Slenderman Stories

Needleteeth

The river was the color of whiskey and flowed like hot tar. Invisible cicadas jack-hammered away in the reeds and horse flies hovered, waiting to dive bomb unsuspecting ears. We'd been hiking for hours and only just came upon the ruins.

The stone foundations of the cabins had weathered the years much better than their wooden bodies and the now splintered furniture within them. We didn't trust the walls to hold but the bonfire pit was in good enough shape for our purposes. The coolers we'd lugged all the way up here were set down, and the boys immediately started to brag about who was best at starting fires.

This expedition was all Tyler's doing. Classes had let out a week ago, but we'd just got organized enough to coordinate who would buy the beer and who had tents and where we'd go for a long weekend in Algonquin Provincial Park. As a group we'd kicked around the idea for ages but it wasn't until Tyler piped up about a now-abandoned boy's camp he had attended as a kid that everything came together.

The day was a haze of blue and gold, one of those perfect early summer daydreams. We had a lot of fun poking about the ruins of the old camp and even found some useable old pans and marshmallow roasting sticks in what had been the mess hall. By the time the sun set we had s'mores and a good buzz going over the fire.

Shaun and Jana had recently hooked up and were in the obnoxiously clingy new couple phase. She sat in his lap and fed him bits of toasted marshmallow like he was a baby bird. Amy and Tamir had been together so long that somehow they spoke a language all their own of body movement and eyebrow raising. Tyler and I were the only unattached ones and I think the others hoped this trip would push us together so we'd all be a group of couple-friends. They didn't yet know that Tyler was gay - he'd only just come out to me in confidence and so to deflect their pointed lines of questioning I suggested a scary story contest.

There were the usual retellings; Hookman, Slenderman, Goatman. And then Tyler told us he had a true story.

"I used to go to camp here."

A pause. A fresh beer cracked open.

"Do you know why this place got shut down?"

"Jason Voorhees!"

"Michael Myers!"

"Cannibal hillbillies!"

We are a bunch of jackasses. Tyler didn't go along with the joking. He looked ill. Like a man in a confession booth making one last ditch attempt to save his mortal soul. He shushed us and started over.

"Ten years ago my parents sent me to camp here. The place was in a lot better shape then. It was great, actually. Everything a ten-year-old could ever want from a summer camp. There were six cabins and the mess hall and a big cultural hall where we sang camp songs and listened to lectures from forest rangers and stuff.

"That's where I met Brian. We weren't bunkmates so it took a few days for us to bump into each other. He was skinny and asthmatic with big ol' coke bottle glasses. The perfect picture of a nerd right out of an 80s sitcom. But we got along great."

He broke off abruptly and it took a bit of cajoling to get him going again. We figured he was pausing to buy time to come up with something.

"Brian Sweeney might have made it if he hadn't been such a chicken. The lake here was great and all but the counselors knew how dangerous the water could be so there was always someone on lifeguard duty and there's nothing more alluring to a kid than the promise of unsupervised adventure.

"A bunch of the older kids found it and it was top secret but somehow Brian found out and he dragged me along to see. A few kilometers outside of camp there was a place where the river was wide and deep and in the middle there was this sort of rocky outcrop with some trees on it and an old rope tied to one of those trees. That's what the older campers had been using to get across. They weren't too happy when we showed up to gawk. They made us swear to secrecy on pain of death and then shooed us away."