Eyes Open

After everyone had been settled into their rooms – Nate and Troy in one and Jeff in another – Jeff came over to Troy and Nate’s room for a while, as all of them were having some serious trouble relaxing enough to go to sleep. Troy, who had forgotten his medication, knew that he was most likely doomed to a sleepless night anyway, and so he was sitting on the floor, his back up against the bed, in a noticeably worsening mood.

"So, how long will we stay here for?" Nate asked.

"Probably until we’ve all rested up a bit," Jeff replied. "We don’t want to be here for too long, that’s for sure. Old Slender Man looked pretty pissed off."

"Will he ever give up?" Troy asked, though deep down he knew that the answer wouldn’t be one that he wanted to hear.

"No," Jeff said bluntly. "No, he won’t."

"Great," Troy muttered. He almost missed the days where the only thing he had to worry about was his insomnia and being late for work. He could see any hopes of ever having a relatively normal life fading away fast, and the thought was less than pleasing.

"So, what about you?" Nate asked Jeff. "You said you’ve been running for some time now."

"Ten years," Jeff nodded. "Well, getting closer to eleven, actually. I first saw him when I was sixteen. Of course, I probably saw him before that, I just didn’t remember. Many people who see him as adults have seen him as a child. Probably all of us, actually. I don’t really know why that is. Perhaps he’s the sort of guy who really doesn’t like unfinished business?"

"Where were you?" Troy asked curiously. "When you first saw him, I mean?"

"I was in the old park up the road from my house," Jeff nodded. "I didn’t have a great family life, if I’m honest, so I spent as much time out of the house as I possibly could. There was this park up the road that barely anyone used anymore, so I would just go sit on the swing set and think to myself. Not very interesting, I know. Anyway, there was a road on one side of it, a field on two sides, and on the last side a small thicket of trees. You probably both know that he likes to hide among trees. He can disguise himself easily among them, especially in the winter. That was where he was. I could see him as plain as anything else around me. He was standing in between two larger trees, perfectly still, perfectly straight, watching me. I’m sure I don’t need to describe how that feels."

Both Nate and Troy shook their heads.

"Anyway, after that, I started to see him more and more regularly. Sometimes he would be standing in the trees, other times he would be standing dead centre in the road, looking up at my bedroom window. He also liked to stand under streetlamps a fair distance away, so I could never be sure if it really was him or not. It started to drive me mad, and my parents thought I was crazy. I thought I was crazy. The thing is, in my family, you weren’t allowed to be crazy. I’m from the South originally, and down there they still think that if you’re crazy, you’ve done something to annoy God and it’s a punishment or something. Where I came from, these were the type of people who thought that being homosexual was the worst thing you could do and that black people should still be slaves. They were a fucking horrible bunch of people, let me tell you that. Right bunch of Bible-bashing hypocrites. Anyway, you just didn’t talk about anything unusual happening. If I’d started spouting about the fact that I was seeing this tall, faceless guy all over the place, they would have thought all sorts of things; I was cursed, I was possessed, I was being punished by God ... all of that shit. Man, they could be idiots sometimes. Anyway, as you know, it’s hard to disguise your paranoia when you know he’s after you, eh?"

"Tell me about it," Troy muttered. "If I had received a dollar for every single time I jumped or looked over my shoulder, I would be a very rich man by now."

Jeff chucked.

"I know the feeling," he nodded. "That’s exactly what I was like. I was jumping all over the place, I was always looking over my shoulder, my eyes were forever darting around, scanning everything and anywhere that could be used as a potential hiding place for Slender Man. At first I managed to keep it under cover, but as I started to see him more, and even dream about him, things changed. I stopped sleeping as much and I was always jumpy. I was letting the dogs out into the garden one day and my father came around the corner of the house and I screamed and ran back inside. It was totally mad. So obviously my parents knew something was up. You know what they thought?"

"You were crazy?" Nate asked.

"That came later," Jeff winked. "They thought I was on drugs. Drugs! Where in Hell would I find drugs in the most Bible-bashing town in the South? Well, that’s what they thought, and there was a shitstorm. They dragged me to the church the same damn day and I had to sit there convincing my pastor for three hours that I wasn’t on drugs. I had no choice to explain what was going on, and that was when they decided I must be mad."

"That must have been horrible," Troy muttered. "I mean, it was bad enough when it was happening to me ... but if no one had believed me ... if they’d just written me off as being mad, I might just have believed them."

"I nearly did," Jeff nodded. "But there was something in the back of my mind that let me know that there was something more sinister going on. Of course, when I was that age, the internet wasn’t a widely available thing, so I had to take to the library records and things like that. Makes me feel old – even though I doubt I’m much older than you two. Anyway, I went through all the town’s documents – it was this big, old-fashioned library, lovely place. Probably the best part of the town. They had all copies of newspapers right back to the town’s founding, and loads of different documents and released police reports and things like that. For weeks and weeks I spent from morning until night in there, so much so that the librarian started trusting me to lock up when I left. I eventually got a job there, which put my parents off of my back for a while – getting a job was nice and normal, see. It was convenient for me, too – I could spend every spare second going through more newspaper reports and things. I found a lot about our tall friend, though of course the townspeople couldn’t have known. There were decades, sometimes centuries, in between each sighting, and not many people read three hundred years of newspapers all in a few weeks."

"What sort of stuff was there?" Nate asked. "Like, disappearances and things?"

"Yeah, lots of them," Jeff nodded. "The earliest one was in seventeen hundred and something. Our town is fucking ancient, see, though back then it was only a small cluster of farms. Anyway, this family had a farm a little further away from the others and one day the sheriff of whatever they were in those days went down to have a look because they hadn’t been seen in a while. Found the father covered in blood, wondering around muttering incoherently, and the wife and three kids dead. Of course the guy was hanged for murdering his family, but from the records it doesn’t look like he was to blame. Not to me, anyway."

"Slender Man?" Troy asked.

"Looks like it," Jeff agreed. "The guy was muttering about this tall man in a suit coming after his kids, and that he had tried to stab the creature and hadn’t actually touched his family, the blood was from trying to help them. Of course no one believed the poor guy and they put him to death. There’s a gap of about thirty years, then, and then I read about two schoolchildren going missing. Then it’s at random intervals all the way up to the same decade I was in while reading it. Kids disappearing, people killing themselves, fires, unexplained fog in the wrong weather conditions, strange sightings ... really fucking weird. I don’t know if other places had as much activity as my town, but we seemed to have a lot. There were a lot more that could have had Slender Man potential, but I only counted the ones that I knew were one hundred per cent related to him."

"So is that what made you run?" Troy asked. "The fact that your town seems haunted by him?"

"Yeah," Jeff said, sighing. "It was a tough decision. I mean, I didn’t like my town, and my parents didn’t really give a shit about me. I was the middle child – I had an older brother who was basically perfection in my parents’ eyes, and then I had a younger sister, who was a little Southern belle and the apple of everyone’s eye. I was the crazy one, see, so I didn’t really think they’d miss me. It’s just strange to leave everything you ever knew and set off into the unknown. I’d never left the town before, until I ran away."

"Damn," Nate muttered. "What did you do, though? I guess you didn’t have a car when you left?"

"I had nothing but the clothes on my back," Jeff said grimly. "But then again, I didn’t really have time to grab anything. I had been planning a date, but something came up and I had to make a swifter exit. I saw the Slender Man when I was walking back quite late from the library. We watched each other for a while, before he seemed to blend into the darkness. Before I could react, the school across the road just burst into flames. I don’t know how, but it just did. I’m not talking a little fire that spread, either. It looked as though someone had fired a missile in there – there was a huge bang and the whole building was alight. Obviously, in a town so small, word spread even though it was about one in the morning, and the whole town came out in their night clothes to stare and throw accusations. Well, word got around that I had been standing outside when it went up and, as the resident crazy kid, instantly everyone was blaming me. I’d guessed this would happen, though, and the last view I had of the town was everyone storming up to my parent’s house. I haven’t been back since."

Jeff sighed, picking at the carpet.

"He likes to ruin lives," he said, after a pause. "I hit the road. Hitchhiked to the bigger town a few miles away, begged and did odd jobs, then took the first overnight bus going to anywhere."

"Sounds lonely," Nate said sadly. The thought was indeed a depressing one.

"It can be, at times," Jeff agreed, "But I meet other people like me. Like how I came into contact with you two. Whenever I have a few dollars and I have gas in the tank and food handy, I’ll spend it in internet cafes, looking through all the forums to see if there’s someone nearby. I like to meet with people and exchange experiences – the more we know, the closer we’ll be to defeating him, and some people will have little nuggets of information that others don’t. But it’s risky – a group of us can’t stay together for long. If the Slender Man is after someone, he almost has a sixth sense as to where they might be. If a large group of us are together, he’ll be able to trace us easier. We either have to move two or three times a day, or make the meetings short and sweet."

"I guess we’ll have to be saying goodbye to you soon, then?" Troy asked.

"Most likely," Jeff replied. "But I’m sure we’ll bump into one another more than a few times. But that’s another point entirely. I have a question for you now. Where are you going from here?"