2 - Encounter

Tears were still trickling from the corners of my eyes as the lids became heavy. Gradually, my weary body gave in to sleep, but turmoil didn't cease to possess my mind. In my dreams, the lovely boy was smiling cheerfully at me. He was running from me – I was chasing him… I couldn't identify where we were, but I could tell it was a game of tag again. We were laughing and teasing and taunting… and it was childish bliss. Then, quite suddenly, we both stopped running. The boy was still grinning at me, but we were standing still, across from each other. He opened his mouth to say something, when a clawed hand belonging to something unseen reached across his face from behind, preventing his speech… He tried to pull it from his face, but another hand grabbed him on the side, pulling him backwards, away from me… He screamed, but it was drowned out by a frightening cackle, and then the face of the hands' owner came into view –

It was a vampire, its jaws wide in malevolent laughter, vicious fangs protruding from its gums. Its claws sank into the beautiful boy, and as I watched, my hand outstretched in protest, his figure completely dissolved, leaving nothing between me and the hideous creature… It advanced towards me, still cackling, and I noticed that this vampire had blonde hair that reached its shoulders…

My eyes widened in terror and I screamed as the giant claws reached for me, now, ready to shred me up… A number of other malicious creatures was appearing out of nowhere, creeping around the vampire… A werewolf, scrawny and rabid… A witch with a gnarled face and rotting teeth… A ghost with long white tendrils stretching towards me… A zombie, drooling tar, its wicked eyes fixed upon me, wide with hunger… I kept screaming, and the vampire's claws seemed to grow larger and larger, looming towards me, about to pierce right through me –

"AAHHHHHH!"

I opened my mouth and shrieked with fear, my eyes flying open, my legs straightening out of my windbreaker. My breath came in pants and I scanned the area around me nervously, the image of that evil vampire still playing in my mind –

I shook my head violently, wishing to rid myself of the idea. But it was no use. I felt haunted, as though all of those creatures I had dreamed of were lurking in the darkness that had now surrounded me, creeping up on me…

I whirled around, looking behind me. But there was nothing to see except the rest of the plastic slide I'd been sleeping on, and past that, an expanse of darkness. Turning back to face in front of me, I tried to slow my breathing – but I couldn't. Not only was I shaky and frightened, but I was also chilled by the coolness of the night air, and it was making my whole body shiver. Huddling in my windbreaker, I could see the pale clouds that were my breath, puffing out and then dissolving moments later.

The monsters from my dreams continued to infect my thoughts, and I shook my head repeatedly – but there was no getting rid of the ghoulish specters that haunted my mind. I tucked my quivering hands into the pockets of my dirty jeans, and was a little surprised to feel a plastic solid in my right pocket. It was the tiny flashlight that the man in the toy store had given me. Feeling grateful towards the man, I extracted it from my pocket, and found the little switch in the dark. A small but bright beam of light shone from the opposite end, illuminating the mulch leading up to the edge of the playground's boundary. The light on its own was a welcome sight, and provided at least a little comfort in the chilly eeriness of the dark.

Though the light brightened my spirits ever so slightly in addition to the area in front of me, I decided I'd better turn it off, just in case. I didn't know how long the little batteries inside it could hold out, and there was no sense in wasting it all simply staring ahead of myself. Tucking it back into my pocket, I hugged myself to keep warm, and sat staring into the nothingness that was the park at night.

Minutes passed, but they felt more like hours. My thoughts were still polluted by visions of the beasts I'd had dreams about, and I shuddered frequently. I became overly sensitive to the slightest notions of danger around me. The unsettling chill of a breeze. The sound of chains clinking on a nearby swingset. The tricks my eyes played on me in the dark…

It was torture, and it was driving me mad. I murmured under my breath in spite of myself, but there wasn't much I could say to try and calm myself down. All that I was able to repeat there in the dark was, "Monsters aren't real… They aren't real… They aren't real…"

But of course, I couldn't persuade myself when my voice itself was quaking. Helplessly, I buried my head in my knees, clenching my hair with my hands. Why me? I wondered, beginning to question whether everyone I'd met that day had been right, whether I should have gone back to my uncle's house even though he was a terrible man…

No. I couldn't turn back now, not even in my thoughts, I decided. With some difficulty, I determined that I'd rather be out here, alone in the dark, than back in my uncle's house. Even though it was just a little warmer there. Even though my only companion would be a complete idiot of a grown man…

I shook my head again. No! I was never going to believe that my uncle's house was the better place for me. I couldn't. I wouldn't. Ever.

Making this somewhat pointless decision didn't do anything to keep me from psyching out about anything that so much as indicated a sign of life around me. I sat on the edge of the slide, trembling with cold and anxiety, tense –

Snap.

It was merely the sound of a twig breaking, but it was enough to scare me onto my feet, to propel me forward… straight into the woods at the edge of the park.

I regretted the action as soon as my brain caught up to my scrawny legs. The floor of the forest was covered in a tangle of roots and multiple layers of fallen leaves. My right hand scrabbled around my hip as I tripped around the foliage, searching underneath my baggy upper garments for my jeans pocket. At last it found the little plastic flashlight, and immediately I yanked it out and turned it on.

The resulting plume of light illuminated my surroundings: to state the obvious – trees. Everywhere. Tall and thin, short and wide, spotted with moss or completely coated – they were everywhere. In front of me. Behind me. To the right, to the left, roots meshing beneath me, branches sprawling above me… EVERYWHERE. I had no idea how I'd gotten this deep into the woods in such a short amount of time; the speed I'd discovered I possessed just that afternoon, must have carried me farther than I thought, even with the masses of roots to trip me up.

Staring around me, shining the flashlight on the infinite woods, I felt the color draining from my face, and it was as though a breath of air could have knocked me over. I wanted to close my eyes, open them back up, and see that this was just another crazy dream, that I was still lying on the plastic slide with my legs tucked up inside my windbreaker.

But no matter how many times I blinked – hard – I was still a little girl in a gigantic forest, with not even an inkling of an idea as to where I was.

I found myself shaking my head vigorously for the umpteenth time that night. "There has… to be… a way," I muttered to myself, and I forced my right leg to take a single step forward, lifting the foot mechanically and setting it down just beyond a knot of large roots.

One small step towards…somewhere, I decided. Somewhere that wasn't packed with trees.

As I began moving a little more steadily through the forest, I settled on moving straight forward – which was, of course, impossible for me. Every second, I found myself maneuvering around clusters of enormous trees, swerving out of my intended path; and though I thought I returned myself to my original path, I never actually did. (Of course I didn't!) The darkness enveloping me, and the shadows my flashlight caused when it shone on the trees, did nothing to improve my sense of direction.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to decide that I was, officially, lost. Nonetheless, I kept moving, shining my tiny plastic flashlight in front of me, stumbling over the foliage. I may not have known where I was going, but I did know that there was no way I was going to stay in these woods forever…

The darkness was beginning to close in on me – or, rather, my flashlight battery was depleting. I couldn't tell which was true, and I'm not sure it would have mattered. Either way, it was getting harder for me to see where I was going, and that didn't help with my attempts at avoiding tripping over roots.

I was frustrated and frightened all at once as I continued my struggle through the woods. My steps were mechanical and jerky, and sometimes I muttered nonsense words as though to vent my frustration. My legs were already bruising underneath my jeans from repeated collisions with the ground, and my hands were nearly numb from the combination of cold air and scrapes from tree bark. Altogether, I simply felt awful, and it didn't improve matters when I fell hard over a thick fallen bough.

I tried to step over it, but my depth perception failed in the dimming light of my flashlight, and I caught the bough on the front of my ankle; in turn, my ankle became the fulcrum of my body as I spun forward, falling forward over the obstacle and landing hard on my chest, with my shins suspended against the branch. I gasped in pain, bringing my legs down from the bough and trying to stand up. But this time, the pain was more significant than after my other blunders, and I fell back to the forest floor. My chest ached, and I could feel the soreness of individual bruises on my legs. I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing the pain would ebb away, and detecting a menacing ringing in my ears.

After a little while I was able to get back on my feet and start moving again, but it wasn't without difficulty. The soreness of my body was a constant reminder of my dismal situation, and the ringing in my ears was anything but fading. If anything, it was getting louder, filling my head and making it feel heavy. And, I noticed, it wasn't like the normal "ringing" that I'd ever experienced before. It was a fuzzy kind of sound, but high-pitched, almost like some sort of screaming static.

It became more and more noticeable, the sound resonating in my head. As I pressed on through the woods, that peculiar, unsettling sound became the only thing I was really thinking about. I didn't understand. I wasn't particularly dizzy, a typical cause for ringing ears – if anything, the ringing itself was making me a little dizzy. In fact, it was very nearly becoming painful to endure, as its volume increased, screaming on inside my skull. Every now and then, I would pause my journey and press my hands to my head as though to squeeze the noise out of it. Of course, it didn't do any good, and the eerie ambiance continued to echo through my head as I went along.

I was becoming conscious of the feeling I wasn't alone in the woods. At first, the feeling made me perk up a little, and my pace sped up – for a short amount of time, that is. Eventually, I reasoned that no normal human being would want to be in a forest like this so late at night. I didn't want to be there, I thought, so why would someone else want to be here, of all places? My thoughts began to turn unstable, darting fearfully from one subject to another: the increasing static scream in my ears, the surrounding darkness, the creepy way in which the trees' branches loomed over my head… Perhaps one of them would trap me, like my uncle said…

Becoming jumpy and tense, I felt my body start to twitch here and there, and my hands were shaking uncontrollably, causing my fading flashlight beam to bob rapidly up and down. Every moment, I felt the need to whirl around and point the light in another direction. I checked over my shoulders and searched the branches above me, expecting some sort of hideous beast to leap from the heights to devour me at any second.

This case of paranoia certainly didn't improve my body coordination. I was so busy checking everywhere except in front of me, that I began tripping over nearly everything my feet came into contact with. I slipped on fallen leaves, stubbed my toes on gnarled roots, got my hair tangled in dangling broken branches. And all the while, the weird noise in my ears became more and more ominous, until—

"Ah…"

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, and it was all too noticeable for me. A tingling, eerie feeling crawled across my back, and I could feel sweat beading all over my body. On top of all of that, the noise had reached a climax – it had evolved into a shrieking, screeching sound, almost like loud car brakes combined with a resounding hiss.

Unable to stand the sound any longer, I brought my hands to my ears, bringing the flashlight to the side of my face. With the beam of light pointing off somewhere in the air, I couldn't see a thing in front of me, and I tumbled over multiple roots, moaning in discomfort. Somehow I managed to rise to my feet, but upon taking one more step forward, I promptly crashed over yet another gnarled root. The impact jolted my skinny body, loosening my grip on the tiny flashlight and sending it tumbling to the ground. With a short cry of panic, I hurriedly rustled my hands through the fallen leaves on the ground in an effort to retrieve the miniscule glowing object.

My hands were trembling, scrabbling, and it seemed to take far too long for me to finally grip the plastic flashlight in my right hand – but I had it, and that's what mattered. With my ears still ringing, I give a brief exclamation of triumph, and shined the light towards my front once again.

The second after I did that, I regretted it.

All the color drained from my face, from my entire body, as I stared, petrified, at the figure in front of me. My panicky little eyes darted around its figure, identifying broad shoulders, obscenely long arms, writhing black growths coming off of its back—

And a pale, eerily shadowed shape floating atop it all… A head, with no face.

I screamed, my voice cracking as I forced it as loud as I could for no legitimate reason, just screaming out of pure terror. My fist clenched around my flashlight, still shining on the form in front of me as it came ever closer, the white orb that was its face leaning in towards mine – it was going to eat me, it had no mouth but it was going to eat me – and the noise in my ears was even higher than before – and now I was falling backwards, my voice shrill with alarm as I tumbled over a root, and just kept falling… and falling… and falling, into blackness that concealed everything except that white, featureless face of none other than the Slender Man…