Eyes Open

Jeff woke up quite suddenly. Instantly, he was on edge, his ears straining to hear what had woken him up, his eyes scanning the room warily, expecting to see a pale head or dark tendril at any moment.

The noise came again, and Jeff realized someone was banging relentlessly on his door. Cautiously, Jeff climbed out of bed, the cold air hitting him, and crept as silently as possible to the door. He didn’t want to make a single sound as he approached, because he had no idea what could be on the other side of the door.

As he approached, the knocking became louder, and more consistent. Someone clearly wanted to wake him up, and carefully, Jeff pressed one eye against the peephole. Outside, in the slightly distorted hallway, stood Nate, who was looking around himself while still banging on the door in a non-stop rhythm.

Jeff pulled open the door as Nate was in mid-knock.

"Finally!" Nate exclaimed.

"What’s going on?" Jeff demanded.

"I woke up and Troy’s gone," Nate said worriedly. "The door to the room was open. I’ve done a quick scout of the motel and the immediate area, but there’s no sign of him."

"Shit," Jeff muttered. He turned back into his room and quickly grabbed his jacket and his shoes, pulling them on and hurrying out into the hallway to join Nate. The two men began briskly walking down the dark hallway, scanning every corner they could.

"Do you know how long he’s been gone for?" Jeff asked.

"No," Nate muttered. "I don’t think that it was long, though. The hallway is colder than our room and the room wasn’t much colder than usual when I got up."

"Nice detective work, there, Nate," Jeff said, and the weak attempt at humour made the situation slightly more bearable for the time being.

They crept through the deserted reception and out of the grubby glass doors at the front. The frost had melted now, but the air was still bitterly cold. Nate had noticed Troy had left his shoes and jacket in the room, and knew that they had to find him quickly, before he got hypothermia. The two men did a circle around the motel, and then a wider circle when the first one didn’t yield any results. One the third circle, Nate spotted a familiar looking figure hunched down by the road side.

"That’s him!" he shouted to Jeff, who was a little way over from Nate. He looked up, and then looked to where Nate was jogging over to, before breaking into a jog himself to catch up.

Troy was huddled down in a ditch beside the road. It was in shadow, so the frost here hadn’t quite melted yet. He was shivering, but didn’t seem to notice this fact, or the cold that was causing the reaction.

"Troy?" Nate asked, crouching down beside him. "You need to come back inside, man."
Troy looked up, annoyance in his eyes.

"She knows something," he muttered. "That little girl. She’s just messing around with me, Nate."

"I thought you said she turned to dust back in the forest?"

"She did. But now she’s back. I know she knows something about Rosie – she recited that poem I wrote when I was younger. She told me that the Slender Man sees me as a game. Apparently I entertain him. Fuck that – what is he? A child? You want to hear what she calls him?"

"What does she call him, Troy?" Nate asked calmly, as he helped his best friend first to his feet, and then out of the ditch.

"She calls him The Master," Troy muttered. "What a creepy little shit, eh? She runs around being all high and mighty because she’s some slave to whatever he is."

"Well, Troy, slagging him off madly probably won’t help," Nate pointed out.

"Yeah, but it makes me feel better," Troy muttered.

Together, Jeff and Nate helped drag the ranting Troy back to his room, where they tried to warm him up and then, after enduring several more minutes of his ranting, which was becoming steadily more incoherent, they started to pry into what had happened.

"I saw that girl again," was the first thing Troy muttered.

"Yes, Troy," Nate said, managing a small smile despite the situation. "We kind of gathered that. You know, from all the ranting and the raving that you did about her."

"Well, I have a point," Troy fired back indignantly. "I’m not really sure what happened. It’s sketchy."

"Were you in the woods again?" Nate asked curiously.

"No, thank God," Troy replied, huddling further down into the covers of the bed as he began to shiver, finally realizing how cold he was. "I would certainly remember that. I remember ... it wasn’t rural this time. There were houses. Red-bricked ones."

Troy squeezed his eyes shut briefly, struggling to remember exactly what the little girl had shown him. She seemed to have been calmer this time, talking to him for once like she didn’t think she was better than him, actually explaining small portions of things. She had said a lot about the Slender Man, and this was what Troy was trying desperately to remember.

"She said something about the Slender Man is ... a personification or something," he eventually said, the memory flitting in and out of his mind as he tried to hold onto it.

"A personification of what?" Nate asked, glancing from Troy to Jeff in confusion. Jeff was looking thoughtful, but unlike Troy, it didn’t seem to be taking all of his energy and concentration.

"I’m not sure," Troy muttered. "Damn it. It was before we left the motel. I think we were still in this room."

Troy got up and walked slowly around the room, until he stopped in a spot that felt right. He looked around himself, more memories coming back to him as he retraced his steps.

"The unknown," Troy said strongly, nodding. "She said he was a personification of the unknown, and that’s why we couldn’t understand him. He works differently to us. He understands us, but we don’t understand him."

"Sounds about right," Jeff muttered, sounding annoyed at the mere thought of the unfairness of it all.

"Then we went out into the hall," Troy said. "And after that, I don’t really remember much else. It’s all little snippets – they don’t really make sense and I’m not even sure if they’re in order or not. I remember being in this field, and the grass was really long – up to my waist. Then there were those red-bricked houses I was telling you about, and the street looked really empty. Then there was this old, run-down park, with a ... yellow? A yellow slide? I’m not too sure about that. I was back in the field after that and then I was in that ditch where you found me. The girl was with me up until you guys came over, and then she just ... faded away. Aside from her showing up, it all seems pretty useless, doesn’t it?"

"It has to mean something," Nate said. "What about the park where you first saw him, Jeff? Did that have a yellow slide?"

"No," Jeff answered. "That park didn’t even have a slide."

Troy blinked.

"A play park had no slide?" he demanded, and he sounded so genuinely outraged that Jeff started to laugh.

"You’re being given clues by Slender Man and all you can manage to be worried about is the fact this park had no slide?"

Troy managed a smile as he saw the funny side to what he had just said.

"Well, you know," he shrugged. "I mean, tall, faceless guys with tentacles are weird, but a park with no slide ... that’s a whole new level of evil."

"The slide was evil," Jeff grinned. "It was taken down because it was a state, and one kid fell off of it and broke a leg. So they took it down and never got around to putting up a new one. So I’m not really sure where you might have got that image from. Perhaps it just represents the fact Slender Man is often seen before the disappearance of children, specifically multiple ones?"

"I’m not sure," Troy shrugged. "Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ve yet to see it? You think that could be it? It could be a premonition?"

"Maybe," Jeff replied. "But I’ve never heard of Slender Man causing premonitions. Flashbacks, certainly, and hallucinations, but never premonitions. Perhaps you’re right – it could be random. Knowing the Slender Man, he probably put it in there to confuse you."

"That’s the most frustrating thing!" Troy suddenly burst out. He began pacing the room again, his eyes narrowed. "All of this gives me hope that there could be some answers out there, but then I know that it could just as easily be a total mindfuck. So what do I believe? I feel like I can’t even trust my own thoughts and ideas."

"And that’s exactly what makes the Slender Man such a dangerous foe," Jeff said softly. "His primary aim isn’t to kill you, Troy. It’s to drive you mad. He liked to play with his victims. He likes to confuse them, to frustrate them, to watch them drive away everyone who cares about them. Then, when they’re completely on their own, he stalks them relentlessly, until they finally go mad. That’s when he’ll make his move. It’s not death you should fear when it comes to Slender Man. It’s the unknown."

Troy sighed. He knew that Jeff was right, but he still didn’t want to admit it. Admitting it made everything seem too hopeless, too redundant. How was he meant to carry on in life when he’d accepted the fact that there was nowhere for him to run? There was no way he would ever be safe?

"We should go," Troy eventually muttered. "The Slender Man was in my room before I saw the girl. He knows where we are."

Jeff nodded, and silently, everyone began to get ready to leave. Troy’s heart weighed down upon his chest heavily – although he hadn’t admitted that Jeff was correct outright, he knew that the fact he no longer had the drive to fight against the creature was just as bad as admitting Jeff’s idea of his fate.

They locked up their rooms, as it didn’t take them long to gather all of their things. Troy and Nate had the clothes on their backs and that was it, and Jeff had a small bag of belongings, with most of the larger items still in his car. They walked through the hallway, which was still depressingly dark, and emerged in the reception area. An old, rather miserable looking man sat there, and he looked up at them with apathy, before he noticed the blood covering Troy and Nate – mostly Troy – and his eyes widened.

"What the Hell were you boys doing last night?" he smirked.

"Having raunchy, raunchy sex," Jeff muttered, putting the keys onto the desk. The receptionist’s smile faltered as Jeff retained a straight face. "We paid up last night, it’s on the system. You might want to air the rooms out before you use them again."

The three men made it almost to the car before Troy started laughing, a little hysterically, setting the other two off. It had been a while since any of them had laughed, and as a result, Jeff’s joke seemed at least ten times funnier.

"I can’t believe you said that!" Troy laughed, as he jumped into the back of the car, Nate taking the passenger’s seat and Jeff the driver’s.

"Well, he was obviously thinking it, the pervert," Jeff replied, smirking at Troy in the mirror. "May as well give him the scary illusion that we knew what he was thinking all along."

"Why would he even think that?" Nate asked, still suppressing chuckles.

"Usually, there are only two reasons why people check into motels that cheap," Jeff winked, leaning behind his seat so he could see out of the back of the car and starting to reverse out of the parking space. "One, they’re going to kill themselves, or two, they’re off to have hot sex with someone they shouldn’t be having hot sex with. As we all walked out very much alive, I’m guessing he thought we were one of the hot sex crew."

"I wouldn’t dare," Troy muttered, and there was a silence as Jeff and Nate tried to work out if he was being serious. "Not with Slender Man perving on me, anyway," Troy finished, winking, and for a while at least, the journey could be light-hearted.