From this closeness the two built a wholly immersive imaginative life. They bonded through regular sleepovers at Juliet’s house, and the swapping of chapters of the baroque novels they were writing, packed with tales of doomed romance and adventure. Pauline was stocky and boyish, with short black hair and a scar running down one leg; Juliet’s hair had blond highlights, and she was taller and slimmer and wore well-tailored clothes. Pauline shuffled when she walked and was often ready to lash out; Juliet carried herself with the elegance and easy confidence of an aristocrat. They called each other by secret pet names based on their fiction (Pauline was “Gina” and Juliet “Deborah”). They dreamed of running away together to America, where their work would be published to great acclaim and adapted for film. They rode their bikes far into the countryside, took off their jackets and shoes and socks, and danced until they were exhausted. Some late nights, Pauline would sneak away and ride her bike to Juliet’s house, where Juliet would slip out through a balcony. They would steal a bottle of her parents’ wine and drink it somewhere out on the grounds, or ride Juliet’s horse through the dark woods.
On a bright June afternoon in 1954, Pauline and Juliet took a walk through a local park with Pauline’s mother—the place was vast, with a few hiking paths cleared between the young pines and outcroppings of volcanic rock. When they’d gotten far enough away from any other visitors, Juliet provided a distraction—a pretty pink stone she planted on the ground—and as Honorah Parker bent down to take a look, Pauline removed a piece of brick she’d hidden in her bag, wrapped in a school stocking, and brought it down on her mother’s head. The woman collapsed to the ground, and the girls took turns bludgeoning her—about forty-five blows to the head, her glasses knocked from her face, her dentures expelled from her mouth—until she was dead.
According to Pauline’s journals, in the year leading up to the murder Pauline and Juliet had created their own religion, unimpressed by Christianity and inspired by elements in their lives both secular and sacred. They’d drawn on the Hollywood movies at their local theater for their coterie of “saints” (Mario Lanza, Orson Welles, Mel Ferrer), erected a “temple” (dedicated to the Archangel Raphael and to Pan) in a secluded corner of Juliet’s backyard, and marked their personal holidays with elaborate, choreographed rituals. They believed they could have visions at will—visions of a “4th World” (also called “Paradise” or “Paradisa”), a holier realm inhabited by only the most transcendent of artists, a plane of existence far above that of Pauline’s father, with his fish-and-chip shop, or her undereducated mother. With enough practice, each would soon be able to read the other’s mind. Each made the other singular and perfect.
What eventually drove Pauline and Juliet to kill Pauline’s mother was the fear of being torn apart: Juliet’s parents, who were separating, wanted Juliet to stay with her father’s sister in Johannesburg while they prepared to return to England; Honorah had refused to allow Pauline to go along. If this were to happen, the world they’d built together—over so many daydreamy afternoons and secret nights out among the trees—would collapse. The girls could not permit that.
In April of 1954, Pauline wrote: “Anger against mother boiled up inside me. It is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of the obstacle occurred to me.” And then in June, a series of entries:
We practically finished our books today and our main like for the day was to moider mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it all out and are both thrilled with the idea. Naturally we feel a trifle nervous but the anticipation is great.
We discussed our plans for moidering mother and made them a little clearer. Peculiarly enough I have no qualms of conscience (or is it peculiar we are so mad?).
I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a surprise party. So next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing.
And early on the morning of June 22, on a page of her journal labeled, in curling letters, “The Day of the Happy Event”: “I am writing a little of this up on the morning before the death. I felt very excited and ‘The night before Christmas-ish’ last night . . . I am about to rise!”
FOR FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE STABBING, MORGAN AND Anissa discussed how they would kill their friend. They learned to speak in their own private code: “cracker” meant “knife”; “the itch” was the need to kill Bella; their final destination, the Nicolet National Forest, was “up north” or “the camping trip.”
Like those girls in Christchurch, they were drawn to each other out of loneliness. Each saw the other as an affirmation of her uniqueness; they shared a hidden, ritualized world. Morgan and Anissa’s private universe was spun not from the matinee idols and historical novels of the early 20th century but from the online fictions of our own time. They had devoted themselves to an internet bogeyman.
Like a fairy-tale monster, Slender Man emerged through a series of obscure clues, never fully visible. He first appeared online, in the summer of 2009, in two vague images that were quickly passed around horror and fantasy fan forums. In the first, dated 1983, a horde of young teenagers streams out of a wooded area toward the camera, while behind them looms a tall and pale spectral figure with its hand outstretched. The image is coupled with a message: “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time . . .” In the second photo, dated 1986, we see a playground full of little girls, all about six or seven years old. In the foreground, one pauses to face the camera, smiling, as she climbs a slide; in the background, in the shade of a cluster of trees, others gather around a tall figure in a dark suit. If you look closely, you can make out wavy arms or tentacles emanating from its back. A label states that the photo is notable for being taken on the day on which “fourteen children vanished,” and as a record of “what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man.’” Making this all the more meta-real, these photos were presented as “documents”: the 1986 image bears a watermark from “City of Stirling Libraries”; the photographers, respectively, are listed as “presumed dead” and “missing.”
These images were created by a 30-year-old elementary school teacher (Eric Knudsen, who goes by the name “Victor Surge”) in one of the collections of forums on the website Something Awful. Surge decided to take part in a new thread called “Create Paranormal Images.” The game was to alter existing photographs using Photoshop and then post them on other paranormal forums in an attempt to pass them off as the real thing. The monster was deliberately vague, his story almost completely open-ended—and so the internet rushed in to make of him what it wanted. Bloggers and vloggers and forum members wrote intricate false confessionals of encounters with Slender Man and posted altered photographs and elaborate video series, all predicated on the assumption that “Slender” was a real entity and a real threat.
Over the next several years, the monster spread at an exponential rate, mainly through alternative-reality games—online texts and videos created by fans feeding off the narratives of other users in real time, creating a “networked narrative” that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. And as the story spread, it quickly lost its point of origin, becoming instead the creative nexus, for hundreds of thousands of users, of a dark, sprawling, real-time fairy tale. A sort of 4th World.