So my father’s death was described in rather grisly (I really didn’t think they were able to give this kind of information, more for taste than security) detail in the archives of my local papers. It’s also amazing that they allowed that picture. They could never do that today, I should think, I don’t know who they did it then. But it’s clear that my father didn’t die of stab wounds.
At any rate, it yielded more clues than I could have hoped for reasonably. At the least, it confirms that it was a suspected murder, though I have yet to find follow up information indicating how the investigation went. Though considering I cannot recall my mother or myself being interviewed concerning his death, I feel that either it didn’t last long or that there never was a proper investigation at all.
After all, there was a lack of material evidence. At the time of the article, no fingerprints, tire tracks (other than those of my father’s truck), footprints (other than my father’s), or indeed anything tangible could be found pointing to a subject. The only known thing was that my father had been killed with something sharp.
However, it is was his manner of death that was especially grisly. His abdominal wall had been cut though, then ripped open. His organs had, apparently, been individually removed and subsequently replaced in the body.
Anyone reading this should know that this is a more or less typical scene from a Slender Man’s killing. There was nothing taken, except a life and the structural integrity of a person’s innards.
But perhaps the strangest part is that my father didn’t have any of the characteristic behavior of someone being stalked by a Slender Man. There was no paranoia, no obsessive observation, no frantic drawing. My father went to work every day, came home, watched TV, played with me, he even helped around the house. He was a more or less normal person to the end.
Thus there are two primary possibilities for how my father came to this state (killed by a Slender Man, but with none of the accompanying behavior changes):
One, he came upon it suddenly and tried to interfere with it (saving me/someone? If it was me, it fits with both a Slender Man coming after children and returning again when they are older if they evade it the first time).
And two, there was something different about my father. Maybe he simply hid it from me. Maybe his mentality simply made him too stubborn to give into the fear (a proto-Zeke Strahm?). Maybe he carried a mutation that made him immune to a Slender Man’s control (if the fear is caused by a Slender Man interfering with the mind directly). Maybe it was something even more farfetched and ludicrous, like my father being a Slender Man.
Of the two, the first is obviously more likely. There was a precedent for this in Just Another Fool, provided it wasn’t the rambling of a veteran driven insane. The second is unlikely, though it is possible that my father simply hid it well. My memory is foggy around that time (itself a cause for concern), so it could be that I simply forgot any subtle behavior changes my father made to hide his situation from me.
But the strangest thing perhaps was my father’s age. My father was in his early forties when he died, by far the oldest case I have come across (Strahm was 27 if I recall correctly, the oldest age I can recall given explicitly by a blog). This again may suggest that it was a more “spur of the moment” incident compared to the stalking examples typically seen. If a Slender Man had intended to claim my father as a child who escaped him previously, why wait so uncharacteristically long and apparently simply end it quickly rather than dragging it out as is typical?
So I must conclude for the moment that my father had not been pursued before his death. I will have to ask my mother for more details since she may have held even more information back due to the nature of his death.
But in the meantime, this makes me think of a subject that I have yet to discuss, and that I have not yet found any information on whatsoever.
How do the children escape? Does it simply stop or does it taper off? Why does a Slender Man wait years and years for a second attempt? Is the goal the same as with the children or is there another reason?
While I work up the nerve to open these old family wounds, I’ll try to make some sense of these questions, and hopefully come to sensible answers.
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