Ending.

They found Simon. They found his body.

I don't feel anything.

I don't feel anything except resignation to what I must do next.

They found Simon with a bottle of antiviral medication next to him. Mine. It didn't work. For all his thought and theory, it couldn't save him. Daddy isn't a virus, or a tulpa, or anything so simple. Daddy can't be categorised and classified and tucked away in a box. The Slender Man is beyond understanding.

He is chaos. Writing, gaping chaos, beyond human conception and comprehension. Even looking at him makes our heads hurt, can even drive us mad. The extent of his nature is simply out of reach of the tiny scale of sane thought. He is the true face of the universe; cruel, vicious, random and impersonal. He shifts and changes, always different, with no order or consistency impressed upon him. He is what we make up gods to hide from - the face of a reality which does not require that we be safe or happy or sane, or that we not be made to suffer. No rhyme or reason.

The universe is vast and empty, and we are alone with Him.

Now I'm doing it too.

They found Simon with his innards torn out, and his limbs stretched. To do so without breaking the skin, they said, must have taken a long time. It must have been slow. And now Simon is dead, Simon is nothing. Simon does not exist anymore, not as a person. Now it's just a bundle of meat in roughly his shape. I feel sick. I feel like I'm suffocating. He's gone, he's gone and dead, and he'll never come back. He'll never hold me, never kiss me, never talk to me again, and I've never lost anything like this, never, and my nails are digging into my palms so hard I feel like I must be bleeding and my breaths are growing moist with welling sobs.

Why did he leave me, and kill Simon? I don't know. To speculate would be futile and arrogant. To uphold a pretence to understanding would be naieve and idiotic.

Natalie, Joey's older sister, ran away from home shortly after He started appearing to her. She knew to run. M got something right, it would seem. That was about a month and a half ago. She's run far - we talked recently, after her comment. She's in hiding, but apparently she's not alone, and she's a long way from here. Simon was an idiot to hang around Eastbourne. I won't make the same mistake.

So this will probably be my last post, everyone. To anyone who's still reading, anyone who's helped or offered support, I want to say thank you for your support on this, the worst four months of my life, the first four months of the rest of my life. Sorry I couldn't be here for all of it. But from here on out, I go it alone. I'm going on the run. I don't know where I'll end up - I always wanted to travel - but I don't have any choice except to outpace Him.

Simon, I love you. I will always love you.

Kari.

Alone.

I haven't seen Simon since he first came by. He's not returning my calls, he's not responding to my texts. I don't know where he is, or what he's doing. He's abandoned me, off on some wild goose chase to find why I survived. He's left me, alone, with all my fear and confusion, so he can go and play hermit some more.

I just want him with me. I want to enjoy the life I've gotten back. I'm out of hospital now. There's no physical reason why I'm not okay. But I'm still a mess.

I haven't seen Daddy in days. But I'm not letting my guard down.

Frustrating.

Why can't I remember?

One month.

A bizarre amount of time to be gone, a month. Especially this month. It seems like no time at all passed when I was gone, and yet to the people I love, this month has been life-changing, or life-ruining. Simon just left. He's lost his way. Exhausted, nearly to the point of delerium. He's a mess. This Daddy issue was damn near the death of me, and yet while I've returned without a scratch, his experience has left him with a hollow, wild desperation about him. I've caught up on his blog. It's an odd feeling; an insight into a mind I don't feel like I recognise, horrible as I no doubt am for saying that, he's changed almost beyond recognition. His hair is greasy and wild in its natural tight curls. His eyes are near-dwarfed by the yawning shadows underneath, swollen from lack of sleep. He's even neglected to shave, though his thin, light adornment could only charitably be called a beard. It must be odd for him to see me, nearly exactly as I was the day he last saw me, when he has been forced from his home and his family, and lives in terror.

And then we have Daddy. I don't know how to feel. On one hand, I've seen glimpses of him (or Him, as Simon has ended up writing it - I'd be very interested to read that book of his) but on the other, I honestly can't tell if I'm in danger. I was returned unharmed. He had me, and yet I'm still alive. Everything about Daddy - or the Slender Man, as it were - is one big question mark.

Whenever I wonder about this, Ms. Fisher's corpse fills my mind. Jagged ribs jutting from her chest like teeth, the hollow cavity like a maw. Her arms blue with the bruises of burst blood vessels, stretched obscenely. Her terrified face. To have endured that and still have room left for terror. The last thing she saw must have been beyond imagining. Like what Gladwell's brother saw. Gladwell's name was Simon too.

But I think of Daddy and I don't see what Simon sees - my Simon, that is. It seems odd that he criticised me for granting Daddy supernatural status, and he has since ascribed him the properties of the vicious, uncaring void of the universe. He's always been rather nihilistic, and I never bought into it.

After all, the void got me. Sucked in by the darkness. And I've returned.

Filling in gaps

Okay, I'm all caught up with what went on in my absence. So here's my side.

It was night, a few days into the stakeout operation. I was on the computer at the time because sleeping was not an option at that point, and I'd set it up so that I was facing the window. I didn't really have a reason to be doing so - alarm systems and intercoms meant that I'd know as soon as Daddy was spotted, and there was no way I'd spot him before the camera perimeter, so we thought.

I glanced out of the window and, between the trees, there was a flash of black and white. A headache overwhelmed me. At this point, the text was sent to Simon. I do not remember writing or sending it.

I was shaken awake by one of the guards, who shouted at me that the building was on fire. I climbed to my feet and we moved quickly through the house. Flames had spread at a startling pace. The heat was unbearable. I scrambled down the stairs and into the main hallway. A feeling of something wrapping around my torso, and I was pulled back into the darkness.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital. A month had passed. I had no memory of anything which had taken place in that time.

Sorry, guys, I don't know much more than you do on this one.

Prelude

He's outside, in the distance. I can see him out of the window. I'm back, but I still haven't escaped.

Big post coming tomorrow.

Simon here, again.

She's gone.

http://oldcelluloid.blogspot.com/2011/05/karis-disappeared.html

Night

It's worst at night. Because you can't know he's out there. Night vision mode on the cameras only does so much. I get scared near windows, worried that out of the corner of my eye I'll spot movement. Quick. Silent. I know in my head that there's no way he found us this quickly, that no ordinary man could have tracked us down here. The sighting must have been a false alarm. But it's dark, and it's cold, and it's always worst at night.

Alert

About two hours ago, one of the guards has called in a tentative first sighting. While patrolling, he could have sworn he saw a tall, thin man in dark clothes standing between some trees about 100 meters away, watching. It didn't register immediately, and by the time of the double-take, he was gone again. The guards swept the whole area. This was all about five hundred meters away from the house. Couldn't find anything. Not even tracks. Here in the house, everything's on high alert. Initially, we were ushered into a safe room, but we've been allowed out now. Assuming it was a false alarm. If you're wanting to see something for hours on end, you'll probably see it. Still, no-one's letting that assumption get in the way of their readiness. The threat has come not as soon as we were prepared for, but much, much sooner than we expected. All the police in the house are tense, their guns always in their hands. There're questions to be asked - how'll he find us, will he be armed, is he a proper threat - but no-one's asking them. Not sure if the answers are things they'll want to hear. Just assume he will find us, he will be armed, and he is a threat. The ifs and hows can wait. I'm less on edge - antivirals, antihistamines and the steady numb of sleep deprivation have made me drowsy, distancing me from the panic.

I hope it was a false alarm. I don't want to believe that someone wants to kill me so bad they'd wade into the middle of this just to do so. But it's an odd feeling knowing someone is coming for you, determined to kill you. Someone who might not even be human. All these people here to stop that, all this money and time. I try not to think about all the people who were there to stop Joey getting taken.

False Reassurance

The firearms team here aren't here for the long run. They're assuming that, in spite of the changing cars and the fake license plates and the stop off in a town to throw our pace off, Daddy will find us, and he'll do so quickly. They know the cameras won't work, and they've seen what he does to his victims. They're not scared, I don't think, but they're not looking forward to this. He's just a man, they tell themselves, he's just a man. Here's hoping. Bullets can hit a man. Bullets can stop a man.

This would be quite a nice house, under normal circumstances. It's at the midpoint of a long detour road going through the wood, like the centre-line of an H. Two thirds of a mile of road either way, and a mile of forest in every direction. Police campouts throughout, with a camera network informing every one of them. They're all heavily armed. The manpower here is incredible, but when you consider the publicity these murders have been receiving nationally, it makes a little more sense. The police forces of increasingly large areas are looking like idiots, and they are really disliking being made a fool of by whatever person or people are behind Daddy. Rather looking forward to filling them with holes.

The house itself has three out of five bedrooms taken up by police, sleeping on the floor two-to-a-room. Monitors of the security cameras in every room, wires trailing everywhere. My family and I are forced into the smallest possible space. Nadine and I are sharing a room for the first time ever. She cries all through the night. This Daddy affair is hurting everyone. Spoiling the lives of everyone it touches. And it's my fault that my family's been exposed to it.

Simon and I have barely been off the phone, I don't know why I'm still having to vent to you guys. I just feel powerless against this overwhelming malevolent presence. It wears a girl down.

The paranoia. The disgust. The relentless horror. I feel like there's less and less of me.

Migration

They've set somewhere up for us. Deep into the Shire counties. Not going to say which one, but yeah; away from cities, in the country areas. Changing cars regularly, unmarked license plates. We'll be taken to a house in the middle of the woods, full of police, armed and equipped. Camera perimeter, motion detectors. The police have attained special permission  to be armed with submachine guns, body armour, night vision goggles. They let me hold one. The Heckler and Koch MP7, they called it. It was heavy. Looked like it should be attached to a lightgun game in an arcade. Several trained police guards, each with one of these, is being put up against a tall bald man. Why am I not more confident?

I haven't shared my suspicions about him being something...not entirely human. My sister, Nadine, won't stop crying. She's eleven, but even now fear is overcoming her. We haven't told her about exactly what's going on, but she knows that whatever did that to Ms. Fisher, and her boyfriend, and Joey, well he's coming after us, and our attempts to run are failing. We're still in the waiting room of the local police station, like we have been for days now. She's lying across hard plastic chairs, her head on my mother's lap. My mother's stroking her head, desperately trying to reassure her that it's all going to be okay. My dad's been staring at the vending machine for twenty minutes. He can't even look at us anymore. Stir craziness set in a long time ago. The police went to get our stuff; we didn't even have a chance to unpack most of it. But I don't feel like doing anything, like I have no agency. In my lap I have Simon's copy of House of Leaves, open to some random page. The colour version, the one you can't get in Europe. A book about being stalked by a nameless horror as paranoia slowly envelops you? You see why I'm not in storytime mood.

I don't even know why I'm keeping this blog anymore. I guess I need somewhere to vent, and the knowledge that there are people out there who care about me. I looked back over the old entries. Interning at Motcombe seems like a lifetime past. I find myself feeling nostalgic for three months ago. I'm at a loss to explain why all this is happening. Did I deserve this? Did I bring this upon myself? Why did everything have to get so fucking fucked up? There doesn't seem to be a reason. It's just arbitrary, and yet it's derailed my life and the life of my family. I have been made prey; something to be devoured. My mindset is shaky, my nerves brittle. I think of Daddy less and less as a person these days. He's a force, a presence, far more than a man. My would be killer has, in my mind, become a monster, his form black and swirling, writhing, chaotic, and at times I find my will to live draining like warm water in a basin, leaving only an exposed cold, when I think of him.

I've been trying to occupy myself with memories of before all this. Lying in bed with Simon. Hanging out with my friends, eating with my family round the table as we talk about all the nothings we did that day. They seem like things I saw in a photograph once. My life is fear and disgust and paranoia...and something else, lingering in the back of my skull like an ache itch, that I can't quite put my finger on.

"Then for an instant, feeling stripped and bare, I teeter on an invisible line suspended between something terrible and something terribly sad."

I've looked down at the book. I've been letting tears drip-drop down onto it for about five minutes now. Simon's going to be so pissed the next time I see him. He's going to remind me that he doesn't pop over to Canada and happen upon copies of this book every other day, then he'll complain for a while. I wonder, almost idly, if I'm going to see him again. Not when, if. Not "when I'm reunited with the person I love more than anyone, who I sometimes dream about being with for the rest of my life, he a journalist or writer or film critic, me a teacher, as we grow older and raise a family and watch it grow and - " but if. I don't think about "if not." I've never felt like this before. No belief - none at all - that things will get better. A faint hope, but no actual conviction that it will do so. No optimism left in me. I believed that the world was a beautiful, harmonious place, where good ultimately triumphs. I don't any more. And it hurts.

That's enough from me. I just need to get my thoughts out of my head. Anti-viral medication time. We're going soon. I now leave you with a quote from a classic book. Go educate yourselves.

"The truth of the matter, I sometimes thought, was not so much that I wanted to die, as that I no longer wanted to go on living in my present manner." - Alberto Monrovia, Boredom

Rough morning

First off, never admit to being willing to consider supernatural options in any question you're considering on the internet. You have NO IDEA the kind of crazy-ass shit you'll get in your inbox. I've had one or two guys trying to convince me that this is the Devil, sent to Earth to punish me for reading "The God Delusion", one guy trying to convince me that it's a manifested fictional monster who - according to this guy - gets confused if you're more than 8 feet from the ground, or wearing a mask, and one guy who devoted four of five messages to trying to convince me he's a government experiment being let loose on an urban population to test his warfare applications. It would appear that being willing to consider something that's supernatural attracts people who are willing to consider anything that's supernatural. Or maybe I'm just too damn drilled with scientific rigor and scepticism (lies: there's no such thing as being too damn drilled with scientific rigor and scepticism). I mean, I'm looking for something just on the edges of human understanding and I'm getting stuff from people who seem to just believe anything from Coast To Coast AM. I guess when you compromise your rationality, all bets are off. All myths are true, anyone?

Feeling like crap right now. Still sleeping in chairs in the police department. No-one knows what to do with us. And I've gotten ill somehow. The police doctor says the symptoms aren't of exhaustion from lack of sleep, but rather a really late-season flu. He's given me antivirals, which is a first. Remember all that mention of how I get sick a lot? This is partly the kind of thing I'm talking about (The chronic conditions are, if nothing else, easier to manage.) Only I could get flu, in May, while being chased across the country by a serial killer who may not be human. Oy.

My family's getting increasingly irate. My dad can't work, my mum can't work, my little sister can't go see her friends, and the thing that stopped them doing these things didn't even keep them safe like it was meant to. I think they've found themselves blaming me, which sucks.

Also, I have to write all this on my smartphone, just to keep you guys updated. I hope you're grateful...

Neccesary update

I'm fine. Just to get that out of the way. Daddy just stood there. Watching. When the police arrived, we ran out of the house and into their cars and they whisked us away. We slept at the station.

I have some stuff to say.

Last night changed a lot for me, because it forced me to come to a conclusion I never thought I would. You see, assuming Daddy was just some serial murderer was easy, but it ignored so much. The strange dimensions. The headaches. The fact that it seems like I had dreams about this whole thing before it happened. And our inability to stop him using methods that, to anyone else, would be beyond beatable. The distortion in videos, despite comparative clarity with photographs.

Whatever Daddy is, I don't think he's something that modern science knows about. I don't think he's human. I don't know what he is, and this far outside of my comfort zone, I refuse to speculate, but that's a conclusion I've been forced to come to. I know it sounds crazy; hell, right now it seems like you'd have reason to assume I AM crazy. But whatever Daddy is, he's not something DCI. Duncan or any other damn detective is equipped to handle. He's something else. God only knows what. Alien? Some kind of monster?

Christ, listen to me. I sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist ranting about men in black. I just...I can't come up with a conventional explaination which fits what's going on here.

He's here. He's outside. He's in our back garden. I've just called the police, they're on their way. God only knows how he followed us all the way here, but he's here. And there's something wrong with his arms. Jesus, his arms. I thought he was holding something but I kept looking even though I thought he'd see me and even though I don't know whether or not he did and the more I looked the more and more I thought that his arms were long enough to touch the ground, just like his victims, and he's thin. He's too thin. He's thin and tall and with long, thin arms and no face. He doesn't have a face. No face at all. He's tall. He's taller than the six and a half foot fence around the back garden that he's standing into, staring up at the house. I don't know if the police will be here in time. Oh God, this is the first time I've seen him with my own eyes, that I'm not too pissed to remember. My head hurts and he's here and I don't know if I'll ever write anything ever again. I love you Simon. I love you Mum. I love you Dad. I love you Laura. I love all of you. Just...I hope that this isn't the last time I get to tell you this.

Please don't let me end up like the others.

Phonecalls

I got two phone calls today. One was from Simon. The other, from DCI. Duncan. Apparently, in my absence, absolutely nothing new has happened. No sightings, no new disappearances. They're currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they've got a dead teacher, a dead architect and a dead seven year old, and they want to bring the culprit down, but on the other, they have no leads, and anyone who's spent any major amount of time looking at the photographs has mysteriously fallen ill. All claiming, surprise surprise, headaches. The headaches have defied explanation, but it's affecting more and more people. I haven't had any in a while.

Okay, there're something I didn't tell you about that night. Up in Ms. Fisher's flat. While you know how she died, and what had been done to her from the newspaper article about Joey, there was one thing I hid. The look on her face. I don't know how I'd expect someone's face to look having had that done to her, but it wasn't like this. Her face had a look of the most abject horror, like everything she wished she would never lay eyes on was advancing upon her. It's quite a fear, that. Not just to be scared of the unknown. Not just to be scared of something that startles you. But the long, all-consuming dread of being trapped with something beyond your most frenzied, wild nightmares as it bears down upon you. Past screaming. Past crying. Nothing but horror.

That's what Daddy was.

No wonder I can't sleep.

Not for days.