Feral Youth

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Sunday was sitting on a log talking to David, who was crying and shaking his head.

  “That’s not how it was” David was saying.

  “I know, but you have to admit it sounds really messed up.” Sunday was sitting close to David, but not touching him.

  “That’s because none of you let me finish.”

  “She was your sister, David,” Sunday said. “Can you blame us?”

  David shook his head. “But if you just hear the rest of the story, I swear you’ll understand.”

  “Tell me, then,” she said. “I’ll listen if you want to finish.”

  “BIG BROTHER, PART 2”

  by E. C. Myers

  I STAYED UP that night, waiting and listening. Allie asking me to check on her made me scared; I almost would have preferred if she was lying to me instead of being just as clueless about what was going on.

  When I heard the first sound, a gentle “mmmm . . .” followed by a series of gasps, I noted the time: 2:01 a.m. I hurried to Allie’s room, but I hesitated for a minute outside her door as the sounds intensified. I imagined her sitting in bed and laughing at me when I burst into her room, trolling me. Maybe she’d snap a picture of me with her camera so she could send it to Ryan and Tony. I wouldn’t even be pissed if I found out she was pranking me.

  But that’s not what I saw at all when I eased the door to her room open.

  Something was hovering over Allie’s bed. It was kind of faint and shimmery. See-through, so I could make out Allie’s Yale pennant on the wall behind it. The thing looked vaguely human-shaped, but it was sort of leaking at the edges like a bad video signal. And each time Allie moaned, it pulsed. Or maybe, each time it pulsed, Allie moaned. She was fully clothed, and she wasn’t touching herself. So that thing must have been doing that to her.

  I bet you’re thinking the same thing I did at first. A ghost?

  I know what you’re really thinking. He’s full of shit.

  I was frozen, peering through the door. Finally, when my brain rebooted, I did the only rational thing. Exactly what you would do in the same situation.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  The thing quickly expanded and faded into nothing. Poof! I rushed to my sister’s bed. Her room was noticeably cooler than the hallway, but she was sweating. Her eyes moved rapidly under her closed eyelids, and her lip quivered, like she was freezing, but she had gone quiet again. And I couldn’t wake her.

  “Allie. Wake up. Wake up!” I gently nudged her over and over again. Then I started shaking her. I was finally ready to go get my parents, call 9-1-1, when her eyes opened wide and she took a great gasping breath, like coming up for air after diving under water.

  “David? What are you—?” She bolted up. “It happened again?”

  I nodded. “Um. Do you remember anything? Do you . . . feel anything?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  I cleared my throat. “Like, your, uh, breasts don’t feel sensitive, or you’re, um . . .” I glanced down at her. She was wearing a ratty old Gryffindor T-shirt and track shorts. I’d figured she slept in cute pajamas with cartoon owls on them like she used to, but I didn’t know if she always dressed like this for bed, or at all.

  “David!” She covered herself with a sheet decorated with cartoon dinosaurs.

  “Sorry. But seriously. How do you feel?”

  She shrugged. “I feel normal.”

  I pressed a hand to her forehead, the way Mom does when we’re sick. She flinched away from me.

  “That was not normal,” I said.

  “What did you see?” she asked.

  “You won’t believe me,” I said. I told her what had happened.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “That’s a pretty weird story, even for you. What do we do now?”

  “Well, whatever it was, maybe it won’t be back again since I interrupted it.”

  She scrunched up her face. “Whether it comes back or not, I want to know what it is. Why me? This is . . .” Her voice became thick, like she was trying not to cry. “It’s horrific, Dave. What is it doing to me? Why can’t I remember?”

  * * *

  It happened again the next night, a Friday. This time I was ready. I grabbed my camera on my way to her room, but the thing disappeared even before the door opened, so all I caught was more audio evidence. But I also had more information: the event began at 2:01 a.m., just like the night before. And even though I no longer had the file I’d recorded the first night, the video project I was editing had been saved last at 2:07 a.m., when I had noticed the sounds.

  Now convinced that something ghostlike was attacking my sister every night, I went into full-on protective older-brother mode. Allie let me bring in Ryan and Tony to help us figure it out. Our parents were at work—yes, even on a Saturday—which let us talk about the situation in Allie’s room without worrying they would overhear us.

  My friends didn’t believe me either.

  “Is this like your Sasquatch hoax?” Ryan asked.

  “First of all, Sasquatch is real,” I said. “I know what I saw.”

  “Bad luck that your camera lens was dirty.” Ryan smirked. “And it was conveniently dark in those woods.”

  I sighed. She still thought I made up my Sasquatch sighting in another desperate attempt to get more views on YouTube, but I wouldn’t fake a video. People online analyze the hell out of everything, and if they thought you were lying, you might as well change your name and move to another country. The video I shot at the national park was dark and grainy, and yeah, there was some crap on the lens that put a blurry streak through it, but I didn’t make anything up.

  “Tony was there. He saw it too,” I said.

  “Don’t drag me into this old argument. We were drunk. I was seeing all sorts of things that night, but that doesn’t make any of it real,” Tony said.

  “It looked like a bear, maybe,” Allie said generously.

  “Sorry, there’s no way that thing in your video is a Sasquatch, Day. I’ll still allow that Bigfoot could be real. But come on. Now you claim you saw a ghost?” Ryan gave a short, derisive laugh and threw up her hands. “Why not aliens?”

  “Aside from the fact that there’s no other rational explanation for what’s been happening to Allie—” I said.

  “Persistent genital arousal disorder.” Ryan snapped her fingers. “That took me two minutes to find on Google.”

  “Is that the technical term for puberty?” Tony chuckled.

  “It’s a serious condition, Tony,” Ryan said. “An invisible, debilitating disability that either gets no medical attention or the wrong kind of attention, from childish idiots like you.”

  Tony looked chagrined. Uh-oh, I thought. What’s going on there?

  “What’s persistent genital . . . ?” I asked.

  “Arousal disorder. PGAD. It causes unexplained, spontaneous orgasms that last for hours, days, or even weeks,” Ryan said.

  “Sounds awesome,” Tony said.

  Ryan gave him a scathing look.

  “This is a little different. Allie’s orgasms happen once a day, starting at 2:01 a.m. and running for about twenty minutes,” I said.

  Allie groaned and covered her face.

  “If you want to be scientific about it, those are the facts,” I said.

  “Hypnotism!” Tony said.

  “Not that again,” I said.

  Tony had been excited a few months back about web videos showing a guy hypnotizing women to have an orgasm when he gave them a keyword. Ryan eventually let Tony try it on her, but it hadn’t worked. Of course.

  Or had it? What if Tony had hypnotized Ryan into being interested in him? (Because talk about unexplained phenomena.) But that was a different problem for another time.

  “Never mind him,” Ryan said. “Lately, Tony has trouble distinguishing between fact and fantasy.”

  “That’s funny coming from you.” Tony folded his arms across his chest.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Anyw
ay. PGAD or hypnotism, that doesn’t change what I saw with my own eyes. I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but it was real and it was weird.”

  “Look, it’s clear something’s going on, and we want to help,” Ryan said. “But I think you should see a doctor, Allie.”

  “Medical or psychological?” Allie asked.

  “You aren’t imagining this. If I hadn’t noticed it, you wouldn’t even know it was happening,” I said.

  Ryan gave me a look, like she was still trying to figure whether I was gaslighting all of them.

  “David?” Allie asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What if this has been going on for a while? I’ve been so tired lately. It’s been hard to focus on school, swimming—everything.”

  I frowned. “For how long?”

  “A couple of months?”

  “Succubus!” Tony said.

  “What?” I turned to him. He had Google open on Allie’s laptop.

  “Hey, I didn’t say you could use that.” Allie slapped Tony’s hand away from the keyboard. He grinned and kept reading.

  “A succubus is a demon that has sex with men while they’re sleeping. Oh, but wait, I wonder if there’s . . .” He typed for a minute. “Incubus. That’s the male form.”

  Allie paled. “Nephilim,” she whispered.

  “Huh?” Tony asked.

  “They’re in the Bible,” Allie said. “They’re fallen angels.”

  Ryan rolled her eyes. “Now we’re talking about angels?”

  “Not angels,” Tony said. “Demons.”

  “Great, all we need is to perform an exorcism,” I said.

  “Or we call the Ghostbusters,” Tony said.

  “Oh, honey. They aren’t real either,” Ryan said.

  “There’s a group nearby, a paranormal investigations group that looks into reports of psychic and spiritual activities.” Tony brought up the page: Ghost Sweepers.

  “No,” Allie, Ryan, and I said simultaneously.

  “But they have cool equipment. Psychokinetic energy meters, electromagnetic monitors, infrared cameras—”

  “They’re just in it for the YouTube hits,” I said.

  “That sounds familiar,” Ryan said.

  “Right. And if anyone’s going to get this on video, it’s us. . . .” Which gave me an idea about how I could help Allie and prove that something strange was going on.

  “Yeah! Let’s do this!” Tony fist-bumped me.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, forget it,” Allie said.

  Tony looked at me hopefully. He wanted to make a hit viral video almost as much as I did.

  “Forget it, Tony. We’ll come up with something else,” I said.

  But I was lying. I thought that getting this phenomenon on video was a great idea, but I figured it had a better chance of working if I kept my plans to myself. Allie couldn’t know I was monitoring her if I wanted to keep the conditions of the experiment as normal as possible and rule out the last little doubt that she was putting one over on me.

  “Day, can we talk?” Ryan asked me.

  I nodded. We stepped out into the hall.

  “You’re not trying something, are you?” she asked.

  “ ‘Trying something’?” I asked. “What are you accusing me of?”

  “You’re not using your sister for some ridiculous scheme to make a viral video?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Ry, why would I do that? You know me.”

  She pursed her lips. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Wow.” That felt like a slap to the face.

  “Okay, I’m sorry, but I had to be sure. Of course you wouldn’t exploit your sister just to get YouTube famous.”

  But that’s exactly what happened, even though I never intended it.

  * * *

  I really just wanted to get the ghost on film, to prove to the others—to prove to myself—that it was really real. When Ryan and Tony left, and Allie went to swim practice, I snuck into her room. Instead of trying to hide a small wireless camera, I decided to use the one that was already there: the webcam on Allie’s computer. I always used to bug her to put tape over it, but she was too trusting. She believes the best in people, especially her big brother.

  It was easy to install a remote access program on her computer so I could control the webcam and stream it to my PC for recording. But all the late nights finally caught up to me, and I made a couple of mistakes.

  When my vibrating cell phone woke me up the next morning at my keyboard, I checked the recording and saw the three most devastating words of my life:

  “Video upload complete.”

  “What? Oh shit. Oh shit.” I fumbled the phone and saw it was Ryan calling. As I hastily clicked to play the video, I answered her on speakerphone.

  “Day, what the fuck?” she asked. “You’ve gone too far! How could you do this to your own sister?”

  “It was an accident! How bad is it?” I said.

  “Bad.” She sucked in her breath. “The worst.”

  Then I saw it for myself. The same video millions of people have seen. When I watched it for the first time, more than five hundred thousand people had already seen it on YouTube, and the counter was going up by the second. Thanks, Reddit. It even had a hashtag on social media already: #moaningmyrtle. I don’t know who came up with that; it’s awful, but it stuck until Allie had been identified. Then the really bad names started.

  Why didn’t I take the video down right away? There wasn’t any point. It was already out there, and you know nothing disappears from the Internet; if I had deleted it, a dozen copies would have sprung up in its place, and at least I can get those removed as the owner. I thought I could control the narrative somehow. I thought deleting it would support the widespread belief that it’s a hoax. Because the real kicker is the ghost didn’t show up on video. Of course it didn’t.

  I never planned to upload that video without Allie’s permission, but I was exhausted when I started recording at 1:30 a.m., I forgot to uncheck auto-upload—so when the file hit the maximum allowed size, at a little over two hours long, the software immediately posted it to my YouTube channel. If I hadn’t fallen asleep, I could have stopped it.

  Allie was scandalized, and it wasn’t long before her school found out, and then our parents. They took action: they sent Allie to a church support group and counseling for sex addiction. Leave it to them to put the blame on her instead of an external force.

  I wasn’t off the hook either. Our parents accused me of being a pervert, and the police actually investigated me for child pornography, but because you don’t really see anything in the video—hell, even they’re convinced it’s a stunt—no charges were filed. But facts don’t matter when people have already made up their minds about you.

  I’ve never been a model son, but nothing quite matches the feeling you get when your mother won’t look you in the eyes anymore and your father stops talking to you. They moved me into the basement, like they needed to put two floors of our house between me and Allie at night. And after things got worse, they sent me to Zeppelin Bend.

  I wasn’t doing anything but trying to help her! And maybe if I’d been in my old room, I’d have been able to do something to save her.

  That’s what you really want to know about, right? Where did she go? Everyone has a theory, but only I know what really happened.

  Even while Allie was dealing with bullying from her classmates, she continued experiencing the visitations. She started her own YouTube channel to document what she was going through, how the bullying and sleepless nights were affecting her, since she still didn’t remember anything of the actual attacks.

  It’s heartbreaking. You can see her wasting away in her daily videos. If you want to know what it was like, watch Allie in her own words instead of that obnoxious “Sex Files” podcast that someone posted about our family.

  That night, the last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I was in the kitchen grazing on leftovers when I heard foo
tsteps above my head—from Allie’s room. The clock on the microwave said it was 2:03 a.m. A minute later I heard a high-pitched sound outside. . . . No, I felt it, a kind of sonic vibration that set my teeth on edge and rumbled through my bones.

  I rushed to the window and looked outside just in time to see a flash of light bathe the back of the house like a giant camera flash. I blinked. When my vision adjusted again, I saw something zoom off overhead, into the night sky.

  It was quiet upstairs.

  I bolted up to Allie’s room. Her door was locked; my parents had the key. It’s a lot harder to kick doors open than it looks on TV. When I entered her room, it was too late. Her window was wide open, and the room was empty. There’s nothing she could have climbed down on: no trees, storm drains, or ropes made of knotted sheets. I looked out her window, and the backyard below was empty and undisturbed.

  “Allie!” I called. “Allie!”

  My parents ran in. Dad pulled me away from the window, and Mom screamed at me.

  “What are you doing? Where’s your sister?”

  At first they thought I’d pushed her out the window, but there was no body. There was no sign of her. The police came, took me back to the station, questioned me. All but arrested me. I was in even more trouble than I was for secretly recording Allie, but I didn’t care because she was gone. And it was my fault.

  Most people think she ran away or that this is some elaborate hoax the two of us concocted together. Even my best friends finally abandoned me over it. Ryan thinks I’m lying and that I did something unimaginable to my sister. Tony cut me off for a different reason; it turns out I was right about him and Ryan being together, and he’s siding with her. So there go my friends, along with my YouTube content and my dreams of making it big as a video producer. If it weren’t for the video of Allie’s attack, my channel would be dead. Instead, I have more subscribers than ever, though they’re probably following me because they think I had something to do with her disappearance. But I know what really happened and who was responsible.