Like a clockwork screw to the brain.

It hurts.

Everything hurts, the room is spinning, and I think - no, I know I've thrown up all over myself.

The headache that feels like my skull's being split apart from the inside isn't the worst thing about it, but the flashes of odd, almost nostalgic memory that has me thinking of a time when I was a child in a similar situation, my mother whispering promises of ice cream and sweets once I feel better actually aggravating the situation.

Even now I can't be sure if He's near - there was a flash of static from our radio and an unsettling heaviness in the air (and the shadows were restless again, but they always are, and my eyesight is anything but pristine to begin with), but aside from that, I couldn't even bring myself to look outside my bedroom window, much less work up the needed strength of will to make a sound. I'm only feeling mildly better now, the jackhammer in my skull turned down to a dull screwing motion, and I'm here because it's the only semblance of clockwork normality I still have anymore.


Tomorrow, once I feel better, I'll close the heavy drapes I haven't used since I was a child.




















Not that it'll help much.

An outcome you want to avoid.

I woke up with a smile this morning.

Not that it's uncommon for me to do so, but... Given the subject manner of my recent recurrent night terrors, I suppose I should be alarmed I'm not waking up a screaming, sobbing mess. Last night I had my very first dream about him (and I'm certain there will be others in the days to come), and it was surprisingly mellow when one considers the star is what many have argued to be the very manifestation of a person's most primal of fears: Fear of the Unknown.

There's a time when you realize that you're dreaming, in the waking moments between unconsciousness and the stirring of self-awareness. I don't have those moments very often, not until I awake to find myself wondering if I had actually been dreaming, or if I was looking at a memory warped in the ways photographs tend to curl in on themselves when left in the sun. It was dark, grainy like a film noir, and I watched with the keen awareness of one out of their body as my bedroom door creaked soundlessly open; decrepit, tall body sliding in the low arch and gliding across the floor like a hull cutting through water.


He called out to me, I fancy, the soundless quality in His voice impossible in its contradictions as I watched Him hover over my sleeping form, inky tendrils caressing the side of my face much like a great Savannah cat paws at its prey. Only this was no cat but something that seemed to only very faintly pass as a man, and as I watched in rapt fascination and muted horror He stops, pausing and turning to face me, blank head tilted over His shoulder, and I know He's smiling. He's fucking smiling at me, and there's no veil in between us and I'm there, in the body that's on the bed, the abomination we call the Slender Man considering my fear for a moment before He leans forward, His Darkness devouring everything.


It's a painful feeling, like drowning outside of water.


And that's when I wake up, and I look into the mirror and catch myself smiling.
Lovely.

And I thought; what a charming guy.

Equius found out about the blog.


He wants me to stop. I told him I would - but I don't think I can. He says it's not good for me, it's a distraction and frivolity I can't afford to be bothered with. I know it's something much, much worse than that.

He wasn't supposed to get involved in all this...

With the stars on their shoulders.

I've been feeling meticulously stressed for the last few days, something that's a genuine rarity for me.

And not just stressed in regular ways, but in the way that comes with a snapping irritability and a dense sense of paranoia and morning sickness. Part of me says I should stop this foolishness. Another says I should do anything but, because when (and it's when, not if. It isn't a matter of will He, but a matter of how horrible and what place it will be) He finds me and decides He's wrung me dry of all the night terrors and anxiety attacks and piss-in-your-pants paranoia and finally sends me to The Other Side, there isn't going to be an ounce of memorandum to my name but this scrap of internet space I'm taking up, and the thought of losing even that... It's a little too much for me to process right now.

I saw Him again today. In fact, it was the clearest, most specific moment of contact I've had with Him so far - ironic, considering the one time I'm certain it's Him and not a trick of my mind or a distortion of shadows I'm at the office, surrounded by people in the brightness of day. He was standing outside, innocuous in all of His otherworldliness, ridiculously tall and pale and simply watching, and my head starts to spin in that peculiar way that's only ever significant when you least expect it. My first instinct (and admittedly one of the more stupid of impulses I've ever had) was to lean forward, hands and forehead pressed against the glass to gape, wordless gasps leaving parted lips. Instead I look away, blinking down the swelling, searing heat in my stomach and taking deep breaths - but I look again, and He's still there, and everything goes to hell.


















To hell.

There was no punctuation when I told them, and no rejuvenating breaths.

Didn't get my eyes checked today, too much going on at home to find the excuse to slip out. Maybe I'll go tomorrow. I've been getting headaches, but they're very faint - like they're not really headaches, so much as their little reminders of what's going on in our heads past the scientific notion that thinking won't hurt you.

I've been exchanging emails with a charming young lady named Parker from the United States, and while we're still in that fragile point of friendship where you and the person get acquainted, where revealing everything you think is wrong inside your head isn't an option at the time; I have to confess she's growing on me in ways I didn't think I'd appeal to people at all. She's clever, pragmatic, and a little reckless - but that's just what makes me love her more. And convinced I can't involve her in this fiasco that's clearly a derogatory regression of my mind, because impossibly tall, faceless men don't exist, and they don't stand in the shadow of the vacant field next to your bedroom window in either the light of day or the dead of night.

Theoretically, this shouldn't bother me. No, it should bother me, but it doesn't. Or rather, it does; but not in the way you would think. It's easy to think about it during the day, because bogeymen don't come out when the sun is up. Last night, for the first time in years since I was a child, I slept with the covers pulled over my head, curled in on myself and absolutely dead quiet - if you think about not thinking about him, does that count? And if it did count, shouldn't that go to say that me sitting here, in the shadow of early evening writing what in essence is an electronic shout out just another way for him to track me down?

...I shouldn't put too much stock into it. I doubt anyone is reading this, not when their are others who write about their own experiences in terrifying detail - Funny, I almost think I'm jealous. I'd like to talk to the others, the ones he's Touched; see what they did in the earliest stages of the H(a)unt, but...










I don't want to be a bother.

And 'round the tree grew a vine.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is all just a byproduct of an extremely hyper active imagination.

It wouldn't be the first time that's happened, given my utterly ridiculous habit of being incredibly susceptible to even the subtlest of mental suggestions - but there's something off about the whole thing, like it's forced with the kind of natural awkwardness you only serve to exemplify in your conscious moments, only to realize later on that you weren't actively thinking about it, only thought you were because you'd catch yourself in the middle of cheerful conversation throwing looks of panicked paranoia around you whenever things go dark and too quiet.

I thought I saw something earlier today, when I was out running errands for the war machine that is my employer, when I had to cut through an unusually long stretch of underground parking. The jarring difference between the noisy sunshine I'd been submersed in to the quiet coolness was startling, and I caught myself scrutinizing corners and holding my breath, goosebumps on my skin. 'Get a grip,' I thought. 'You're playing to much into the paranoia.' To be honest, that I probably was; but the pragmatically cloud coocoolander in me realized, later on when I was back at home - It's pretty fucking hard to imagine nausea and distraction in someone who practically lives off rainbows and butterflies.


I wonder - against my better judgement I went back online and started delving deeper into the whole 'Slender Man Mythos', just to see if I could find possible and logical explainations. Like maybe it was mass enduced hysteria, but on a smaller scale. And besides; what would the Slender Man even be doing here? Didn't he h(a)unt the Norther Hemisphere? That's a pretty long way from where I'm from - until I stumble across an article that disccusses how he's been seen in places like Australia and Germany, and Iraq of all places... And suddenly the fright factor is amplified, in the sense that I doubt anyone else in my little neck of the woods would even be aware of the Mythos. Luck bastards.

I'll be going to have my eyes checked tomorrow at the hospital I hate going to. Part of me is screaming that that elongated, emancipated shadow I keep catching in the corner of my eye is a result of abused optics, and that the doctors will prove it, but... It's too convenient, so we'll just see how it goes.

I see. So courage is just like madness.

It was an accident.


I can't even remember what pushed me into doing it, so much as I knew it was something interesting, something I hadn't heard about before save in passing. A friend brought it up but at the time I didn't think much of it then, I still don't know.

That was two days ago.

Sure, reading about the Slender Man - what is it with that name that always raises eyebrows? - seemed harmless enough, but the utterly insane amount of information I had available was intense, and as minutes turned into hours that poured well into the night, and when I finally did go to bed, I hardly imagined I was getting into what I was getting into. What I am into.

They say he only comes after you when you think about him.
So stay calm, and try not to think about him.














Fuck.