Slenderman

If only you hadn’t looked back. Though it was autumn the day had seemed long and the brief walk toward home short. As the sunlight began to fade you and your two friends left the playground behind and trudged reluctantly home, knowing that you would be forced to pick up the games and conversations the next day. The next day, that never came. If only you hadn’t looked back. But you had.

Turning just for a moment, you had glanced back toward the treeline. Seen the fingers of their branches clawing up toward the sky and beside them, the figure.

At first you’d thought you must be mistaken, that your eyes in the hazy blur of twilight were playing tricks on you, but no. When you looked again ‘he’ was still there. Taller than any man could be, thinner even the willowy branches that extended ever upward from the trees. He loomed in the distance, like the shadow of some horrible dark truth and you knew instantly that you had to look away, that if you didn’t tear your eyes from that blank featureless face then soon the blank would wash over you, become you and you would walk slowly but surely, as if pulled by some magnetic force toward him, toward him though you feared him, though you were scared of his unnatural height, the aching  blank whiteness of his face, the arms that seemed to stretch towards you and the slithering tentacles behind.
You turned. Screwing up your eyes, telling, willing yourself not to look, not to see, not to give in and go to him. You scream to the others telling them the same, telling them not to look. But as you open your eyes you realise, they had already looked. They were already gone.