I'm gonna tell you about Graham.
Graham was twenty when I met him and when he died. Five years older than me, but we were still the closest in age of everyone in the Hospital. We were all crazy, but he looked....haunted. I guess hunted is a better word for it. He looked like the generic patient you see in horror films about insane asylums, the twitchy kind who look over their shoulder all the time and whisper about people following them. He was a walking stereotype.
We're not really supposed to know what all the other patients are in for, but everyone kind of hears anyway. It's hard to describe the community built in one of these places, I've never been to jail, but I'd say it's a softer version of that. We didn't get much time out of our cells but we all had the same psychiatrists and the same nurses so we had a sense of unity. Us against them. But a lot of the guys in there were pretty terrifying, not the kind of people I wanted to hang out with.
So basically what I'm trying to say is it took all of two days for everyone to know that Graham was arrested standing in a pool of blood with a machete, surrounded by body parts, shaking and screaming that they were coming for him. A walking stereotype, as I mentioned before.
I don't know if he gravitated to me because of the age thing I mentioned earlier, because I certainly never tried to approach him. I didn't make friends there, I hadn't hardly made more than casual acquaintances in all the time I had been there. Maybe he was attracted to me because he felt like I was a potential stalked. Do you think that there are specific people destined to be stalked? Maybe He guided him to me. He jumps by infection, so He controls His victims like vehicles to make His way to His preordained victims. Or maybe it was just me being unlucky.
Either way, Graham decided to open up to me. He told me about his whole life, how he had been in college when his friends showed him those videos. Marble Hornets, I think it was. I personally have never gotten up the courage to watch them, especially since I went into my research about Him knowing that He was real. The videos just seem far more terrifying than these blogs. In writing there are no jump scares. I'm terrible at jump scares.
Basically, Graham and his friend Tony got infected together, through the videos I guess. Sometimes he was incoherent, I'm sure some real insanity was mixed in with the Slender stuff that society deemed "insanity", and I didn't think then to ask follow up questions, so the story is patchy. He and Tony started seeing Him around campus and they fled together. He talked about finding what I realized later are these blogs, part of what helped me find them, and he read about the strategies you guys have compiled. They latched on to 'keep moving' and made it their mantra. They made it almost across the country evading both proxies and the police since their parents sent out missing person reports pretty immediately after they skipped town. Graham used to get almost calm looking remembering those days. Sometimes he would forget about telling me his story at all, instead just lapsing into college memories. Or what his mom looked like. Or when he met Tony. Or Liza, who I gathered was some kind of crush though I don't think he ever worked up the courage to ask her out.
They kept each other sane for a pretty long time, Graham and Tony. It was months before there was any serious sign of trouble. They were crashing in an abandoned house and Graham woke up in the middle of the night to see Tony missing from his lookout post. When he went downstairs he found him, with two other men all carrying machetes. At this point Graham gets a bit gibber-y, and so I had to work out most of the story myself. He just kept repeating the part where he saw them and asked Tony if he'd found more runners.
"Did you find more runners?" he kept saying over and over until he would start shaking and rocking back and forth. "I saw him there and I said 'did you find more runners?' and then...and then' and then he'd start screaming or convulsing and the orderlies would sedate him and drag him back to his cell. With the limited amount of time we had out of our cells to talk, it took most of the months we had together to get past this part.
From what I can gather, He had told Tony that He would protect him and his family if he joined Him. I wonder how He asks people things like that. Does He have a voice? I wonder what it sounds like. He's never spoken to me. The trade off was that Tony had to kill Graham. I don't know how the fight went down, but from the police report it seems that he somehow got one of the machetes and killed all three. Then he was too freaked out by it to move, and the police had been called about noise disturbances and they found him there. Crying and covered in blood.
I wonder how many of us end up that way.
I had known Graham a while by the time that he finished his story. I still thought he was crazy, but it was scary nonetheless. I had never heard of Slenderman or anything before this. It was the day after he finished his story that everything came apart. I have to wonder if He was waiting for the end of the story to do it. Like Graham had outlived his usefulness once he told it all to me. Maybe Graham knew that, somewhere in his heart. That's why he was so reluctant to complete it. Like he knew that He ruled his life, and all he had left to do was pass on his story and then die.
Our Hospital, you have to understand, was more than a mental institution. It was for the criminally insane. This wasn't padded rooms, this was guns and bars. It would take someone seriously skilled to break into one of our cells. To break in with a weapon and spend the time tearing someone to pieces. To then break in to another cell and leave pieces of the first victim. To make the security cameras in just those two areas fuzz out. So when Graham showed up that morning as a pile of his own organs there was mass panic. I was the lucky winner.
I got his right foot. On my bed. I woke up to it just being there. I have never been more terrified in my life. Even the first time I saw Him. And I immediately believed everything Graham had said. It just wasn't possible for a human to do something like that. Graham had been so sure that he wasn't safe here, that He could still get him, and he was right.
I was removed from the Hospital and put in protective custody. I was going to be released soon, anyway. Since I had received the special message, they assumed that I was next. I guess they were right. He came to my new cell. I saw Him. But he didn't do anything to me, he just let me know that this was my life now. What had been Graham was now going to be me. I knew better than to tell anyone. They would just lock me up again, and I'd be a sitting duck. But I also knew that running didn't help. It hadn't saved Graham. It won't save me.
There. I've told his story. It took forever and my arm hurts. I'm going to sleep.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm telling you this. I'm pretty much damning you with every word I say. I just have to. You have to know. I'm sorry, He's coming, and we'll never be saved."
-Graham Piers
