Distance. Peace. Control. Hope. Sleep.

I can. I have the symbol. I can do anything. IT can't couch me.

I can't stop writing

I can't stop crying

It. It. It. It. It. Not he. It. Holy shit, what is happening to me?

We don't know enough about Slenderman. Maybe the trees are part of it. Maybe he has the patience of the trees. Dear Mother of God, let it not be so.

There is no Slenderman in my mind. In my mind there is only the symbol. I don't need to believe or not believe, I just need to know that it works. It can't touch me, because I can do magic.

It's so fast

I keep thinking of a spider I saw last summer. It came running out of my bedroom, and I caught it under an electric flyswatter. This thing had a frame just a little too big to let me push the electrified grid down on the floor and kill the sucker, so for a while I stood there crouched and wondered what I was going to do.The spider didn't move a millimeter.

I slid the device along the floor to trap the spider against the frame, but then my grip slipped and I left a tiny opening and the spider darted out. It was so fast I could hardly believe it.

Now, I don't have any serious fear of spiders, like a girl in my class back in school who had a panic attack just because someone threw a speck of dried moss in her direction and said it was a spider. But I have that instinctive revulsion for them that most people do. And it was huge, maybe the largest spider I've seen, and it was faster than me. Much faster.

And it was more patient than me.

It watched and waited for an opening, and then moved before I could react.

I never saw it again.

I feel watched now.

It's happening so fast.

Fuckballs

I started this as a joke, I swear. I wanted in on the creepifying, maybe-there's-come-grain-of-truth alternate reality game and maybe put a more positive spin on it with the symbol. But everything I write becomes true. I write about my nightmares and I become scared. I just got back from a walk in the woods and my heart is still pounding.

That's right, I went for a walk to carve the symbol into some tree trunks. I stepped off the lit asphalt road into the undergrowth and scrawled in the dark with the little saw tool on my old Swiss army knife and giggled to myself like a crazy person, because making those crosses against Slenderman made me feel safe.

And of course my camera ran out of batteries, stupid rechargeables die when you don't use it for a few weeks, so of course you won't believe a word of this.

By the way just when I stepped back in the light I heard a couple of young men walking ahead of me talking about how everyone with the same last name were going to die. Probably an entirely fictional scenario and a complete coincidence. But it seemed a little too convenient, like a face appearing in the leafwork when you're not even looking for one.

And there I go again, creeping myself out. I need to stop this immediately. I don't believe a word of what I'm saying.

I don't believe in Slenderman.

If I don't believe it can't touch me.

I need to stop writing this blag. Sorry if you were expecting some dramatic climax or more than a few hours of entertainment or something. I quit. I'm out.

If you somehow found your way here and don't know what Slenderman is, I'm sorry that your life may now be ruined. But since you're in for a penny:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSlenderManMythos

If someone from /x/ is reading this I'd like to congratulate you for making the apparently huge effort of copying and pasting the link. Clearly you are a tenacious and inquisitive soul and I hope that you will help me spread the word.

My friends laugh at me and call me obsessed and insist that it isn't real. I suddenly feel rather lonely.

Remember the symbol. Watch it, think about it, draw it, carve it; put it on those things you want to protect. It's not rocket science.

There is too much darkness here. Too many trees. Too much distance between people. I could see a face among the leaves and scream and scream and no one would hear it. Protection is important.

I have a dream where a large pale face peeks into my bedroom window, on the second floor. I'm afraid of looking out the windows after dark. I want to be brave, but the nights are so long here now.

What's important to understand is that it doesn't even matter if Slenderman is real, in the everyday sense of the word.

I myself am not strictly convinced that Slenderman walks around here in the human world, or killing people.

But it exists as a symbol. A terrible symbol, created by and scarred into the popular consciousness. The symbol exists; it is as real as Pepsi or Television or Democracy. And it hurts us. The pain and fear it causes is real. That's how symbols work.

And that's why the symbol works against Slenderman.

I have taken it, as I mentioned, raw and screaming from the pages of Fell, where it has been charged by intense energies from tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people reading it. Intense feelings of wonder, of hope, of horror and of disgust has been directed at it. This gives us a headstart in making it a significant symbol against Slenderman.

You're thinking, how does that work exactly? How can I transfer the immaterial but tremendous energy of the symbol just like that? The answer is: By deciding to do that. I will probably suffer some psychic backlash from handling this massive accumulated force, but I have done it. It's not hard to handle the immaterial powers of the imagination. They are after all immaterial.

Slenderman was born the same way, so it seems the obvious route by which to fight it.

One more thing

Now our real work begins. I said the symbol is the only thing of importance I have here to say, but of course I can't stop talking. I need to:

*Establish my own credibility as a person, for you to be able to take me as a person.

*Explain how a new age hippy thingamabobber can protect you against otherworldly horror, to make sure that you understand that it works.

*Keep writing just so that if I stop, you'll know something has happened to me.

*Drive home the point that although you may think Slenderman is a joke, a stupid meme or an alternate reality game it is no less real. Somehow make you believe it. Not to underestimate it or fear it, but to be able to fight it.

*Probably something more I haven't thought of yet. Please, don't let me miss anything important.

The manifest

The only important thing I have to say you can already see all over this site: The symbol of the crossed out "S".

It is a weapon against Slenderman.

A symbol, once devised by author Warren Ellis for his series Fell, where it protects those who wear it from Snowtown. Now it protects us from Slenderman. It is our shield. It will not fail you, as long as you keep it in your head or in your heart or in your home.

The fight begins here.

We may not be able to beat Slenderman, but we may be able to survive. We may be able to live without fear.

That is everything you need to know.