Valete, mi amicis

First, music. It's a tune I'm sure you all know.

I'm writing this from the airport. I sold everything I own for a ticket. Getting past security was easy with no bags. I'm going back to England. I'm going home. I'm going back to the only thing I have left in the entire world.

My name is Jean Domremy. Last year I was a Freshman in college. I was taking classes, hanging out with friends, and living a blissfully ignorant life. Now I am nothing, I have nothing, and I'm only holding out for one person.

This last year I've seen most of my friends die. If they didn't die, they went crazy, or changed so much that they are no longer who they were. And I changed too. I'm far from the same person as I was a year ago. I had to change. My world has burned, just in time for the real world to follow.

There is nothing left in my life worth living for, but for Elsie. That's why I've got to stop this blogging shit. It's an addiction, it's a curse, and it spreads his name without doing anything for the writer. Sam's dead because of it. Kim's dead because of it. The Church doesn't have an agenda but for the Gentleman to win. And the Gentleman always wins. So I'm done with the blog. If I need to get a message out to you I'll find some other way to do it.

I miss the way it was. Even before everything went to hell it was almost kinda fun-- to be part of a group, discovering ~mysteries~. But looking back, I see how foolish I was. It was all part of a game. The masked men were only distracting themselves, having a little fun because they know the monster is coming. You can do whatever the hell you want, but it's only a distraction. It's always only a distraction. The monster has us where it wants us.

We lost Zero and Amelia, Ali and Nessa, Slice and Dice and Jekyll. We lost Schrodinger, and we lost Stella. I lost Fizzbomb and I lost Sam and I lost Kim. And Sam, I will find your mother. She will pay for everything she did to you, whatever little comfort that offers the dead. What little comfort is given by the blogs, even more is taken away.  I lost friends at school and at home. I lost the family that took me in when I came to the United States. I lost friends I never got to meet.

I lost my mum and my dad and my brother.

See, what we don't see is that we've already lost. As they chip away at our lives and our relationships, they win more and more. We're going to be nothing, because all we have is each other. The Slender Man doesn't need people. It doesn't need anything to define it because we did that with only a name. Humans need villainy and friendship, kindness and cruelty, emotions, thoughts, feelings, to be close to the world, objects, relationships. And all he needs to win is a name. We gave him a plethora, and now we're drowning in his identity.

D'Arcis is right in what he does. He's got nothing to live for. He knows what happens after you die. It's worse than you can imagine.

Our lives belong to him. Our breath belongs to him. When we die, our spirit is his, and when we live, our fear is his. We run, and it pleases him. We are enveloped in his roots, speared on his trees, controlled by his strings. And we are screaming but he doesn't care. Why should he? We can't do anything to stop him, and the drums are getting closer and louder and faster. Why has he become more active? Destroying cities, killing more and more, spreading further?

The end is coming. He's bringing it to us. And he doesn't care about us. For him, it's as instinctual and habitual as crushing an ant or smacking a fly. He will break us, and he will kill us. He has broken me without having to kill me or even touch me. I am gone. I have no identity.



No. For this fleeting moment, it's not true. At this moment I don't belong to him. My life is my sister's life, and Sam's vengeance. At this moment, I am free. It doesn't matter, though. I'm not coming back to the blogs. It doesn't matter whether I rescue my sister or not, I can't watch anyone else die. I just can't. So I'm going to go back to England, and I'm going to try and rescue my sister. I'm going to find Sam's mother-- the monster-- and make some sort of revenge. Then I'll live until I die. That's all I can do.

So, my friends, I'm leaving. We'll meet again some day, if I need to contact you I'll be around. But I can't do this anymore.

So salvete, and valete, mi amicis.

Be strong and be safe.

I'll see you later.

Desunt Cetera, Peccavi

What are you without your relationships? Without other people? Without family or lovers or friends? Here a little child I stand, stripped of anything that gives me worth or identity. That's why Kim hid her name, you see. Without identity he can't get you. So what am I without anything? My name is my own, but it can't define me any more than my favourite colour or this blog. I don't even know what I am, and I don't even know why I should care.

It was only supposed to be a "recon mission." We'd joked about that, pretending to be spies, mostly to allay our tensions about what we might find. We were just supposed to check out the house, and then leave and formulate a plan. We were going to have a plan. We were going to be smart and genre savvy and we were going to take charge. This time, neither of us would be a damsel in distress. We'd be the heroes, saving Sam from monstrous villains. That attitude seems hilarious to me now. It was a nice, sunny day. Kim drove us. She was acting fine-- more than fine, she was acting on top of her own instincts, defined. I had a camera, since I wanted to be able to see if the creature was watching. I wanted to be able to go over the footage and schematics that could be picked up by the camera before formulating the plan.

We arrived, parked the car, I tried to make jokes to alleviate the tension that suddenly filled the air. Kim had a weird feeling, based off of a weird dream and a half-memory. I tried to reassure her, I really did, telling her that we'd leave the area pretty quickly. She seemed fine-ish-- had been dealing better than me up until that point. The house was utterly normal, though in a shitty neighbourhood. The garden was well kept, and though the shutters were drawn, we weren't given any reason to fear what could be inside. We moved around the house, and Kim's behaviour got more erratic. I didn't want her to relapse and leave me alone again, and in any case we'd checked the place out, we knew what it looked like and where it was. I decided it was time to go.

The last few weeks had been softening. I was used to having my Kim back. I let my guard down. It was my fault-- I was being stupid once again. Kim was staring at the house, and maybe she saw something I didn't, but it was terrifying. I told her we were going and turned to leave. Barely took half a step before I heard the gate to the house open behind me. Kim had gone in. I ran after her-- stupid, I know, but there are monsters, and I knew I couldn't handle losing her again. I knew I couldn't handle losing anyone else. And I could save her, and it was a sunny day, and the house looked normal, and if I could just grab her and stop her from going inside, and surely the doors would be locked--

I approached the wide open back door and readied myself to walk down the stairs. I didn't want to, every instinct in my body was telling me not to go into the dark, to give up on Kim, to flee, but I couldn't leave her. I love her. So I slowly crept down the dark dank stairs like a damsel in a horror film, like a child, like an idiot. The stairs were scattered with papers, and I could hear rustling coming from what must have been a basement. There were other noises too, but I don't want to think about them. I got to the bottom of the stairs, and saw-- well, in shock, I stopped moving. Kim took that opportunity to knock me out.

She tied me up whilst I was unconscious, and tacked more papers up to the walls. As I came to I was surrounded by madness- brown sheets of paper scrawled with symbols and sigils and spells, the writings of someone so gripped by fear they had lost hold of all reason. It wasn't all Kim's writing. I remember some of it-- poems about lambs, pleas to be forgiven, prayers, rhymes about a mother's love. Kim was busying herself with my camera as I came to. My body was bruised and aching, my head thudded, and I felt nauseous. My arm hurt, and I guessed that it was broken. I was terrified.

Kim was cheerful. She thought that basement room was safe from the Gentleman. I could tell that she was gone again, but I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe my surroundings. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't-- she grabbed my shoulder. The thing is, the thing is-- she really believed that we could be safe. She tied me up because she wanted me to be safe. She wanted us to be safe and okay. And she thought that we could be safe and okay. And she wanted other people to be safe and okay, so she was recording it, so that the whole world would know that the fucking spell would keep you safe. I knew she was wrong, but she wanted to prove that she was right to the world. So she stuck the camera with me and kept adding sigils. I begged her, I don't even remember how I begged her, but I begged her to let me go. I just wanted us to be away, I just wanted to be home, with my mum and my dad and Elsie and Benny, but that was never going to happen.

And I remember that she said "Sam's upstairs." And I knew he was dead.

The lights went out. I couldn't scream, I couldn't breathe, I felt like I was drowning again. He was there, behind the screen of paper and pen-strokes, and Kim taunted him. She laughed. She thought she was finally free, we were finally free, that she'd made the world free from that damned plague. She thought we would be safe. It's my fault. I shouldn't have researched getting away from him, I shouldn't have thought it was even possible, I should have focused on running and living, not some impossible cure. She laughed, and she taunted him, and then the papers enveloped her and dragged her away.

Then darkness. I wrestled myself free of my bonds, and turned off the camera.
-

I remember corpses and blood and a phone in my hand, and the flashing of the lights of a police car, but it was all a blur, and didn't matter. I guess at that point they were blaming me for the murders and disappearances, but I couldn't process it enough to care. I was in shock. I still am. The only reason I'm not still in police custody is due to D'Arcis, who paid my bail, and got the police off my back. Earlier today actually. Serendipitous? Not really. He came to talk to me after I left the police station. We talked a while.

D'Arcis is a member of the Church, and his job is to plant the idea of the Gentleman in the minds of children. Then, as they grow older, they either become infected themselves, or create fictional works involving him. Regardless of quality, or truthfulness, or grammatical quality, the works spread the idea of the man who isn't there. And that's all they need. D'arcis himself lives between glee and self-hatred. The Church is an amalgamation of individuals with agendas, and his own agenda is a distraction. He plays games with people because it's funny, and he doesn't think humanity is going to last long enough to be helped. And we weren't a special game to him, but he wanted to see the results. A test. An experiment. Whatever. He wanted to know if one could be saved. That's why he did what he did to Sam. If I could rescue Sam, or Kim, then maybe there'd be hope.

I laughed at that. "Well, I am pretty sure that there's no hope, so I guess you've confirmed my hypothesis." Or something in that vain.

He told me there was one damsel left.

Road trip

We're on our way to Oregon. We were in Georgia when we got the note, but I'm not patient enough to wait for a bus or a train ticket. The new note said to be there by this Saturday or it'd be too late. To be quite clear, the note said;

"Jean. Jeanne.

You have until Saturday, or it's over. You'll find the back door unlocked. See you soon.

D'arcis."


I'm going to save my Sam. We're going to save him. Hopefully we'll be in Portland by Thursday, so we've got enough time to figure a plan out. Maybe for once it'll go okay.

It's just I miss Sam so much. He could put up with all my stupid bullshit and he wasn't fake about it. Hell, he enjoyed my inanity, my babbling, all the weird character flaws that used to make me who I was. Though I do have Kim back, and that's nice. She can drive, so I used $500 bucks to buy a car, proving that I have stopped fucking caring about the longterm. As long as it ends up alright in the short term that's a bloody plus.

So yeah, that's me rambling. We'll have to stop off again soon. Still, the car is quicker than public transport. And it might work out for the better in the long run too. And we can sleep in it. 

Further Instructions

After the miraculous news of Kim's return I was kinda hoping things would get less complicated but pfft, like that was ever going to happen. Kim is getting more and more back to her old self with every passing day. She can tell jokes, she can speak in first person, she can use grammar far better than I. Though she knows about it of course, she's not quite ready to deal with the loss of her family-- but hell, neither am I, and, well. Let's just say she's starting to make me look like the crazy one and leave it at that. Kim's thrown herself into the research, desperate to find a way to save people from Slendy. It's good, because on the day she came back we got mail:

"Further Instructions" on a lined piece of paper, no envelope.

Text reads as;

"VjTGG
Dear Jean;
Solve it to save them.
Count the numbers. [Then, in small handwriting] 1 2 3 4 5 6
-- D'Arcis

(8108 hsA Vtgg ./-./.-/.-..
Liarhearhearliar/hearhearhear/liarhearliar/hear/liarhearliarliar/liarhear/hearliar/hearliarhear
47, 61)"

I was confused for a bit, and then Kim pointed out the useless coded numbers that have been showing up on the tomes.

Tome 1:

Suspended guessed that this was morse code backwards, and meant "fourth". It may have been that I had the paper upside-down, though.

Tome 2:

Aimee guessed that this was morse, with liar being the dot and hear being the dash, and guessed the answer to be five.

Tome 3:

 Nowt, not owt! But seriously, a blind man could see that this is two, just backwards.

Tome 4:

And similarly, one is one.

Tome 5:

67 23 89. Nobody has this one yet. I'm guessing it's a six, seeing as there are six words in the bit of coded paper...


Further Instructions: VjTGG which also have no clue. Probably the only remaining missing number though. Anyone wanna help me figure this out?

Small Victories.

Small victories. Les petite victoires. I'm feeling much better. Jean's out and about right now.

It's me. Kim. ME. I can say it now. I can use my own words, I can use pronouns! I can type grammatically, though I'm having to resist the urge to add multiple exclamation marks and chatspeak to this as I type. I feel almost back to normal. It's been a slow progress, but something must have happened, just snapped in my head, and pulled me back to reality. I'm normal. Normal-ish.

We've been in this town a week. No sign of -

Okay, not that much, I'm not going to push it. Sorry. There are still some things that I can't-- that I struggle with. Jean said that getting me to be coherent and aware is a massive improvement to how I was. I don't want to look back on the other posts. It made sense in my head but there was something in the connection between my head and my mouth.

Jean is slumped. She was happier some when I got back together last week. (She uses the term "Came back" but I didn't go anywhere, I was just locked up in my own head...) But she's not well at all. I'm so relieved that I'm able to talk that everything else seems distant, but nothing seems to stay happy for her anymore.

I'm babbling again. It's difficult to keep my head safe, but I'll do it. For Jean. She doesn't deserve to lose anyone else. Then again, nobody deserves to lose their friends... their family.

Just an update, and I had to display my new-found powers of pronouns to the world! I hope Jean gets back soon-- there's an envelope for her. I hope she didn't go out drinking again.

Fault

Today a man is dead. It’s my fault.

Good evening class! Today we’re taking an advanced look at denial as a defense mechanism.

Can’t see the forest for the trees. He looked younger than me, perhaps 14, a kid. He had a knife, but what excuse is that? I should have let him kill me. Then he could have. Could have what? Lived a life under its control? He was just a kid. Just a goddamn kid. And I only have the words in my head to prove that he attacked us first.

So, what is denial? It’s the little switch in your head that makes you look the other way away from the things that you know cannot be true. Monsters, murders, rapes, genocides. Tall men without faces. Cuts on your arms that you might have made. It’s turning the other cheek in the worse way—not in forgiveness, but ignorance. The same ignorance that lets corporate crimes run rampant, not looking, not seeing, not wanting to know.

We were out, it was sunny, and we were in the middle of a damn crowd of people. I think it was a market day or something. I’ve been following the rules, all the rules, as best as I can. It’s difficult though; the Runner’s Bible has as many conflicts as the real one. We kept high apart from when we couldn’t, we moved, and we stayed together but away from runners but near people. And we’ve kept out of the bloody forest.

Denial can come in different forms, but simple denial is the denial I think most people have about the situation the world has come to. People simply deny the reality of the fact, but not, as in psychology, mere pathological lying. The brain creates a bandage to paste over the problem, and once “fixed” in this way, all memories of the event are ignored. This is the Tall Man perverting actual psychology once more.

I’m not qualified for this. I don’t know how brains work, anyone who’s seen how I cope with anything can tell that. Can the Gentleman literally block out the world? I killed someone and I don’t even know if I should of. Was it morally right?

We were walking-- no, we were sitting on a low wall around a statue. What was the statue-- something important, or it wouldn't be troubling me so much. And there were people everywhere, I saw cops and schoolkids and artists. Kim wanted to rest, she's not been good at walking much, I think she's injured but she won't tell me or show me.  We were sitting down, but I went off because there was a guy selling smoothies and it was so hot. I grabbed us drinks and turned around and I saw the knife before I saw the guy. Kim was pressed against the statue, and the man had already hit her in the shoulder. He was going to kill her. That's no excuse. But I dropped the drinks and ran at him, tackling him to the ground. He still had the knife, and was waving it at me, attempting to somehow hit me. He was weaker than I was.

I punched him, several times. He still had the knife, and I was thinking of Kim. But no matter how many times I hit him, he stayed active and attacking. I wrenched his bloodied knife, a kitchen utensil, from his hands and attempted to stab him in the shoulder. It didn't stop him from grabbing at me. I hated myself for it, but I needed to immobilize him, so I shuffled back to his feet, and swiftly stood, kicking at his kneecap. I heard a crunch, but hit at both his knees again and again, each time hearing that crunch, watching the blood seep into his trouser legs. I glanced around. Nobody was looking at us, or even acknowledging the centre of the square. I scrambled over to Kim, sure the boy wouldn't be able to come after me, I mean Ibroke both his fucking knees. You can't walk with your knees broken. Kim's shoulder wound wasn't deadly, but it was painful for her, so I tried to wrap it up best I could.

I felt the someone's hands scrabbling at my back, and turned to see the boy. He looked drained of blood, and had something trickling out of the side of his mouth. His eyes weren't focused, and his knees were bulging and not pointing in the right directions. His skin seemed bone white. But his nails were sharp and he was scrabbling at my throat. I grabbed Kim and tried to run, but he lunged at her, dragging her to the ground where he grabbed her throat. I threw myself at him once more, and hit him over, off Kim. I remember punching him, aiming for his throat, trying to incapacitate him somehow. And then he went limp and he was dead. I killed him.

I know there are a lot of people who've killed because of the Gentleman. But I've had the privilege-- fuck, not killing is a privilege to us. What kind of a people are we? We know enough of the truth to ruin ourselves, but not enough to see what's in front of us.

And there's a boy with freckles and a second hand hoodie and size 9 shoes with no ID or a phone or credit cards who's dead. A kid who maybe watched a horror vlog series or his older brother told him a spooky story once. But a kid, with a life, and a personality, and a million things he'll never get to do and a million stories he'll never get to read.

The first funeral I went to and felt things about was a friend of mine. We were young and I didn't get it until the day of the memorial. There was a choir singing, in Latin, "O vos omnes, qui transistis per viam, attendite et videte," "All you who walk by on the road attend and see." The road that grows longer the longer I try to survive. It's slow, my breaking, right? I've handled this quite well I think. Devolving into drink is better than being crazy, right? I am crazy, though. Not as crazy as some are, not by a long ways. I'm not dying. I'm not giving in. I mustn't.

And no further instructions.

Blind inside the head

Apparently, I'm the crazy one. Fuck, didn't see that coming.

I've spent the last few days trying to get my head on straight. It's like-- it's impossible to describe, everything that's going on inside my head right now. What's wrong with me? I feel like I'm wearing a blindfold on the inside of my head, and I know it's there, but I can't touch it, or take it off. Sometimes Kim sees it, sees the Gentleman, and I can't, and I don't know how to react, whether she's mad or I'm mad or we're both mad. See, sometimes she hallucinates and sees what's not there. I don't see what is there. We don't know what keys fit what locks or even if the locks are there.

Then there's Sam. I don't know what to do about him. I don't know what to do about Elsie. I don't know what to do about Kim. I'm 19 for god's sakes. 19 and being stalked by an abomination. 19 and my life is already ruined. Just fucking perfect.  I don't want to drink again, but I keep thinking if I could only grab a beer, a vodka, a whiskey, it'd feel fixed. It wouldn't be fixed, but it would feel fixed. I don't want to drink, not now. Not while I'm processing all this.

So. Timeline. That's why I started this post. I was a kid, my sister was in therapy, and apparently Sam was in there about the same time. Was it the hospital? Why would they infect the kids? Unless... Then I met Sam in school, started dating him. He saw the Gentleman again, ran off to America. I came over to follow him. I'm admitting that now. Not to get out of a difficult life, to find him. In America. The amazingly big country. I make such good decisions. What happened next, I ended up with Kim and her family. Lived with them for two years. Went to college. Kim must have become infected that summer, maybe whilst I was in the UK visiting the family. Benny and I found that... meat. Elsie was back in the hospital then, so she must have been infected too. And Ben as well, perhaps. Maybe that was why that day in the park was so off.

Came back to the US, went to college, and Kim was losing it. She knew she was losing it. That's why she put together all those notebooks, why she told me to make a blog instead of making one herself. She wanted to keep track of the world, and she wanted someone to keep track of her. Or maybe she was lonely, and just trying to infect me too. All this time, Sam's in the US, writing. Then Kim disappears, I get involved, Elsie starts seeing the Tall Man again, my family- Kim- Fizz. Someone starts "guiding me", sending me "clues", putting me on a fetch-quest style errand to some unknown end.

And then when things fall apart I can't handle it. I start drinking. I start ignoring things. How many murders have I missed with my eyes away from the action? How many clues have I ignored, or not paid attention to? I just averted my head. Denial. A weird, tricky kind of denial, the kind that doesn't show you what you need, a selective amnesia to anything that shouldn't be. I can see scars now, all over my hands. I always knew they were there. Scars by my hand. What's happening to my sister because I denied she was in danger? What's happening to Sam?

I wonder about numbers. What're we forgetting? Are we all blind, or is it just me? I hope to god it is. I see things now, sometimes, but I'm blind about half the time I'd say. Blindfold behind the eyes. I don't know what to do next. Do you guys ever get that feeling? Are there events that don't make sense, people you haven't seen in years and you can't remember why, towns you just stopped visiting and don't seem to be on the map? Can the damage be so widespread and nobody has really noticed? I might have opened a bottle at some point here, but my point stands. We can see some of the world as it shouldn't be, but what if there's more? There are ripples, changes, things we don't see, things we can't. And I don't know what to do next.