In the places where the forest grows too dense for light to fall,
Where the shadows stretch like fingers and the autumn breezes crawl,
There’s a rumor whispered softly by the children in the town,
Of a figure in the thicket when the sun is sinking down.
He is standing where the timber meets the edge of broken stone,
An impossible geometry of sinew and of bone,
With a silhouette so narrow that he mimics every tree,
And a quietness about him like the freezing of the sea.
He wears a suit of midnight black, immaculate and tailored,
Like a monochromatic phantom or a memory that failed,
A stark and formal contrast to the rotting wood and vine,
A geometric nightmare cutting through the natural line.
But look above the collar where a collarbone should rest,
Above the pale tie knotted tight against his hollow chest,
And the mind begins to fracture, and the blood begins to chill,
For his face is but a canvas that is featureless and still.
No eyes to track your movement, yet you feel his heavy gaze,
No mouth to breathe the winter air or speak of ancient days,
No brow to knit in anger, and no lips to curve in spite,
Just a blank and shifting void of skin, a pale and awful white.
He does not run or gallop when he marks you for the chase,
He does not leave a footprint in the mud to leave a trace,
He simply stands at distance while the static fills your ears,
And bridges the horizon through the distortion of your fears.
If you wander past the tree line when the evening whistle blows,
You might notice how the forest suddenly forgets to breathe.
The crickets stop their strumming and the crows forget to cry,
And a heavy, breathless static hangs beneath the twilight sky.
Then you see him in the clearing, just a little closer now,
Framed beneath the rotting canopy of an oak tree’s crooked bough.
When you blink, the space has vanished; he has shifted through the air,
He is hiding in the blind spot of your frantic, frozen stare.
From his back, the darkness ruptures into appendages of pitch,
Like the legs of giant spiders or a shadow with a twitch,
Black tentacles that lengthen and uncoil from his spine,
To weave a web of terror where the pine and hemlock twine.
They reach across the branches, and they block the path ahead,
Turning every root and briar to a trap of living dread.
Your electronic devices buzz and flicker into gray,
As the proxy of his presence drains the sanity away.
The camera feeds distortion, and the audio goes dead,
Leaving nothing but a high-pitched scream inside your throbbing head.
The sickness starts to take you—a persistent, hacking cough,
As the boundaries of reality are slowly peeling off.
He is the architect of panic, he’s the king of urban lore,
A digital boogeyman stepping through a prehistoric door,
For though we built his mythos out of pixels and of code,
He’s the same shape in the darkness that our ancestors foretold.
He is the tall man in the thicket, he’s the whisper in the dark,
Leaving pages torn and scattered in the shadows of the park.
Do not seek the hidden papers, do not look behind your back,
For the moment that you see him, you are already off the track.
He will harvest your compliance, he will pull you to his side,
To the gray and endless limbo where the stolen children hide.
So lock your doors at evening when the mist begins to fall,
Lest the Slenderman comes knocking with a shadow on your wall.