Slenderman Stories

The Fairdale Kids Stay Inside

We called them fallen angels. They were strung up by their ankles and suspended from trees. There was always barbed wire. Wrapped all around the body. Sliced the skin and ripped the tissue, and it was worse if they struggled. Ideally, they would die of dehydration. But this mercy was extended to only a very fortunate few. Most of the time, they would dangle from the branches for hours as the barbs tore their flesh and the pressure built in their heads. When upright, the heart doesn't have to pump blood that hard to circulate through the brain. Gravity does most of the work to get it back down. Consequently, the blood vessels up there are smaller and thinner than in the rest of the body.

I'd rather be hanged, personally. I would much prefer the struggling for breath and kicking the air and the white hot agony of my vertebrae coming apart than waiting for the blood to pool in my head, clot, and eventually burst the veins and feel the warm, sticky liquid drip out of my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. A noose would be kinder, and suffocation gentler.

"There's somethin' in there," my brother would tell me from the porch, pointing his cigarette toward the trees. "It watches people. Then strings up the ones it doesn't like."

As paranoid as he was, I agreed with him. He spent a lot of time on that porch. I don't let him smoke in the house. He sat out there, cigarette in one hand, gun in the other, just watching the woods and waiting for something to come out. One night, I heard him yelling, frantically trying to get my attention. Gunshot after gunshot exploded through the air and intermingled with his crazed screaming.

I ran out onto the porch to find my brother in a panic that was slowly turning to rage. "Guns don't do anything."

"I saw them. Their eyes were just peering out from the trees, f*ckin' watching me. They almost glowed." He emphatically pointed to the woods behind our house, trying to show me the eyes that weren't there.

"That's no reason to wake up the whole neighborhood."

My brother had this habit of keeping his cigarette between his teeth when he talked. It didn't matter how important what he said was. I could only see the glowing end of the cigarette bobbing up and down as the words fell out. It was f*cking infuriating, and it was one of those trivial things that finds its way under your skin and stays there, tapping at the inside of your skull. I had expressed my displeasure several times, but he didn't seem to care much. I must have been giving him a look this time, because he yanked the cigarette out of his mouth and let it limply dangle in his fingers.

"I will not be strung up in those woods." He spit his final words at me before stomping out his remaining half cigarette and storming inside.

I wasn't worried that the neighbors would call the police. They knew my brother, and they knew the woods. It was amazing, the things you could get away with in this town. Everybody here was afraid, but more than that, they were constantly on edge, as if their whole body seethed with anticipation. The paranoia that was so ingrained into these people could only be borne out of desperation. It seemed that they had tried everything, guns, knives, brute force – sh*t, one time somebody tried to light the whole forest on fire.

The kids played in the street or, preferably, if they had friends from the next subdivision, in the backyards the next neighborhood over. When they grabbed their flashlights in the middle of the night, they would tell stories about the woods. They never talked about Bloody Mary or Slenderman because in Fairdale, the real horror lived ten feet behind their homes.

I don't think anyone in that town had seen the creatures in the woods, but we all knew what they looked like. The descriptions were spread in passing whispers and hushed voices, out of fear that they were listening. All the children spoke softly but emphatically about their gray skin, six-inch fingers, and hollow, infinite sockets carved deep into their skull. They seemed almost human, and maybe they once were.