They run to her. Jack scoops her up in his arms. Cradles her. His shoulder is pissed at him for the sudden weight. Jack tips his hat back. Brushes yellow strands back from her bloody forehead. “What’s your name? Can you tell me your name? Are your parents here?”
Her eyelids flutter. Open. Two black orbs with white specks at their center.
The girl flails at Jack and starts to wail. He holds her head. Rocks her in his arms. For a moment, he pretends she’s the girl he abandoned in the abattoir at house nineteen. Pretends he saved her.
His conscience digs into him.
The tortured mothers and fathers struggle against the wire and thorns that pierce them. They watch Catarina make her way up the aisle. Some try to get her attention. One woman chokes herself, gurgling as she attempts to cry out at this newcomer.
Along the walls, shadows jump and sway like a field of black wheat.
And all the while, there’s the mad chanting.
Jack hands the girl to Catarina. But the girl grabs at him. She pulls his ear down to her mouth. She whispers in a tiny, cracked voice. “They will spread darkness to every corner of our world. Listen for them. Listen for them. The Corrupted. The parasite...”
Jack looks to Catarina.
Her mouth is set. A hard line. The same look of fierce determination he’s seen a million times.
The three of the Tribe square their shoulders. An island of light.
Jack checks the Colt. “Take the girl and Caleb. Get out. Go back to the garage. It’s the safest place right now...even with the busted back door. I wanna find the other kids.”
Catarina realizes protesting is useless. She cradles the little blonde girl. Glances at Caleb. Wonders if there’s even the smallest chance the boy will come with her.
There isn’t. Caleb hefts his crowbar and stands by his brother. “We’ll be fine.” He’s suffered enough already. He doesn’t want to suffer any longer. He’s ready to fight.
Catarina makes her way back toward the exit with the girl. No point in arguing with those two.
Jack reloads his revolver.
The two brothers start up the aisle.
Caleb says, “Whatever’s in here is carrying the kids. It was carrying that girl. The shadows aren’t shadows at all. They’re part of it. You hurt it. And if it can be hurt, it can be killed. We just need to find what it’s all attached to. The core of it.”
Jack nods. “Yeah, that makes a horrible kind of sense. But bud, I don’t think I have enough bullets to free—there’s maybe fifty adults in here? Who knows how many kids there are.”
Every step they take squishes.
Jack says, “We don’t know what the rules are, either. Whatever this thing is, it’s doing shit I ain’t even heard of monsters doing in movies.”
“When we see it, we’ll know.”
Squish squish squish.
Jack says, “It’s been pretty stealthy so far. I can’t kill fleeting shapes on the wall. I’ll destroy more building than bad guy.”
Squishsquish.
They’re ten feet from the altar when the shape appears between the ruined, twisted golden gates. It floats out of the darkness of the sanctuary. An impossibly thin man with impossibly long appendages. He’s dressed in black. Eight feet tall, at least. His shadow creeps around him. Spreads along the walls like hellish, ethereal vines. From the shape’s back springs four tentacles that whip and shake. He raises his arms in a gesture that asks the brothers, Like what I’ve done with the place?
The man in black drops his hands to his side. Bows.
The brothers see his pristine white shirt and black tie.
And his head. His hairless, featureless head.
The shape throws its arms up again.
Really glad to see you boys. Where’ve you been? I was wondering when you’d show.
Jack watches in horror.
No face. The man has no face. No eyes. No nose. Nothing. Just minor indents where the features are supposed to be.
Jack’s seen this creature before. He feels a real sense of panic as the Red in his head fights to take over. “It’s the Slender Man,” he croaks. “Son of a dick.”
The figure tilts its head to one side in cruel mimicry of confusion.
“He’s a meme,” Jack says. “Some dumb idea driven into the ground. A mutt born of the Tall Man from Phantasm and creepypasta online. It took on urban legend status and then grew to become its own goddamn myth. Started in a Something Awful forum thread. I was there. We were trying to create scary images and scary stories and all that shit. Someone did. Viktor Surge. Kids started making movies on YouTube and folks started writing about him. It took on a life of its own.”
The Slender Man tosses his head from side to side. Blurring as he rocks. His arms keep gesturing as if he’s so glad to see the Svoboda kids.
He throws his white, blank head back. A seam etches itself across his skull. Where a normal man might have a mouth. He stretches his jaw until the flesh along the seam splits and pops open. Teeth grow. All set in a mouth that’s far too large.
Jack says, “He isn’t supposed to be able to do that.” He backs up. Drags Caleb with him. Squishsquishsquishsquish. “He didn’t have a mouth in the original stories.”
The bound parents shake at the sight of Slender Man. They convulse in their efforts to free themselves. A few tear flesh from metal and barb from bone. Their screams fill the air.
The Slender Man cackles. His laughter sounds like some mad experiment where the audio is slowed down and sped up and played at the same time over itself. The noise bounces along the walls of the great church.
Squishsquishsquish.
The brothers retreat to the doors. The captive congregation who’ve freed their mouths scream that the boys are motherfucking cowards and they need help.
Jack and Caleb jump outside. They check the street behind them. They see no sign of Catarina, Zarifa, Akil, or the girl. The rest of the Tribe is either perfectly safe in the garage or goddamn dead.
“The Slender Man can’t do that,” Jack says.
“He is doing it,” Caleb says. He grips his brother’s jacket. “How do you stop him?”
“We never wrote that part. Nobody did. Hell, most of us can’t even agree on where he came from or what he does or his origins or—” Jack shrugs. “It was always a question of surviving him. Trying to fight off the madness he inflicts. Cocksucker messes with electronics. Makes people see shit. Makes people lose time. He stalks people. He lures people away. Kidnaps kids.
“He cuts folks open. Takes out their organs and slams them back in. When the bodies are found, they’re inside bags or wrapped in membranes. He’s like a transdimensional butcher. Or a mad anthropologist who’s all about the blood. He could be some alien scientist for all we know. And we never knew shit.”
The Slender Man stands at the altar. He balls his fists together and tucks them underneath his ribs. He vibrates. Laughs again. More tendrils burst from his back.
Caleb says, “What keeps him going? In the stories?”
Jack pounds a fist against his skull. Thinks. “Belief? Shit, maybe he’s a tulpa. Something brought into being because enough stupid people actually think it’s real. You think about him, bang, he shows up. It’s belief.”
Caleb considers this. “You’d have to kill all the people here to get rid of him.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He let go of that girl when the bullets hit him. The dickbag is vulnerable in some physical way.”
“How do you know he wasn’t just messing with you?”
“You said before...”
“I know, but you said we don’t know the rules.”
“Thanks for the help.”
The Slender Man holds up a hand to the boys. He stares at them without eyes. He raises a single, long finger.
Watch this. It gets better.
The black tentacles from his back strike out. Pierce the wall of the desecrated iconostasis. Puncture paintings of the holy. The images tumble free. Fall into
the fires.
The Slender Man walks forward. The walls shake. Crack. Shatter. The Slender Man throws his head from side to side in a blur again.
With the walls gone, Jack and Caleb finally see where the children are.
In the church’s sanctuary. All strung up with barbed wire along the walls. Thirty children hang. Metal cuts into their wrists and waists and legs. It covers them like webbing.
They chant. Sing songs to the Slender Man.
The Slender Man walks.
Jack moves into the doorway.
He faces the shape head on. Feels the Red in his head yearn to take over.
“Jack,” Caleb says, “we don’t have to do this.”
Jack furrows his brow. He thinks about the girl in house nineteen. The girl he and Patrick left to die. Thinks about the girl he saved minutes ago. Then all the children, strung up on the walls like meat. Chanting like lunatics.
“I do,” Jack says. “Just because we never wrote about how to end the Slender Man doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Caleb’s eyes widen. With telepathic insight, he says, “You feel bad about that girl you left in the house. The one you ditched so you could save your little brother, and Catarina, and two other kids. You feel bad about that? You had no choice. You saved us.”
“Ain’t that simple.” Jack’s no longer thinking guilt. He’s thinking bloody vengeance.
None of that matters to the Slender Man. The barbed wire-wrapped parents on both sides of him gurgle. Four of his tentacles dip to the floor. He hoists himself up with them. Walks with them instead of his legs. It gives the Slender Man an insectoid appearance.
Jack wraps an arm around Caleb. Then he pushes his younger brother back.
He checks the chambers on the Colt. Full. He spins the gun forward once, then twice backward, rotating the weight of the machine around his index finger.
He walks.
Caleb clamors for Jack. But Jack—for the only time in his life—shoves his brilliant little brother back. “No.”
He pushes Caleb outside.
The Slender Man slithers. Whips his tentacles in a flurry.
The children chant their song of madness.
The parents moan and mewl and bleed and struggle.
Jack struts. Stops ten feet from the Slender Man. The Slender Man halts as well. They watch one another. Neither move. Only sound is the breathing from the two combatants.
The creature’s wet and heavy.
Jack’s slow and measured.
“I was there when you were made,” Jack says. “You’re a fuckin meme. An idea. A digital urban legend. Like everything else tonight, you’re a nightmare that crawled out of people’s heads. The difference is, I know you’re bullshit.”
Jack’s gun waits heavy in his hand. The hammer’s cocked. It’s begging to be used.
He can feel a similar, unspoken, ethereal desire in the tentacles that shudder around the Slender Man. And something else from the creature. Another voice. Different from the one before. Farther away but powerful...
Jack gives in to the Red.
The Slender Man attacks. His tentacles burst upward with the sound of a wet explosion. A white fang erupts from the tip of each dark appendage. The Slender Man stands perfectly still as his tendrils dive for Jack.
Jack fires from the hip like a gunfighter in a duel. He lets his hand guide the barrel without thought. The Colt’s bullets hit their marks. Five slugs explode the five tentacles coming for him. They pop. Let loose showers of ichor. The sixth bullet carves a tunnel in the side of the Slender Man’s neck. It burrows out like a metal mole.
The tall thing does not howl. But its face contorts.
Jack doesn’t care. He grunts at the sight of gore falling from the wounds and reloads his machine with uncanny speed. If the thing bleeds, it can be killed.
Jack slides the gun into the holster at his side.
The Slender Man screams with psychological chaos. Mental distortion.
There’s a sudden, painful buzzing in jack’s head. Guitar feedback squealing in hell. The metal-on-metal screech of a car crash. All inside his brain. Thin, twin rivulets of blood flowed from his ears.
Jack’s body registers the trauma. He narrows his eyes. A tiny voice—his own—tells him to stop. Rest. Go to sleep. Get a doctor. Plug your ears. Just stop. Run away. You need to take care of this bleeding.
“No, I don’t,” Jack mutters.
The Slender Man’s head whips from side to side. The tentacles that curl from his back recede. He approaches Jack.
Jack senses frustration in the monster. He thinks he can read some kind of the emotional turmoil. Something’s different now.
They’re toe-to-toe. At eight feet, the Slender Man towers over him. He bends at the waist. Brings his horrible featureless face within inches of Jack’s. The wound on the thing’s neck keeps gushing.
Jack has no intention of moving. No intention of panicking.
He can feel its tendrils wrap themselves around his legs. Feels how cold they are through his jeans. Then a mental pinprick, as if the thing is in his brain meat.
He sees the history of this monster in his mind.
Everything the faceless suit believes itself to be.
Darkness. A flowing, roiling darkness that will sweep over everything like a flood. An unknowable creature. Contained only because right now he wants to stay in this form. To move among us better. To blend in better. To get to children better. Cosmic insanity on a mission.
A voice says, It isn’t alone. Help us. It isn’t alone. There are more out there somewhere in the black. Shapes shifting and moving.
Jack sees the Slender Man in Germany’s Black Forest ages ago. He slides between trees. His long arms and tentacles are camouflaged by branches.
Night now. He fades into the shadows. Moves like liquid. Flows over and in between. He creeps near homes and cabins with caution. Curious about the lights. More curious about the sounds of giggling and laughing. The sounds of children.
The Slender Man wants them because he loves the sound.
He takes the children. Puts their parents and their parts in bags that drip drip drip. Puts the bags in the trees so the bags can drip drip drip until there is no more pretty red glistening fluid left inside.
He creates a congregation with the children. A chanting, frightened body to sing his praises. Oh, he likes this very much. The singing. The fear. It smells wonderful. He sucks their pheromones up. It pleases him. Fills him. He keeps the children until they grow into adults. And when they grow into adults, he puts them in bags so they can drip drip drip.
The Slender Man moves from time to time. Place to place. Always seeking children.
He’s in Stirling City. There’s a horrific fire. Several children go missing alongside a hapless photographer who catches evidence of his existence on film.
He pursues the people working on a student film called Marble Hornets.
He’s in New Jersey, angry that a kid named Evan had the nerve to attack him.
Jack’s mind fills with false memories of having seen the Slender Man when he was a child. Seeing the Slender Man just around the corner. Seeing him on the edge of the tree line. Seeing him emerging from the fog. Memories of being haunted.
All lies this creature is pumping.
Seeds of terror that would never take root.
The Red beats it and throws it away. It guards Jack’s mind. The sonic distortion keeps Jack from hearing his own words, “Shut the hell up.”
Jack draws the Colt. Slams the barrel of the Peacemaker under the monster’s chin. Bullets erupt. He drills six enormous holes through the Slender Man’s head.
Warmth falls over him from above—blood rain.
The sonic insanity in Jack’s head ceases. It’s replaced by faint, dark laughter.
The Slender Man tumbles backward. Lands face-up with a squish. He thrashes like a crazed insect. His tentacles crawl out. Act like living ropes trying to detach themselves from a dying host. Some of them
wrap their grimy blackness around the legs, arms, chests, faces of the mothers and fathers who’ve spent the night tied up with barbed wire.
Jack obliterates each troublesome appendage with a .45 slug.
Then he walks.
The Slender Man slows his thrashing.
Jack drags the Slender Man toward the altar by his collar. Toward the fire. Toward the children. He looks up. Sees the kids hanging. They aren’t chanting anymore, but their eyes are still photo negatives. Jack stands on the altar, flanked by fire.
He knows the monster feeds on fear. Maybe it does ingest the pheromones fired off by the body. Maybe there is something here cosmic chaos wants to eat. But on a night like this, Fuck it.
The physiology of the monster doesn’t matter that much.
He’s gonna show the children that there isn’t a reason to be afraid.
He brings the Slender Man up to the edge of the nearest fire. What remained of the bastard’s head hits the floor with the thunk of a dropped melon chunk.
Jack reaches into the fire. Pulls out a flaming stick. He waves it back and forth in front of his face. “Wake up, Slendy.” He turns toward the horror. Tips his hat. “It’s time to die.”
The Slender Man rotates his head.
Jack punches the torch into the monster’s skull. It catches like kindling.
The Slender Man thrashes again. Tries to stand. Jack kicks it into submission. It spasms. Cooks. Dies.
The children smile.
The faint, dark voice laughs again. See you real soon.
The world explodes. Again.
Chapter 14: In Desperate Need of Coffee
The ancient titan slams its enormous bulk against the sides of its burrow. It vomits. As if expelling poison from itself. In a way, it is. Hours of acting like a nightmare engine have polluted its mind.
Those mammals. Yes. The special ones.
It needs them. The Hroza needs them. But there’s something wrong.
The Hroza stretches and straightens itself. It blinks its eyes. Drags its many feelers across the walls and ceiling and floor.
It begins to think. To ponder.
What it’s done can never be forgiven. But it will deal with that later. It wants to know where those special mammals are. It will find them. It’s good at that. They smell different.
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