Brother

by Ania Ahlborn

  He grabbed the steering wheel with tear-streaked palms and squeezed it tight, his knuckles turning white. He tried to shake it free of the dashboard, as if that momentary flare of aggression could somehow subdue the pain he felt.

  Thoughts of Alice shook him out of his temporary state of turmoil. As if summoning another magic trick, she managed to reach out to him from her prison beneath the farmhouse and lull him into a strange state of emotionally wrecked calm. If he followed the steps, he could help her. If he placated Reb by doing what he said, he could save her, and maybe himself.

  When he arrived at his destination, he pulled into the gravel driveway and stopped a good distance away. He stared at a house he recognized yet couldn’t believe he was seeing again. The place had once given him a strange sort of peace, but now only filled him with dread. He sat motionless for what felt like forever, trying to convince himself that he had the wrong place, even though there was no question that it was the right one.

  Lights burned inside, as though someone was home, but Michael knew it couldn’t be. The same lights had been on the night they abducted the woman who lived there. They’d been on for days, as if in memorial to the house’s former owner. He imagined the woman coming home, covered in blood, dragging her feet. Perhaps she was just inside, sitting in front of the TV, a scorned ghost waiting for her murderers to return.

  Michael cut the engine but left the keys in the ignition. He pushed open the door and rose from the car. And for whatever reason—whether his senses were heightened or it really was warmer than usual—the evening heat hit him head on. It was heavy and oppressive, trying to push him down into the earth, to pin him where he stood. Something was trying to keep him from moving forward with whatever plan Rebel had set in motion. If it hadn’t been for Alice, he would have stood there for the rest of his life, staring at the lights that seemed so melancholy in the way they shone through closed curtains. He stared at the front door they had left open days before, undisturbed by a single visitor.

  He left the car door open and the dome light glowing in his wake, as though doing so would somehow help him get back to where he had come from. Gravel popped beneath the soles of his boots as he passed the small bistro table and chair beneath the bowed branches of a pine. Birdhouses swung from jute rope slung across the tree’s branches, its leaves shivering in the breeze. Stopping near the front entrance, Michael stared at the slash of light that shone through the open space between the door and the jamb. He remembered how the woman had fought. How she had thrashed in Reb’s arms. How she had breathed Michael’s name into the quiet of the bedroom.

  Please, Michael, don’t . . .

  He was afraid to go inside, but he pushed open the door enough to slip in anyway. His heart leapt into his throat when a man’s voice swam into his ears. It was professional-­sounding, like a cop’s or an FBI agent’s. The voice spoke in low, gruff tones. At first he was sure he’d walked in at the worst possible moment. The police were scoping out the place. Someone had reported the woman as missing. They were there, investigating, looking for clues, and there was Michael, stepping right into their arms. He twisted where he stood, ready to bolt out the door. But he stopped when the voice was cut off by a commercial. A Dr Pepper jingle played into the room.

  Michael peeked around the corner of the foyer and into the living room. The place was empty. The television was on.

  He inhaled slowly and stepped further inside, his arms at his sides, his hands balled into anxious fists. He didn’t understand what he was doing there, had no idea what he was looking for. Rebel had left no instruction, only an address, as though whatever Michael was supposed to find was so obvious that clueing him in would have spoiled the game.

  The interior was quaint—a perfect match to the exterior that had given him a fleeting sense of peace. The living room was simple. A couch and an armchair faced an entertainment center. An open can of soda sat on a coaster next to a bookmarked paperback novel. The NBC peacock flashed on the screen before some sort of made-for-TV movie took its place. Michael’s gaze drifted to the fireplace and the mantel above it, drawn to a framed photo that sat there. He approached slowly, careful not to upset anything, and stopped in front of a family photo. A mother and father smiled at the camera. A little girl in a pink dress was balanced on the mom’s hip. A little boy threw a peace sign at the camera.

  Lights burned bright in the kitchen. He left the fireplace behind and entered a simple room with Formica countertops and linoleum floors. A pot rack hung from the ceiling above a small kitchen island. It housed a collection of cookbooks as well as another framed photograph. A glass-encased pillar ­candle sat next to it. This time the little boy was front and center. He was hugging the leg of a man who looked as though he’d just crawled out from the furthest depths of the earth. A mole person. The man mugged for the camera while the boy wore his father’s orange hard hat, a light attached to the front. The frame was engraved: FOREVER WITH YOU.

  Michael rubbed the back of his neck as he turned away, a slow-growing panic burgeoning at the base of his guts. What if he didn’t figure out the puzzle? What if there was no puzzle at all? What if all this had been a trick to get Michael out of the house? What if Rebel never intended to let Alice live?

  He turned in a circle, struggling to see the clues, to find anything of significance that would lead him to an answer.

  That was when he saw a stark blot of white against the hallway’s wood-paneled wall. A folded sheet of paper was tucked beneath the edge of a picture frame.

  Stepping into the hallway, Michael hesitated. His fingers hovered mere centimeters from the paper, stalling, knowing that whatever the note revealed would somehow change his life. And then, as if that very thought spurred him on, he snatched it from the wall and unfolded it.

  Reb’s sharp, angular handwriting was scrawled across the page: WELCOME HOME.

  The photo it had been tucked beneath was of the same small family—Mom, Dad, and two young kids posing in front of that very same green-shuttered house. Dad had hoisted the little boy onto his shoulder. The boy’s arms jutted out like a superhero about to take flight. Mom was laughing as though Dad had just told a particularly funny joke. Dad wore a charming half-smile as the toddler in Mom’s arms reached out to her father, wanting to join her brother higher up. Michael looked down the length of the hall. The walls were covered in similar framed photographs, offering to tell the family’s story, much like Alice’s comic-strip panels.

  The next photo was of the two kids, chocolate Easter bunnies clutched in their hands, their smiling faces smeared with melted confection. They were small—the boy maybe three or four, the little girl younger than that. But before the boy could grow into his sneakers, he vanished from the pictures like a ghost.

  Mom and Dad now smiled for the camera with only the little girl between them, a Christmas tree blazing behind them. But Mom’s smile was distant, and Dad looked like he was faking it. Eventually, as though succumbing to their sorrow, neither parent appeared in the pictures at all. The photos only featured a dark-haired girl. A shot of her on the swings at school. Another of her at a birthday party at a pizza place. Each one showed her age in succession until, coming to one where the girl was maybe ten or eleven, Michael could no longer pull his gaze away. There was something terrifyingly familiar about the girl’s face, about her smile.

  The master bedroom was nothing special—a chest of drawers, a few bedside tables, and a bed that was halfway undone. The comforter rested half on and half off the mattress. Michael looked away from the bed, the woman’s panicked expression flashing through his head. A photograph of the little boy occupied one of the bedside tables. Another glass-housed pillar candle sat beside it, almost completely burned away.

  Michael stalked across the hallway to another door—this one closed—and peeked his head inside. The room was dark, illuminated only by moonlight, yet he could see right away that it belonged to a girl—the one in the photos, all grown up. Various band posters covered the
walls. A white, black, and red striped comforter was pulled across the bed, and pillows of varying sizes were propped up against the headboard. A dresser with a large mirror sat against one of the walls. Its top was littered with small trinkets, a stack of eight-track tapes, a few hardcover novels, a jewelry box, another photo.

  It was this picture that made him lose his breath. His fingers crumpled the note in his hand as the world faded in on itself. Everything but that photo blurred.

  Alice and Lucy smiled into the camera, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Alice’s hair was chopped into a pixie cut. She beamed at him through the glass of the picture frame.

  Michael didn’t get it. He couldn’t put it together. His mind reeled around the details, refusing to put them in the right order, shielding him from the truth beneath a haze of confusion. But clarity eventually moved in, burning the haze away, leaving ­Michael gaping at the photograph in front of him.

  He stumbled out of the room, his gaze now snagging on a picture in the hall—Mom again, a golden M shining in the hollow of her throat.

  The woman they had abducted.

  Screaming in the backyard, struggling for life.

  Michael dragging her down the basement steps.

  Hanging her upside down.

  Cutting her throat.

  Bleeding her dry.

  He pressed a hand to the wall, steadying himself, sending a few pictures of a younger Alice to the floor. He tottered down the hall and back into the living room. Stopping to grab hold of the back of the couch, he shot a look to the open front door, noticing the entryway table he had missed upon entering the house. There, upon that long, skinny table, was nothing short of a shrine to the little boy who had disappeared from under this roof. The table was packed full of framed photographs—some of just the boy, others of him and his parents. A carefully arranged candle garden sat upon a metal plate in the center of the display. The largest pillar was stamped with a scripted M in gold relief—a perfect match to the necklace Mom had worn.

  M for Michael, Misty whispered into his ear.

  We don’t talk much, Alice reminded him.

  Welcome home, Ray told him.

  Michael stared at the photograph, at the golden M he had buried with Misty Dawn upon that hill. He tore away from the candles and spun around to look at the living room, suddenly hit by a sense of something he didn’t understand. A memory he couldn’t place. The scent of something sweet, like maple syrup and pine. The vague recollection of that fireplace decked in evergreen and Christmas lights. The television playing Saturday morning cartoons. The earthy smell of soot.

  When he looked back to the picture, the little boy’s face didn’t belong to a stranger, but to the person he knew best.

  He fled the house and into the front yard, his heart hammering, nausea taking over. The heat punched him in the chest. He had to squat in the grass, his fingers digging into the soil.

  This had been his house.

  She had been his mother.

  The woman he had taped up and forced into the trunk of Ray’s car had been his mother.

  Please, Michael, don’t . . .

  A flash of the basement.

  Of latching the delicate gold chain around Misty’s neck.

  Of Rebel’s leper grin as he refilled Michael’s bowl with a second helping of . . .

  Oh God.

  Hot vomit spewed from his throat, splashing across the grass and the tips of his boots. His stomach cramped, doubling him over. He threw up again as tears ran down his face, streaking his cheeks.

  He cried out into the night, his yell a wounded animal’s wail.

  Alice . . . she was his sister—a relation that Rebel had purposefully sought out and twisted in his favor. The girl who had finally made Michael wish for more was someone he could never have.

  He vomited a third time, his body wracked with bone-­creaking tenseness. Overcome with a sudden bout of chills, he shuddered so violently that he was sure he was in the beginning throes of a seizure. Epileptic shock.

  He kneeled in the darkness, long strands of hair framing his sweat- and tear-drenched face. Staring across the yard, his vision drifted along the ground until it settled upon the roots of a cut-down tree. The axe handle jutted up at an angle, winking in the moonlight. It was a weapon that had been unwittingly left for him by his birth mother. An instrument of destruction to set all wrong things right.

  Michael’s fingers touched the dirt, the sick still burning at the back of his throat. His eyes blurred behind incredulous tears. Gathering himself as best he could, he hefted himself into an upright position. His stomach spasmed with another wave of queasiness, but he forced the feeling to the back of his mind as he pressed forward. Reaching the stump, he grabbed the axe with both hands and pulled. It came free without a fight, which was exactly how he expected the Morrows to fall.

  They’d never see him coming.

  He was immune to them now.

  Cleansed by his own hate.

  27

  * * *

  MICHAEL PULLED THE Oldsmobile onto the side of the dirt road a quarter mile away from the farmhouse. Sliding out of the car, he put the keys into his pocket and opened the trunk. He stared down into the small chamber that had housed so many squirming, frantic women, a trunk that smelled of urine and fear. It was empty now, save for two things: a roll of silver duct tape that represented his past, and his mother’s axe, which represented an inevitable future.

  He grabbed the axe, slammed the trunk shut, and began to walk the rutted road that would lead him to his false home one final time.

  The farmhouse looked almost silvery in the moonlight. There was something grotesque about it. Every angle was slightly skewed, as though the place belonged in a particularly dark fairy tale. Its odious appearance was fitting, seeing as to how it held Snow White captive in its bowels. Michael increased his grip on the axe handle as he approached. He skimmed the side of the house, passed Wade’s truck, with its still-raised hood and its carburetor removed, and climbed the back porch steps with silent feet.

  The house was dark. No flicker of firelight from the dining room. No sound of a phantom record playing from behind his dead sister’s door. The only disturbance was the momentary creaking of stairs as Michael climbed, one step after the other, stalking upward to the second-story hallway. He nudged his bedroom door open and peeked inside. Empty.

  He proceeded to Misty’s room. His heart twisted at the memory of her lounging in its threshold, tying her macramé knots while she played album after album. He’d have done just about anything to hear some ABBA or Neil Diamond right then. Even Simon & Garfunkel would do. He turned the knob and let the door swing open. It too stood vacant in the dark.

  Michael checked the bathroom before stopping in front of the final door at the far end of the hall—Rebel’s bedroom. Hefting the axe up to rest on his shoulder, he readied himself to use it, then reached for the doorknob. He didn’t understand what had driven his brother to such madness. What terrible evil had Michael committed to turn Reb into such a demon? Despite the fact that they had both grown up in a house of horrors with a monster as a mother, Rebel’s attack was personal. Somehow, Michael was to blame.

  His room was empty, just like the others—nothing but an unmade bed and an old night table littered with empties and crumpled cigarette packs. He turned away from the room, half-expecting to find Reb standing at the opposite side of the hall, but there was no one. Michael was alone.

  He narrowed his eyes, steeled his nerves, and stalked down its length before descending the stairs. His next destination would yield results. Downstairs, at the opposite end of the house, Momma and Wade were tucked into bed. He silently unlatched the door and pushed it open with the blade of the axe. The all-encompassing darkness assured him that Wade was standing in the shadows somewhere on the opposite side of the room, a shotgun pointed squarely at Michael’s chest. But his eyes adjusted quickly, the moonlight making the room glow blue. He made out the silhouettes of two peo
ple on a sleigh bed as old as the house itself. There, in the dark luster of night, Wade and Claudine Morrow appeared as nothing more than a serenely sleeping couple. Michael wondered if their eyes needed to be open to be what they were; was a killer still a killer while asleep? Did Momma see blood and hear the screaming in her dreams?

  Michael hesitated, a sudden pang of guilt turning the axe heavy in his hands. He was starting to see how he could separate himself from the responsibility of the things he’d done in his life. The fear. The manipulation. The sense of duty that had been beaten into him. Without the Morrows, he would have died in the Appalachian hills, cold and alone. But the newfound ability to disconnect was burdened with a question: If Michael was allowed to slough the wrongs from his shoulders because he was never a Morrow at all, did that mean Momma could blame the abuse she had suffered for turning her into what she had become?

  Sometimes things only make sense in retrospect, Alice reminded him.

  Alice. Smart. Beautiful. The only real family he had left.

  He detached his doubts from his thoughts and his thoughts from his body and moved to the foot of the bed. Wade lay on his back, breathing through an open mouth. Michael raised the axe high. Its heaviness vanished, as though he was being helped by an invisible hand. Adjusting his grip on the wooden handle—a baseball player ready to swing—he took a defensive stance, one that promised no chance of him losing his balance should Wade spring out of bed like a jack-in-the-box.

  The head of the axe pulled his grip back behind his shoulder.

  And then he swung.

  A pang of sorrow hit him as the axe flew through the air. It was a momentary jab of self-reproach reminding him that, of the three Morrows that remained, Wade was the lesser of evils. He had always been tender with Michael, teaching him how to hunt. But now, in split-second hindsight, Michael made the connection—the reason why Wade had taught him how to field dress the animals he caught as a kid.

  Every kindness, no matter how small, was anchored in blood.