"The Faceless one Follow"

The first time Ava heard the whispers, she was walking home from school along the narrow dirt path that split through Briarwood Forest. The wind was calm that day—too calm. Even the birds seemed to hold their breath. She almost convinced herself the sound was just leaves rubbing together, but leaves didn’t hiss her name.

“Avaa…”

She froze. The voice slithered from the shadows between the tall pines, thin and wavering like stretched paper. Her heart thudded. She scanned the woods, but nothing moved. No animals, no people—just trees standing unnaturally still, their silhouettes long and crooked under the late-afternoon sun. She took one shaky breath and ran the rest of the way home, refusing to look back.

She didn’t tell anyone. Not her mother, who already worried too much. Not her younger brother, Liam, who loved ghost stories a little too deeply. Besides, she had seen the legends online—the drawings, the warnings, the stories about a tall faceless figure lurking in forests, watching children, waiting for the ones who listened.

Slender Man.

Just a story, she told herself. Just a creepy internet myth.

But myths didn’t follow you.

The second whisper came three nights later.

Ava was lying in bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. Outside, the wind howled through the branches. Her bedroom window rattled lightly. Then she heard it—soft, almost polite.

“Avaa… open the window…”

Her breath turned to ice. The voice came from just outside the glass.

She sat up slowly, every muscle locked with dread. Her curtains swayed slightly, though she had closed the window earlier. She forced herself to look.

A pale hand—impossibly long, impossibly thin—was pressed against the windowpane.

Ava screamed. When her mother burst into the room seconds later, the hand was gone, the glass spotless, the night silent.

“You just had a nightmare,” her mother insisted gently. “Stress from school, maybe.”

But Ava knew the truth.

Slender Man had found her.

At school the next day, she felt watched. Not by classmates or teachers—but by the windows, the doorways, the distant tree line that edged the campus. Every reflective surface seemed to stretch shadows a little too far.

That afternoon, Liam tugged at her sleeve. “Ava, look what I found!” he chirped, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket.

Her heart dropped.

It was a crudely drawn symbol: a circle with an X through it.

Slender Man’s mark.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded.

“In the woods,” he said proudly. “Someone nailed it to a tree.”

Ava snatched the paper away, her voice rising. “You went into the forest? Alone?”

Liam shrugged. “It wasn’t far. And… someone was calling my name. I thought it was you.”

Blood drained from her face.

That night, she didn’t sleep. Every creak of the house made her flinch. At 2:17 a.m., the whispers returned—not at her window this time, but inside her room.

“Ava… bring him to me…”

The darkness seemed to shift, thickening like smoke. A towering shadow unfolded in the corner. Limbs too long for any human. A featureless face that somehow stared straight at her.

Ava couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.

“Ava…” it crooned again, its voice inside her skull. “The boy belongs to the forest. As you do. As all lost things do.”

“No,” she choked out, tears stinging her eyes. “You can’t have him.”

A long, skeletal arm stretched toward her. Her room flickered like a dying candle flame. For a moment, she was standing in Briarwood Forest again—the trees bending inward, leaning closer, whispering secrets she couldn’t understand. Liam stood ahead of her, reaching out, but every step she took pushed him farther away.

The Slender Man loomed behind him.

Something inside Ava snapped. With a scream that tore her throat raw, she lunged forward—not at Liam, but at the faceless figure. The forest dissolved into blinding white.

When reality snapped back, Ava found herself on the floor of her bedroom, gasping, shaking violently. The shadow was gone. The whispers had stopped.

But Liam’s bed was empty.

The front door stood open.

Bare footprints—small, familiar—led out into the fog-drenched woods.

And at the edge of the trees, motionless and impossibly tall, stood the Slender Man… waiting.