The first thing you have to understand is that my brother was not born a killer. He wasn't raised a killer, either. He didn't skin cats, he didn't throw rocks. The only person he ever threatened with violence was me, and I knew he didn’t mean it. They say it must have been our father’s fault, that he must have been a horribly cruel man, to make John turn out so wrong. True, our dad was a raging alcoholic who burned himself to ashes while trying to make dinner, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. It hurts, when my neighbors give each other conspiratorial looks, or hint about how hard it must have been to be John’s sister, or wonder obliquely why no one noticed his sadism. Y’all had better be kind, because I'm not going to let some strangers on Reddit bad-mouth him, no matter what awful things you think he did. That’s the point of this post. To tell all of you the truth.
He was John Edward McDonald, and he hated his name with a burning passion. He wasn't a bad kid, but he was Trouble, like that, capitalized. Whenever he'd gone off and snuck somewhere he wasn't supposed to, or given an adult some extra sass, mama would yell his hated full name through the house.
"John Edward McDonald, you come here right this instant and apologize!" she would call out, with that disappointed tone of voice all mothers seem to master.
"Don't call me that, mama! I sound like a criminal, like goddamn John Wilkes Booth!" he would yell back from the far corner of his room where he always went to hide when he was in trouble, like clockwork.
Of course after that came the inevitable reproach about appropriate language. That was another thing about John, he had a dirty mouth like you wouldn't believe. It was instinctual to him, his tongue mixing up swears and unleashing them like a hurricane at anyone who happened to be nearby. It always threw people for a loop when they first met him, this blonde-haired little cherub cursing like a sailor on crack and making the bad words sound so natural that they were almost unnoticeable. Mama tried to train it out of him, she really did, but he had a stubborn streak a mile long and two miles wide.
I guess all of these stories about our childhood are my way of telling you that I didn't know, that there weren't any signs. I've heard family members of other murderers saying those same words like a mantra, like a benediction, like a desperate prayer to be absolved of guilt, and I don't know how true they are in this case. Maybe there were signs of what was to come; maybe I missed them. But I was certain then, as I am now, that there was nothing wrong with my brother beyond a god-awful sense of humor.
The first ripple in the pond, so to speak, came in the form of a phone call. When I heard the ringing, I almost didn’t pick up. I was settled in my fluffiest armchair, the one that always settles around me and makes it hard to get up again. My phone was all the way on the other side of the room, and I figured that there wouldn’t be any harm in calling back later. Now, I loved my little brother, I really do, but that boy had the biggest mouth on him. I was nice and settled in my big comfy chair, and I knew that if I started talking to him, I wouldn’t be able to get back to my show for an hour at least.
But… I answered. And he didn’t say anything. That was the strangest thing, first. John was always off like a rocket as soon as you gave him even a lick of attention, words tumbling out of his mouth like there wasn’t any room for them in his brain.
I thought he called me accidentally, at first. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I could hear, ever so faintly, his breathing on the end of the line, rapid and sort of choked, like there was something caught heavy in his throat.
“John?” I asked, laughing a little. The breathing got louder, faster, with a whimper twisting up the exhale every so often, but he still didn’t say a thing.
“John,” I said again, uncertain. “This ain’t funny.”
There was silence for a moment, and then he started moaning, not the type of fake-ass noise you get on porn sites but a real animal sound, like he was in too much pain to scream. As soon as I heard that, I was on the way out the door, not even bothering to grab my coat off the hook. I loved that coat, I wore it everywhere, even when it was hot as Satan’s asscheeks outside, but the only thought I had was for my little brother.
There were a couple years, in the 2008 recession, when mama spent every moment trying to keep a roof over our heads, and during that time I practically raised him. I made sure he ate something other than junk food and got his homework done, comforted him when he got bullied for his secondhand clothes. I still worried about him, even though by then we were both adults who lived miles apart. In my mind, John will always be the little boy that I built Legos with while mama was sobbing in the kitchen because those goddamn paper-shufflers, as she called them, had laid her off.
I knew him, and his pranks leaned more towards pelting strangers with snowballs. He wouldn’t do this to me unless he was really and truly hurt.
“John, I’m coming, stay with me,” I said into the phone, trying to decide whether to hang up and call 911 or get someone else to do it. The line was slowly filling with white noise, his groans being distorted into long wheezes and clicks that sunk downwards like a decaying oak tree.
He heaved in a great gasp of air, then whispered through the crackling static. “It wasn’t…”
“Don’t try and talk, it’s okay.” I tried to unlock my car, a beat-up
Honda that used to be painted blue but was so scraped up that you could
barely tell, with trembling hands. The key slipped out of my fingers.
John
swallowed, hard, and seemed to gather his strength. I finally got the
door unlocked and swerved down the street. The little speed-trap sign
flashed as I sped by it, slow down, and I pushed harder on the gas.
“It wasn’t me, I didn’t fucking do it,” he said, the static rising to nearly cover his last word. There was the sound of movement, a thump as the phone was dropped, and John screamed like he was being flayed.
The line went dead.
I called the police while I was still driving towards John’s apartment, knowing that I would get there before them, especially at the rate I was driving.
John lived in a run-down area, not quite the slums but certainly not the sort of place that you want to walk alone at night. The few people that I passed walked with purpose, their coats drawn tight around them.
His apartment was one of the few that actually looked inhabitable, with all the windows intact and a cheery little garden out front. His apartment had a copper knocker in the shape of a middle finger, which he’d found in a goodwill, then promptly told me to come over so I could see it. I lifted the knocker and let it fall, once, twice.
When John opened the door, I immediately smelled something awful, like milk gone bad, but a dozen times worse. Other than that, though, there didn’t seem to be anything out of place. He was wearing the sweater I’d given him for his birthday, his hair mussed like he’d just woken up and his glasses sitting askew on his nose.
He blinked slowly at me, like a lizard on a rock. “Hello, sister dearest.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, out of breath because of my run from my car to his door.
John smiled politely, folding his hands behind his back. “I’m afraid that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“John—” I paused. He continued to smile. “You don’t talk like that.”
I took a step back. He hadn’t cursed, not even once, in the entire conversation. John tossed out shit and damn as easy as breathing. I don’t think I’d ever heard him get through a sentence without a little bit of what mama called the devil’s tongue.
The man in front of me just kept on grinning.
“There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there?” I said. “Something really wrong.”
He didn’t respond.
I placed a hand on his shoulder, carefully. I could feel the coldness of his skin through his clothing.
“Look, just let me inside. We can figure this out.”
He stepped aside wordlessly, gesturing for me to enter, still with that smug fucking smile on his face. The door opened wide, and I made my way inside, turned the corner into the living room area.
My brother was lying dead on the couch, in a pool of blood, his throat ripped open. His roommate, a quiet man I’d only met once, was sprawled on the floor beneath him, just as dead. The smell of decay and rot was overpowering.
John’s throat looked strangely collapsed, and after a moment, I realized it was because there was a hole in it that extended deeper than just the cut that had killed him. His vocal cords were just gone, leaving skin dangling in ribbons and muscle shredded. I could see his spine.
Distantly, I heard the click of the door locking behind me.
“What?” I said, my voice faint.
“What,” he repeated, in a scratchy, gnarled approximation of my voice. “This ain’t funny,”
I realized what I should have known from the start. This was not my brother.
“Just let me inside. We can figure this out,” he said. “There’s something wrong with you.”
With every sentence, he sounded more and more like me, the interference disappearing from his words.
I stumbled backwards, away from not-John, trying to say something, to deny the whole situation, anything, but nothing came out. I tried again, gaping like a fish, and couldn’t take a breath. Across the room, not-John opened his mouth, wider than should have been possible, unhinging his jaw like a snake. His teeth ended in sharp points, and his tongue hung limply against his chin. His jaw was hanging almost to his chest by then, and I could see the inside of his throat, exposed by his stretching face. His vocal cords looked strangely out of place, like they didn’t belong with the rest of the macabre scene, and with a surge of nausea, I knew that they had come from my brother.
I clawed at my throat, trying to get air, as his mouth opened wider and wider. It was like I was choking on nothing, the oxygen being stolen from my lungs before I could use it. With black spots forming in my vision, I wrenched a painting off the wall, a landscape that John had done himself years ago. Tears blurring my vision, I drew on my schoolyard frisbee practice and threw it at not-John as hard as I could. It spun right into his open mouth, bashing against his tongue and knocking against his teeth. The corner hit the back of his throat before rebounding onto the ground, and he gagged. Suddenly, I could breathe again, and I ran for the door.
Not-John hissed at me, and blurred forward in a flash of blood and too-long limbs. He grabbed me by the back of the neck before I could react, his fingernails digging into my skin, and covered my face with his dangling, elongated mouth. I could feel his teeth digging into my forehead and my chin, pressing down. Blood was flowing down the sides of my neck and towards my ears as he tried to crush my head like a grape with the strength of his bite.
Screaming, I flailed blindly for a weapon. My hand closed on something small and heavy, and I slammed it against the side of not-John’s head.
Music started playing, blaring loud enough to shake the building, and the weight of not-John pinning me down disappeared. I thought I was hallucinating at first, but when I blinked the blood of my eyes, I saw him writhing on the floor, frantically clamping his hands over his ears.
The thing that I’d grabbed had been a computer, still open with the music paused, and when I hit him with it, the sound had turned back on. His skin was flexing and pulsing, like he was being torn apart from the inside, and blood was leaking out of his pores. But not-John still got to his feet, laboriously, his bones cracking with every movement. He snatched the lamp off the ground and spun it between his hands, limping towards me. One of his feet didn’t seem to work, so he dragged it along as a dead weight.
I squared up, staying loose and low, like I’d taught my brother when
we were still in school. He’d been having some issues with bullies. In
the end, he didn’t even have to throw any punches, just threaten.
Not-John raised his lamp and I got ready to fight.
Of course, that’s when the cops arrived. They put a dozen bullets into him within two seconds, and he went down hard, still twitching but too weak to move. I was pretty attached to my life, so I got down low and put my hands up quick. They screamed at me anyways, told me to put my face on the floor, and one of them cuffed me while her partner waved a gun in my face.
Later, after I’d repeated the story half a dozen times and spent a day in a holding cell, they let me go. I didn’t tell them about the voice-shifting monster, of course, just that my brother had called me and when I arrived, I’d been attacked.
The paramedic who tended to my bite wounds told me that she’d never seen anything like them. She wanted to know what happened. I told her I had an encounter with a wild animal. It wasn’t far from the truth.
John’s body, the one that I’d seen in the apartment, had never been found. They went back and looked again, after I told them that I’d seen it, but the only thing they could identify on the couch was a strange red slime that smelled like sulfur.
In analysis, not-John had the same DNA as my brother, and so the official story got told. According to them, my brother had gone insane, killed his roommate, and tried to kill me. The biggest news that had ever hit my town before that was Ms. Davies committing tax evasion, so the murder was in the headlines for weeks. When I tried to tell my friends that it hadn’t been John, they just looked at me with pity, so I stopped trying. It never got picked up by any major newspapers, thank god for small mercies. It was just another murder, after all.
My cousin works at the funeral home. She told me yesterday that not-John’s body had disappeared. She thinks it got stolen. I don't believe that.
It’s amazing, the sort of things that can be bought when you have three thousand dollars worth of savings and nothing else to lose. I’ve got a couple assault rifles by the door, a machete hanging in the kitchen, a dozen bluetooth speakers, and a flamethrower hanging on the hook with my best coat. If the thing that killed John comes knocking, that bitch is going to get grilled like a cheap hamburger.
My brother was John Edward McDonald, and he deserves to be remembered.
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