The Nuremberg dial in Tomaz’s hand began to swirl. The thing it pointed to was moving. It was circling them. Steven saw the dial spinning and changed his stance. He put down the bag and gripped his bottle and lighter in one hand and the sawn-off in the other to go back to back with Tomaz.
The mist thickened. Steven scanned from left to right. This was a mistake. This thing was pure evil, it was not of this earth and now it was circling them in a forest.
“He is here!” Tomaz suddenly yelled. Steven turned to see a tall, ultra-thin man gliding through the trees as though he was made of smoke. Tendrils of some kind emanated from his back as though they were black ribbons. In the darkness the tendrils were almost invisible, but they stirred up the white mist and blocked the moonlight as they flowed.
Steven spun with the figure and aimed the sawn-off.
“No, Steven,” Tomaz barked. “With fire.”
Steven dropped the gun and fell to one knee. He sparked the lighter and held it to the rag which burst into flame immediately. He stood, he aimed with his arm outstretched behind him and then threw the molotov at the Slenderman’s feet.
There was an exploding flash of yellow and orange flame as the glass broke. A fireball rising up that threw burning liquid directly at the Slenderman. His wispy movements were effective but not fast enough and as the fireball spread up into the tree branches it was clear the monster was hit.
Steven went back to the floor and grabbed the gun.
Tomaz threw his molotov jar without lighting it, hitting the burning floor and sending another explosion of fire onto the Slenderman.
With a shriek, the creature fell to the floor and glided further back, sliding along the ground as though cushioned by the mist.
“Come!” Tomaz yelled. “Do not let him escape. We must stop him!”
----- X -----
William Warwick had just arrived home. His father walked him to the house with a hand on his shoulder. Mother was waiting in the doorway. “Come in, Wills,” she said opening her arms to hug him.
“He’s alright,” his father said. “It’s the bloody idiot police don’t know what else to do.”
In his mother’s arms William felt emotions coming to the surface. The whole thing was overwhelming. The body. The murder. The arrest. The photographing. They took his clothes and forced him to shower whilst two policemen stood watching with their arms folded. It was intimidating. It was perverse. They didn’t believe his story, they called him a liar, they stripped him naked and watched him shower with authority over him.
His mother’s hug was wonderful.
For a moment…
Just a moment…
“I have to go,” he said breaking out of her embrace.
“Go, what do you mean, go?” his father asked; but before answering William had ran out of the driveway in his blue paper suit and foot protectors. “William Warwick, you get back here this instant!”
His mother shouted his name, screamed it. “William!”
“Where the hell is he going…?” His father cut his words short and ran for the car. “Are you coming?” He yelled to mother. She ran to the car with him, stopping only to close her front door. Not to lock it, not to get a coat. His father slid the car out of the driveway.
“There he is,” his mother pointed to William running away at top speed.
“Where the bloody hell does he think he’s going?”
----- X -----
Holly Aston was sitting in her studio looking through the window of Highgate wood when the first explosion happened. She was working on her knitting machine, a home business making bespoke luxury knitwear. The best part of having a home studio was the view across the woodland. When she saw the first explosion she thought she’d imagined it.
She got out of the chair and switched off the light, the better to see outside. Another explosion went up as a big fireball rolling into the air. She could see a tree was on fire. She opened the window in time to see a third explosion of fire, but this time it came with a frightening bang.
She called the police. “Hello, operator. I live opposite Highgate Wood and there is a disturbance in the park. At least three explosions have gone off and I can see that some of the trees are on fire.”
----- X -----
“I don’t care if you think it’s important, you’re not going out.”
Christopher Howell didn’t have time to talk with his father, he was being called, or summoned, or commanded. Whatever was happening was powerful and he felt as though his life was in danger. Everything superseded what his parents wanted. If he didn’t get to Highgate Wood quickly he would die.
Christopher opened the front door. His father leaned above him and slammed it closed. “You’re not going out,” the old man shouted.
Christopher spun, wrapped his arms around his father to lift him and ran, carrying the big man backwards towards the lounge and used the weight and momentum to throw his father onto the glass coffee table. The furniture exploded into cubes of glass as his father smashed through it. His mother screamed at the household violence. Moments later Christopher was outside and running. He lived close. Only a few minutes run, but it was a frantic few minutes. He had to get there. He had to get there now. Slenderman needed him.
----- X -----
Police constables Robert Bowen and Mark Archer were driving along Muswell Hill Road when Archer called out, “Did you see that?” There was a flash of light to his right, inside the wood. Bowen slowed the car as they both scanned the fence of the park.
“I saw a flash,” Bowen said. “What was it?”
“I think it was a… LOOK OUT!” A kid in a blue forensics suit and foot protectors ran straight in front of the car. Bowen slammed the brakes in time, but it still hit the kid gently, enough that he slapped both palms on the bonnet. The kid looked at them for a second then took off, running into the park.
Archer got out of the car. “Hey. You, get back here.”
Then came a boom. A huge bang with a flash of yellow light that felt like something from a war. Archer and Bowen looked to one another. Bowen turned on the blue flashing lights and pulled the car to the side whilst Archer ran into the park.
A black Mercedes crossed the road and awkwardly mounted the kerb. A frantic well-dressed man got out and shouted to Bowen. “The boy in the blue overalls, did you see him go in there?” He pointed to the woodland as another explosion blew into the air shining yellow light between the trees.
“Get back! Just get back away from here,” the policeman yelled.
“No!” William’s mother screamed running to the park. “That’s my son in there.”
----- X -----
The Slenderman shifted back and forth between smokey and vague to full bodied and solid, but there was something weak about him. He didn’t seem to have any power. He wasn’t attacking, he wasn’t fighting back. He was trying to evade and hide, but doing so within a small territory as though trapped in a small corner of the woodland.
Around them, trees burned high in the branches. The woodland illuminated by multiple fire pools and burning shrubbery. Dried leaves fell as fire flakes, drifting to the ground.
The Slenderman appeared before Steven fully. He was a man, almost three metres tall. His suit was old but it was a man’s suit and for the slightest moment Steven was close enough to see pin-stripes in the fabric. He raised the sawn-off ahead of him, pointed it towards the head and realised the Slenderman wore a rough-hewn sack across his face, wrapped with twine about his neck. The bag sucked inward with a breath that showed the face beneath. The dark tendrils from his back suddenly splayed out like a peacock displaying its feathers, but this was not pride, the Slenderman was afraid; and with a gun pointed in his face he was frightened.
The world moved into slow motion.
Steven pulled the trigger.
At the same moment something body-slammed him from the right, pushing the gun into the air to blast shotgun pellets into the trees. Someone grabbed him, gripped his
clothing. He pushed back to shake them off and saw it was a boy, a young kid of Jemima’s age with short black hair and a fierce disposition. “Get off me, kid,” Steven shouted.
Another boy appeared wearing a blue paper suit. “Owen,” the new boy shouted to the first, “Hold him. Kill him.” The first boy scratched and fought against Steven, clawing his fingers to his face, scratching for his eyes whilst grabbing the gun, seemingly unafraid that it may go off in his face.
Then a powerful blow hit Steven that knocked him backwards. He hit the ground hard and looked up into a burning canopy of treetops and realised there were now three boys attacking him. A shrill sound came from his side and he twisted his head to see Tomaz throw a molotov close to his feet. It exploded in a fireball that must have burned the old man, but as he fell backwards Steven caught sight of something else. It looked like a spider. It was a creature the size of a dog, on fire from the molotov and biting into the old man’s ankle as he fell. Flames surrounded the old man and Steven could see fire coming from his coat. He was on fire. He was burning.
“Hold him...” It was the voice... It was the ghostly voice of the Slenderman.
Steven stopped struggling for a moment to see the shape of the tall man stride with incredibly long legs, silhouetted by the burning trees and bushes… and something else… Young girls stepped from the smoke and flames as though gliding mysteriously between worlds.
Danesha… Steven recognised her... “Where is she?” he screamed. “Where’s my daughter? Give her back to me!” He screamed it as shrill and powerfully as he could with three teenaged boys holding him down.
“I’m here, Daddy.”
The voice…
“Jemima?” he called.
The three boys pinned Steven to the floor by resting all of their weight across his arms and neck. He heard Tomaz cry out again and looked to see him sitting up, kicking against the burning spider with his loose foot. The man was old, but he was strong as hell and he was kicking the spider with tremendous force, but it clung on like a psychotic pit-bull. Steven saw Danesha and two other girls walk to Tomaz and pick up rocks. The first girl hit Tomaz so hard with the rock he immediately fell back, his strength sapped from the single blow.
“No,” Steven cried out. “No… Leave him alone…”
But the girls didn’t. They knelt down beside the old man and began smashing his face with the rocks. The spider limped away from the old man, its body smoking, its legs injured and damaged, but it wasn’t going to kill Tomaz. The little girls with bricks in their hands raised them high and pounded the old man’s skull, smashing his jaw, his eye sockets and cheekbones, his nose breaking and his teeth shattering. The rocks raised and crashed down time and time again, by three little girls silhouetted against fire.
Steven had to close his eyes and look away as Tomaz grunts and strains became wails, then cries, then silence.
He opened his eyes when he felt the presence.
The Slenderman was stood over him.
“Give me back my daughter,” Steven said, this time pleading.
“I’m here, Daddy,” came Jemima’s voice.
“LET ME SEE HER!”
“I’m here, Daddy… Over here.”
Steven rolled his eyes to see a girl walking from the smoke, stepping between worlds. She wore a white dress with white socks. Her dark hair was pulled across her face except for a small gap that showed a scarred eye. It was Jemima, but it wasn’t her. This… thing… was not his little girl. Not anymore.
Jemima Collins stepped through the falling fire-flakes of burning leaves. She stepped across the lifeless body of Tomaz Karner and reached out her hand to hold Slenderman’s blackened fingers. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “But Slenderman needs things. He needs a head... a heart… and a soul.”
The Slenderman reached his hand into his suit and withdrew an ornate looking knife. It had a thin blade, a stiletto type knife with a white handle topped in a ruby. He passed it to Jemima who let go of his hand to approach her father.
Steven wrestled harder against the boys holding him but they were blessed with an almost supernatural weight and power that held him like he was set in concrete. “Jemima… run away. Run away from these people.”
“I can’t, Daddy,” she said as she stepped across him. “They’re everywhere.” Slowly and deliberately she squat down to kneel across her father and used the knife to cut away his shirt buttons. “I’m sorry, Daddy… but Slenderman needs a heart. And the best I can give him is yours.”
Jemima pressed the knife into the flesh below his rib cage then dragged it down, cutting his stomach open from sternum to navel. Steven gasped and squirmed under the weight then screeched as Jemima squeezed her hand inside the wound and began scratching away at his diaphragm with the knife, cutting her way to his heart from under his rib cage.
Suddenly Steven couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fight. His vision was fading and only the intermittent stabs of pain brought him back to consciousness. He was dying. He was laying on his back as his own daughter cut out his heart in the midst of a forest fire.
There was a moment where his vision cleared and he saw the Slenderman looking down on him. Then it went black, but he still heard things for a few seconds. He heard Jemima speaking. She said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. But because you die, Slenderman can live. You can’t defeat the Slenderman, Daddy. Nothing can defeat the Slenderman.”
It was the last thing Steven Collins ever heard.
----- X -----
PC Mark Archer could see the flames. He could hear the screams, but getting through the woodland was frustrating in the dark. Between himself and the action was a nature reserve of bushes and dragonfly ponds surrounded by fences. He’d tried to climb one fence to get there quicker and found it taking minutes to fight through nettles and shrubs to gain only ten metres distance. It was better to stick to the pathways, but in the dark they were impossible to see. It was maddening. He could see the fires, he just couldn’t get to them quickly.
They were dying out when he broke into the area.
“Who are you,” he gasped to the young girl.
Who is here?”
“I’m Jemima,” she said.
Archer staggered about the scene, trying to catch his breath. He paused for a moment to rest his hands on his knees and breathe deeply. He saw the man on the floor, his face was crushed. He backed up to the girl and saw that she was standing beside another man, his abdomen opened and his entrails stretched out.
They were dead… There were two dead men here. Two dead men and a little girl in a blood soaked white dress.
“Jesus… what in Christ’s name happened?” he gasped, still spinning around as though scanning for an assailant.
“Slenderman was here,” Jemima said matter of fact.
“What? Who is Slenderman?”
Jemima smiled in a broad grin. “Slenderman… he steals children’s innocence when parents look the other way.”
Archer’s brow furrowed. He knelt down to take hold of her shoulders and look her in the eye, then noticed she was holding a knife. “What’s that in your hand? Give it to me!” Jemima handed it over. It was a bloody knife with a white handle of bone or ivory. It was inlaid with delicate symbols and topped with a gemstone in a silver ring. “What the hell is this?” Archer asked her. “What are you doing with this?”
“I used it to cut out my Daddy’s heart,” she said as her hand rose to point at the dead man on the floor.
Archer suddenly felt sick, his legs buckled beneath him and he gulped big breaths of air to try and purge the sudden swelling sickness in his stomach. The girl was covered in blood, her hands were stained red. She was pointing at a dead body on the floor and had just handed over a knife. “I cut out my Daddy’s heart,” she said again. “And I gave it to Slenderman so that he may live.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
From the documentary evidence it would appear that Silke died in the fire and Adalbert chronicles her funeral in his diaries. However,
Adalbert never writes of Silke as being truly dead. Rather he discusses her as a spiritual being with whom a physical reunion is virtually certain. Perhaps this was due to his belief in the Eyes of Satan. As a believer, he knew he could use an Eye to outlive his own death. Furthermore, if he truly believed that Silke was blessed by Satan, their reunion through the power of an Eye was, to his mind, absolutely guaranteed.
Excerpt from The Dark Handshake
by Tomaz Karner
--- CHAPTER SEVEN ---
“The Collins girl has been moved straight to Westwood. The psychologists want to assess her,” Donovan said.
“Has she said anything?” Helen asked.
“Yes, she said she cut out her father’s heart and gave it to Slenderman… and she wasn’t kidding. Her father and another man were murdered and her father is sliced open and missing his heart. And I mean missing... Somebody has walked away from the murder scene carrying a human heart and that’s now starting to look like the three boys. All three of them were seen running into the park… So, what do you have? What’s been uncovered?”
Helen shook her head. “Nothing… This is a rabbit hole, isn’t it? We don’t even know what we’re looking at anymore.”
Donovan had lines showing around his eyes, clenched muscles in his jaw. “The boys are the prime suspects and there will be a television appeal to locate them… Other than that, we work the case. We collect everything…. Has anything been uncovered in the children’s histories? Anything in their background?”
“Nothing.” Helen said. “Nothing has raised any sort of flags so far. They’re all good kids from good homes and we can account for their movements both online and off... We need to talk with the Collins girl.”
Slenderman, Slenderman, Take this Child Page 17