Down The Rabbit Hole (Creepypasta)

C. 04

A knock at the door awoke me from my dreamy state.

"Honey?" My mom's voice.

"Hmmm?" I groaned, rolling over and sitting up a little so that I could look at her as she entered the room.

"Are you feeling okay, girlie? It's two in the afternoon," she stated, placing a hand on her hip. I sat up straighter and looked at her in surprise.

"Two?" I questioned, reaching over to grab my phone off of my nightstand. She was right. '13:53,' the clock shined back at me.

"Mhmm, if you want to sleep more, that's fine. It's just not like you to do so. You feel okay?" she asked, walking over to me to sit next to my legs on the bed. I nodded.

"Yeah, yeah. Just stayed up a little too late," I answered, in an attempt to not worry her at all. She couldn't know what I knew. She would either freak or think I'm insane and neither of those options were a winning situation.

"Well, alright then," she said, ruffling my hair. "Get some more sleep if you want then." She stood and began her exit from the room, softly closing the door behind her as I hummed in reply. I looked at my phone again, brightening the screen again and swiping through notifications and replying to a few people who had texted me throughout the morning. Turning it off and tossing it to the other side of my bed, I finally got out of bed, running fingers through my (h/l) hair and deciding to brush it along with my teeth.

Finishing the routine I usually follow after waking up, I made my way back to my room and thought about what I was going to do with my day. I thought over looking into the creature I've grown fond of but recently found myself terrified of, but decided to mess with it later. Continuing to think over the other options of things that I could do to make the day pass quicker, I walked over to the window and opened the curtains, flooding the room in natural light. However, before doing anything else, I decided to give my unnecessary amount of plants a good watering and to change the batteries in the fairy lights that surrounded them as they were dying.

As I went through the day, my mind wouldn't empty. It seemed forever clouded by recollections of the night before, reminders of the dream I had with Sally that stood out from the rest that I've had of her, and countless questions. Hours went by of doing chores on my own accord, cleaning my bathroom, wiping my mirrors, doing my laundry, but I couldn't seem to actually focus on any of the tasks done. Even with the music I chose to blast in my ears until it began to give me a headache, I couldn't shake the thoughts for even a moment.

"Dammit," I muttered under my breath as I sat in my desk chair, staring dully at the closed laptop that sat in front of me. I couldn't even tell if I should look into it. I would either find that it's all in my head and I probably should see a psychiatrist, it was real and freak myself out even more and make the questions that bounced around in my head like a DVD loading screen at max speed worse, or I would find out and finally feel content with myself. But even if I did find content in obtaining the knowledge I might find, what would I do afterwards? How would I deal with the seemingly now hostile presence of the creature I used to be so fond of? My brain rattled and I started to lose track of how long I sat there with an empty expression aimed at the still closed laptop sitting on my desk.

The longer I sat in silence with myself and just stared, the more my brain itched for answers to the building questions. Without thinking, I reached up and opened the laptop. The screen glared brightly at me, daring me to scour for the answers to my questions, if there even was any. I opened a new tab, being greeted by the familiar Google logo, and watched as my cursor blinked in the search bar, waiting, just as curious as I was. How would I even search for this thing? I fumbled over the things I could type in to obtain results and settled on a basic description. I slowly typed in the letters, pondering the sanity of the entire situation, entering letters and words before deleting it and starting over.

"Creature with white face." Delete.

"Tall thing with suit." Delete.

"Tall creature with suit and no face." Enter.

Immediately I was met with a name to describe the freaky thing. Slenderman. What the hell kind of a name was that? The first link that appeared on the page had a block of text above it.

"He is depicted as a thin, unnaturally tall humanoid with a featureless white head and face, wearing a black suit," the text began, but another sentence followed. "Stories of the Slenderman commonly feature his stalking, abducting, or traumatizing people, particularly children."

I read and reread the second sentence. More questions replaced some that I already had that had been answered by the name in the link and the first sentence that affirmed his existence. "Stalking, abducting, or traumatizing... particularly children." Then why did nothing bad ever happen to me when I saw him as a child? He's been a figure, a distant friend in my life since I was very young to before he became a thing of terror the day before, just a couple months into my freshman year of high school. I never saw him as hostile since yesterday, nothing bad ever happened in his presence. The only thing that could even be considered as hostile about the being was the faint pressure that appeared in my head in the times of his presence. I clicked on the link, desperate for more, and an entire article about the thing appeared before me.

"This article is about the fictional character." Fictional... fictional? No, it's not fiction. This is real. The thing isn't fucking fiction. I read more into the article as it continued to describe the "Slenderman" as fictional, a character originated as an internet meme created by a man of the name Eric Knudsen. Then how is it real? How have I been seeing this thing for years if it's not... real... Not real. It's not real. But nothing could've conjured the thing into my mind as a child. I was three. Three years old with zero access to the internet and no idea of who or what the thing was when I saw it so far into the distance of the woods beyond. Frustration, almost anger, plagued my mind. I couldn't think straight anymore, but the night was still early. The light in my room that came from outside continued to dim slowly as the sun set under the horizon. I needed to know more.

The creature was made up for a photoshop contest and consisted of scraps of text to make it more real to the public, apparently. Scrolling further, there was another set of text under the subtitle "Waukesha Stabbing" that lay under the "Reasons for Popularity" subtitle. A small sourcing for the text sat under the title, linking something called "The Slenderman Stabbing." Curiosity gripped at my mind, almost depleting any other question that remained. According to the text, two young girls had dragged their friend out into the forest in a seemingly innocent adventure only to hold her down and stab her nineteen times in the name of Slenderman. The girls stated that they had committed the murder in the will of becoming proxies to him and they were scared he was going to harm their families. Both girls were tried, but each were sentenced to mental institutions in claim of mental illness during the time of the attack. However, the victim was hospitalized for her injuries for 25 years, but survived in the end as she was able to crawl to a roadway after the attack to which she was found by a person who had been riding their bike.

My mind rattled, but I continued to read the article. The creature's internet popularity fell after the incident, causing some sites dedicated to it to be shut down and some to simply have less traction, and the tale of the Slenderman became more horrifyingly real to its fanbase.

The more that I read, the more that my mind screamed at me the truth of the creature, that maybe the girls weren't lying in claiming that they were afraid their families would be harmed. But the idea of being proxies? Who would idolize that sort of being to want to work next to him? To kill people for him? I shook my head slightly, rolling my chair away from the desk to try to clear some of the thoughts that screamed at me. I went over the information in my head, but one thing continued to stick out at me. If it was fictional, then how was it real?

In order to organize my thoughts and information, I rolled myself back to my desk and opened a new tab to Google Docs, creating a new document, and began to type what I found, citing the source of the Wikipedia site as well as the link that was given in the sub-text of the stabbing, titling it "Entry 1." I wasn't done with this. I needed to know more, and I was going to know more no matter how long it took and how far I needed to look. I knew that Wikipedia wasn't the most credible, so I wasn't going to base everything I knew off of this one article. I needed to find more, more information from more credible sites. And I especially needed to know how this thing was real when it was labeled fictional.

None of this is making sense.

[1679 words]