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The Brother

Trinity Martin

    My mother’s hands were soft as she wiped the sweat from my brow.
I sat up in my bed and stared blankly at my bedroom walls as she dipped a cloth into a pail of water and began wiping it across my forehead.
She sat the pail in my lap and then she smiled slightly.
    “Your brother said he feels ill too,” she said to me, “He said it started not long after he came home.”
    “That thing is not my brother,” I said.
    “Stop it, Tommy,” my mother said frowning, “I don’t understand why you keep saying that.”
    “Because he’s not,” I said.
I continued to stare at the wall as my mother let out a sigh of exasperation.
    “Listen, I understand you’re not feeling well after everything you’ve been through this week.
You’re just imagining things, Tommy, and so is your brother.
He is saying strange things, too.
You both need to rest.
Your father and I are so glad to have you both home safe, but you need to stop this.
Your brother has been through just as much if not more than you have.”
    “That thing is not my brother,” I repeated as I cut my eyes sharply to meet my mother’s gaze.
    “Stop saying that!” she said.
She yelled so suddenly I flinched, sending the pail of water in my lap tumbling to the floor with a metallic thud, and spraying water across the hardwood.
My eyes were wide, startled, and my mother’s hands flew up to her mouth.
She was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She bent down, picked up the pail, and then began frantically wiping the floor with the end of her dress.

    “It’s okay, mom,” I said quietly.
I looked at the wall again and cringed as a bolt of lighting raced horizontally across the evening sky like a string of bursting Christmas lights and a sharp report of thunder cracked.
I listened to the rain and was quiet.
    My mother sighed again, stared helplessly at the water stain on the hardwood floor, then slowly rose to her feet with her hands bracing her knees.
She smiled slightly, but the gesture felt forced, and her hands were still shaking as she wiped them on her dress.
“Too much water,” she mumbled, “I’ll have to get the mop.”
She did not look at me as she turned and began to walk towards the door.
“Lie down sweetie, try to get some rest before dinner.”
    “Where is he?” I asked.
    “Who?”
    “Jacob,” I said.
    She finally looked at me.
Her face was sad and her eyes looked tired.
“He is with your father in the shed.”
    My body grew tense.

“What are they doing out there?” I said as I tried to keep my voice level.
    My mother shrugged and tilted her head.
“I don’t know, just talking I think.
This is your father’s first chance to speak to your brother since they released him from the hospital.”
    “What are they talking about?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, Tommy,” she said as she brushed her hair behind her ears and furrowed her brow, “Why?”
Her eyes were squinted as she watched me, visibly troubled.
The stress of the past week was apparent in the lines in her face and the bags under her eyes.
    I shook my head and managed to smile somewhat.
“No reason, just curious.”
    “Get some rest and I’ll let you know when dinner is ready,” my mother said.
Her face erupted into a huge smile and she said, “We get to have a family dinner again, just the four of us.
For a while I didn’t think we would ever be able to do that again.”
Her smile wilted a bit and her eyes began to well with tears.
She wiped them quickly, sniffed, then her smile reappeared.
“Well, anyway, get some rest.
I’m going to finish dinner.
I love you.”
    “Love you too,” I said.
I returned her smile, and she turned and left.
I listened to her heels move down hallway, click, click, click and then descend the stairs.
I was alone again.
    I knew she would not believe me.
When they brought Jacob home from the hospital, I was sitting in the front room, and I looked up at him as he walked slowly into the house. He looked weak and frail and I knew immediately that that...thing was not my brother.
He was not the boy who fell into the creek with me that day and was washed upstream for god knows how far.
He was not the boy who lay alongside me on that muddy bank, both of us unconscious.
That boy was Jacob, my brother.
The thing that my mother brought back from the hospital was not.
We were different now.
The dark people saw to that.
    I did not bother to tell my mother about the dark people—the ones with the gray skin and all those sharp little teeth —and I did not tell how they came to Jacob and I as we lay on those muddy banks and took us away.
I knew she would not believe that.
    I did not tell her about their dull red eyes that seemed to glow in the dusk light like phosphorescent crimson coals, the thin layer of black hair that covered their gray skin, or the revolting, sewage smell that emanated from both their hair and skin.
That stench seemed to stick to me like honey and stayed with me for days, even after I was found and taken to the hospital, and I swear I can smell it yet.
    I also did not describe their mouths.
Oh my god, those mouths.
Thin, elongated jawbones that seemed to extend to their collarbones.
A mouth that seemed to open 180 degrees like demonic Thylacines when they roared, as if their heads were on a hinge.
Big enough to fit a human head in one bite, their jaws were, and maybe even the shoulders.
And maws lined with tiny teeth, so many sharp and tiny teeth.
    When I awoke on the banks, the sight of one of those beasts looming over me like an executioner greeted me, and when it opened its massive jaws and unleashed its terrible howl, I felt the bones rattle beneath my skin.
It was like looking into the mouth of some malevolent cave from a world underneath my own, a dark world, with stalactite fangs caressed by demon winds, a place where no being pure of heart could ever spring forth and any creature that entered bearing crests of righteousness would inevitably perish.
Then I saw more of them creeping from the brush, both before and behind me.
They took us away.
    There was another boy there with us, and I did not mention him to my mother either.
The boy with the red hair.
In an area where everyone knows everyone else, this boy managed to be a stranger, someone neither I nor my brother had ever laid eyes upon before that day, and he was scratched up and bruised from head to toe as he wept and shook convulsively in the presence of those things.
The creatures descended on him from all sides as we watched, and the boy stood marbled with eyes wide and lips quivering.
He made no sounds.
    One of the creatures stepped forward and opened its huge maw, unleashing a deep roar from some devilish place in his bowels, and the boy whirled around and let out an ear-piercing scream as he looked down the throat of the thing.
Things happened rapidly then.
Jacob and I watched as the boy’s head disappeared into the beast’s mouth.
We could hear the boy’s muffled shrieks of terror and pain coming from the creature’s throat for a few moments, and then we heard nothing at all.
    It held the boy’s head in his jaws for several moments, then suddenly it lurched backwards, releasing the boy.
He fell like a rag doll and crashed into the dirt.
He did not move for several minutes, and then he stood up slowly and looked around.
His eyes met with mine and he stared at me vacantly.
He was...different.
He was no longer afraid, no longer crying, and no longer looking around with terrified eyes.
The boy was changed somehow.
He simply observed me with that vacant look, and it was enough to spur the hairs on my neck to stand up.
There was something else in his eyes as well.
    Hunger perhaps.
    Jacob and I were sitting back to back in the dust beneath a tall tree and we leapt to our feet and ran.
We did not know where we were or where we were going and at that moment it seemed not to matter; we simply ran.
I had never moved so fast in my life.
Jacob was more than a year older than I was and he was stronger, but he could not surpass me that night.
I overtook him quickly and paced our escape.
He grunted as he ran—perhaps his leg was hurt, I am not sure—and I could hear him careening through the brush behind me.
My feet barely touched the ground as I leapt over felled logs and squeezed through the small trees.
    But no matter how fast we moved those things moved faster, and they crashed through the brush behind us like runaway ghost trains.
I heard their feet slapping against the leaf covered ground, their grunts, their pants, and those stomach-turning snarls.
I turned once to look, and I saw their dark faces and scarlet eyes glowing in the moonlight like disembodied gargoyle heads inset with rubies, and those burning eyes bounced up and down with each step but always remained fixed on their prey.
They caught Jacob.
I heard a swoosh, the sound of something whipping rapidly through the air, a sickening fleshy thud and the sound of my brother crashing to the ground.
He screamed once, and then he did not scream again.
    I kept running and I stopped looking back.
My legs began to burn as if the blood there had been set alight, but I kept running, and I felt the big muscles in my skinny legs beginning to turn to stone, but I did not slow, and every time my feet slapped against the earth it felt as if I was running on a bed of rusty nails, but I rushed through that as well.
I ran until my legs finally locked up like an engine divorced of its oil and I collapsed face first to the ground.
I don’t know how far I ran or for how long, only that it was not far enough nor long enough.
I laid there for a moment, gasping and delirious in the dust like a whipped dog, and then darkness took me.
My next memory was a hospital bed.
    I did not tell my mother that story.
Who would believe such a thing?
I would not believe it myself had I not been there, had I not seen it with my own eyes.
It strains the mind to witness something too incredible to be real yet somehow manages to be.
Believe me.
    That thing posing as my brother tried to tell her though.
He did not tell her everything, but he did mention the tall, dark people.
He told her they took us.
She only watched him with both compassion and sadness and then told him to rest.
That was her answer for everything that ailed a person—rest.
I lay out in the woods for two days before I was found.
I had rested enough.
They found Jacob two days after that, so he was out longer.
Yes, we were both sick, and yes we were both near death when they found us.
But no, I am not crazy, and I decided I would not bother explaining what happened to my brother and me.
I made the decision to handle the situation myself, for I was the only one who knew what had to be done to put things right again.
    I decided to kill my brother.


    My mother called that dinner was done, so I slowly made my way down the dark hallway and descended the stairs.
I walked into the kitchen and saw my father and Jacob already seated at the table, their plates piled high with hot food.
Pots covered the surface of the stove—each billowing steam that filled the air with their aroma—and the room was smoky.
My mother finished preparing my plate and then she smiled.
    “Here you go,” she said as she handed the plate to me, “Have a seat.”
    I took the plate and sat down at the table across from Jacob and my father.
I did not touch my food, only looked at my father.
My father was more silent than usual.
He sipped on a tall glass of ice water.
In all of my days, I had never seen my father drink anything with his dinner save a beer, but not that night.
That night he stared impassively at the table and slowly sipped his ice water.
    My brother got to him, I thought as my mother took her seat.
    “Before we start eating,” my mother said, “I want to say something.
I don’t want to hear any talk about what happened over the past few days, not from anyone.”
Her tired eyes moved from me, to Jacob, to my father.
“I just want a nice, peaceful dinner tonight, okay?”
She did not wait for a reply and began eating.
No one moved to say anything anyway.
    The silence was a wet blanket on the room, the only sounds the occasional crunching of chewing and the clatter of knives and forks on plates, and outside the rain picked up and was like the steady drum of a thousand wet fingertips against the windows.
The walls creaked and groaned under the pressure of the blowing winds, and the single candle sitting in the center of the table cast soft shadows on all, its flame whipped back and forth gently by the breeze that crept through the walls.
I ate slowly, but I was not hungry.
Not even a little.
My father had yet to utter a single word and his brow was furrowed.
His fork merely pushing food.
His face dark.
Introspective.
Jacob devoured his food as if he hadn’t eaten in days, and I guess he hadn’t really.
My mother finally broke the icy silence.
    “Well Jacob, looks like we will be able to have your birthday party next week after all,” she said as she grinned at him, “and the whole family will be there.” She looked around the table optimistically at all of us, but no one spoke or looked at her, so her smile faded and she began to eat again.
    “You guys were outside in the shed earlier?” I said without looking up.
    “Yeah, for a little bit,” Jacob said.
He stopped eating and stared at his food with an expressionless look on his face.
    “Why?” I asked.
I looked over at my father.
My father shook his head nonchalantly.
    “Just talking,” he said, “Nothing special.”
    Jacob and my father both began staring at me intensely through half-closed eyelids, their lips pressed tightly together, and I felt a tingle go up my spine like tickling ghost fingers.
They watched for a few more moments and then they both looked back down at their food simultaneously and continued to eat.
    It was then I knew that not only had I lost my brother, but I had also lost my father.
Jacob had gotten him in the shed and my father had changed.
I placed my fork on plate and pushed back my chair, intent on getting up.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m going to go upstairs.”
I did not look at Jacob or my father as I spoke, only my mother.
    “Tommy?” my mother said.
She placed her fork on her plate and looked up concerned.
“What’s wrong?”
Jacob and my father said nothing, they only watched at me.
    “I’m not feeling very well,” I said, “I think I’m going to lie down for the night.
I’m sorry.”
    My mother sighed and said, “Well, go get some rest then.
Let us know if you need anything.”
    “I will,” I said, and as I rose to my feet I felt frightened for my mother.
I knew they would not attempt anything with me awake—they don’t work that way—but I knew they would move for her tonight, after dispatching me, of course.
When their attention returned again to their meals, I picked up a butcher knife from the counter and then I ascended the stairs.


    The blackness of the night was thick as I rose from my bed with the knife in my hand.
I looked over and noticed my brother’s bed was still empty despite the late hour; I had not seen him since dinner, but when I opened my door and stepped into the hallway he was there, standing at the opposite end with his hands behind his back.
    “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, “I knew you’d be coming.”
    I took a few steps closer and made no effort to hide the blade in my hand.
“Where’s my mother?”
I said.
    “She’s not your mother anymore.”
    I felt my face grow hot as I said, “So, you got to her.”
    “Not yet,” Jacob said, “but we will talk to her soon.
Tonight.
After we are done with you.”
    I took a step closer and felt the bones in my knees pop and I winced.
“We?”
    I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see my father step from a doorway.
I turned and looked at him.
He stood with an axe clenched in his fists and staring past me to Jacob, his eyes awash with both grief and confusion.
    “I don’t see it,” he said to Jacob, “I don’t see what you are talking about.”
    “You will,” Jacob said, “Tommy’s not like us.
Not anymore.”
    I stood pinned in the narrow hallway where memories hung like shingles from the paneled walls and said to my father, “I was right.
He did get to you.”
    “Yes, we spoke,” my father said, “Your mother doesn’t know anything yet and we’re going to keep it that way.
We only want to help you, son.”
    “That’s right, Tommy,” Jacob said as he took a step forward, “Let us help you.”
    I laughed and the sound was deeper than normal.
I pointed the knife at my bother and began taking slow steps toward him.
My legs began to feel strange as they moved and my steps became unsteady, but I ignored it.
“You want to help me, do you?
How exactly do you plan to do that?
And what were you planning on telling my mother after I was gone, huh?
Let me speak to her.”
    “No.”
    “You don’t tell me no!” I screamed.
Something popped and began to rise in my spine, followed quickly by a grinding noise across the whole of my back, and I grunted with pain, and then my head erupted with a white hot flash of pain that stretched from my temples to my jaw.
I bit down on my lip until blood began to seep out and kept walking.
“Take me to her!”
My voice felt much deeper than usual, like thunder rolled from my lungs.
    Behind my bother lay the door to my parent’s bedroom and someone began knocking there.
It was my mother.
She called out, asking what was happening, asking why the door was locked, saying she wanted the door opened immediately.
Neither my father nor my brother responded to her, and slowly her cries increased in intensity until the pounding was regular and the screaming deteriorated into wild sobbing.
    My skin began to itch.
I reached up with my free hand to scratch my face and felt the stubbles of hair both there and on my hand, hair that was short and black and rough like the bristles of a scouring brush.
My legs continued to pop, audibly now, and I felt a stretching sensation in my jaws, as if the bones there were constructed of rubber.
The pain in my body was legend.
I smiled and said, “Open the door, Jacob.”
    “No.”
    “I want her.
She belongs with me.”
    “No.
She’s not one of you, Tommy, and I won’t let her be.”
    I screamed—the sound like an ethereal siren call—and then I opened my mouth wide.
And then I kept opening it.
And I opened it more still.
I opened it until my eyes were no longer facing forward but forced upwards to the ceiling.
I felt my teeth popping through my mouth skin and extending like spines along my jaw, and I howled again and leaned to devour what was once my brother.
I heard him yell out in fear and I heard his scrambled steps as he tried to move away from my gaping mouth.
I heard my mother’s frantic screams and her fists pounding the bedroom door.
I heard both her and my brother call my name.
    What I did not hear was my father.
He was silent as the grave as he stepped up behind me with his huge blade in hand and swung for my neck; I never heard his steps and I never heard his axe, and I have never heard another thing since.

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