We've never been the closest of brothers.
Growing up, he was the kind of big brother that ****ed with you whenever he'd babysit. He's a good 10 years older than me, so imagine a 16 year old locking a five year old in a closet and making spooky noises, or yelling at the top of his lungs from the kitchen with a knife under his arm and ketchup spread everywhere around him, pretending to bleed to death. Imagine him wrestling you to the ground, throwing small punches to your ribs that make you breathless for minutes at a time.
My personal favorite; imagine being six and your brother is calling you in to the living room to "help" him with something. When you get there he's behind the small coffee table near the backdoor reading a heavy black book, and he tells you to stand at the far end of the room. (That's about 30-40 ft.) Not leaving his seat, imagine he says, "Turn around, pull up your shirt, and tell me if you feel anything." Imagine your anxiety, your trepidation in knowing that anything involving your brother involves pain and fear.
Imagine then, faced away from him, your shirt hiked up just under your shoulders, you begin feeling fingertips trace gently up and down your spine. Then the sudden shock of nerve endings shouting from pinched skin that makes you jump and turn around, only to see that he's still at the table, an impossible distance away, just smiling a gruesome smile that speaks innocence to all but you.
That's what it was like growing up with him until he finally got his G.E.D and shipped off to the military. You can't imagine how blissful my years were then. At 10 years old, after all the torment, all the bullying, to finally be able to live comfortably in your own home. I started doing better in school. I started making friends. I started laughing more than hiding, lounging more than tensing. I was finally allowed to be at peace, and in peace, found how the normal live their lives.
A year after he went to boot camp and A-School, we found out he was being stationed in Turkey, which to me meant 2500 miles of relief. I didn't even have to see him when he came to visit before deploying because of my week long sixth grade camping trip.
It was six and a half years from him signing up for service until I had to see him again. Returning from Turkey, he'd been stationed this time in Las Vegas, and my parents, caught in a frenzied fever of protective instinct and the fact that it's ****ing Las Vegas, decide we should take a trip to see how he's holding up. At 17, I was dragged along to the worlds biggest tease- underage Vegas visits. Even worse, I had to see my brother.
I'd like to say I was pleasantly surprised, that seven years of military training had made him a better person, had forged a man out of him. That absence from each other's lives had somehow made us hungry and happy for our brotherhood.
Wrong. He was still an *******. It was like the seven years melted away, and I'm just this terrified shell of a boy waiting for an evil I know is coming. Only now, it was with trained precision that he could take me down, pull my wrist almost to breaking point, push his kneecap between my chin and chest, laugh as he bleeds the consciousness from me in small panicked heaves of barely breathing. Yeah, I stayed in our hotel almost all the trip.
Three years later, his contract ended along with his marriage, which blossomed from a 2 month fling, half a year after our first visit, who should show up at our doorstep but a military-grade sadist. Claiming to want real family time, promising to be the best of roommates and sons, the ****er moved back in.
Despite all my apprehension, we made due for a while. We were able to talk civilly, I wasn't pinned to the ground with an asp behind my neck. I thought maybe we could live peacefully until I found the black book.
Now, his fingers touching me from ten yards away stays vivid in memory. I can still feel them if I concentrate hard enough, and it still nagged my mind how he did it. So, when getting a letter for him in his room and reading it to him over the phone, I see peeking from his luggage a dusty, dull-black book spine with a darker but shinier set font, my curiosity engages and I pull out the thing. It's not as big as I remember, but then I was a kid when I last saw it. There's no writing on the front, just the black font on black background on the spine which was in, I think, Latin. It said something like, "Arceseer Tenbrae."
Flipping through the pages, I knew it wasn't normal. They were yellow and curved from aging, and the print looked almost as if it were handwritten. It was also in English, which threw me off, but not modern English. The meter, the syntax, the wording, was all derivative of old English. I'm talking Old with an E. Only a few sentences I could make sense of, like, “Takest sage & burn by New Moon's light on May's third day,” and even that is me cleaning it up to make sense. And the drawings.
These were most certainly hand-drawn, with both expert skill and macabre imagination. A severed head, a plucked eyeball, horned children, an upside down pentagram. I know these things to be satanic, but I also know satanism to be either the gross misrepresentation of paganism, or it's anarchic, true devil worshiping form. I dropped the book to the bed after I skimmed a page and realized it was what my brother had been doing to me. The illustration, opposite a page depicting two identical men, only one with darkness instead of eyes, showed a man with limbs that stretched further than humanly possible. I dropped the book when I saw the man grinning much in the same way my brother had all those years ago. Freaked, I left the house to hang with a couple of friends. We had a long day since the fair was in town, and we caught a movie afterward. So it wasn't until about 12 or 1 am when I came home.
My front door opens to a small, second living room that to the right leads to the kitchen, the stairs, and then the larger, main living room, and to the left leads to a small hall and the only room downstairs, my brother's. With his door cracked open, he leaves it open so he can use the hall light instead of his room light, I can faintly hear him talking to someone. Creeping past the hall and making for the stairs, I catch a couple of words that don't sit right with me, though it takes me a while to figure out. And then I realize it's not English he's speaking.
There's a certain quality about danger that is at once disagreeable yet mesmerizing. You shy away from it, but not before it draws your gaze to the magnificent suffering it can impart. I chalk that up to why instead of finding my way to my bed and the solace of it's sheets, I tip-toed, pink panther turned ninja, towards his slightly open door. As I reach the doorway, I remember too late that I didn't put the book back where I had found it, that I had merely cast it away from me in my frightened haste. I wondered what he thought of that, but I never got to ask him.
The conversation is weird, as if Latin did not already categorize it as such, but it's like he's speaking to himself. I hear the string of foreign syllables, followed by the normal inquisitive pause or intonations of finality, but then it's him answering back sometimes slower, more relaxed, or else higher pitched, almost meek. It was after a sentence that sounded more like a chant, monotonous and kind of lyric, like a Catholic priest chanting, that I hear him slam the book and whisper, or maybe it was a hiss, something between the two saying, “No!” And then more urgent, more frequent, “No, no, no!”
I look in the doorway and find him turned around, facing the left side wall. It's almost perfect the way he mirrors me at six, when he touched my back with his stretched arm and digits. There's trepidation in his face, anxiety. His shirt isn't pulled up, but he's standing there like someone instructed him to, and just as he turns around, from the opposite wall that lay in a blanket of shadow something happens.
“No, no, no, no no!”
From the shadow emerges the impossible. The illogical. The Other. Another brother, a third son for my mother, a second older brother for me. Wearing the exact same outfit as his frightened counter-part, wearing the exact same face, holding the exact same frame, the exact same smile from when I was a frightened child touched by stretched fingers. It was my brother, but not my brother. I knew, from the way it plucked the strings of my fear and sanity, that this was a different player altogether. The only difference I saw was that, either by the nature of the shadowed light, or it's own anatomy, the things eyes did not match my brother's. They were a dull black, from iris to sclera.
My brother, the frightened one, whispering no and, for once, sharing my fear of him, stood frozen. The thing, the Other, whatever it is, walked to him with odd, jerking rhythm, the ungodly smile never fading from it's copy-cat face. It stretched a single, stolen finger; stretched three inches longer than it should, and touched my brother, right between the brow.
Several things happened in that instant. The first, my brothers eyes, wide from shock, turned cataract and gray. The second, my own gasp ringing in the quiet darkening. The third, the thing snapping it's attention from my falling brother, who crumpled instantly, to me.
It locked eyes with me in a way more menacing than I could have dreamed of my brother, or at least, anything that looked like him. It's eyes were no longer black and in a horrible instant I knew it stole his eyes. As if reading my mind, it's smile grew wider, physically grew spreading the insanity of his mouth not from cheek to cheek, but from ear to ear. It walked toward me.
Maybe I had gone insane. Maybe that day marked my descent in to delirium. Looking back, that's the only way to explain it. Maybe the thing making it's way to me, deadly and devilish and infinitely strange, wearing the mask of my brother's face, maybe that was a physical representation of my farewell to reality.
The thing reached me, and raised a normal hand, it turned it backwards and stroked my chest from collar bone to just above my heart. I swear I felt fingertips along my spine. Then it brought it's hand back up in front of it's stolen face, and raised one normal finger to it's unnaturally large lips, and gave a shuddering “Shhhhhhh.” And just walked away, leaving me in the doorway of it's new room.
I haven't told anyone yet, I can barely bring myself to consciously think of that day. I don't talk to it, I don't walk near it. I hear it in rooms of the house, speaking to my family as if it's really him. I hear sincerity that was never present before, I hear kindness and goodness from my family about it, and I know dread. I wake up at night sometimes, and I know, in the shrine of shadow in the corner of my room, that it's there just watching me, smile pulled from ear to ear, waiting to stretch it's demon fingers and throttle me in to nothingness. I can't look my brother in the eyes anymore.
Because it's not my brother.
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