After only a little further, I find a large tree that seems to stand apart from the others. It's larger than the rest, and, when I look up, I notice it has no leaves growing on it.
Strange.
I take a look at all sides of it; maybe there's a page here? But there's nothing. I give up and turn back in the direction I was heading, when my flashlight beam lands on something else. Something tall and black and white and slender.
It's him. The Slender Man.
I stand still, waiting for him to…do something, I don't know what. But he doesn't. He just stands there. I would say he's staring at me, but he has no face - just a pale white head that almost seems to glow in the light from my flashlight.
Slowly, I feel myself starting to get lightheaded, and my eyesight starts to blur. What's wrong with me? I feel like I'm being drained of all my energy…
Suddenly, I remember the words of the page I'm holding - "don't look, or it takes you". This must be what it meant.
But aren't I supposed to let "it" "take me"? I am the human sacrifice, after all…
I think through the increasingly thick fog in my head. I was told to collect eight pages, and the one page I have told me not to look at the Slender Man. I don't know if this is some sort of game he's playing with me, but I decide that I don't want to die just yet.
I force myself to take my eyes off the eerie figure among the trees, and I turn away and run. As I run, my head stops spinning, and my vision gets clear again.
Okay. I'm fine. I just can't stare at him like that for some reason…
What am I even doing?
I slow down to a walk again. Why am I running away? I came here, didn't I? I'm supposed to die…
…Aren't I?
It occurs to me that there's really no proof that the Slender Man kills his victims - I mean, apart from no one ever hearing from them again. Maybe this is just a game he plays with people. If I win, will he let me live somehow? Faced with this sudden possibility - that I might not have to die, after all - I immediately start to walk faster, more purposefully. I'm allowed to run from the Slender Man as long as I'm inside this fence, and I think I will. And I'll get the eight pages while I'm at it.
The low, distant sound like a heartbeat continues to pulsate in the distance. I wonder what it is? It definitely started the moment I picked up this first page, but I've never heard it before, not even during the spaces of time immediately after a new sacrifice is sent here into Slender's Pit.
Maybe it isn't really in the distance. Maybe it's not even real at all. Or maybe this space that the Slender Man has claimed for his own is now partially in a different dimension, and that's where the sound exists…
Increasingly wild theories drift through my head as I walk, and it takes me a moment to realize it when I'm not walking among trees anymore.
