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.