"Please! Someone help us!" Jenny screamed into the frigid night air. I gasped for breath as I ran alongside her, thinking the exact same thing. "Oh shit, shit, run! It's behind us!" Peter yelled and began shoving us forward. A squeal of terror escaped my throat and the adrenaline made me sprint even faster through the dense woods. We, my friends and I, had been running for hours, running from a thing, a thing that we had no clue what in the hell it was at first. It was pursuing us, each of us disappearing one by one as time went on. The group used to be 9, now it was 5. Our group came here in a stupid impulse to find out if the legends were true or not; if a monster really lived here in these woods that made people vanish into thin air. And unfortunately, we found out just how true it was.
Suddenly a terrified cry broke me out of my daze and I spun around to the direction it came from. And to my horror I saw my friend Freddy being pulled backwards by an invisible force. He had his hands tightly clamped around a smaller tree and was hanging on for dear life. "Someone help me! Fuck, I don't want to die!" Freddy cried out as his legs begin to give out from underneath him. "Shit. No, Freddy!" I shouted and lunged at him, holding onto his arms for dear life and pulling. "Someone help me." I said quickly to the others when I could feel my feet beginning to slide along the bracken. I felt arms wrap around my waist and pull me backwards and then saw Jansen grab hold of Freddy's other arm. As much as the three of us pulled, I could still feel him slipping from our grasp. Tears streamed down my face. I didn't want to see another friend be killed by the demonic thing. "Pull harder!" I cried out, yanking at his arms. But then then to our horror, our attempt to save him was to no avail. With a great heave, Freddy was suddenly ripped from our hands, and he immediately disappeared into the night, his screams of terror piercing the air. "No!" I howled and charged for him but Jansen threw his arms around me and pulled me away. "Stop, Gwen. He's gone! He's dead, that thing killed him. We need to run before it kills the rest of us!" He told me frantically, pulling me along. I nodded in shock and bolted, trying to purge the sounds of his death out of my mind.
Bile threatened to come up, burning my esophagus, but I kept choking it back down with a shudder. I was so scared it wasn't even funny; I could feel death at my heels, laughing a throaty chuckle and itching to wrap its hands around my throat, desperate to squeeze every last ounce of life out of me. There had to be some way out of this inner circle of hell, there just had to be. If not, then I pray to God that my death will swift and painless. Jenny, who was running ahead of me, started to slow down and sob, absolutely gasping for air. "Oh God, we're gonna die. We're running in circles, that demons going to find and it's going to eat us, just like everyone else…" She blubbered, completely coming to a stop. We all halted and then came running back to her. "Jenny! Get a hold of yourself, Jenny! We ain't gonna die, and that thing ain't gonna eat us_" Peter said to her, while holding her shoulders and shaking her slightly. "No! Shut up! You know we are, and you know that thing eats people…you could hear it crunching on the bones of our friends, you could hear them being ripped open alive and eaten, you could hear their blood splashing on the ground…their screams, oh their screams…God help us." Jenny shrieked, cutting him off and jerking out of his arms, quaking violently. Suddenly we all reeled back in pain when we all were assaulted with the blinding static. The sound made us all moan in pain and grab at our heads. It left my ears ringing and my stomach threatened to heave out all its contents on the forest floor. "Your God can't help you now." A garbled, deep voice whispered to the group. Jenny cried out and fled from the group, stumbling in a random direction. The others and I quickly wrenched ourselves to our feet and pursued her, anything to get away from that thing. That thing that legends stated was a myth, that tall, faceless slender being…the Slender Man. Slender Man was real, and we were all trapped in his layer of hell.