My memories of the day are all but gone.
After that thing with the disturbing dream this morning I went and dug through my dresser for uh… other clothes. I took another shower just because they’re soothing and then watched old sitcoms until I went to the school.
Well… well I assume I went to the school. I don’t really remember much of the day, I’m pretty sure I got there though. It feels like I did… I'm not totally certain though, that may just be bits of another dream. I do remember some things though. I…I remember waiting for a bus. I was sitting on one of those bus stop benches and it was… it was really foggy. Like really foggy, I remember being concerned that the bus wouldn’t stop because the fog was too dense and the driver wouldn’t see me. But then from the fog he came, it sorta parted for him and he came up to me…something he’s never done before. For whatever reason he never approaches me on the street, just watches from afar. But that’s not important right now. He came up to and this… this wave of comfort washed over me. It was like… like this was where I supposed to be. Strangest feeling I’ve ever felt.
He pointed. Stretched his long arm out and pointed into the haze across the street. And I looked up over there and then back to him in curiosity, but when I looked back he was gone. So I just continued to sit there for what felt like a couple hours. The bus never came though, and so eventually I stood up and walked over and found a backstreet among the fog he’d pointed to. And with each step down the alley that belonging feeling grew stronger until I could see a long silhouette. Approaching he pointed again down another alley and vanished when I looked away. In a daze I followed his instructions again and again and again until eventually he didn’t even need to point for me to know where he wanted me. He’d just vanish and… and I’d start walking in the direction of that feeling.
It must have continued for just hours because when we finally stopped it was dark out… like really very dark… it must have been at least 8PM then. When we did stop though he vanished once more and this time I felt no pull in any direction, so I stood there and… and searched blindly through his miasma that seemed to envelope the whole of the city. I couldn’t find anything in that final alley so I did the next seemingly reasonable thing; I started looking in ground level windows. And… and I found him, he was inside this building, in a dimly lit room… just sort of hovering, and for a moment I just couldn’t even begin to conceive what he was doing.
I stared in that window completely puzzled until I realized just what sort of room he was in. The walls were painted light blue and inside I could see posters of various sports stars, though in my daze I failed to see any importance in their names not that I'm a fan anyhow. There was a toy chest and a night light which was the source of the room’s dim light. It was a child’s bedroom. Craning my neck it became clear that the object he was hovering over was a low set bed, and in it was a little boy. The nightlight flickered and then, yet again, he had disappeared. And he had taken the child with him. But I could still his presence, and that intoxicatingly strange feeling. I turned and saw the two of them standing before me. The little boy was dressed in blue plaid pajamas and dug into Slenderman’s body, still sleeping in his grasp. Slenderman wrapped that child in his long arms in a way that I can only describe as lovingly.
And then he unwrapped one arm from the little boy and extended it out to me. His hand was as black as the rest of him… it extended from his arm without hem or seem, just an outcropping of his long sleeves. I felt my arm rise instinctively and reach out for him, but before our hands touched the illusion fell. I looked up from his twisted claws and back to the little boy. The monster's hold over him was no longer that of protection but something much more sinister, his other arm down by his side, the child was wrapped in black tendrils. They covered a great majority of his tiny body, holding closed his mouth and pulling him tight against the larger phantom which he stood infront of. That poor boys eyes blinked open for just the tiniest moment, they held terror that even through all this I had never known, a quiet hopeless pleading and the knowledge it would never be answered. I'd seen this look before... it was the same one that Sara had stared upon me with in those early nightmares, and the feeling from them was so much rawer in life. I yanked my arm back. Back from Slenderman and his grasp, back from the broken child and... and I reeled. I inched away and moved backwards… or maybe he did it starts to get fuzzy again here. The… the whole world started to lose color, the Slenderfog engulfed me again and broke my vision of them both. Something in me welled, I... I felt anger, just terrible anger... it's... it's not an emotion I'm all that familiar with, and I... I just charged into that fog completely blind. But then all the feelings, all the fog, they vanished… and the color slowly washed back into existence. I stood there stunned and I couldn’t help but think that… that I had just witnessed something that human beings weren’t ever supposed to. I had to sit for a moment and catch my breath, not sure if any of what I just saw, any of what I just experienced was even real.
It was. I got up from the stained alley after a moment or two and made back toward the window. The boy was still missing and this realization led me to a state of panic. I immediately thought, though I don’t know why, that I’d be blamed and so I fled. I... I ran about eighteen blocks before the feeling subsided, and it was at that point that I truly realized what just happened. I had been there. I experienced that monster steal a child from its very home, right from under the noses of the kid’s poor parents. And I let it fucking… fucking infect my mind… I had felt envy for that child in the monster’s embrace. And then, then when I should have done something to inform the parents I fled.
I turned back and tried to find the building I’d followed him to. In my head the whole way I struggled with the words I’d say to the parents when I got there, but in the end it didn’t matter. I couldn’t find the place… I’d only run so far, and I’m sure I'd ran a straight line, but attempting to retrace my steps left me completely lost. Nothing was familiar at all; it was almost as if I’d been in an entirely different city for the kidnapping. But I kept searching, I searched for at least two hours but in all that time I found nothing at all to lead me back to the boy’s dimly lit room. I eventually gave up and caught a bus… turns out that somehow in all my efforts to get back I ended up no more than four blocks from my own apartment.
