Eyes Open

After around half an hour of walking around the outside of the house, looking into windows and searching for any clue as to whether the house had been recently lived in, the trio came to the conclusion that it was empty, at least for the moment.

"Should we try the door?" Troy asked. "I mean, it’s a little optimistic that it’ll be open, but it’s better than wasting time trying to get in when the door’s been open the whole damn time."

"That would be just my luck," Jeff muttered.

"Guys," Nate piped up. "I don’t know if I’m being a little suspicious or something, but do you not think there’s something about going into an empty old house in the middle of a forest that we’ve been magically transported into that’s a little bit ... I don’t know ... stupid?"

"Well, yeah," Troy replied. "If we were going to stay for ages and split up and we knew that this was where the four teenagers were murdered exactly ten years ago today. But it’s just a house, well ... more of a cottage, and we’re just going in to see if there’s any food. We don’t know how long we’re going to be out here, remember?"

"It just seems ... I don’t know," Nate muttered. "Highly convenient," he eventually decided.

Jeff and Troy had to acknowledge that Nate had a point, but they also had to think of the fact that they could be stranded out here for a very long time, especially if there really was no way to get the car out of the forest. So, they tried the door, and upon finding it open, cautiously entered, despite Nate’s mutterings of how convenient that was, too.

"Look," Troy eventually said. "If you’re that convinced that there’s some psychopathic, axe brandishing serial killer in here, why don’t you stand guard while me and Jeff go food hunting?"

"Oh, that’s rich," Nate replied. "I’ll stand here by myself and either get slaughtered first, or wait for ages while you two get silently slaughtered and he comes creeping through the house for me."

"You ever stop to think that you might watch a tad too many horror films, Nate?" Jeff asked.

"Well, this shit is straight from a horror film, if you ask me," Nate replied. "And what’s the first thing you do when you see a horror film? Yell at the characters for all of the stupid things they’re doing wrong."

"True," Troy shrugged. "But like we said, we’re only here for food. So the quicker we have a look around, the quicker we can get out of here."

The interior of the cottage didn’t look anything like what they imaged a creepy abandoned house in the woods to look like. The only sign that it hadn’t been lived in for a while was the fact that there was a thick, healthy layer of dust over absolutely everything. There were no fingerprints on everyday items, and no footprints on the dusty floor or carpet.

"I wonder why they left?" Nate muttered.

"Probably something to do with a massively tall, faceless man in a business suit, at a guess," Troy replied wryly.

They moved through the hallway, which was full of dust-covered photographs and seemed quite cosy. The floor was carpeted and although the rugs were dulled with yet more dust, it was clear that at one point they had been beautifully coloured. Troy paused to squint through the grime at the photos. They were hard to see, but he didn’t dare wipe any of the stuff off, because knew that would leave further traces that they were there. The footprints in the dust on the floor wouldn’t be as obvious as smear marks on the pictures.

The one he was looking at was slightly discoloured, probably due to over-exposure, and featured a black-and-white portrait of a family. There were two elderly people, either the paternal or the maternal grandparents, most probably, a younger couple, a boy who looked around eight, a girl of around four, and an infant. They were dressed as though it was the early twenties or thirties, and they all looked rather happy. The trees around them seems a lot younger, and even though they all seemed content enough, Troy couldn’t help but instantly see the thin, slender figure in a gap in the trees in the background, watching the family with a blank face.

He appeared in all of the pictures, even the more modern ones that looked as though they could have been taken only days ago. Troy reached the end of the line of photographs and saw that one had fallen off of the wall. He crouched down and picked up the frame and the loose photograph, about to slide them together, when he noticed faded pencil writing on the back of the picture.

He has appeared again, it read. This is the last photo. No more. No more.

A shiver ran up Troy’s spine as he slid the picture back into its frame and placed it back on the wall. The children in this picture were teenagers, their pet dog sitting with them, and judging by the quality of the picture and the way they were dressed, it was a pretty modern shot. The Slender Man lurked in the background, this time with his tendrils spread wide around him, as though enticing them to come towards him. Troy wondered if they had.

He looked around himself briefly, making sure the door was shut behind them, before he walked into the room at the end of the hall, which had served as a living room. Like everything else in the house, this place was also dust-covered, and featured an old TV, a couch and some armchairs, a battered coffee table, a bookshelf, several more dusty pictures and some random ornaments. It was all very homely, and Troy got the impression that the people who lived here may have been elderly.

"Oh, gross!" Nate muttered, and Troy looked over to see his friend had nearly stood on a small skeleton, which looked to have once belonged to a rat or similar sized rodent.

"I bet there’s loads of them in here," Jeff said. "At least we definitely know that it’s not been lived in for a while, then."

"Unless the people living here are complete tramps," Troy muttered. He left the room and went back down the hallway into a room by the front door on the right, which was the kitchen. There were still some dishes in the sink and the seats around the wooden dining table were pushed out slightly, as though people had been sitting at them only hours ago. However, once more, the dust settled thickly upon everything, making it clear that the place had long since been abandoned. Troy felt a little saddened as he looked around – it had once been a loved home, incredibly looked after and impeccably decorated, and now it was left to fall into ruin, presumably because of the Slender Man. It was just another sad story of another life ruined or cut short by the creature, and standing among the forgotten trinkets and once loved pictures brought it all home to Troy. This would probably be the fate of his own house.

He heard Nate and Jeff heading carefully upstairs to check out what might or might not be up there, but Troy was fine to stay where he was. He walked slowly around the kitchen, hunting for any food that might still be able to be salvaged. He found nothing in the fridge apart from milk that was completely solid and cheese that had long since turned into a green-black lump of soggy mould, and some unidentified brown mush that could have once been a lettuce. Shutting the door on the smell, Troy looked down to the freezer, which would hopefully be more promising.

It was – he found a bag of frozen sausages and some chicken nuggets, and another almost full bag of frozen roast potatoes. Going through the cupboards found things like tinned beans and soups, which wouldn’t expire for another couple of months. Seeing all this food made Troy realize how hungry he was, and so he was glad that he had good news to tell Nate and Jeff when they came down the stairs and entered the kitchen.

"What is that damn smell?" Jeff asked, wrinkling his nose.

"Yeah, sorry about that," Troy said. "I made the mistake of opening the fridge. There’s some old milk and cheese in there and an URO."

"A URO?" Nate questioned.

"Unidentified Rotting Object," Troy replied casually, and the other two men managed a laugh. "I think it could have been a lettuce, once upon a time."

"So is there anything in here worth salvaging, or should we just head back to the truck?" Jeff asked.

"Ah, I managed to find this," Troy replied happily, showing them what he had discovered in the cupboard and what the freezer held. "So we’ve got something to eat, at least."

"Now to find out if the stove works," Jeff said. "That would be funny."

"Not really," Nate replied. "I’m sorry guys, but I really would have to eat one of you. I’m starved."

"You’re not the only one," Troy agreed. "But if the worst comes to the worst, there’s plenty of stuff in here we could burn."

"Yeah, I found about five hundred old newspapers upstairs," Nate said. As he did so, there was a clank and a groan and Jeff managed to get the stove to spark into life. He switched it off again and turned to the others, grinning.

"Now we get to clean it," he said brightly. "Because God knows what’s living in there. There’s probably a racoon or something, knowing our luck."

"I’ll leave you to deal with that," Troy muttered.

After an hour or so, the kitchen had been transformed greatly. They had cleaned the dust off of some of the things they would need, knowing that by this point it would be obvious someone had been in the house as it was. The room was bright, lit by a single light in the ceiling which still worked and some candles that they had lit on the stove. The smell of cooking filled the room, as did the warmth, and for a few seconds it could almost be forgotten that the place had been long abandoned. The promise of food had cheered everyone up greatly, and the bantering and bickering going on around the table was happy and good-hearted.

"All we’re missing here is a bit of ketchup," Jeff said, as they dished up sausages, beans, roasted potatoes and chicken nuggets.

"Now that would have been a miracle," Troy laughed. "I think the only thing in the vegetable family that survived in this place were these potatoes."

"Let’s just hope it tastes all right," Nate chuckled.

They were in luck, and the fact that the food tasted so good made their moods improve greatly. However, it couldn’t be ignored that it was gradually getting darker outside, and they were going to have to make a decision about what they were going to do for the night – stay at the cottage, or try and get back to the car. The three of them stood at the kitchen window, looking out into the darkness that had come in rather quickly to surround them.

"What do you reckon, then?" Jeff asked quietly.

"I reckon we should stay," Troy replied. "I mean, I know I won’t sleep. I can keep an eye out while your two get some rest. It just makes more sense than trying to blunder through all that forest again. It was a good half an hour walk to get here, and now it’s dark it’ll probably take a lot longer. If something was here, it wouldn’t wait until dark to make itself known. This isn’t a horror movie, as much as it feels like one."

"That’s true enough," Jeff agreed. "What do you reckon, Nate? Would you be comfortable staying here until it gets a bit lighter?"

Nate shrugged.

"If Troy’s on the lookout we should be fine," he said. "Although if you feel you’re going to fall asleep, Troy, make sure you get one of us to take over, yeah?"

"Sure thing," Troy nodded. "Are you going upstairs or are you just going to camp out in the living room?"

"Living room," Jeff and Nate said at the same time.

"Upstairs was kind of creepy," Nate admitted. "It’s weird, seeing people’s bedrooms, when you don’t even know if they’re still alive or not."

"True," Troy replied, and he remembered how even just seeing the kitchen had been creepy enough, without all of the extra personal effects like clothing.

They remained staring out of the window warily for a few seconds longer and then eventually moved to their positions for the night.