I heard it when it came up behind me. The hard sounds of branches rubbing against each other, muffled by the softer, wetter sounds of squelching meat. My skin prickled as my heart picked up its pace. I was exposed, caught in the silvery spotlight of a thumbnail moon. Something puffed in front of me, and it took me a moment to realize it was my breath. The air around me had begun to freeze, burning my throat as I took another step forward, preparing to run.
That’s when it said my
“…name. I’m just saying, if you’re going to tell a creepy story, you need a name that’s not so fucking stupid, man.”
Colby scowled at me. “It’s not my name for it, dude. It’s just its name.” He shrugged before feeling compelled to add. “Fuck you.”
I snickered at him. “Yeah, whatever. Something you read on the internet then. Still lame. ‘The Slumberjack’? What, does he sneak into your house and cut down trees while you’re asleep? Maybe he hides in the toilet and steals your floaters.” Brina was down the table from us, but she snorted and shook her head at that last. The dark look on Colby’s face had only deepened, and I knew from experience I was on the edge between fucking with him and really hurting his feelings.
“Okay, nevermind, smartass.”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I want to hear it. Just busting your balls. Tell me.”
He grimaced at me while weighing his desire for me to beg against his clear excitement to tell the story. Finally he shrugged. “Fine. I’ll be the smaller asshole and tell it.”
And then he did.
So the story I read was that the Slumberjack is really old. Like he’s been traced back to Europe during the Middle Ages. The stuff I was reading didn’t really know what he’s supposed to be. Some kind of monster maybe? Or a demon? Who knows. What he does though…I mean he’s kinda like a fucked-up genie.
Brina snorted some water down the table as Colby shot her a dirty look. For my part, I was having trouble keeping a straight face, so I ate a bite of sandwich and nodded before talking around that. “So, he’s a fucked-up genie. Or something. Got it.”
Yeah, like…well, you’ll see what I mean. So the early stories of him are from travelers that were going through the forest. They’d come across a stranger, a tall man wearing a long green cloak with a thick gray beard. He’d greet them, and if they responded, he’d invite them to barter with him. Like do a trade.
The deal was, he offered you the thing you wanted the most for the thing you valued the least. And that sounds like a good deal, right? Except he didn’t just ask you what you wanted to trade. He looked into your heart and saw what you really wanted and wanted to get rid of. And a lot of the stories are about…well, not him tricking people really, but things turning out differently then they expected. Not happy endings, I mean.
But that was the old version, right? Now people don’t wander around the woods too much, which I guess sucks for the Slumberjack, but with the internet, more people know about him too. So he’s changed with the times.
“Slumberjack 2.0.”
Brina laughed as she got up from the table and walked toward the trashcans, but when I looked back at Colby, he was staring me down. “Look, fucker. If you don’t stop it I won’t tell you the rest.”
Grinning, I nodded. “Sorry, I’ll shut up. Go on.”
Narrowing his eyes, he nodded and started back.
So now he comes to people’s homes at night, but only if he’s invited. To invite him, you melt down a candle, mix in some of your own blood, and then remake the candle so it can sit up and burn. Then, on the next new moon, you light it and put it in a window. He’ll come in while you sleep, and when you wake up, the trade will be complete.
Colby sat back with a satisfied smile as I stared at him.
“That’s it? So it’s just like a ritual creepypasta or something. Like do this weird thing and this spooky thing will happen. Ooga booga.”
His smile slipped away. “I mean, I guess, but there were lots of people saying they knew people that had tried it and were warning everybody to take it seriously and not mess with it.”
Giving a small laugh, I smiled at him. “Well, I mean, yeah. That’s what people do, right? Don’t do this! This one’s real! My sister’s roommate tried it. And my uncle works for Nintendo.” I shook my head. “It’s just part of pumping it up, man. All those things are bullshit.” I could see the hurt in his face, so I tried to change subjects. “So why is he called the Slumberjack. Seriously, I don’t understand.”
Nodding, Colby leaned forward. “Some of the people were talking about that too. Apparently jack used to be slang for man. So like a lumberjack is a lumberman? So maybe slumberjack is supposed to be like a sleep man or the sandman or something.”
I eyed him dubiously. “I guess that’s kinda cool.” The bell rang and as we picked up our lunch trays I grinned at him. “It’s a neat story, man.” I started to laugh. “Fucked up genie, huuugh…” I almost dropped the tray as pain shot through my side. Colby stepped forward with a worried look.
“Are you okay?” He glanced down at my side and back up to my face. “You need to go to a doctor. He could have punctured a lung or something.”
I frowned at him and shook my head. “It was two days ago. I’d be worse than this if he had. My ribs are just bruised from where the fucker kicked me.”
Colby sighed and nodded uncertainly. “Maybe. But you should tell someone. A teacher or the cops or something.”
I waggled my thumb at him. It had been three years and I still couldn’t straighten it all the way. “I tried that before, remember? She always protects him. Lies for him.” I spit onto the concrete. “It’s my dumb ass for trying to get in the way this time. He leaves me alone if I don’t get in the way.”
We were walking toward the main building now, and for a few moments we were both quiet. Then Colby suddenly asked something he’d never asked before.
“Why does your Dad hurt your Mom like that?”
I shrugged. “I used to think it was just because he had a temper. And hell, he does have that. But when I was little, I still thought he loved us. After he bent back my thumb and sent her to the hospital, I decided he was just evil. And maybe that’s true too. But after I tried to tell and she backed him up?” I let out a long breath. “Fuck man, this last time? She was apologizing to him while he was kicking me for trying to defend her stupid ass. And when he stopped, she didn’t even check on me until the next day. She doesn’t love me either. She’s as bad as he is, and I’m fucking done with both of them.”
Colby reached out and patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry, man. That sucks. You know you can stay over at my house any time it gets too bad.”
I gave him a smile. “I know. But I can handle it. I won’t let them beat me…you know what I mean. I’ll hang in until I graduate, and then I’m fucking out of there.”
He grinned back at me. “Yep. State college here we come.” Colby cocked an eyebrow at me. “And if it gets too bad before then, just ask the Slumberjack to take them away.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I might just do that.”
I didn’t do it that day or that week. I didn’t even think about it again until a few months later. One moonless night when they were screaming and fighting for so long that they seemed to get bored of it and wanted to turn it on me.
I locked my bedroom door and stuck a chair under the knob, and when they got tired of pounding on the other side, I still waited until I could hear them back in their room before I risked trying to go to sleep.
But despite feeling exhausted, I wasn’t sleepy at all. Instead, I was wired on a restless anger that was well on its way to becoming a weary hatred of them both. Knowing that they were turning me into something hateful, something closer to them than I’d ever want to be, only made me hate them more.
It was then, laying in the hot darkness of my barricaded room, that I remembered the Slumberjack. I felt silly as I dug up a pack of old birthday candles from the bottom of my closet, and for a moment I wasn’t sure how to melt it in such a way that I could reform it at all.
Then I thought and took an old straw from the trash. Folded over one end while I melted two candles into the other. I’d already cut and split a shoe lace to make a thin wick, so all that was left was pricking my finger over the waxy mixture before it began to harden. An hour later I gently cut away the straw and was left with a thin, crooked, but surprisingly decent-looking blood candle.
After I lit it in my window, I slept like the dead.
“Good morning, sweetie.”
I jerked at my mother’s voice as I stepped into the kitchen. I hadn’t expected the Slumberjack to actually come and take them away, but I hadn’t expected this either. I looked up at her warily, searching for sarcasm or the preamble of screaming. But no, she was just smiling at me as she cooked something on the stove.
“Just cooking some eggs. Want some?”
I nodded uncertainly. “Um, yeah sure.”
She nodded. “Coming up.” She glanced past me. “Morning, sleepyhead. Breakfast will be ready soon.”
I felt my guts tighten as I turned to look at my father as he passed. He patted me on the shoulder and went over to get some coffee. “So what do you have planned for today?”
I shrugged. “Uh, just was going to go hang out with Colby. His cousin is in a band and we were going to go watch him practice maybe.”
My father nodded as he smiled. “Sounds cool.” He pointed at me, his face growing more serious as my balls tightened. “But be home for dinner, okay? We haven’t had a good family dinner in a long time, and I mean to correct that.” A drop of blood ran out of his left nostril, and he wiped at it absently as he held my gaze.
“Yeah, sure I ...” There was a strange creaking noise behind me and I jumped as my mother set down a plate of eggs.
“Eat up. You’re still a growing boy.”
“It was so weird, dude.”
Colby shrugged. We were sitting out in the driveway of his cousin’s house. The band had practiced and it had been pretty bad, but at least it’d distracted me for a little while. “Maybe they feel guilty and are trying to be less assholey.”
“Maybe. But they were really different acting. They’ve tried to suck up before when they thought I might report them, but this was different. It was like they were different people. They even looked a little different.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I know how that sounds. I…I don’t know. They just seemed off somehow I can’t put my finger on.”
I could tell Colby wanted to make a joke, but something stopped him. Instead, he just looked off into the distance. “You could always come over to our house. Dad’s making lasagna I think.”
I heard the bitterness in my laugh. “Wish I could. But apparently we’re having a family dinner tonight.” I checked my phone. “Shit, it’s almost five. Time to go.”
They were waiting at the kitchen table when I got home. My chest tightened as soon as I saw them there. This was a trap. They’d done stuff like this before. Set me up so it was like I’d done something wrong—did something they said not to, not did something they wanted done, or maybe just show up late when I hadn’t known I was going to be. It was all a trick, though. Just a justification to yell at me. To punish me. As though sometimes they couldn’t get full just tearing chunks out of each other.
Walking into the kitchen, I sat my bag down without looking at them. “Sorry, I didn’t know we were having dinner so early.”
It was my father that spoke even as I saw my mother get up out of the corner of my eye. “Not a problem, son. We didn’t say a specific time, after all. Just glad we’re all together now.”
Feeling a bit confused, I nodded and took my seat. When I glanced up at my father, I recoiled slightly. There was dried blood on his top lip, and his right eye was drooping like he’d had a stroke.
“Dad, are you…”
“Dinner’s served.” I jumped the same as that morning. There’d been an odd background noise since my mother had gotten up from the table, but I’d been so focused on him that I’d ignored it. But it was close now, a rough scraping sound married to something soft and moist. I didn’t know how, but it sounded like it was coming from…
I looked down on my plate. It was heaped high with grass and leaves bound together by twigs and black mud. My stomach dropped. What was this? Some new kind of bullshit? I glanced around for my mother, to try to get a read on her expression. Was this a bad joke or something worse? She was already on the way back to the table with their plates, both heaped high with more of what was on mine. As I stared, she sat the plates down before taking her seat, and before I could make myself say anything, they were already grabbing up fistfuls of the muck and forest bits and shoving them in their mouths.
My mother paused after a couple of handfuls and turned to me. She smiled, mud and twigs sticking out of her mouth as she leaned forward. Her eyes were bloodshot and streaming what might be tears, though they were dark brown and had a sharp smell that stung my nose as she drew closer. “Why aren’t you eating, honey? You have to eat your dinner. You’re still a growing boy.”
I felt the thing that looked like my father grab my arm gently but firmly. “That’s why we’re here, dear. To make sure he grows up right.”
Turning to look at him, I saw his mouth was already caked with dirt, and in a couple of places his skin poked out strangely, whether it was from a twig poking into his cheek or something wrong underneath the face he wore, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I had to get away before…
The motherthing stood up to my right and grabbed my shoulder, pushing me back down into my seat even as I started to get up. With her other hand, she reached forward onto my plate and grabbed a fistful of the filth before pressing it against my lips as I choked.
“Open up and eat it. It’s okay. I’ll feed you like when you were a baby, and after the first few bites…well, I bet you won’t want to stop.”
I managed to get my feet up enough to kick out at the center support of the table, and when I did, the table went one way while I felt back in my chair the other. I was free of their grip, if only for a moment, but that was time enough. I hadn’t lived with my parents all my life and not learned how to run and hide.
They called as I headed for the door, and I could hear them behind me, coming for me. I didn’t know who they were, what they were, and I didn’t know what they were capable of. We lived three miles from the nearest neighbor and I’d had to leave my phone behind in my bag, so unless I could sneak back inside without them noticing and get my phone or some car keys, my best bet was to hide somewhere until they gave up looking.
So that’s what I did. I hid in the woods near the house, watching them as they wandered around the yard, checked the garage and my father’s work shed, all the while calling out for me to come and finish dinner. It was dark soon, and while it would hopefully make it easier for me to slip away, the night also meant I couldn’t see them anymore, making it easier for them to slip up on me if I wasn’t careful. Shuddering at the thought, I looked up at the sky. There was only a small sliver of moon in the sky tonight, but it would have to be enough. Turning in what I thought was the direction of the Anderson farm, I started to make my way through the trees.
I had made it out into the first field when I heard the things that looked like my parents behind me.
I broke into a run, at first in the same direction I’d already been going, but it didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t going to work. I was still too far away from our neighbor, and they were faster than me. I’d never make it before they ran me down. So I forced myself to cut to the left, back into the trees and curving back to the house. If I couldn’t outrun them, I needed to get a phone or a car or a weapon. Something, anything, to stop them from…well, whatever it is they were trying to do to me.
When I hit the yard, I initially planned to head for the house. Grab my phone and lock myself into my room until help arrived. But they had caught up again—I felt one of their hands brush my back as I pushed myself to go faster even as my lungs and legs protested. I’d never make it inside in time. My eyes fell on the shed. It locked from the outside, but there were tools in there I could use to defend myself. And if they tried to lock me in, I could always crawl out through the window.
I juked right and headed for the building, closing the door a moment before they hit it. Bracing myself against it, I looked around for something that might work. There was a saw, and a couple hammers…a shovel…but all of them meant getting close to the things, and even one of them was faster and stronger than I was. I ignored their calls from outside to just come out as I flipped on the light to see better. That’s when I saw the gas cans in the corner.
The police thought I killed my parents for awhile, but they could never prove anything. They had both disappeared, yes, and the work shed next to the house had burned down, but that was all. The samples they had taken from the odd smoldering piles inside…well, if they got anything from them at all, my guess is it was nothing human.
And I hadn’t given them anything to work with. I could have told them about bracing the door with the shovel while I pulled over the cans of gasoline and dumped them on the floor. How I had to scrabble for something to light the fire until I found a book of matches my father had squirreled away next to an old pack of cigarettes in one of the work table’s drawers. Maybe explained to them how terrified I was that they would get in before I could turn off the lights and get to the window. Call to them even as I slipped outside and around to the door. How I’d known every moment that it wouldn’t work, that they’d catch me and kill me, or worse, turn me into whatever they were.
But how, for once, things had gone my way. They’d pushed past the shovel as I got to the corner of the shed, and when they went in, I pulled the door shut and locked it. They were beating on it immediately, but I wasn’t giving them a chance to break back out. It only took three matches through the window for the whole thing to catch, and I waited until it was burned down to nothing before I went back inside, cleaned up and called 911.
I told them I’d woken up to find my parents gone and the shed burned down. Wouldn’t someone please help me. And for the next three months, every time anyone asked what happened, I acted like that was all that I knew.
Anyone except Colby. I told him everything, and to his credit, he believed me, or at least he acted like he did. His parents took me in until I turned eighteen and graduated, and after that, we both headed to college. In the years since, we’ve always stayed close, and in all that time I’ve never told anyone else what really happened. So when I started having the dreams, it was Colby I called. And when I told him I had to go back to the house, he asked if I wanted company.
It had been five years since the night it all happened, and other than packing up some stuff when I first moved in with Colby’s family and a bit more when I went to college, I hadn’t been back in all that time. I’d tried to sell the place, but there’d been no takers, and so I’d left it to rot until I figured out what to do with it. The grass had grown into a jungle, but Colby had an SUV, so we drove on up to the house anyway. When we got out, he started heading for the front door, but I shook my head. The dreams hadn’t been about the house, after all.
I could see them laying in the grass before they noticed us. Two figures, half-formed, half-grown, matted sculptures of bark and mud and strange meat. Sculptures crafted by strange, unseen hands and given life by…the Slumberjack? Or by me?
“You…you’re back…oh…gooood…” The words came out almost as a moan, and behind me, Colby let out a yell. When I looked back, his eyes were wide as he looked down at the twitching figures in the grass and then back up at me.
“Je…Jesus. I never really thought…”
I nodded. “I know. But they’re real. And they’re growing back.”
I notice more motion from the grass, and when I looked back, I saw they were both trying to crawl toward me, though they weren’t making any real progress. Their arms were only half developed and their roots were still sunk deep into the ashes of the shed. They were like new growth after a forest fire—alive, but fragile.
“We…we’ll always come back for you…We love you.”
The tears that leapt into my eyes surprised me, taking my breath for a moment. I felt Colby’s hand on my shoulder and I nodded at him. “You know, when I lit that candle, what I wished for was for them to just go away. For me to just be free to have a normal life.” I gave a watery laugh. “But I don’t think that’s really what I wanted. Much as I hated them, I didn’t really want to lose them. I just wanted them to be different. To love each other and to love me. And…” I puffed out a breath. “…and for them to never give up on me the way I had given up on them.”
“You still…need to eat your…dinner…”
I shook my head. “Go get the gas can.”
They screamed when the gas hit them. I guess they knew from experience what was coming next. It was an awful sound, but it would be over soon. At least for a few more years. Colby was holding a twist of newspaper and a box of matches, and he offered to do it for me, but I told him no. If he’d just hold the paper, I’d light it and take care of the rest.
They’d stopped screaming now, instead staring up at me as they clawed the earth and tried to reach me, their eyes faintly glowing like fireflies in the shadows of the deepening afternoon.
“We…we love you.”
Choking back a sob, I struck the match.
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