’t merely exploiting an area of physics that we have no understanding of? More importantly, what exactly is a time slip? And how would the Slender Man use it to his advantage?

The concept of time suddenly becoming fluid, and ending with baffling (or oftentimes, fatal consequences) goes back as far as recorded human history. One of the earliest (although sadly unverifiable) reports come from Mexico City. On October 25, 1593, A Spanish soldier who had been assigned to a regiment in the Philippines was arrested and taken before the Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, (a frightening enough prospect in and of itself.) Explaining that he thought he was still in Manila, he was confounded by his presence in Mexico, as the journey had taken him, in his own words, “Less time than it takes a cock to crow.” Explaining that he had merely been walking to the palace garrison in Manila, only to find himself in Mexico, his interlocutors demanded to know why he had been walking to the garrison. He explained that he was reporting for guard duty after the assassination of Don Gomez Perez Dasmarinas, the Governor of the Philippines. Thinking him a deserter, and having heard no such news, he was imprisoned. News traveled slowly in 1593, and almost two months later, it was revealed that Dasmarinas had indeed been murdered on the night of October 24, 1593…mere hours before the soldier appeared with no way to explain his sudden arrival in Mexico. Further investigation revealed that his fellow soldiers had indeed seen him that night, marching off to the garrison, as ordered. The Tribunal concluded that he had merely “gotten lost,” and was sent back to the Philippines.

If this seems impossible, or perhaps an anecdote from centuries past, be aware that the occurrences have happened recently, as recently as 1901 (for the sake of brevity, see wiki on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly-Jourdain_incident.

Or, if Wikipedia seems suspect, dip into the archives of Oxford University and judge for yourself: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/caemoberly.html

We here at The Slender Man Chronicles always urge you to do your own research, make your own decisions, and act accordingly. The only thing we can do is speculate, specifically, on the origins of the Slender Man, and question what nefarious purpose he might have in mind for us. And what better place to start speculating than by looking at a little theoretical physics? Before you groan, know that understanding as much as we can about this mystifying shadow world of physical properties may help shed some light on the Slender Man. After all, an entity who can shapeshift, open and travel through dimensional gateways, become invisible, and drag people into alternate realities clearly has a few tricks up his long, black sleeve. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. So what can science tell us about the capabilities of the Slender Man?

I am not Stephen Hawking, and this is not a forum to engage in semantic arguments regarding what time “is” or “isn’t.” For our purpose, we shall have to agree that time, as it is viewed by the average working stiff, is a fixed constant. One day containing twenty four hours, each hour containing sixty minutes, and so on. As we understand time thusly, we accordingly plan our actions around it. Thus, a loose conclusion can be made regarding what time “is.”

But what if someone, or more frighteningly, something, were able to disregard our carefully constructed edifice concerning “when” exactly an event has to happen? What if, through some manipulation of a substance greater than time, it is able to align itself precisely at a moment when it knows we will be most vulnerable? More horrifyingly, what if we have done this to ourselves? We’ve all heard the story of “The Grandfather Paradox,” regarding the man who travels back in time to murder his own Grandfather, yet finds he is incapable of doing so because to carry out said act would negate his own existence. Should the time traveler in this case indeed be able to kill his own grandfather, he himself would never have existed in the first place, an event which would have necessitated the death of his own grandfather in the second place, because he would, in effect, merely be fulfilling his role in history, and not changing anything. Does this seem contradictory? It isn’t, and this is the theory posited by the Novikov self consistency principle, which claims that “random” or “contradictory” casual/time loops cannot form, but repetitive, consistent ones can. Let’s look at it thusly: Appearances of the Slender Man often come with a foreboding that goes beyond the pedestrian fight or flight response. His presence awakens a horror in us so deeply rooted as to be nearly pathological. The concept of re-living the same even over and over, throughout time, regardless of the apparent “circumstance” in which it appears, was even said by Nietzsche to be: “Horrifying and paralyzing, the heaviest burden imaginable.” Suppose, then, that in some distant past (or perhaps even distant future) we invited the Slender Man into our own realities, by merely thinking of him, and he has been capitalizing on the self consistency principles inherent in time itself to appear again and again, like some sort of ghoulish whack-a-mole? And what if, warned by some type of “sense memory,” we are aware, if even on a cellular level, of the horror he represents? Many multi-dimensional entities make their most frequent appearances under similar circumstances. The Mothman, for example, has been known to manifest in areas where mass tragedies are about to occur. Does our suspicion and fear act as a beacon for the Slender Man, calling out to him throughout time itself?

But what if it’s not this easy? What if, instead of a repeating loop of repetitive circumstances, the appearance of the Slender Man, and our reaction to him, open hundreds, if not thousands or perhaps millions of new opportunities for him to terrify us? Calculations made by Kip S. Thorne and his study of the above mentioned Novikov principle indicate that simple masses traveling through “wormholes” would never contradict themselves, as there are no primary conditions that would lend themselves to paradox once the concept of time travel is introduced. This is to say that any situation in which time/dimension travel allows the conclusion of many consistent solutions. Which leads us to parallel universes.

The notion that our destiny is inescapable might only make our present difficulties seem all the more desperate. How are we to escape a foe that can manifest himself anywhere, at any time? If paradox is impossible, how do we escape? Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation could provide us with a trick of our own. This theory suggests that all quantum events can occur in mutually exclusive histories. These alternate histories would branch out, forming a maze of possibilities that symbolized all possible outcomes of any interaction. If this is true, than any paradoxes occurring in any reality could be explained by having the paradoxical events occurring in a different/parallel universe. If we “thought” the Slender Man into existence, it stands to reason that by merely “thinking him away” we should be able to introduce a paradox in this or perhaps another universe and render him powerless, right? Think again. Stephen Hawking has suggested that even if this theory is accurate, each individual time traveler would experience a single self consistent timeline, making it impossible to travel to a world other than your own, no matter how bizarre. So maybe the determinists were right.

This suggests another, theory, our last and perhaps most terrifying. Known as “The Theory of Eternal Return,” it is a concept familiar to most of us, if not intimately. Known to the ancient Egyptians, the Stoics, and a host of other, The Theory of Eternal Return states that time is cyclical and not linear. This philosophy fell into unpopularity as Christianity gained prominence, but it holds that every condition, no matter how seemingly random, is bound to repeat itself eventually. That a finite number of states must repeat themselves within an infinite amount of time is perhaps the key to the Slender Man’s power. What if the Slender Man knows every possible outcome, everywhere, in all our possible histories, throughout time? And what does this mean for us?

This all leads us back to time slippage, however hesitatingly. We must admit at the onset that the Slender Man has capacities to reach us that are beyond our ability to control. He is not summoned, nor is he beckoned. He appears as he wishes, and does with us as he will. Could “time slippage” be considered not a slippage of our own time, as we know it, but a condition of paradox created by the Slender Man, in his own reality, do disrupt the patterns in ours? The odious conclusion reached by these suggestions seems to be that, given the lengths this being will go to reach us, whatever waits for us along the byzantine corridors of time itself will be countless times more horrifying than a slim shadow at the window.

A screengrab of the original page before it was torn down by terrified Wikipedia editors.

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