Chapter Two
April 7, 2008 Fairfax County Police Recording
911 Public Records provided by the First Amendment Center
Operator: 911, what's your emergency?
Caller: Hello… Yes, I'm. I'd like to report an accident.
Operator: Okay, sir. Can you give me your name and location.
Caller: My name is Daniel Keefer. I'm… I'm not too sure of my location. I'm on Compton Road.
Operator: Are you near the elementary school?
Caller: I think so.
Operator: Alright, Mr. Keefer, sit tight. I have an officer on the way. I'll stay on the line with you until they arrive. Can you tell me what happened?
Caller: Um. It was so strange. There was a man in the road. I swerved to avoid him, and now my car is stuck.
Operator: Are you or the other man injured?
Caller: I think I'm okay. But the door is pinned and I can't get out. I don't know about the other guy.
Operator: Can you describe the other man?
Caller: He was tall. Really tall, over six feet easily. And he was wearing a suit.
Operator: What about facial features?
Caller: I don't—
(muffled noises and static)
Operator: Sir?
(line goes dead)
"So we have a lead, though we can't exactly send out a search for a tall man wearing a suit," Arthur said.
They were back in the car, Arthur following Emrys's directions to the next house, the home of Matthew Tanaka, in order to investigate chronologically. They had taken a look around the backyard, but found nothing particularly amiss. Taking a child from there discreetly would be a bit of a stretch, but it wouldn't be impossible either. Arthur wished he could have seen Andrew's mysterious vanishing footprints for himself, but there was nothing he could do about that.
"But my question is, how can he be both the kidnapper and the imaginary friend?" asked Emrys.
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Apparently, he's not as imaginary as they thought. Hopefully one of Matthew Tanaka's parents will have a bit more information. It said in the report that Matthew talked about the same thing before he disappeared."
The two of them had tried asking Mrs. Sheffield a bit more about Andrew's "imaginary friend," but she didn't know much. Following her husband's wishes, she had more or less ignored the subject and never asked Andrew any questions about it.
"Yes, but they'd dismissed it as nightmares," Emrys responded. "We did as well."
"A child goes missing, and you dismiss one of the biggest clues as a nightmare?!" Arthur cried in exasperation.
"Well, to be fair, the full description wasn't just 'a tall man in a suit,'" Emrys argued.
"Well, what was it then?"
"Apparently, Matthew told his parents that there was a tall spider man in a suit with eight tentacles that came out of his back watching him from the woods. That's not exactly the kind of lead we can follow up on."
Arthur bit back the derogatory retort that he wanted to say and instead focused on his driving again. Nothing good would come out of arguing with the local officer about the police force's past mistakes. "It's down this road?"
"Yeah, turn left," Emrys said, quiet and to-the-point.
They pulled into the empty driveway of a quaint little one-story home. It was smaller than the Sheffields's, and in a more rural area, meaning there were more trees, more hiding places all around. They got out of the car and closed the doors quietly. This time, there really was no answer when they knocked on the door. Only silence.
Arthur huffed, then looked around. "He disappeared on his way home from school, right? He was presumed to be walking home when he was taken."
Emrys nodded.
"Do you know how to get to his school from here? Could we walk the same path?"
Emrys shrugged and looked away. "Sure. It's not exactly complicated, though it's at least a thirty minute walk."
"Let's do that, then. We can drive to the school and then walk back this way."
Emrys didn't say anything, just walked back to the car. Arthur glanced at him discreetly, but the dark-haired officer was unreadable, his face impassive and serious. Still, Arthur couldn't help but feel as though he were hiding something.
They made it to the school, a small building that currently stood abandoned and deathly silent, with none of the students or teachers around to give it life. They parked in the empty lot and got out.
There was only one obvious way that Matthew could have gone home from there, which was a little path bordered by the road on one side and the forest on the other.
"Do children around here often walk home on their own? Even the younger ones?" Arthur asked.
"Yeah. Until now, there wasn't much reason not to let them. I used to walk home too. It's a safe area, only a little traffic, but it isn't exactly well-off. A lot of the families have two working parents, so it's hard for them to pick their kids up every day. In my case, I only had one parent, though. I always walked home, even in the winter. My mom felt bad, of course, but she did what she had to do. At least then, she never worried about me getting abducted."
Arthur gave a soft "hm" of acknowledgement. While he certainly knew what it was like to have a parent who was too busy working to do something as menial as picking his son up from school, his family had never struggled financially.
They walked along the road in silence for some time. They were disturbed only by the occasional passing of a car or the cawing of a crow. The trees loomed up on one side, too dark to see clearly, too dense to pass through. Arthur had thought that perhaps Matthew had used the woods as a shortcut, but now he realized that couldn't be the case.
Abruptly, a small footpath appeared, cutting its way through the trees.
"What's this?" Arthur asked.
"It's a short trail, about half a mile long. It doesn't go anywhere, though. We searched it when Matthew first went missing and didn't find anything," Emrys explained.
Always preferring to see things for himself, Arthur hopped down onto the trail and began pressing deeper into the woods. A quick backwards glance told him that Emrys was following behind him. Then he turned his attention forward again, keeping his eyes peeled for anything that could be related to the case. It had already been several months since Matthew had gone missing, and if the police had already searched the area like Emrys said, the chance of him finding anything was incredibly slim. But for some reason, his instincts were telling him that he was on the right path.
His instincts had never let him down before.
The deeper they went, the darker it became. The trees blocked out a lot of the sunlight, making it hard to see. He couldn't imagine a small child coming down this way on their own, but it wouldn't be a bad place to hide.
Eventually, the path ended in a small clearing. There were no other ways out other than the way from which they'd come, and no signs of anyone having pushed their way through the dense forest surrounding the area. Arthur was about to give up and turn around when the Emrys suddenly moved around him.
"Look. This wasn't here before," he stated, gesturing to a paper that was stuck to a tree.
Arthur almost hadn't spotted the small, loose sheet of paper. It looked like someone had torn it hastily from a notebook and wrote on it in scratchy, messy writing.
"'Always watches. No eyes,'" Arthur read aloud. In the middle of the paper was a messy circle with two X marks on it, resembling something like a crude drawing of a face. "What the hell does that mean?"
The other man shrugged, but looked uneasy. "A prank, maybe?"
Arthur pulled it off the tree and folded it so that he could put it in his pocket.
"You're taking it?"
"Just in case. It's probably just some stupid joke, like you said, and if that's the case, we can always throw it out later."
"Arthur Pendragon. Cleaning up Virgina's forests one paper at a time," Emrys deadpanned.
"Haha," he said sarcastically. "Come on, let's get back to the road and finish the sweep. Maybe one of the Tanakas will be back when we get there."
As it turns out, one of the Tanakas was home, but they were unable to gain any more information than they already had. Even pressing for more information about Matthew's supposed nightmares had proven futile.
"We just thought he'd been watching too many scary shows on the television," Mr. Tanaka had told them tiredly. "Some nights he would come to wake us up, saying that a tall man in a suit was scaring him. He said that he watched him from the forest, grew tentacles, and told him to come outside. We would look out his window, of course, but there was never anything there that we could see."
"How often did this occur?" Arthur asked.
"He woke us up two separate nights, but I don't know if there were nights when he saw the man and didn't tell us about it."
"Well, thank you for your time. We're working hard to find the children."
That was over an hour ago.
Now, they were sitting in a booth at Denny's, both with plates of food and hot mugs of coffee in front of them.
"So, Emrys," Arthur started.
"Merlin," he interrupted.
"Pardon?"
"Just Merlin is fine. There aren't many people who call me by my last name."
"Alright. Merlin. What are your thoughts on the case overall?"
"Oh, so you want my opinion now? I thought all your training and experience meant you were above us lowly police officers."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Don't be a smartass. I'm sorry for my attitude earlier, alright? Let's just say that I've been stuck with officers who were even more useless than you."
Merlin squinted at him. "I'm not sure if that was supposed to be a compliment or an insult."
Arthur grinned. "A bit of both? Now, can you answer my original question?" He took a bite of the burger in front of him, watching the officer thoughtfully as he chewed. Now that Arthur knew Merlin wasn't one of those useless lackeys there to throw off the feds while the police tried to close the case first, most of his animosity had fallen away.
This was the first time he had really had the chance to study the officer. He was slightly taller than Arthur, but Arthur had a broader build. He was muscled, not obviously so, like Arthur was, but definitely strong enough at least to perform his officer duties. He was of a thin and lanky build, more streamlined with long limbs, probably a fast runner, if Arthur had to guess. He had bright blue eyes and quite a striking face, prominent cheekbones that were only highlighted when he grinned, which he seemed to do fairly often—at Arthur when he cracked a joke at his expense, at their waitress, at a little baby who was staring at them from the next table over.
It was easy to tell that Merlin had become a police officer out of his genuine desire to help people, and not for any perceived glory or adventure. Arthur couldn't dislike those sorts of people.
"Well, it's definitely the worst incident that's occurred since I joined the force," Merlin started. "It's hard to comprehend how or why the kidnapper is doing this. Why these children? Why now? Is it another member of our community? I'd like to think that the children are still alive somewhere, being held captive, maybe out of state. But we don't know, do we? And what's worse is we don't know if it's over or if he'll strike again. On the one hand, we can't let another child fall victim, but on the other, if he's done doing whatever it is he's doing, we may never find him." Merlin was resting an elbow on the table, leaning the weight of his head in his hand. Arthur realized that the weight of this case was really bearing down on him, and had been all these past months.
"Well. No need to worry. I'm here now, so we'll get everything cleared up soon enough," he tried to joke.
Merlin smiled weakly. "I hope so." He turned to look out the window and took a sip of his coffee. The sky was bright and clear, the temperature pleasant and bearable, a few people outside walking past the Denny's windows. But he wore the same dark expression he had earlier in the forest.
"Merlin."
The dark-haired man turned back at Arthur's lower, serious tone of voice. "Hm?"
"There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?"
Merlin's expression went immediately from dark to pained and defensive. "It's probably nothing. Pellinore told me to disregard it, in any case. He said it'll just send us off on a wild goose chase."
"I'll be the judge of that. What is it?"
Merlin looked around warily, discreetly, but there were no other customers sitting near enough to hear, and all of them were absorbed in their own meals or conversations.
"Well. Something my uncle said to me had been bothering me, so I went and did a bit of research." He leaned forward. "It turns out, this isn't the first case of serial kidnappings in Fairfax County. Four children went missing in the early '80's and the culprit in those cases was never discovered either. The children are still missing to this day. No bodies found, nothing."
"You think it's related?"
"I can't say with any certainty, but the incidents are too similar to disregard, don't you think?"
Arthur nodded. "Can you get your hands on the old case files?"
The grin from before was back. "Of course. A friend of mine works in the Records Annex."
"Could you do it by this evening? I could drop you off at the station again and you could meet me at my motel room later."
Merlin tilted his head in consideration. "Should be doable. As long as he's there."
"Great." He downed the rest of his coffee, now gone cold, and stood up. "Then let's pay for this shit and get out of here."
It was nearing five o'clock when Merlin showed up at his room. He had a box full of files in his arms.
"Well, the secret agent life certainly isn't as glamorous as it is in the movies, huh?" he said, taking in the small room, lumpy bed, and furniture that looked as if it had been there since the '80's. It probably had.
"At least it has internet. You managed to get all the files?" Arthur asked, taking the box from Merlin.
"Like I said, my friend works there. He handles all the cold case storage." Merlin took in the map of the area, all the marked off places and notes pinned to the wall. He raised an eyebrow, seemingly impressed.
"Let's get to work then. Find out where each of these children were living and pin the location on the map using the green pins to see where they were in correlation to the recent cases, the red pins. Make note of all the similarities and all the differences."
Merlin rolled his eyes and gave a mock salute. "Yes sir, Agent Pendragon, sir." He pulled out the first folder in the box and settled himself down on the floor where he could spread everything out.
Arthur resisted the urge to chuckle. The officer was growing on him. The blond man grabbed a file himself, and sat down on the bed, before what Merlin just said got through to him. He twisted around to look at him again. "Merlin?"
The officer looked up.
"Just call me Arthur."
Arthur's eyes were beginning lose focus from staring down at the papers for too long. He rolled his neck and blinked a few times. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Merlin stretch as well, reaching his arms above his head, pulling his shirt up just a bit, revealing a sliver of skin at the small of his back. He shook his head. It had been too long since he'd been with anyone, but he couldn't let himself get distracted now, just because he was tired.
He glanced at the clock. It was already after eight, and the two of them had been reading through the case details for several hours. They couldn't stop though. He was sure that they were on the right track. Several new pins had joined the old ones on the wall, revealing that many of them were from the same general areas, and in one case, even the same neighborhood. From what he'd read, the children had disappeared under similar circumstances, quietly and inconspicuously, without the parents even realizing they were gone until later.
Still, his stomach rumbled, reminding him that some things couldn't be ignored.
"Hey," he said, breaking the silence. "I'm gonna order a pizza or something. You want anything?"
"Sure. Whatever is fine."
"Pineapple and anchovy, it is."
"Uh-huh," Merlin said, distracted. He was still reading through some papers, his brow furrowed.
Arthur grinned. He should really order something weird, just to tease Merlin for not listening. "You know, I admire your work ethic, but you can take a break, you know."
There was no answer. Merlin flipped a page and kept reading.
"Merlin?"
"I think you should take a look at this, Arthur," was the reply he got.
He stepped forward, all jokes set aside. "What is it?"
"This case goes back even farther than we thought. The officer in charge of finding the missing children in 1981 put together a list of all the past cases of unsolved missing children's reports in the area around Fairfax County. Two brothers went missing in '66, which is noted as possibly unrelated, but between 1953 and 1954, six children were declared missing and never found. In 1934, twenty years earlier, four children went missing. There's even a case recorded in 1909, when four children were supposedly kidnapped by a man called Jeff Sheppard, but he'd claimed innocence until the end and the children were never found. The last note says 1882 and the number five, so I'm assuming that means five children, but there aren't any details."
The wheels were turning in Arthur's head. "So… what? A cult? A child smuggling ring? If it's been going on this long, it's obviously not the work of a single man."
"I'm not so sure."
"Merlin, how can one man possibly be responsible for children who went missing over a century ago?"
Merlin had his head in his hands, his fingers curled around tufts of hair. He was muttering something to himself, and Arthur was slightly worried.
"Hey, don't freak out on me. I know it's a lot to tackle, but we—"
"It's not that." Merlin looked up at him, eyes pleading with Arthur to listen.
Arthur tilted his head, staring at Merlin in consideration for a moment. "There's something else, isn't there? Something else that you're not telling me."
Merlin started to rearrange papers in a move that was obviously more to do with settling his nerves than tidying up the notes. "I didn't want to bring it up. It was so stupid that I didn't even think anything of it at first. But the more I learn about this case, the more things start fitting together. They make sense in a way they shouldn't."
"Merlin, you're going to have to help me out here, 'cause I really have no clue what you're talking about."
"Have you ever heard of Slenderman?" he asked abruptly.
Arthur paused. "I… can't say that I have."
"He's a myth. Or an urban legend, more like. It got circulating on the internet and became pretty popular around areas like this with lots of forest land. When the children started disappearing, a lot of the older kids started to spread rumors that it was the Slenderman who was doing it. I think they started saying it as a joke at first, but as time went on and more kids disappeared, I think they even started to take it seriously."
"Okay," said Arthur hesitantly, still obviously confused. "I'll bite. Who is 'Slenderman?'"
"Slenderman is supposedly a very tall and slender man—thus the name—who dresses either all in black or in a black suit, but he has no face. Sometimes he has tentacles, sometimes he doesn't. But because he's so tall and thin, he blends in with trees very well. Supposedly he stalks his victims, usually small children, watching them from afar and following them for days before he takes them. No one knows what he does with them afterwards."
"I admit, it does sound a lot like our case. But you can't think that's what's actually happening, do you? I mean, it's much more probable that Matthew knew about this Slenderman, and then when a real tall man in a suit started following him, his mind combined fantasy and reality."
"That's not the only thing though," Merlin said. "Like I said, I dismissed it at first, myself."
"Then why the change of tune?" Arthur crossed his arms.
"Because this was also in the case folder."
Merlin held up a piece of paper. At first, Arthur wasn't sure what was so significant about it, but then it clicked. He pulled out the paper that he'd taken from the forest earlier that day and put them side by side. The one in Merlin's hand had yellowed a bit with age, but it was still clear that it was the same sort of paper, ripped out in exactly the same way. It had writing on it in the same scribbly handwriting. Only this time, it had a crude illustration of a stick figure man next to a tree and one word. Follows.
No reviews so far, but a couple of follows, so hopefully some people are enjoying the story? Also, if anyone's played the Slenderman online game (it's free to download!), I'm sure you recognize some of the clues I've dropped in there. ;)
