He Went to Play With The Tall Man


Are you familiar with Slenderman? You should be. He's been an internet sensation for some time now, and every day people create new and fantastical stories of horror and blood and terror that center around him. Of campers getting lost in the woods and seeing something tall and lanky moving within the shadowy bows of distant trees. Of people finding entrails and carcasses strung up, as if in warning. Tales of harrowing visits from a faceless man in their homes in the dark of night.

These people are wrong. They always were. They want the Hollywood spectacle, the shock factor, the jump scare. But they don't know Slenderman. Not like I know him. Of course, I knew him before we called him Slenderman.

I was seven years old, enjoying recess on a crisp autumn afternoon with my best friend Travis, who I'd known since before I had memories to remember. We were doing what boys do, making dares, throwing rocks, playing in the dirt. We were excited because school was almost over, it was Friday, and we had big plans for a sleepover weekend. Precisely what children would be excited about. But as we played, I noticed something was off about Travis. His attention kept slipping, diverting to the shade of the pine trees lining the far side of the playground.

The teachers told us not to play in the woods behind the school because of coyotes and cougars that stalk down from the mountain, and though I'd never seen anything I'd always wanted to. I asked Travis if he saw something in the woods, the possibility of maybe seeing a wild animal sparking a thrill of anticipation.

“No, I... no, it's nothing.” Was what Travis replied. He didn't sound sure of himself, but he kept looking back at those woods. As recess was close to wrapping up, Travis started walking to the woods, checking to make sure the Playground Monitor's attention was elsewhere. I, being his friend, trotted after while voicing my misgivings. I wanted to see what had Travis' interest piqued, but I knew we were not supposed to be in those woods, and I feared the talking to I would get if we were caught far more than any coyote.

“Travis, let's get out of here, we're gonna get in trouble.” I whispered when we had breached the tree-line. The pine trees were old, their trunks thick enough around that Travis and I could hug one and our fingertips wouldn't touch. The canopy of those ancient sentinels blocked most of the sunlight, save for the occasion beam of light that struggled to reach the ground. I felt that us being out there was a violation, not only of the school rules but of something else as well. Something darker. Perhaps it was my imagination, young as I was, but my enthusiasm was draining and soon I was left with little else but dread.

We walked for maybe fifty yards before we stopped in small clearing. Travis stood there silently and I tugged on his sleeve, trying to pull him back the way we'd come. If we didn't hurry, we'd miss the bell and our teacher would yell at us. At least, that was the excuse I gave, but that oppressive feeling of terror knotting my stomach was my real motivation. But Travis just stood there, and that's when I felt something move. I didnt see anything, no, but I felt it. I turned and looked around, trying to spot what was gliding through the trees.

Have you ever felt like you're being watched, even when you're all alone? It sends chills tracing up and down your spine and your legs start getting antsy, like you should be moving but you don't know which direction you should run. I'd never felt that way in my life before, and only a few times since, but that sensation was nearly over-powering.

“Travis. Come ON.” I said, trying to be more forceful, trying to sound brave and stern even when I heard the tremor in my voice.

“Be quiet.” Travis replied. He started smiling and he pulled away from me, walking across the clearing towards the shadows on the other side of the clearing. And that's when I saw him.

A man. Of sorts. Tall, far taller than any man should be, and dressed in a simple black suit. His arms were long as well, dangling far lower than one would expect. And there was something off about him, beyond his strange stature and attire, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Now, Travis was not a short kid, by any means of the word, but the top of his head didn't even reach the man's waist. When Travis was standing beside this mystery person, he looked over at me and smiled.

“We should play with the tall man.” He called over to me, reaching up and casually taking the strangers hand.

“We're...we're not supposed to be out here!” I repeated, my voice quivering noticeably.

Travis frowned at me and looked up at the stranger. The stranger looked down at him, then over to me. And that's when I realized what was off about the man, but couldn't tell before because of the shadows; he had no face to speak of. I could see the outline of features, but that was all. It was if someone had taken a human face and covered it with a thick layer of rubber.

“Travis! We need to go back! We're gonna get in trouble!” I was shouting, near tears.

“Well I want to stay and play with the tall man! And you should too! You're my friend!” Travis screamed back at me. He looked angry, upset that was not joining him and his new friend.

The tall man, as Travis called him, was staring at me. Though his face was blank, I knew he was watching my every move, like a hungry animal. And something rustled behind him, and when I peered past him into the darkness I could see something moving. Tendrils, or tentacles of darkness, gripping the tree trunks behind the tall man. The all seemed to converge on the man's back. And now that I'd noticed them, I couldn't believe I hadn't seen them before. But Travis was standing there, as if nothing was out of place about what was happening.

“Well, I'm going to tell on you!”

I turned, and I ran. I could hear Travis shouting after me, but fear was powering my legs at this point, because as soon as I turned and fled I could feel the man give chase. I could not hear him, but I knew he was behind me. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, my legs pounding the dirt, but I dared not look behind me for I knew exactly what I would see.

I just had to make it to the playground. I just had to make it to the teachers, and the open sky, and the sunlight, and I would be safe. Tears streaming from my eyes, my lungs burning, I burst out into the open air and directly into the arms of the playground monitor.

Before she could chastise me for being in the woods, I broke down.

“He went to play with the tall man!"

Sobbing, screaming, pointing, I babbled out my story. I told her about the man, about Travis, about being chased. She shushed me and took me back to my classroom. As soon as I was situated and calmed down, the teachers did a head count. Travis was indeed missing. I was questioned about his whereabouts and several faculty members began combing the woods while the police were notified.

The teachers never found Travis. The police never found him either. They found the footprints that Travis and I had left in the soft dirt. They found the clearing, exactly as I'd described it. But that's as far as they got. There was nothing in the clearing. No tracks. No indication of a struggle. No sign of the tall man I had seen, or “claimed to have seen” as the police report said. It was as if Travis had simply vanished without a trace.

The search was kept going for two weeks before it was called off. Nothing could be found. No clothes, no blood, nothing. Even when they had brought out dogs, they stopped at the clearing at exactly where the footprints ended. Travis was gone. Of course, no one believed me when I told them about the tall man, but his disappearance was a mystery. And I had lost my friend.

I was devastated. My mother took me over to Travis' house one day to speak to his mother. I didn't want to. I was still reeling from my mother telling me they had called off the search. But go we did. When we got their, Travis' mother, who I had always called Mrs. Delilah, hugged me and started crying on my shoulder, and I could only hug her and do my best to not start sobbing as well. When she had collected herself, Mrs. Delilah took us into the kitchen where she handed me a box.

“I thought you might want this. They're pictures of you boys. I thought....I thought it would remind you of the fun you two had.” Mrs. Delilah said between sniffles.

I could only nod and took the box in my hands, and with that my mother took me home. I sat in my room all weekend, just going through those photographs. Some were taken by my parents, some were by his, some were pictures that we had taken of eachother.

A picture of us out by the lake, holding up fish we'd caught. A picture of me on Travis' shoulders, splashing in the pool. A family barbecue, with us delighted to have burgers in our hands. A picture of us camping out in the backyard in a tent made from sheets.

But then I noticed something peculiar. At first I thought it was a smear on the picture, but when I looked closer I felt my blood run cold. A picture of us at the park, the middle of summer, and in the distance, obscured by trees, was the tall man. My hand shaking, I set it aside, and began going through the old photographs more thoroughly. There was Travis and I at the 4th of July celebration, but there in the background was the tall man. Another picture, of a ski trip we'd taken, and in the shadows of the trees was that blank face, watching us. Picture after picture, I could find evidence of this tall man. Some showed him standing right beside my parents, but they didn't seem to notice him. How could they not see him?

I took all the pictures I had found that had the tall man in them and showed my mother and father. I spread them out and showed them to my mother.

“See?” I said, my voice high enough to squeak, “This is him!”

“Sweetheart, those are just branches in a tree.”

My father confirmed with a stern nod of his head.

It was at this time that my father decided it was time for a change of scenery. He put the house up for sale and before I knew it I was leaving my hometown for the mountains of Colorado. My father said I'd like the town, saying it was a busy little place where I'll make lots of friends. I suppose he was right.

I was the new kid, but I adapted quickly. I made friends, got used to my new school and my new neighborhood, and life became normal again. Only once did I mention why we'd left my old home behind, and the other kids said it must have been some kidnapper or a pervert. I dropped the subject, feeling foolish.

But, time heals all wounds, as they say. Time makes us forget, makes us grow incautious. I grew up. I went through my angsty teen years. I got a girlfriend. I graduated college and got a job. I got married. I had two kids of my own, Eric and Annie, and a beautiful house with a big, open backyard that sits by the edge of the woods. It was peaceful, and we were happy.

While the kids played out back, I was sitting at my desk when I found those old stories on the internet; about “Slenderman”, of children meeting this tall, faceless stranger, even when parents paid no mind to his presence. How this “Slenderman” was associated with the disappearances of those children. Children who vanished, without a trace. My mind immediately went to Travis, my friend from so many years ago. There were personal accounts from some, about sightings of the Slenderman. Many of the stories so closely mirrored my own. A friend walks off, there is an encounter in the woods, and then they disappear. The name they used was different from the one I had called him, but I was certain the tall man that I knew was the “Slenderman” these people referred to.

I was about to comment on one such board when I was startled by the backdoor banging open. My daughter, the youngest, was five, and she was standing in the doorway with a big pout on her face.

“Why the frown, sweetheart?” I asked gesturing for her to come closer. Her brother was probably teasing her or up to some of his tricks. She stomped over and and I sat her on my knee.

“Eric is being mean! He won't play with me.” She grumbled, her eyes wet.

“Well, I'll go talk to him and he'll be nice, okay? Now, where did he run off to?”

Annie took my hand in hers, and then pointed towards the woods behind the house. Then she said something that filled me with a long forgotten dread.

“He went to play with the tall man.”

If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell are right, I need to get a better handle on myself and there’s no excuse for my behavior

The Neighbor's Toy by The Weaver

Zootopia Porn is always fun.

Terrorism

“The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”

“Everyone is entitled to their own sorrow, for the heart has no metrics or form of measure. And all of it…irreplaceable.”

Zootopia Porn involving Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps, complete with some of the best fucking dialogue in a porn comic I've seen in a long time. Thanks to The Weaver.











































"I can feel your teeth on my stomach". Now THAT is hot.

"Sunlight could hardly touch suffering lands, covered with craters and ruins of the cities, sunk into past. Those unfortunates who could not leave dying earth , had no other choice but to adapt and regenerate. Dirty, sick and covered with scabs, life still has continued to warm up under the gray clouds, it was hiding in burrows, caves and rusted skeletons of iron monsters, plentifully strewn the endless plains with their bodies."

What angels are apparently supposed to look like.

They had 6 wings, covered with eyes on the wings. And had two eyes on their face, but used 2 wings to cover their face at all times because if a mortal ever saw their face they would die.

The bible mentions multiple faces, being covered in eyeballs, constant singing, lion heads etc.

Besides being described as beasts and monsters, they’re practically brainless drones. Heavenly angels are only one step removed from demons. The only difference is demons fell from heaven because they chose to follow Lucifer, who was an angel (angel of music and one of god’s favorites). So they are these eyeball covered animal mashed up monsters who were only created to worship for eternity (part of humanities creation was so that something would choose to love god, not just worship him because they were created to).

Angels fall into a lot of new age and conspiracy beliefs.We were taught that the supernatural realms went in the order of Heaven, Hell, then Earth. So when the angels fell from heaven with Lucifer, some fell through hell and landed on Earth. We were taught they intermarried with early humans and created giants and taught witch craft to women.

They’re abominations, they’re alien, they’re beyond us. They’re creatures that biology as we know it does not apply to. Often they do not love mankind, they love God and God alone.
Yeah, the few times that angels show up in front of people in the Old Testament in a human form, they’re glowing and their skin looks like its made of molten metal; scaring the piss out of anyone who sees them. I think Gabriel even admits to Daniel that he’s having to conceal his true power level, because Full Angel Mode would scramble a regular human’s brain.


C.S. Lewis’s notes on this subject as they appear in the foreword to The Screwtape Letters are interesting.

It should be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good or evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature. Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings it all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all.

These forms are not only symbolical but were always known to be symbolical by reflective people. The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful human shapes their sculptures gave them. In their poetry a God who wishes to “appear” to a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man. Christian theology has nearly always explained the “appearance” of an angel in the same way. It is only the ignorant, said Dionysius in the fifth century, who dreamed that spirits are really winged men.

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Rafael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity — the frigid houris of a tea-table paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it was going to say, “There, there.”