Last week I saw my brother Jeffery for the first time in five years. When he looked up at me, his bloody hands tightly grasping fistfuls of that poor girl’s blood hair, I knew from his expression that it was no accident, that he had meant for me to find him like this. Feeling his dark eyes boring into me from the depths of his pale and sweaty face, I felt like I was thirteen years old and back at Rocky Creek. Except instead of feeling love and admiration for my brother, now I only felt terror. As I ran away from the path home and to a local coffee shop where I hid out for the next half-hour, I thought back to my childhood with Jeffery—what happened when we went into the Ricter house, how he had screamed when I left him behind in that place, and how impossible it was for him to suddenly be back after all this time.
But more than anything else, I thought about how he had smiled at me tonight as he thudded the girl’s head back into the ground with the crack of an overripe melon.
From the outside, Rocky Creek was seen as some kind of militia compound or even a cult, though neither was strictly true. It was definitely remote and closed to outsiders, and yes, there were a decent number of guns around, but I only ever remember them being used for hunting or target practice. And if some of the people in the group had strong and slightly odd opinions on some things, well, there’s always a few odd ones in every bunch, right?
Still, we would periodically get visits from Family and Children. They called them “welfare checks”. My parents called it harassment. Said that they just wanted to chip away at our community because we wouldn’t conform. As we grew older, Jeffery and I started to resent those visits more and more, particularly when they actually took me for a month when we were nine. They never got Jeffery, of course. Our parents refused to give them any information except in writing, and Jeffery had always hidden when they came. We had been born on the compound, so there was very little record of me aside from the busybodies who came to check welfare, and there was no proof of Jeffery existing at all.
Well, that’s not entirely true. After I got taken that time, Jeffery started making himself known in different small ways. One time the caseworker’s tires got cut. Another her car window got broken out. Police would come out every time, yelling and threatening to lock someone up, but my parents and I were in with the caseworker when the car was damaged, and there were no witnesses who saw it happen.
After one visit, Jeffery whispered to me that he had done something she wouldn’t notice for awhile. He would never say what, and based on the devilish gleam in his eye, I decided it was better not to know. But after that, the visits got less frequent and it was a different lady that would come.
By the time we were thirteen…no, wait. Let me address something before I go on. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but if you’re reading this, you’re getting to know me a little as we go, right? Except, how much is that really worth if you can’t believe that what I say is the truth? I’m not stupid. I’ve always read a lot and I’ve seen plenty of t.v. and movies in the last few years. Especially horror movies. I know that when you hear something about a “bad twin”, your first assumption is that it’s a trick. That I’m crazy and that I’ve imagined a twin to take the blame when I go out and hurt people or whatever. I get it. I’ve seen that movie too. Like twenty times.
But Jeffery is very real. And back when we were thirteen, he wasn’t the bad twin at all. If anything he was always the best of us.
You might think that twins are identical right down the line. They talk the same, they act the same, they have creepy twin talk and some kind of twin telepathy, right? That’s all bullshit. Jeffery was always smarter and stronger that I was. And while he would sometimes get into mischief, he was also the kindest and most generous person I knew.
Our lives weren’t that different in most ways than if we had grown up in a suburban neighborhood or in the middle of a large city. We had children to play with, we spent time with our families, and while we were home schooled, I found out when I transitioned to the public school system five years ago that I was well-ahead of most of the other students. I say all this to explain that despite some of the strangeness of our upbringing, we didn’t have a bad life and Jeffery wasn’t a bad person. In fact, the only real complaint we had as children is that we got bored sometimes.
Boredom is what led to us going exploring most days when the weather was nice. We’d started going off into the woods hiking when we were eight or nine, and by the time we were thirteen we knew the ten mile area of wilderness around us like it was a giant backyard. But of course, familiarity breeds boredom, and so we kept going farther and farther out.
It was on one of these trips that we saw a large, stately house sitting in the middle of the woods. It was in good shape, but we saw no signs of anyone living there from the overgrown yard or barely visible driveway, and when we crept up closer to the house and looked in the window, all the furniture looked intact but untouched. The strangest part was that everything looked very old-fashioned but new, as though we were somehow looking into the living room of the house but seeing it as it was sixty or eighty years earlier. We told Papa that over dinner.
“You said it was northeast? That sounds like the Ricter house.” He raised an eyebrow as he looked between me and Jeffery. “Place has been abandoned for years. It was abandoned when I was a child here. In fact,” he leaned forward, giving us a conspiratorial glance before making sure our mother was out of earshot, “We always heard it was haunted.”
That was all we needed to hear. The next day we planned a trip to explore the inside of the supposed haunted house. I remember being nervous because Jeffery had brought a screwdriver in case the door was locked, and I wasn’t comfortable with damaging anything to get inside. As it turned out, the front door was unlocked and we walked right in.
We were in the house for about an hour, exploring the first floor and then the second. At first we were making jokes and trying to scare each other, but with each room the oddness of the place seemed to draw us in more and more. It really did feel like a lived-in home from another time, or like some picture perfect museum that managed to replicate the imagined feel of such a place. There wasn’t even dust on the tables or dead bugs in the windowsills.
Our growing silence was borne partly out of amazement, but also somewhat out of fear. While there was nothing obviously scary about anything we were seeing, there was a…wrongness to the rightness, if that makes any sense. I remember thinking about the pitcher plants my mother used to grow. She would show us how the insects would be drawn to the flower, venturing inside so deep they couldn’t escape from the bottom.
The bottom of the Ricter house was, naturally enough, the basement. And it was the floor we had saved for last. I wanted desperately for Jeffery to chicken out so I could too, but my stomach dropped when he headed toward what we had already figured out was the basement door. Determined not to look weak in front of him, I pulled out my flashlight and followed him down into the dark.
There were no lights down there, but then there were no lights anywhere. No lights on the walls or ceiling and no light switches or outlets that we could find. Still, what had been a eccentric curiosity looking through the sunlit rooms upstairs became another bad omen as we trudged down the wooden stairs into the oppressive darkness below.
The beams of our flashlights barely seemed to make a dent as we reached the bottom, and we had to walk forward ten or fifteen feet before I could even see the brick wall that made up one of the boundaries of the basement. Even then I was more aware of the light shining back at us as we approached. I had a moment of panic at the thought that someone was down here with us, but then I realized Jeffery was laughing.
It was a mirror. A large, ornate full-length mirror hanging on the far wall. Walking closer, I could see our shadowy outlines in the dim, reflected light of our flashlight beams, mimicking our motions as we studied the mirror and then began timidly looking around again for other things that might be down there.
Except there was nothing. The floor was dirt and the walls were brick, and aside from the pristine mirror hanging alone on the wall, nothing else was there. Except for…as I swept my light across the dirt floor again, I realized something was there after all.
Footprints. There were dozens of footprint trails crisscrossing the dirt, most of them well-defined and seemingly recent, though it was hard to tell in that house. Still, I knew most of them couldn’t be ours, and I felt my heart hammering as I looked back to Jeffery to tell him we needed to leave.
That’s when I saw the figure in the mirror. It was standing behind Jeffery, a good two heads taller than either of us, and while I was seeing just a fleeting glimpse of its profile in the mirror, it looked strange, as though it was dressed in ill-fitting clothing or had a body that was deformed. I opened my mouth to scream a warning as I finished turning my head toward Jeffery, but it died in my throat when I saw nothing behind him outside of the mirror. I cut my eyes back the mirror in time to see the thing reach for Jeffery. In the half-second I glanced away from him, Jeffery was already be pulled back into the dark, his surprised and terrified yells echoing off the bare walls as they faded further and further away.
This isn’t about me being crazy, but it isn’t about me being a hero either. I was a scared little boy, and as much as I loved my brother, as much as I hated myself as I did it, I ran. I went up those steps two at a time, more worried about my legs getting grabbed from underneath the stairs than the weakening screams I was hearing from my best friend in the world. I didn’t stop running until I was half a mile away from the house, my ragged breaths mixing with slobbering tears as I tried to make it back home to tell my family what happened.
I saw the smoke two miles before I got back to the compound. There had been some kind of government raid that morning after we left. Supposedly someone had illegal weapons or something, but I never knew all the details, despite being questioned by authorities after it was all over. They only questioned me once, and I got the feeling it was more just to say they had been thorough than because they thought I knew anything important. To the contrary, they seemed happy to stick me into the state system and forget about me, to forget about the whole mess.
Because somehow, while the raid was just starting, my parents’ house caught on fire. I never heard any explanation other than “electrical shortage”, which seemed like bullshit, especially given the timing. Regardless, by the time I reached the edge of the compound, I was being waylaid by agents telling me I couldn’t go in and our parents were already dead of smoke inhalation.
I did a lot of hating in those first few months. Hating myself, hating the agents, hating our friends and neighbors for not somehow saving them. And not knowing the details of what actually happened only made it worse. It was as though my entire world was taken away all at once and I didn’t even know how or why.
So I rebelled. Went through several foster homes in the first year. Got a bit of a juvenile record and went to counselors. Eventually I realized it took too much energy to always be angry, to always find reasons to hate everything. My current foster family was actually really nice, and though I didn’t see them as my real family, I did feel like I could trust them to treat me well and care if anything happened to me.
Which was more than Jeffery ever got. I had a hundred opportunities to tell people about him, about what had happened to him, and at first I took them. I told the police, I told my case worker, and I even told my first foster mother. It was all met with skepticism, especially the part about the basement, but they agreed someone needed to go check. But when police went, they could never even find the house, much less some twin there was no record of. This was well before I was placed in foster care, but when I tried one last time to tell Judy, my first foster mother, she just smiled like she understood and said she’d make some calls to see what she could find out. I knew from her expression she’d already heard about them not finding anything when they’d looked before, and it wasn’t much of a surprise when I was back in a state orphanage later that same month.
So I learned to pretend that he didn’t exist. I would tell therapists that I made it up because I was so upset about my parents’ deaths. They didn’t question it any further after their initial due diligence that I wasn’t delusional any more, and over the years it became easier and easier to believe myself. Not that I ever really believed he wasn’t real, but the mind is a very flexible and selfish thing. I found myself thinking about him less and less as I became more adapted to my new “normal” life. My ideas of guilt and loss were slowly being overwritten with new friends and dating and applying to colleges.
And then the other day I took my standard shortcut between my house and my weekend job and there he was, murdering that girl, his eyes dark and unreadable as he stared at me. Sitting at the coffee shop, running back through the memory, I realized that while his eyes looked strange and his skin seemed pale and clammy from a distance, he otherwise looked just like me.
His haircut, his light beard, his…his fucking clothes.
He was wearing the same clothes I was.
I ran back home as I tried to get someone to answer—Rick or Patty, my foster parents, or their biological daughter Sierra. No one picked up. Rounding the corner onto our street, I saw no signs of trouble, but wasn’t sure what to look for anyway. I wanted to go ahead and call 911, but I had held off initially because what I had seen on the path was so bizarre and I couldn’t be sure I really wasn’t having some kind of delusion this time. Now, as I raced home to try and warn them, I didn’t want to slow down to call until I knew they were safe.
When I reached the house, I saw just how safe they were. They were sitting down to a nice family dinner, which was always a big deal on weekend nights. I had a momentary pang of disappointment that they were starting without me being home yet, but then I realized they weren’t.
Because Jeffery was in there, smiling and laughing. I watched in horror as they all took their places and Rick had everyone bow their heads to bless the food. Everyone closed their eyes and prayed except for Jeffery, who turned toward me at the window. He just stared silently at me for several moments, baring his teeth like an enraged ape or rabid dog as his eyes rolled back toward Rick, who was finishing up the prayer.
As everyone looked up, Jeffery was back to smiling at his new family.
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