by DW Gillespie
A hand carved from pure ebony reached for me, and behind it, in that featureless face, bloody pits of red opened up.
Eyes.
They saw everything.
They saw me.
No death for your brother…he’ll never get that kind of peace.
* * *
Andy shook me into consciousness at about ten. I could have slept until at least three if left alone. The late nights were catching up with me. I felt sore all over, and I honestly didn’t remember when I had finally fallen into sleep. I thought of the dream, of the shape of a man, of the eyes made of blood, and a pain shot up through the back of my neck.
“What?” Andy said as he stopped at my door.
“I’m just…sore.”
“Did that thing hurt you?”
For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. The lingering nightmare was still metallic in my mouth, and I wondered how he knew about something that had just happened inside my mind.
“Thing?”
“The thing in the kitchen. Jeez, are you all right?”
Everything came into focus as the events of the past week, of last night, spilled all around me.
“Yes. Just a bad dream.”
“Good. Garage,” he said without another word.
I followed him out, shaking the sleep out of my eyes as we went. With everything that had happened, I wasn’t sure what he was up to, but I also wasn’t about to question him. When we were safely out, far away from Dad, he said, “Now show me.”
It took a second to figure out what he was asking.
“Showww youuuu…”
“The toys.”
The fog lifted, and I remembered everything we had talked about the night before. After slamming the sliding glass door and locking it, I had dragged him into my room and closed the door behind us. Then I’d told him everything. The video he’d smashed. Sallie’s doll. The late-night encounter. And most important of all, the handprint on his own back. There were tears in his eyes when he drew up his shirt and stared into the mirror at the gruesome mark, which had already started to fade a bit.
“How,” he said, his voice quivering, “how did I not feel it?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“Why me? What does it want with me?”
Again, I had nothing with which to soothe him. I thought of the bear, my last piece of my mother, gone for good, and tears began to fill my own eyes.
“My bear,” I whimpered.
“What? Your bear? The hell does that matter?”
I thought of what he had said earlier that very day, about me, about her.
“You should know exactly what it matters. It matters because it came from her.”
“What do you know?” he asked, the fury clouding his face. “You didn’t love her. You didn’t even know her.”
“Don’t you think I know that? You at least had something. You have memories and pictures and…and kisses and hugs. You know what she smelled like. You know what her laugh sounded like. All I had is that damn bear. And now it’s gone.”
Tears were pouring down my cheeks by then, but I refused to wipe them away. It would have made me look weak. He shook his head, the storm clouds lifting.
“I’m sorry.”
It was just about the last thing I ever expected him to say, but it was a welcome surprise. I didn’t push it, didn’t pry, didn’t demand that he say more. I just took the simple apology for what it was.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
We talked through the night, talked until the two of us couldn’t stand it anymore. And then, when I crawled into my own alien bed, Andy sat down on the edge, his face sincere. “I didn’t know. About that…thing. About everything.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said, pulling the covers over my shoulder. “How could you?”
“No,” he said suddenly. “There’s no excuse. Not for me. Not for the way I am…sometimes.”
I sat up, staring at him, preparing to tell him that everything was fine, that everything would be fine, but he was already up by then, halfway out the door. I expected to hear the familiar drone of his music rocking him to sleep, but I never did, and it wasn’t until he was shaking me awake a few hours later that I knew anything at all.
“Why are we out here?” I asked, motioning to the garage.
“The toys. Last night, you talked about finding your bear in a box. Where was it?”
I waved a hand at the wall of junk, the old boxes, the mismatched furniture, the bags of clothes too small for us to wear.
“I dunno. Here somewhere.”
“Think,” he demanded as he began poking around himself. “How long ago was it?”
“A year or two. I don’t really know. Why does it matter?”
“The box. You said the box was almost empty. That it had your name on it.”
He waited for me to get it, and when I clearly didn’t, he sighed.
“Why put just a couple of toys into a box and put it out in the garage?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “You know how Dad is—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off. “Dad’s not like that, even if you think he is. That’s something an idiot would do. Dad’s not like you. I’m not like you. But neither of us is stupid.”
I readjusted my tone and said, “I didn’t say he was stupid, or that you were stupid. He’s just a little flighty.”
“The reason,” he said, ignoring my logic, “that the box was almost empty is because, at one point in time, it was almost full.”
I tried to do the mental gymnastics to catch up with him, but it was still too early. “I guess,” was all I could eke out.
“This thing…it’s been coming here for who knows how long. Taking what it wants. Leaving little pieces for later. Saving them for…who knows?”
“There wasn’t just one thing in there,” I replied, finally getting it. “There were a few.”
“But it was mostly empty, right?”
I nodded, and we dove in. It only took a couple of minutes to dig the box out, and as soon as he lifted my box from the pile, I already knew. It was too light, as if the box were filled with nothing more than air. Then he tore the top off, and we saw it, filled with nothing more than dust and dead spiders.
“You never came out here?” I asked.
“No. You?”
I just shook my head.
“What about mine?” he asked.
It was a good question, one that we spent the next two hours trying to answer. It wasn’t until we dropped down the ladder to the attic that we finally found what we were looking for. Cardboard box after cardboard box, dozens of them in a neat stack near the back of the stifling attic. They looked, from a distance, as if they had never been touched. The words scrawled on them, in fat, black marker, told a story that made a part of my heart wither.
ANDY/BABY
ANDY/TODDLER
ANDY/2 YR
On and on it went. I had a box. I had a bear.
He had a toy store.
I’d always had a sense of the difference between his early life and mine. The pictures had shown me that. They told one story. This stack of boxes told another one entirely. I felt a few pangs of anger as I gazed at them, fury directed at my father for more or less abandoning me. But that fire burned out in seconds, only to be replaced by a deeper feeling that I had never known before.
When I glanced over at Andy, I saw the look on his face, and I knew he was reliving it. He reached for the first box he came across, ANDY/SUPERHEROES, and he ripped it open. All the usual suspects were in there, but he dug through them, dozens of tiny plastic figures in search of something special. The one that stood out. The one that meant something.
It was the only one not there.
He slammed the box down and sho
ok his head. “I had a Superman,” he said in a pained voice I had never heard from him before. “I took it everywhere. It was…shit. I loved that thing.”
He grabbed another box, and once again he came up short. Again and again he searched, digging through the pile, finding nothing more than junk he could not care less about. As I watched him, silently taking in the pain and desperation on his face, that alien feeling grew deeper. I thought once more of Mom, of how I acted whenever her name was brought up. Every time, I struck back, throwing the issue back at anyone who dared question me.
I was the one who was hurt.
I was the one who never got to know her.
I was the one who really lost.
But now, as his desperation grew into a frenzy, I couldn’t feel anything other than pure, empty guilt. I had killed his mother, and for that, I should feel guilty. The truth at the bottom of it all was that Andy had been hurt a thousand times more than I ever could be.
“Stop,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” he whined. “The ones I cared about. The toys she gave me. They’re all gone.”
The still-bitter part of me wanted to ask him why, if he loved them so much, he had let them rot up here, but I think I already knew the answer to that. Dad, as lost and confused without my mother as Andy was, did what he had to do to survive. That meant that life as they knew it, these two, drifting bachelors, had to begin again. Every nook and cranny of the house before I was born had been packed with reminders, and now those reminders were here, stuffed into boxes and labeled in black ink.
I wanted to tell him it would all be okay, but that felt wrong somehow. There was no easy answer here, and giving him a simple solution would probably just make him mad at me. Instead, I took a different tactic.
“We don’t know what this thing is or why it’s doing this. So,” I said, kneeling down eye to eye with him, “the question is, what are we going to do about it?”
* * *
“Okay.”
Most of the day was already, inexplicably gone. The two of us had gone round and round about what we knew, what we thought we knew, and what we were still completely clueless about. We were holed up in his room, long enough for me to get accustomed to the stuffy, slightly stinky smell of older brother. I sat on the edge of the bed while he lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He was shredding an empty bag of chips, ripping the metallic paper into ever-smaller pieces as I sketched away on my notepad.
“Okay. Okay.”
His eyes were darting side to side, his mind clearly racing. The desperation of hours before, when he realized some of his earliest possessions were missing, had faded into something more like dazed panic. The weight of this strange, inexplicable situation was only now hitting him fully, and he didn’t really know what to do. It was easy for me to recognize that feeling because I had been there myself just a week before. In the years since, I also think that being a few years younger helped immensely in this situation. I might have been stepping into something resembling adulthood, but I still had one foot firmly planted in the world of children. Part of me – probably a larger part than I would have admitted – believed completely that monsters were real. The fact that they might steal toys was just a detail at that point.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked when I couldn’t stand to hear the paper rip one more time.
“Okay,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, apparently not hearing a word I said. I leaned over and snatched the bag from his hand and tossed it on the floor.
“Snap out of it,” I demanded.
“What do you want from me?” he said, leaning up on one elbow. “I mean…what the hell are we supposed to do?”
He was scratching at his lower back without even thinking about it, and when he realized what he was doing, he recoiled in disgust.
“What can we do?”
There weren’t many options. We both knew it.
“One thing or the other,” I replied.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Offense or defense.”
Andy hated football, but it was something that Dad and I watched whenever the mood struck us on lazy Sunday afternoons. Even so, my brother still got the point.
“Defense didn’t work so good last time,” he replied.
I sneered at him, but I couldn’t argue that he was wrong. My planning, such as it was, had been undone by nothing more out of the ordinary than a nap.
“So? The two of us together might do a better job.” My voice was pitifully unconvincing, and it trailed off at the end. Andy picked up on this instantly, and he could have used it to attack, to break me down, to force me to see things his way. It’s exactly what I would have done. Instead, he seemed to carefully consider the idea, and even if he was just humoring me, I felt better.
“Maybe we could. If we came up with some kind of plan to keep it out. Changing the locks or something.”
“That won’t do it,” I told him. “I saw him pick the lock on my desk. It took him all of two seconds. He’s got all these little tools…I bet that’s what he does, just going from house to house, taking things while people are sleeping. You can’t hear him. He moves so fast you can barely see him. I mean, this thing could have been walking on our faces while we slept and we wouldn’t know it.”
He shuddered and scratched at his back.
“Then we tell Dad.”
Again, the years between us from kid to teen began to shine.
“No,” I said bluntly.
“Why not? I mean, he could help us. Give us an idea of what to do.”
“You really think he would believe us?” I asked.
“No,” he replied as he cast his eyes down on the floor. “I barely believe it and I saw the thing.”
I was corralling him now, leading him down the only path I knew to take. I was already there; I just needed him to get on board, and the only way he ever would was if he got there himself.
“So what’s left?” he asked.
“I think you know.”
“Offense,” he replied softly.
“Offense.”
There was a sudden change in him. I saw it in his eyes as he raised them to meet my own. They were gray eyes, like my mother’s. They could be, in his younger days, wonderfully sweet, but there was also an icy coldness to them, a frozen glare that spoke of the ability to go much farther than I would ever dream of. My gaze was fire that burned on the surface, hot but not nearly as dangerous as it looked. His was an ember, hidden inside, boiling, hot enough to melt the world.
“Then we kill it,” he said plainly. “No traps. No tricks. Just dead.”
I think I must have shuddered when he said it, but I didn’t disagree, not when he had me locked in those frozen eyes.
“But first,” he added, “we have to find it.”
* * *
As I thumb through this, I realize I’ve probably been a little too hard on Dad. I’m not the most mature person in the world, even knocking on the door of thirty, and I feel like I’ve only just started to really look at myself in an honest way. Writing all this down, even if no one ever reads it, is part of that. Dad might not have been the perfect guy to be stuck with two kids by himself, but he did the best he could, and he did teach us a lot of things I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise.
Some families went skiing.
Some families played sports.
We went camping.
First off, I don’t want to make it sound any grander than it really is. We didn’t own a camper. We didn’t know anyone who had a cabin. What we did own was a tent, just big enough for the three of us. Dad had to lie in the middle, because the sides were too narrow for him to squeeze up against without bringing the roof down on us.
No matter what time of year we went, the first part of the first day was usually
the same. Andy and I would stroll around, gathering whatever sticks we could find, working our way up from small to large, with plenty of dry kindling like Dad had shown us. Meanwhile, back at our campsite, Dad would spend an hour, sometimes two, cussing and kicking at the dirt as he fought to get the tent assembled and up in one piece. Before night started drifting down on us, we would gather around the pit and take turns trying to start the fire. Dad smoked in those days, but he never let us use his lighter. He had a long rectangle of steel, and he’d pick up chunks of flint from military supply stores. It wasn’t that he was some kind of survivalist. Hell, we had a cooler full of Yoo-Hoos sitting three feet away. It was just that he wanted to teach us something.
Sometimes, we’d bring rods and reels and take them down to the lake. Whatever we caught, we’d lop its head off then and there and take turns slitting open the belly and sliding a finger through the hole. I can still remember the slightly gaggy feeling I got whenever I glanced down at the string of entrails, but I did it all the same. Andy didn’t seem to mind at all, and it was clear that he was simply better at this outdoors stuff than me. More in tune, you might say. Regardless of whether it was bluegill, catfish, even the occasional bass, we would take it back to the fire and roast it on a spit. Usually, there wasn’t enough for more than a few bites, but everyone got to taste it whether they really wanted to or not. A bite or two of half-burned fish, followed by a premade bologna sandwich. Something like heaven.
Sometimes we stayed out there for one night, sometimes for two. We never bathed, because where would you bathe? We pissed and shit in the woods and brushed our teeth with water from Igloo coolers. When it rained, we wore ponchos and didn’t mind when our feet began peeling in our tennis shoes. We ate out of coolers or bits of whatever we found, skinned, cleaned. It wasn’t surviving, not exactly, but it was closer than most of my friends ever got. We grew to understand that being dirty, being grungy, was part of being human.
Usually we went to the public state park, but from time to time a friend with land would let us camp out there. In those cases, we’d shoot the handful of guns that Dad owned. Sometimes we’d set up aluminum cans and pick them off with .22s, easing into the tiny kick, the sharp report, our eyes learning not to close as soon as we touched the triggers. Once in a while, Dad would buy a box of clay pigeons and we’d move up to shotguns. A twelve-gauge was a fast teacher. Keep the butt tight to your shoulder, or wear the bruise for a week. Hold it just so, careful to glance down the barrel, or get a black eye. I never did get comfy with a shotgun like Andy did, but I might have, given enough time.