Well, at least he kept his promise

If by promise you mean "LET'S TWIST EVERY FUCKING HOPE AND DREAM YOU HAVE, SMASH IT INTO THE GROUND, AND THEN SET IT ON FIRE."

Calm, Lyle, focus.

Nick came back.

Now he's dead.

And a whole lot of shit happened in the middle. fuck, my hands are shaking, I'm covered in blood, and I have to wonder if you're insane if you know you're going insane.

Sometimes I log onto the blog and can't see posts. We all used to tell each other when we'd put something up; for praise? Peer editing? I don't know. But lately everyone has been trying to keep things secret.

...I think they're trying to keep it from me.

... He didn't lie. Nick stumbled into camp in the dead of night, not that any of us heard him. We heard this from Richard, who happened upon him first, or did he, no, i'm the one that found him first, it's hard to remember...

But he didn't lie, didn't lie, didn't lie.

Do I blame them....? Can... I blame them? Somewhere in my head I know it's possible. I'm not so sure what they're afraid of, or at least I tell myself that, but I used to share my tent with Zach and now everything so quiet at night and you can hear everything

and I mean everything

And they're talking about me these days in harsh whispers and sideways glances. And this is SO out of character for me but I'm just going to spit it out;

I'm scared.

He had never been quiet or stealthy, but somehow, he made no sound as he moved. It was a voice that woke me up, not a scream or even a grunt, but I heard him, I heard HIM but that should be impossible

Sometimes... something just comes over me and I throw all one hundred and thirty pounds of my lanky body into doing things I... I don't want to talk about. Richard keeps looking at me, oh god, he's not looking at me, he's guarding me and my head is pounding

Just because you let it slip that you heard ONE whisper from Slender in your head, and it wasn't even cool enough to be directed at you, oh jeeze, just KNEW that William was in trouble and now they're guarding me like a fucking prisoner.

Got up, noticed a dark, moving shadow near the fire. Noticed the body. And another. And another. More people dead. It didn't matter, not at that second. Did it ever matter? Not your body on the ground. The dark figure moved over to Suze's tent.

I followed.

I am not Number Four.

It'll pass. It'll pass and either they'll forget or all go nuts or IT WON'T BE SO FUN WHEN IT HAPPENS TO THEM, WILL IT? I'm the only one that can remember everything.

Nick. Nick was back with that knife and that sick grin on his face and he was standing over Suze and I could see her chest move slowly up and down as she struggled to breath and his hand moved over his belt buckle and suddenly I understood

And split his neck open from ear to ear.

He didn't make a sound.

Then they'll know I'm not crazy.

Maybe it's just a matter of me convincing myself of that first.

... Thanks, Elliott.

And so the bearer of bad news is me once again.

As my musically-inclined classmate stated earlier, something happened in the forest today.

A few days ago you'll recall Suze and I found Jennifer and Joshua hanged hand in hand in a clearing not far from camp. Suicide, we ruled. Joined suicide. By the time we had gotten Lyle awake and functioning and returned their bodies had vanished, which lead to many a suspicious glance and paranoid assumption. We could only guess at what had happened to the corpses, though none of us really wanted to.

But I digress.

There were five of us out today - me, Lyle, Suze, Elliott and Richard - compass and map in hand, trying to find our way back to the campsite and trailer park a few kilometers south of where we had set up our own camp. None of us were particularly optimistic as all our previous attempts had landed us back on square one after several hours of wandering in circles, but hey it was worth a shot.

It wasn't like we had anything better to do with our time.

So imagine our surprise when we stumble upon a path that leads us to an area of the forest nobody had seen before. Hope began to spark somewhere inside all of us and we pushed further along, suddenly much faster and with new vigor.

We turned a corner through a thick bit of undergrowth and maybe fifty feet away we saw two figures, backs turned.

A few things happened next.

First, it takes us a few seconds to let this sink in. There are maybe thirty of us still around and everybody else was back at camp and we've been around each other enough to figure out who is who in a dark room based on the sounds of their footsteps.

These two people looked nothing like students from Class 123.

Second, Lyle and Richard kick into high alert. They shift their weight and are ready to deal with whoever or whatever these two people are.

Third, Suze shouts.

'Hey!'

It's at this point that I have no idea what she was thinking (or if she was thinking at all) but she makes a break for the two people standing in the distance.

She didn't see the black tendrils that held them flies in a spider's nest.

Fourth, the figures move in a way that isn't natural at all. Their bodies go limp and the black web withdraws, but the bodies stay standing and their heads just ... fall to one side like the necks has been snapped in half. They pitch backwards and then forwards and their legs kick out from under them and they walk in jerky strides, heads bobbing back and fourth ninety degrees one way then ninety degrees the other. From behind them suddenly appear Tall, Dark and Slender himself and the path goes dark because those tentacles of his are above us, below us, around us, circling us like a cage and this buzzing, this horrible buzzing overtakes my mind and I can scarcely see through the stars that are clouding my vision.

Suze stops.

Dead.

And she screams.

Suze never screams. Not when Zach died. Not when she watched Nick slice Bryan's throat from ear to ear. Not when she saw Slender for the first time less than a meter away. So close she could almost reach up and touch him.

She screams now.

The two figures are Jennifer and Joshua.

She screams and Slender is on her, grabbing her with whatever those black things are composed of, grabbing her and pulling her in opposite directions - not enough to pull her apart, but enough to pop both arms out their sockets and pull a shriek so shrill and so full of pain that I can still hear it in the back of my mind.

She falls to the ground and goes absolutely limp, still screaming and now sobbing and what's left of Jenn and Josh are on her, clawing, pulling, tearing and cutting. Her arms are useless and we can only stand there in horror and watch our classmate and friend be literally picked apart before our eyes.

There's a flash and a cry and Richard yanks one of the two off of Suze, butterfly knife drawn and slices Slender's holds clean off of her. The body falls and blood oozes from her eyes, ears, nose and mouth until the forest ground is coated red and warm and sticky to the touch.

Joshua is a little more difficult. Lyle flies into a rage and he's on him, but Josh is much stronger and doesn't seem to know anything of pain anymore. It takes me, Lyle and Elliott to get Josh (or what's left of him) off of Suze, who is long unconscious and pale from blood loss and pain. Her blood mingles with Jenn's until the entire scene is red, red, red.

Josh goes the same route as his beloved and we find ourselves alone, out of breath, exhausted and one of us heavily injured if not already dead against Tall, Dark and Slender himself.

And what does he do?

He leaves.

He just vanishes and the two bodies vanish and Suze is collapsed and bleeding and pale, my god she's so pale and her face is covered in blood and her nose is bent the wrong way and her eyes are shut and swelling, swelling and her arms are bent completely the wrong way and nothing about her looks right and the only thing in all our of minds is god, please be alive, please be alive...


We're back at camp in a blur.

Everybody is crowded around us and wants to know what happened. Elliott has to explain because Lyle is still shaking, Richard is high off of the adrenaline surge and I'm tending to Suze.

It's just after nightfall now and there's life in her, at least. Her face is swollen and her nose is broken but at least we've managed to pop both arms back into place. It'll be a long time before she wakes up and everyone is taking shifts making sure she doesn't die on us.

Nobody wants to see another classmate slip away.

Especially when we can maybe save that classmate.

She's in for one hell of a time when she wakes up, that's for sure.

Alex out.

Something's happened.

Regularly it's Suze's job to provide everyone updates on the crazy bullshit happenings of Class 123, but as she's currently . . . out of commission, I guess it's my job.


Take it away, Alex.

. . . What, you want a real post?

Guess I can't be cryptic forever.

He showed up on time, as expected. 10:30, and not a second later.

How gentlemanly.

Christ on a bike, the entire camp (or what's left of us) was watching when he arrived. Some were glaring, Lyle was shaking with rage and Suze was just . . . cold. But when the branches split and a dark hoodie entered HQ, you can be damn well certain everybody stared.

You couldn't see his face through his mat of hair. I'm not sure if it's actually brown or if weeks of being stuck in the forest with us just turned it that colour.

It has for us.


"Where's Nick?" it's the same question on everybody's mind, Suze's just the one that says it. She's brave, you know. Brave but protective and that makes her reckless.

"The same place you are all in when the song of the leaves engulfs you whole~" He laughs. "Subject Susan, did you really expect a straight answer?"


You can practically see steam pouring from her ears.


"He will be returned. Unharmed."

She clenches and unclenches her fists. "Tell me when, you blonde basta -"

"Suze, that's enough." That's me. That's me telling Suze to back off. A fight here wouldn't do us any good, especially if they had Nick - especially if Suze was the one doing the fighting. 

She glares at me and I know I'm not going to hear the end of it. But the Collector? He sighs. It's... melodious? 

"Aha, good to see that even I have allies in this madhouse."


"Hardly." Still looking at Suze, I reply in a heartbeat. "But we're not here to fight. We discussed this. Or did you forget about our little arrangement, Mr. Collector?"

"It seems that you lot are all talk and no action~! A shame, a shame..."

He grins. you can't see his eyes.

"Lead the way."

Suze says something to me before I leave. I'm not sure, but it ended with '... you idiot,' and I was guessing I was going to get to hear it many times over when I got back.

I set foot in the forest, the Collector behind me. Every last pair of eyes followed us until we were too far out of view.

No, I couldn't stop my fingers from trembling but yes, we did manage to hold conversation for however long it took us to get to our destination. Little things. How long we'd been playing, other instruments (he plays classical guitar as well, much to my complete lack of surprise.) and, of course, the subject of today's . . . adventure: Sonata Pathétique.


It didn't take us long to reach the boudoir grand he had set up in the woods. What took me well over two hours on my own the other day was maybe a hundred feet away from camp today. I was convinced that if I looked back I would see camp poking through the trees, but all I saw was a thick net of branches and leaves. This forest is a maze.

My shaking was hardly under control by the time we had sat down. I could only catch glimpses of his facial features under that hood and mask of hair. His eyes are, from what I can tell, a grayish blue and his hair looks to have one time been a light blonde.

What followed was . . . difficult to describe. Have you ever sat down with a blank piece of paper or instrument and utterly lost yourself in the feeling of raw creativity? Become a slave to those notes or lines on the page, letting it move your body, no, your soul?

That's what it was like.

Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique is a heart-breakingly gorgeous and it was almost an honor to play with someone with talent as opposed to just skill as a result of years slaving over ivories.

Almost.

Oh, and Mr. Collector?

It's a shame you never got proper training. There are things only years of lessons and professional teachers can teach you that no amount of personal talent can account for.

And don't think this means I'll do this again anytime soon.

Just because we had one good run doesn't mean we trust you.

Or will ever trust you.

Hey, look who's back.

That went much better than expected.

Sort of.

And another thing.

Tune that damn piano, will you?

I can't tell your D from your E flat.

Definitely self-taught.

How do your fingers move that quickly, Mr. Collector?

I can hardly keep up.