Slenderman, Slenderman, Take this Child

by McGeorge, Lee

  Danesha rocked her head back with laughter. “Ha Ha Ha… Hey girls, would you like to hold my balls?” The girls laughed together for a moment. “I would, you know. Get ‘em out, William,” Danesha said quietly but as though she was talking to the boys on the sports field. She held her hand out palm up and said, “Pull them little white shorts down and put ‘em right there.” The boys passed the ball between them, running in a line on a wet and misty sports field. “God, look at them. Can you imagine what they look like when they’re under the shower together?”

  Jemima could.

  She really could imagine it.

  ----- X -----

  Monday afternoon was double maths. Three hours of trigonometry. The hypotenuse, and cosine and acute angle and press the tangent button on the calculator and if the slope on a house roof was blah blah blah.

  Jemima’s mind was drifting.

  “I told you to be home for nine o’clock and it’s already half past,” her mother said in a daydream recollection. “You’re not being responsible, Jemima.”

  It was months ago. She’d gone ice skating at Alexandra Palace. She’d left on time, but then the bus went on diversion and got stuck in traffic. “Yes, I’m sorry,” she replied. In her mind she could see her mother angry with her. Mummy sucked her cheeks a little and ground her teeth when she was angry. Her German accent became more pronounced the angrier she was. Mummy was stressed over work, translating legal documents. She should have told her the truth. She should have said, “It wasn’t my fault, Mummy, the bus went on diversion and got held up.” Except she hadn’t said that. She’d accepted her mother’s anger and went to bed. Mummy held an ill formed belief that she was tardy and irresponsible. “I wasn’t late that night,” she whispered. “The bus was late, not me. I left at the right time and got held up. It wasn’t my fault.” But it was too late now. Mummy had died disappointed in her behaviour and she couldn’t change it now.

  It was a tiny thing but it was a huge thing.

  Mummy had died with a false impression and she would never be able to change her mind.

  ----- X -----

  Jemima and Danesha walked home along the nature trail. There was a strange statue called The Spriggan in one of the railway arches. A sculpture of a Pan-like green man. At school they had read the Stephen King short story named after the local district, Crouch End. They learned the famous writer walked this way on holiday and had been inspired by the Spriggan to write his tale.

  They were passing the statue when something hit Jemima from behind, her arms windmilled to stop her falling forward. She was stumbling into the bushes by the side of the path when something sideswiped her, a force crashing against her cheek to smack her into the foliage. Gravel and shrubbery stung her palms as she fell flat whilst behind her she heard a voice yelling, “I’ll kill you, you little bitch!”

  Then came the pressure as a crushing weight dropped onto her. In her mind she suddenly had a flash image of being trapped in the car, her hand reaching into the beam of light with blood on her fingers... Trapped in the car… She was in the car… she was… Jemima clamped her eyes closed and held her breath as hands hit either side of her head.

  It was…

  It was… Sabina King?

  She was being attacked, physically attacked. For a split second Jemima was about to cry out and scream; in her mind’s eye she pictured her mother and almost involuntarily cried out ‘Mummy’... the realisation paralysed her.

  “I’m in seclusion for two weeks because of you,” Sabina was screaming. “Two weeks… That goes on my permanent record you attention seeking little whore!”

  Jemima rolled under her attacker in time to see Sabina raise her hand and swing it hard, to smack against her stitches. It stung fiercely and made her try and pull into a ball, but with Sabina sitting over her, she couldn’t move.

  She could do nothing but cry out.

  “Shut up!” Sabina slapped her again on the other side but by now Jemima had raised her arms up to protect herself. “Your mother died because she was ashamed you’re a lesbian.” She slapped her again. “You deserve to have your mother die, you worthless dyke.” Slap. “I did nothing wrong.” Slapped again, “but because you’re getting all the attention they’ve hit me hard.” She pulled at Jemima’s hair and hit her head against the floor. “My parents have to visit the school, you little slut.” She smacked Jemima right on the stitches. “You think you can just walk away from this you bitch?”

  Jemima screamed out louder and struggled to twist onto her side.

  There was a slug and she paused when she saw it.

  It was right ahead of her eyes and Sabina followed her gaze to see it also. Sabina had the imagination to use it and yanked Jemima’s head back, grabbed the creature and pressed its slimy body into her face. The hit of Sabina’s palm on her nose stung, but it was the feeling of the slug against her top lip that made her squeal. “That’s it,” Sabina yelled. “Get it in your mouth. It will taste just like your girlfriends black snatch!”

  Jemima kept her mouth closed, twisting her head from side to side but Sabina had her hair pulled back and a hand pressed over her mouth and nose to try and squish the slug into her mouth.

  “Is it in her mouth?” came the voice of Kerry Powell. “Are you making her eat it?”

  Jemima could feel it, the slime wiping across her lips as Sabina pressed so hard she felt the slimy creature’s body split against her teeth.

  There was a sudden stab in her forehead as one of her stitches tore, or the skin tore; but whatever it was caused enough of a jolt to make her shriek and the squashed and squirming slug went between her lips.

  “Leave her alone,” Danesha said weakly.

  Sabina stood up. Pleased with herself.

  Jemima got onto all fours spitting. Crying out in sobs. There was a bitterness in her mouth and a sensation she was going to vomit, her stomach heaving and retching more out of revulsion than anything else.

  The slug had fallen between her hands and was dragging some kind of entrails from its crushed lower end as the top half tried to slither away.

  Jemima wept in huge sobs as Danesha helped her to stand.

  Sabina and Kerry were walking away.

  It took minutes before Jemima could control her crying and sobbing to ask, “Why didn’t you help?”

  Danesha shook her head and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Being asked made her cry too.

  ----- X -----

  The house felt like a shell when Jemima arrived home. It was that feeling of returning after a holiday when you arrive back and the place feels hollow and somehow unfamiliar. Without Mummy the house wasn’t a home anymore. It was a barren house. It didn’t look the same or sound the same.

  In the mirror she saw a small trickle of blood from beneath the plaster protecting the sutures. The plaster was dirty, as were all of her clothes. She rinsed with mouthwash and slipped off her clothes to stand in her underwear and stare in the bathroom mirror. The bitter horror of having the burst slug in her mouth was repeating on her; just thinking about it made her want to spit and she could feel her stomach clenching as though it wanted to vomit. If it wasn’t for the locket she wore she would have been without hope. It was her amulet. It was her protection.

  She filled the sink with warm water and held her face under the surface to soak the plaster, then slowly peeled it off. Her forehead looked terrible. There was a deep gash across her eyebrow held together with four knots of nylon cord. The surrounding skin was bruised yellow and purple and it all felt squishy. Perhaps it would be better to leave the plaster off. Let it dry and scab. “It could have blinded me,” she whispered. “If whatever hit me had hit my eyeball rather than the brow, it would have sliced through my eye.”

  She changed into jeans and a sweater.

  The house was utterly silent.

  Except for a soft calling... of the book.

  It wasn’t a sound as much as a sensed vibration. Something in the air, something touching her nerves that wa
s calling out and beckoning. For the briefest moment she imagined the handsome man ahead of her, ghostly, beckoning with his hand, hooking his finger forwards and enticing her to follow his direction.

  There was nothing to see. But for a split second she felt the hands of the ghost man touching the side of her face and turning her to look at the book. The cover was a mustard yellow leather. It had dark, metal corner protectors and a clasp to hold it closed.

  She knelt down to open it on her bedroom floor.

  It was in German. The whole book was in German language but it barely mattered, just caressing the pages gave a feeling of wellbeing. It was like a holy book, with the text split into two columns and printed in very small lettering. On closer inspection Jemima could see that it was hand written. Here and there were tiny smudges to the ink, tiny imperfections in the characters, but nowhere did she see any crossing out or visible mistakes. It was by all definitions, perfectly written.

  As she leafed through the pages her emotions intensified. She tasted the slug in her mouth and felt a searing anger. She smelled her mother in the air and was crushed by anguish. It wasn’t fair, it was all wrong. She was powerless and helpless and frustrated and alone and scared and it was all happening at once and she wanted to cry until she felt the presence behind her.

  He was here again.

  He sat close behind, with his chest pressed against her back with his hands on her shoulders. She imagined his hands wrapping around her chest to slide across her breasts and rest on her stomach. With each touch she felt some of the pressure ease. The ghost took hold of her hands and moved them to the book. It slowly guided her to turn the pages and with each turn she felt more fulfilled. The text looked like short stories or perhaps poems. Some were long, some were short. Some even had sketches of plants or beetles, or goats.

  The pages of the book stopped turning.

  The heading read, ‘Die Kraft Der Sieben’ and in her ear she felt the handsome man whisper the words, “This is the one for you, my angel.”

  Then he was gone.

  The feeling, the presence, all of it was gone. She held the locket but felt nothing.

  But… she had the book and she had been guided this far.

  Die Kraft Der Sieben.

  Jemima turned on her computer and went to an online translator. “What are you showing me?” she asked the book out loud.

  She typed the heading into the computer and saw it translated as The Force of Seven. The moment she saw the words in English she felt a glowing warmth spread through her and, just like in Germany, the warmth spread between her legs and stroked her privately.

  What was it about this book? There was some attachment to the handsome man and to the locket, but there was no way to comprehend.

  “Can you hear me?” she whispered. “Are you a ghost? Can you see me?”

  There was nothing.

  She began typing the words from the book.

  ‘To those who cause you hurt and pain, those who make you cry and faint, the force of seven will turn the tables and inflict upon them grievous mischief.’

  “Oh, my God,” Jemima said with wide eyes. “How did you know what I need?”

  She continued typing to read the translation.

  ‘The Force of Seven is the kindest spell to repel those who bring sadness and misery into your life. It requires salt, toadstool and spider. Grind the fungus and mix with salt with water to paste and bring to it an ink to write your letters...’

  Jemima read the instructions feeling confused. “I don’t understand this,” she said to herself.

  Immediately she felt the handsome man squeeze his hands around her and whisper in her ear. “Keep reading, my love.”

  She typed the whole passageway into the translator. It sounded like she had to make a cocoon for a spider and bury it; but it was the end of the spell that made her tingle with excitement. It told her to write six letters with an ink made from toadstool and salt.

  Six letters… The words excited her...

  The book said, ‘Grosser Mann, Grosser Mann, Nehmen Sie Dieses Kinder.’ The translation read, ‘Tall Man, Tall Man, take this child’ but the moment she read it on the screen she felt the handsome man slide his hand between her legs and squeeze her left breast and say the phrase, “Slenderman, Slenderman, take this child.”

  The sensation was intense and Jemima opened her legs as wide as she could and let her head fall back to open herself further to the touch of… Max… Maximilian… His name was Maximilian… and he was filling her body with the most exquisite and erotic sensations.

  “Do this for me, my love,” Max whispered in her ear. “Do this because you love me.”

  ----- X -----

  Jemima was walking the nature trail for over an hour. It was pitch black and she was finding her way using the light from her mobile phone. The thing with spiders is you see them all the time when you’re not looking, but when you want one they’re always out of sight. The first she found would have been perfect, sitting in the centre of its web, but its home was above a bush that she couldn’t comfortably reach.

  She was back at the Spriggan sculpture when she found one close enough to catch. It was a common British Garden Spider, with a round body and a thin white cross on its back. Jemima knew it was female by the size of it. Her idea was to trap it in a plastic food container but she would need to hold the phone as well as the two parts of the container. It was a job for three hands. She wedged the phone under the collar of her jumper and held it with her chin as she positioned the box and lid around the spider.

  The moment she disturbed the web the spider ran to the edge and hid under a piece of metal protruding from the brickwork. The creature tucked its legs in and curled into a ball to mask itself into the surroundings but with a careful flick of the lid, Jemima knocked it into the box and trapped it.

  The toadstool was much easier to find. She kept her light pointed at the foot of trees and spotted some bracket fungi; semi-circular growths on the bark like shelves or steps which she scraped off into another kitchen container.

  As she walked back she realised she’d never been here alone at night. It was always too scary. It was the sort of place you could imagine rapes and assaults happening. It had never happened to Jemima’s knowledge, but that was probably because nobody was stupid enough to come here after dark.

  Back at home she followed the recipe, grinding down the fungus with salt and mixing to a paste with water. She had to add ink and remembered her father had a nice writing set that he never used, a traditional fountain pen with a plunger cartridge. She used it all, mixing the ink and toadstool mush together into an earthy smelling dark blue paste.

  The recipe called for her to shape the paste into a cocoon of some kind but Jemima knew better than to do it with bare hands. It was made from fungus after all, who knew how poisonous it was. She wore rubber gloves and pressed the paste into a small Chinese rice bowl. It worked well. The fungus paste was similar to dough in consistency, but brittle due to the salt crystals. It was almost black due to the ink, but it worked well and she was able to fashion two clamshell shaped pieces.

  The last part was the trickiest. Getting the spider encased in the two halves.

  She placed one side of the clamshell inside the container with the spider then chased the little creature around with tweezers, trying to pick it up without damaging it, but the spider just kept running. Eventually, whilst tilting the container, the clamshell slid towards it and the spider climbed on top and sat in the centre.

  “Don’t move,” Jemima whispered as she brought the other side of the clamshell to bear. “Stay there, spider. Don’t move.”

  She covered it.

  She had the spider trapped in a cocoon and used the remainder of the paste to seal it and make it thicker.

  The final task was to bury the cocoon which she did in the flower bed of the back garden. She didn’t bury it as much as she rested it in a depression and sprinkled some of the soil across it.

 
As she stood proudly in the dark of the garden, she heard the handsome man again. “Well done, Jemima,” he said. “Now write your letters. Then the Slenderman can come.”

  The letters. She had forgotten about that.

  Jemima returned to the house as her father arrived home. He was staring at the mess on the kitchen table. Newspapers were down to protect the surface, dirty bowls of salted ink and fungus scattered around.

  “Hi, Jay,” he said thinly.

  “Hi… I’m just cleaning this up. It was, for my homework… science…”

  Her father stared at her and seemed to take notice of her injury now it was uncovered. He opened his arms and Jemima stepped into his embrace. He hugged her and cried a little. She hugged back. He held her face in his hands and turned her head up towards him. His hands involuntarily came away and clasped over his mouth. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Your face…” He sniffed and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Wait… we need to take a picture of this for the insurers.” He took his phone and positioned Jemima under the light. “If this scars your face, I’ll sue them for every penny they’ve got,” he mumbled as he took the picture on his phone. He took three pictures then turned his attention to the mess on the table. “What is that?”

  “It’s… ink. It’s an experiment we were told about at school… Can I go and finish it? I need to do my homework but this will dry soon. I need to do it now.”

  Her father leaned against the kitchen counter and nodded. Jemima picked up her bowl of sludge and carried it carefully with both hands towards the stairs. “Hey, Jay…”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “I love you… You know that?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “I love you too.” She moved towards the stairs but he spoke again making her wait.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you,” he said. “I feel ashamed that I’ve not been a father… I don’t know how to do things like your Mum did. I don’t know how to look after you… I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”