Offenderman [ᏟᎾᎷᏢᎬᎢᎬ]

Chapter Seven

"This is about him isn't it?" he asks, his mouth having been closed long enough for the skin to heal back over it, leaving his face blank of expression. She doesn't respond, just holds her gaze with him. His face splits back open into a broad smile

"let me hear it."

She averts her gaze, body relaxing into the booth morosely as she looks down at the floor beside her. Arms held against her like someone who was scared and cold, but wasn't quite willing to show it, and began to speak, her voice hard and monotone, like she were trying to distance herself from her past enough to tell the story

"I had a husband, and three kids. We had a great house that bordered a forest, although I wasn't able to enjoy it very often since the company I worked for had me travel around the country almost every month. I was on a business trip when I heard that my family had vanished, and that the authorities suspected foul play. I went home immediately, hoping that I might find something the police had missed. Instead I saw him, standing there, waiting for me. I got back in my car and I left. I didn't know what it was precisely that I had seen, but my husband had told me many times about a nightmare he had since he was a kid, about a tall faceless man in a black suit that was coming to take him away, and I was too terrified and miserable to question if he was real until I had spent over an hour driving away and the sun had set completely.

I thought that maybe the loss of my family was making me see things, that somehow it had reminded me of my husband's nightmares and made me panic, so I pulled into a gas station, bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, even though I hadn't smoked in years, and tried to calm myself down, but he was there, just outside where the light reached from the gas station. Standing there, his arms open, beckoning me to come to him.

Instead, I grabbed one of the gas pumps and let it pour all over the asphalt, the fumes made it harder to hear him, and I was able to remember why I was pouring gasoline all over the ground, I was mad, I wanted to burn everything around me to the ground, so I knocked over the firewood stacked by the door to the station and started throwing the blocks of wood into the puddle of gasoline.

He put his arms down, he stopped calling me and I shouted and blamed him for everything, but that got the attention of the man behind the counter.

He ran out and tried to stop me; he froze when he saw the lighter in my hand.

I shouted if he was going to take this greasy idiot too or if it was just my life he was going to destroy. The gas station man ran, he had good reason too, he would have died if he had stayed, I would have killed him. But when I looked back for the tall man in the suit, he was gone.

I burned down the gas station anyway as I drove off. But he kept following me, so I kept running. I started to live on the buses, the mall's, and in the cities, because I had learned that he wouldn't try and take me when there were enough people around me.

I might see him, but he wouldn't try anything, and I in turn tried to give him every reason to leave me alone. Eventually he seemed to grow spiteful of me for being so difficult. It became less about trying to take me so much as trying to make me beg for him to take me.

I made it very clear that I would never ask him for something I can do myself so easily, so he took that option out of my hands.

I was discovered by the authorities as the crazy woman who had burned down a gas station, starting a huge forest fire that had spread through miles of wilderness before finally being extinguished, and was sent to a padded room to rot, the doctors mentioning me committing all sorts of acts I couldn't remember ever doing.

He visited me almost every day, and would stay, making me sick with his presence until I would pass out. I would try to sleep through it sometimes, and that was the only time he touched me. He would kneel down, grab my face, and make me look at him....

And I would beg him over and over to just kill me and get it over with, that he had made his point and I was too weak to do the deed myself.

But he didn't, so I tried to do the next best thing. I tried to break my own mind. The next time he came, I laughed at him, I got on my feet and mocked him, and I laughed as he twisted my stomach in knots and made blood drip out my nose and ears.

I complained that he wasn't letting me do unspeakable things to the doctors and nurses, I complained that everything wasn't on fire like it was supposed to be, I said every crazy psycho thing I could think of; and he stopped coming.

I kept up the ruse for the next week, probably more, I can't say exactly. I would attack the nurses and doctors, I would shout at them about the Slenderman, although I didn't know to call him that until later. I played the sadistic psycho, and I must have been very convincing, because they hopped me up on so many drugs I couldn't even see strait. Until one day, I got a visitor.