“Everyone have a good day?” Dad asked.
Andy couldn’t even muster so much as a sentence, and I jumped in to save him.
“Yep,” I said cheerfully.
“Did you do anything?”
I scanned the question, scrubbing it for any hint of distrust, but I found it clean. “Not much. Watched TV. Andy played games mostly.”
“That right?”
“Yep. How’s work?”
He glanced from Andy to me, watching us with cocked eyebrows. Then he fell right in. “Pretty good. Got a lot of work to get done before the end of the month…”
So the moment passed without another word from us, and within a few hours, the house fell silent once again. I waited until Dad drifted away, back to his room, and I found Andy. He was in his own room, the TV off as he sat at the edge of his bed. He was staring at the floor, and he didn’t seem to notice me when I walked in.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked.
He raised his eyes. “Oh. You.”
“Yeah. Me.”
I plopped down on the bed next to him, not waiting to be asked. We sat there, my legs dangling, his feet brushing across the carpeted floor. The Nintendo sat across from us, and I briefly considered turning it on and playing something. I never got to play much when he was around because he stayed on it 24/7. I don’t think he would have stopped me.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Nothing. Everything.”
“You worried?” When he didn’t answer, I answered for him. “I am. I keep having dreams. They keep getting worse, and they seem so real, I don’t think they’re dreams at all.”
When I finished, I realized he was looking at me.
“I dream awake,” he said. “Does that sound crazy?” I didn’t answer. “Maybe that’s how you know it’s not really a dream at all. He’s still in here, you know. He’s part of me. I can’t… find myself in there. Does that make any sense?”
I wasn’t sure what he was asking. “I don’t know.”
He pressed a hand to his head hard enough to turn his knuckles white. I could see veins in his forehead, tears in the edges of his eyes, and the wild, darting back and forth that never seemed to end.
“I need you to tell me what to do,” he said, raising his eyes back to mine. “The voices keep getting clearer, and I hear something under my skin, telling me what to do. How to think. The things I need to do to feel good. The people I need to hurt.”
He was leaning into me now, pressing closer to my face.
“He wants me to hurt people. The people closest to me.”
I was standing at a crossroads. I could feel it, like my entire life hinged on how I responded in that single moment. Everything that came after would depend on how I reacted to this news. An idea flashed: me running from the room, grabbing Dad, calling the cops, doing whatever it took to keep me, and by extension Andy, safe. This was what my brain was thinking when my heart took control of my body and placed my hand on top of his.
“No,” I told him. “You’re not going to do that.”
His eyes were watering, and I could see him fighting back the urge to strike out at me, to hurt me, to choke the life out of me.
“You’re my brother, and you’re not going to hurt me.”
“I… I…”
“Say it,” I demanded. “Say it now.”
“I don’t know what—”
“I want to hear you say it.” I wasn’t asking anymore, and his wild eyes met mine.
“I’m your brother,” he whispered, the voice of a child. “And I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I believe you,” I whispered back, and I meant it. “Let’s give it another hour or so. Make sure Dad is really asleep. We’ll carry it down to the quarry, and that will be the end of it. For good.”
He was nodding along with the words, but his eyes were staring off at something else, something I couldn’t see.
“Andy,” I said in a sharp tone, “be ready.”
He nodded, and without another word, I walked out of his room, leaving him to sit quietly on the bed. I went straight to my own room and locked the door behind me before slipping between the sheets and pulling them up to my chin. I watched the shadows on the wall, the leaves filtered through the blinds, fluttering in the wind, moving like something alive. They looked like they wanted inside, with me. I listened to the wind, to the house popping, for the sounds of footsteps that might be creeping down the hall. More than once, I held my breath, wondering if the awful thing that jumped from body to body would ever even have to lift a finger to kill me. Why put any effort forth when my brother could do it for him? At some point, I began to drift – not quite asleep, but close enough to wander, glide above my conscious mind, see things, hear things, feel things that were both real and in my mind.
Footsteps.
Whispers.
Voices from within.
Andy’s voice.
Dad crying.
None of it real. All of it real.
I must have finally drifted all the way off. I heard the tinkling sound of music. Familiar, but hard to place. It came from somewhere just far enough away to be a dream. Faint, growing, fading, and growing once more. It was ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ Everyone knows that song. After all, that song had eased me to sleep when I was a baby. It was a memory written in my DNA, the kind of thing I would recall on my deathbed. A sweet sound. A sweet memory.
I could still remember the time I found it. The first time since I was a baby that I had heard it, but even then, I’d known. It was my song, written for me as far as I knew. A song about the stars, something lovely and sweet. I had been in the garage then. It was the first time I found the bear, the ratty green one, and I found that metal clasp on its back and spun it around with my small fingers and listened. There it was: a clear sound, a real sound, not something in my mind at all, but in my room, rising from the floor, from the carpet, from underneath, lower, under the wooden joists and layers of plywood.
From the dirt.
I opened my eyes and listened.
It was faint, but there was no doubt. It was real, as real as the wind and the shadows on the wall, and it was moving. Heart racing, I slipped out of bed and followed it on hands and knees, creeping across my room, keeping pace with the odd trail it seemed to be making. I hit a wall and nearly screamed, because I knew something was down there, some new horror, and the only thing that could hope to give me peace in that moment was to stay on top of it, to know where it was. Not knowing – that was the true nightmare. So I fumbled my door open and spilled into the hall, ear to the floor.
I found it again, halfway down, curving toward the back door. It was wandering, fumbling in the darkness, carrying my bear. Was something toying with me? It felt likely, and that question itself was more important than even the bigger, more obvious questions, but none of that mattered when I was that damn scared.
I imagined the crawl space, open and dark, the musty, murky smell, the spiders, the centipedes, and God only knew what else. What sort of thing would dig around there? I knew where the bear had been, wrapped in the sleeping bag and still clutched in the Thief’s dead grasp – still clutched by the penitent, pathetic creature that died the night before.
I thought of Andy again and wondered if he would even be any help. I didn’t think so, and the realization that I was on my own made me sick with fear. The tinkling sound led me into the living room, over to the far wall, where it halted, hovering, waiting.