When my brother Sidney was four years old, he was possessed by a demon. I wasn’t even born yet, but I’ve heard the stories. The way my mama always told it, it all started when a friend of hers gave Sidney a stuffed rabbit named Mr. Jinkies. It had belonged to the woman since she herself was a child, and was given to Sidney to help with nightmares he was having, as the same toy had helped the woman’s night terrors when she was young as well.
At first, Sidney had improved. But then my parents noticed that he was acting different. Anger and violence were part of it, but that wasn’t the worst. No, the thing that always upset Mama when she talked about it was that he would get this terrible sly look on his face when he thought no one was looking. It was an adult look, an evil look, that didn’t belong on the face of any child, much less Sidney, who had always been sweet and kind.
It only got worse over the next several years. I was born when Sidney was six, and I remember things when they were at their worst. Strange things would happen around the house. We were all plagued by strange and terrible dreams. And any time we had a pet, they would die mysteriously. The unspoken question was never whether Sidney had a hand in it, but rather whether he had physically killed the poor thing or had it been done by the unseen creature that haunted his heart?
For a long time, we didn’t have a name for that creature, as it wasn’t until later we started to refer to it as Mr. Jinkies. This was partly because giving it a name would have meant acknowledging it was real. Beyond that, Mr. Jinkies was the name of the stuffed rabbit, and for the first few years, no one even made the connection between the toy and the entity that had taken hold of Sidney. The work friend that had given us the rabbit had left mama’s office and moved away soon after we got Mr. Jinkies, but at the time no one realized that Sidney’s odd behavior and fixation on the toy was anything other than him acting up and loving Mr. Jinkies.
And then one day, the rabbit just disappeared. I was an infant at the time, but my father told me once that the strangest thing about it going missing was that Sidney didn’t seem to care. He had been inseparable from that thing since he first had gotten it, but when it was gone, my brother didn’t miss a beat.
It wasn’t until later that we understood that was because the real Mr. Jinkies had never left.
I never knew my brother when he wasn’t possessed, so at first it didn’t seem strange when he would say cruel things to me or hurt me when no one was around. As I got older and saw how other children were, how other siblings treated each other, I realized my mistake. I told our parents, and they were properly upset, but I can’t say they were entirely surprised. They had already figured out something was deeply wrong with Sidney by that point, and if they weren’t ready to say words like “spirit” or “demon” yet, they should have known enough to watch him more closely around his little brother.
Still, if I hated them a little for their past willful blindness, I was relieved when his treatment of me became the breaking point. Before my outcry, Sidney had occasionally gone to child psychologists and medical doctors, but our parents had largely tried to handle his “condition” on their own. Looking back at it now that I’m older, I realize that this mainly consisted of them lying to each other, trading reassurances that this was all just a “phase” Sidney was going through.
But when they found out he had been hurting me, they sent him for in-house psychological evaluation and treatment. This was when I was about five and the more obvious strange things hadn’t really started yet. But even if they had, my parents wouldn’t have told the doctors about it. It was a double-edged shame, you see. A shame to have a child that was under the influence of some unseen, inhuman thing. And a shame to believe that something so foolish as that could be true.
So they wasted years on drugs and therapy. Punishments and pleading. And over the years, our house became a prison. My door was locked and there was a door wedge tight against the bottom. My parents door was the same. Sidney’s was similar, except his locked and wedged from the outside.
I used to lay in bed at night when I was a little boy, afraid to go to sleep because I didn’t want to be taken by Sidney or the thing that lived behind his eyes. I knew he should be secure in his room—the door was heavy and solid, and there was chicken wire over the nailed down windows—but it didn’t matter. I didn’t think he necessarily needed to leave his room to hurt us. I could feel him—feel it—on the other side of the house. Thinking about us, sending out tendrils to poison us and weaken us, all while smiling that terrible knowing smile.
And week after month after year, it was working.
We grew weak from the constant exhaustion of being watchful. Of being worried and afraid. That’s how it wins, you see. By being patient. It chips at you and chips at you, digging away at the walls of your sanity and your soul with a tiny little spoon, like in those prison escape movies where they tunnel out of their cell. And Mr. Jinkies was trying to get in, not out, but the reasoning was the same.
Just dig away a little at a time and no one will notice until it’s too late.
I grew into a frightened, distrustful boy that was prone to anxiety and emotional outbursts. My father became increasingly short-tempered and would fly into terrible rages for no apparent reason. My mama took to over-medicating and crying almost daily. And all that time, Sidney would just sit back and watch, drinking it all in.
By the time I turned seven and Sidney was thirteen, it had become clear that our house was not really ours any more. We were seeing and hearing things, finding objects moved around, and living with the constant feeling that something was present that hated us and meant us harm. All of these things were frightening, and not just because of the events themselves, but because of the message they were meant to send. Mr. Jinkies was in control now. And the time for hiding was over.
You may be questioning why it took so long for my family to realize the depth of the problem we were facing. You have to understand that these kinds of things…they don’t happen quickly. It’s not like you see in a horror movie, where there’s a big dramatic reveal full of blood on the walls and people levitating. Instead it’s like a slow-moving virus infecting the person—and by extension, their family—and not making itself known until it is too late.
Except that’s not quite right. Because Mr. Jinkies wasn’t a virus. It was a parasite, draining all the love and goodness from Sidney and replacing it with something dark and filthy. Corrupting him and poisoning us all.
One day, my parents found where Sidney was preparing for some kind of…well, ritual I guess. They would never say what exactly they found, only that it was in the back of the old backyard work shed and it was terrible. And we never knew what the ritual was for. They couldn’t even say for sure that it hadn’t already been completed.
Sidney was questioned about it, of course, but he just smirked and acted ignorant. When he was younger, he would cry and act confused about how he was being treated—always the prime suspect when something went wrong and always locked away in his room at night. As he had gotten older, Sidney had become more openly hostile, full of contempt as he mocked our fear. Still, his expression changed that evening when there was a knock on the door.
The thin-faced man introduced himself as Christopher Darrow. A former priest, he said he now helped families in need of parapsychological counseling and assistance in some forms of what he called “spiritual warfare”. He had a severe look about him, but he spoke with a kind of refined intelligence and authority that wasn’t unkind. It was also clear from the beginning that my parents were desperate enough to take any help someone offered, particularly from someone that would actually believe what was going on.
There was still the sticking point of how Darrow knew to come there, however. That, he explained, was because he had contacts at several occult shops across the state. Sidney had apparently gone into a local one a few days ago when he was supposed to be in school. The shop owner had alerted Darrow about the visit immediately—both because of the dangerousness of the items Sidney had been inquiring about and the shop owner’s intuition that the boy before him was infested by something unnatural.
Darrow was standing in our front hall by this point, and I was already seeing our parents’ shoulders slump with relief. They were satisfied with the explanation and were more than willing to have him come examine Sidney. My brother was locked up in his room at this point, and Mama stayed with me as our father took the man upstairs. It wasn’t long before I heard Sidney start to screech and yell, and in less than an hour, it was done.
My father was pale and clearly shaken by the experience, but he also seemed convinced that Darrow had expelled whatever was living in my brother for good. Darrow cautioned that it would be a slow process of recovery and that we would need to be patient with Sidney, but that we should see no further problems of the spiritual variety out of the boy.
And just like that, the man was gone again. It all happened so fast, and it wasn’t until a few hours had passed that our parents started questioning the strangeness of the entire encounter. And honestly, they never questioned it too much, mainly because the man seemed to have worked a miracle.
Sidney was still odd acting for the next few days, but more because he just seemed subdued and traumatized. By the end of the month, he was like a different person. He was being nice to me, getting along with our parents, and not getting into trouble at school. By the time he was fourteen, the locks had come off our bedroom doors and our house felt like a home again.
In the ten years since, Sidney’s completed high school and college with good grades. He’s already been accepted into a philosophy graduate program that starts next spring. He was going to start this past fall, but then Mama suddenly got sick. We were thinking she was going to get over it—she had started feeling and looking better, after all—but then one day I came home from school to find out she had died thirty minutes before.
When Sidney was alone with her.
I remember the summer I spent with my uncle when I was ten. Things were good at home by then, but I still enjoyed being out in the world and away from all the memories our house held for a few days or weeks when I got the chance. My uncle’s place was entirely different than anything I’d ever known—a remote farm surrounded by woods, it was peaceful and beautiful, free of fear or worry.
I used to spend hours walking in the nearby woods, and one day when I came back to the house, my uncle stopped me as I was walking in. I had a tick on my neck. I think my uncle expected I was going to be upset about it, but I had been through much worse than getting bit by a bug. Still, he cautioned me not to move as he got ready to remove it with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
The trick, he said, was to make sure you got the whole thing when you pulled it. If you didn’t get close enough to the skin, you could pull off the body of the tick and leave the head. That, he said, could lead to an infection down the line. Almost as though he was disappointed I wasn’t more squeamish about it, he went on, his mouth twitching with a barely suppressed mischievous grin. He told me he had even heard stories of the tick surviving without its body. Sometimes, he said, the tick head would just keep on living and drinking from its victim. Even at ten I knew he was joking, but I always remembered the story. I think even then I knew he was unintentionally teaching me something important.
Everyone thinks that Sidney is fine. Our father will hear no bad word spoken about him—when I asked why Sidney was with Mama when she died, our father told me he had allowed it. That Sidney said he had something important to tell her and that he had been right outside the door the entire time my brother was in there with her. That there wasn’t anything mysterious or sinister about her death, she had just been sicker than anyone realized.
When I subtly ask Sidney’s friends how he’s been acting lately, they act like I’m the weird one. They say he’s been the same as always—awesome. I tried talking to his girlfriend about it, and at first she just looked confused. When I kept pressing, feeling sure she must have seen some sign of his wrongness, she started shaking her head and stood up to walk away. She said I was making her uncomfortable. I wanted to shout at her, to tell her that she should be fucking uncomfortable, because she was with a monster. But I held my tongue and told her I was sorry, that it was all just a bad joke on my part.
But, of course, it’s not a joke. Mr. Jinkies is still in my brother just like always. Whatever that Darrow man did, at most he weakened it. He might have gotten the body of the tick. But he somehow left the head, and that’s all that thing needs to live and control my brother. To make him kill our mother and corrupt our lives.
So this morning, I killed Sidney.
It wasn’t difficult. He had always pretended to love me and trust me since he was “cured”, and when I said I wanted to go out to our uncle’s farm, he acted happy to come with me. It was our farm now, anyway. Our uncle had died at the end of that same summer where he told me about the tick head, and while we didn’t get out there often, I still tried to go for walks in those woods every month or two.
I waited until we were near the edge of a tall cliff far back in the woods, one with a small but fast river rushing past some forty feet below. I struck him from behind with a rock, hoping the force of it would send him forward and off the edge. Instead, he wheeled backwards before falling down in the grass.
I had hit him in the back of the head, but clearly his brain was damaged some from the blow. He looked around confusedly, his right eye nearly black from its enlarged iris while his left eye fought to focus in on me. I thought he might curse me or try to attack, but instead he just sat there holding his head and crying.
“You have….have to fight it, Brian. I know it’s in you. I’ve suspected it…for a long time…Just…don’t…let it trick…you…” I was approaching him as he spoke, the sharp rock raised above my head. Seeming to understand that his words were having no effect, he stopped and lowered his eyes. “Please…don’t hurt anyone els…”
After I was done, I threw him off the cliff and into the water below. As I suspected, the current quickly carried him downriver into a series of sharp rocks that would help conceal his initial injuries. My story would be that we had taken separate paths while walking, and when I couldn’t find him after some time, I started searching for him. I’d been careful not to get any blood on me, and the rock was disposed of far away, so there is nothing to tie me to his death when they eventually find his body.
Besides, I doubted anyone was going to look into it that far anyway. He was a troubled boy, after all. Sure, he’d had a few good years, but who knew what demons he still harbored? Maybe he had committed suicide or maybe it was a tragic accident, but one thing was certain. His good younger brother would never have hurt him. Everyone knows what a good and caring guy I am. Always honest and thoughtful, never in trouble, graduating valedictorian in the fall. I have a sterling reputation.
I’ve made sure of it.
The only sad thing is that no one will appreciate the sacrifice I had to make in killing my own brother. They’ll never know the evil that I’ve purged from this world by doing what they were too weak or selfish to do. They’ll never realize I’m a hero.
But I guess that’s okay. I didn’t do it for the glory, and who knows, it may not be the last time I get to do something brave. Besides, I’m not stupid. I understand most people would think I murdered my brother rather than saving him and the world from a terrible monster. Those people can’t accept a world that bleeds outside the mundane boundaries of their narrow view of things. They don’t have the courage to see me as I am yet. But that’s all right.
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