The Suit Man

The long, hot, summer afternoons lengthened yet further, each day more humid and sticky than the last. The children went into the woods each morning to play by the stream and the empty hulk of what had once been Old Man Ransom’s place. There they played endless games of tag, hide-and-seek and football with new friend they’d made there. They called him the Suit man, and used to say that he would teach them to draw and climb and referee their little games. And, when the days were done he would sing to them from outside their windows, or slip in through the house to tuck them in at night.

Sometimes the adults grew suspicious, as for an imaginary figure the descriptions were surprisingly similar. But, that said, no one ever really believed that a man as slim as a teenager and as tall as a tree was playing with their children all through that stifling summer. It was sweet how the older children continued to talk about the Suit man as though he was real so as not to spoil the stories for the younger children.

I think it was the beginning of August when Kara went missing. She was a sickly child. Although she was thirteen, the same age as my eldest, she looked about nine. My own sons didn’t really have much to do with here, but the few times I did see her she seemed to have odd bruises. I must say that while I was suspicious, it is far easier to forget you ever saw the bruises than to start flinging accusations around. However, she had gone missing and it was a matter for the whole town to get her back. Her parents said that she had gone down to Old Man Ransom’s house that morning, and not returned in the evening.

“She was such a loving and obedient child,” her mother said. “She was always home on time.”
No one suggested that her obedience stemmed from fear, but I wonder how many other parents thought the same thing. That night, like almost every other parent in town, I asked my children if they knew where Kara was. I wasn’t prepared for what I heard.

“She asked the Suit Man to take her away and he did. He said we’d still be able to play with her.”
“The Suit Man?” I asked. “Isn’t he a story?” I looked at my older son, knowing that he was far more likely to know truth from fiction than the eight-year-old. The older son shook his head.
“He’s real, dad.”
“You’re old enough to know that telling lies is wrong, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“And you know that Kara’s parents love her and want to know where she is?”
He nodded.
“Imagine how you’d feel if I was taken away.”
He didn’t say anything but his bottom lip began to tremble.
“So tell me once more. Do you know what happened to Kara?”
“She asked the Suit Man to take her away and he did.”
That was good enough for me. I didn’t believe in a man as thin as a teenager and as tall as a tree either, but whatever had really happened, my two kids were both certain that the Suit Man had taken her. Someone was responsible. I rang some other parents and, as I had suspected, they had had similar conversations with their children and come to similar conclusions. Someone was out there down by the creek and the empty house. And whoever they were, they weren’t above stealing children.

Barely larger than a village, our town was built on farming. Every third man had a shotgun in the house and almost all of us kept tools in the shed. It was like something from a Hammer Horror that night as we marched down to the woods. We had shotguns aplenty, and those of us who had no guns held spades and axes. Every single one of us carried a flashlight. The wives and mothers had stayed behind to keep the children in the house. They seemed on edge; we didn’t want them slipping out or worse, having someone else slip in.

We got to Old man Ransom’s house with a niggling suspicion that we wouldn’t find anyone. Once the mob had blown off some steam we were fairly willing to let due process handle this Suit Man. But tonight there was revenge in the air. If we found him tonight his head would be coming back on a pike. Or so we thought.

To our surprise, we found the Suit Man. We thought he would be cleverer than to wander into the path of the mob. Some of us suspected that he was amongst the mob at that moment. We were wrong. As we came upon the old house, we saw him standing there stark against the moonlight. He was grotesque. The children hadn’t been lying when they described him. His body was as narrow as a young tree and as long as a motorcycle. His legs were six feet long at least, and his arms were worse. They almost looked as if they’d been broken because of the strange angle they hung at. He didn’t even react to us at first.

One of the braver men started it. He fired off a shot with his gun, and the mob cheered. Soon though, they died into silence. The Suit Man hadn’t even flinched. His suit was still immaculate in the torchlight as he turned to face us.

His head was blank.

It was as though someone had stretched skin over an almost human skull. He had two indentations where there should have been eyes, and a slight bowing out where there should have been a mouth. He took a stumbling, lurching step towards us, and his arms… unfurled. Almost like there was an octopus hiding in his suit, a mass of long, black tentacles slithered from his suit. With them, he…
He…

The reports will show what he did to them. Disembowelled bodies hanging from trees, organs in plastic bags, it was like a bad slasher film, except that our killer was this humanoid abomination. In disarray we fled back to the town. All through the night I held my two boys close as we listened to the screams of the fleeing and the dying. The flames of the burning houses lit us through the curtains until, finally, it was our time. I pushed my two children behind me and prepared to shield them with my body if it was necessary. It wasn’t. As the creature raised its hands to strike, the younger son ran out in front of me.
“Don’t hurt daddy!” he shouted. The creature stopped and looked at my son. For several seconds they looked at each other, and I would swear that they were holding a silent conversation, before the Suit Man merely turned around and left the house. I held onto my two children until the screams died away. All that I could hear then were footsteps. The Suit Man was leading the children down the road in a group. They seemed almost hypnotised. My two sons stood up and left the house, unheeding of my cries. At one point I laid hands on my younger son to stop him leaving and at that moment the Suit Man turned his terrible blank head towards me and I felt an almost tangible aura of hatred towards me and my fellow adults.

But I even the Suit Man could not stop me completely. I followed him as he led our offspring down to Old Man Ransom’s house, and inside the crumbling building. I followed him through the door and out into another bright field full of flowers and grass. There was a wood on the horizon, and I was more deeply unsettled than I have ever been in my life. For, on the other side of the door, it was a bright sunny day. The sky was grey and lined, like a badly-tuned television, and the sun was a lighter grey circle in the sky. There I saw my children for the last time, playing and laughing in the meadows beneath a terrifying sky with the other children, presided over all the time by the inscrutable Suit Man. I fled.

But the Suit Man is still with me. I know now that the world knows of him as the Slender Man. He has agents everywhere, and yet no one knows why he is here at all. But it is worse than that. I type these words in a brief moment the Suit Man allows me to control my own body before he continues to use me to walk amongst my fellow men. I am a pawn in his unknowable games. He wiped my town off of the map, and the only living fragment of that community is now his slave in both word and deed.