Dead Shade: A Short Horror Story

BROTHER’S KEEPER A SHORT HORROR STORY By Richard Denoncourt Copyright © 2012 Richard Denoncourt Smashwords Edition Cover design by Richard Denoncourt Cover photo: “Spooky Stairway to Dark Cellar” by rdegrie @iStockPhoto Cover photo: “My Eye” by BaronBrian @Flickr This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be pirated or re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient or use a legitimate eBook lending service. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. BROTHER’S KEEPER During dinner I would often hear my brother moving around inside the vents. If the food smelled especially good that night, he would make a scraping, scuttling noise like a pair of oversized rats wrestling. He did this to make us feel bad for him, and sometimes it worked (except on me because I always felt bad for him). One evening, after a few drinks, my father got up, unlocked the stainless steel grate, and threw in half of his pork chop. A chewy, smacking sound followed. “Thank you, Dad,” my brother said in a meek voice much raspier and smaller than any of us remembered it being. My father was silent as he sat back down at the table. My mother sat watching her food, also keeping quiet for reasons I still don’t understand. They could have said anything to my brother, just a single word to make him feel like he was still a part of the family. Instead, they held fast to the rules. You see, this was all a part of my brother’s punishment. I used to play in the basement with my brother, whose name I’m not allowed to say anymore. Cops and Robbers, Hide and Seek, Wild Injuns, and other games that often left things down in the musty room either toppled over or broken. Once my mother noticed that we had chipped an old hand-painted vase she had inherited from her mother. She told my father, and he locked my brother in the basement and me in the attic for a number of days. I finally confessed to the crime on the condition that my brother be let out a week before me. I expected him to be grateful, but instead, he didn’t talk to me for three whole days. I guess he wanted us to be side by side during our punishments, perfectly equal in all respects. But equal we weren’t. I was always the better student, and so my parents favored me. I came home once with straight A’s on my report card, while my brother received a D in science. To teach him a lesson, my parents threw me a party and invited several kids from the neighborhood. My father handcuffed my brother to a pipe in the tool shed behind our house. Through a crack in the door, he could see everyone gathered in the backyard. I tried to sneak some cake over to him but couldn’t find a hole big enough to pass my hand through. When I looked into the crack at just the right angle so as not to block the sun, I saw a shard of light illuminate his face like the gleam off a kitchen knife. His face was still, the one visible eye small and sharp—cruelly alert. I didn’t know what to say. I walked back to the party and tried to have fun without him, but it was useless. I kept thinking about his eye. The time came for my brother to join the other high school seniors in planning for prom. He invited a girl who was also a senior. I can’t remember her name now, after all these years. When she said yes, my brother couldn’t believe his luck. But she truly liked him. I think it was because lately he’d become tougher. He’d beat on any boy who challenged him, and had become the best tackler in the football games we all played during recess. His eyes took on a harder, narrower quality, and his palms and knuckles became like leather. “She’s got nice big ones,” he told me. “You shoulda seen this shirt she was wearing in class the other day.” He put his hands up his shirt, poked his index fingers outward, and skipped around the room, flopping his fingers and giggling like a girl. I laughed until an ache developed in my side. My father watched the entire display from the kitchen. We hadn’t known he was home. My father had changed over the years as well. He’d grown quieter, more secretive and watchful. His sideburns had turned gray and his face was always red and bloated, like someone choking on a bit of food. His biker’s mustache hung low and black around his lips like the wings of an old blackbird. After watching my brother prance around the living room, he walked in, calmly asked me to step out, and closed the door. My brother didn’t get to go to prom. He spent the next week locked in the bathroom with our dog, Ramsey. After the first five days of not eating, Ramsey became vicious and attacked my brother. It was only after my mother saw the missing finger that she convinced my father to let them out. That night, when no one was looking, I kicked Ramsey in the side and told him he was a bad dog. I told my brother about it, but he didn’t think it was necessary to punish the dog. Ramsey had been hungry. He had done what it was in his nature to do. My brother never showed any of the anger toward me that I always imagined he felt. Not once did he get jealous because our parents loved me more. But one day, unexpectedly, he decided he wanted to set his science teacher’s car on fire. When I asked him why, he said it was because she had failed him. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I knew well enough what would happen if my father were to see an F on his report card. I guess my brother figured, if he was going to be punished anyway, he might as well go out with a bang. Why did I agree to help him? I’ll never know for sure. Maybe I was worried I would never get to see him again. At least if we did this together, we would be punished together. And then neither of us would have to feel alone. We snuck out that night with a few bottles of gasoline and some white rags we had torn from our bed sheets. His science teacher lived over a hill near a well-lit highway. We crept like bandits, alone even though the whole time I felt like I had an army behind me. That’s how I always felt when my brother and I played our tricks and games together. When we reached the driveway, we each took a bottle and lit the rags. My brother raised his hand in a salute as the rag burned close to his side. The smell of gasoline was overpowering. “It’s been an honor to serve by your side, soldier,” he said. Tears welled up in my eyes. “Thank you, sir,” I told him, swallowing a huge lump in my throat. It was beautiful. The car lit up in the night like a pyre in a religious ceremony. My brother stuck one fist up in the air and held it there, tears streaming down his face. As we ran back to the house, I felt more alive than I had ever felt. More alive even than when my parents had taken me (but not my brother) to the roller coaster at Alamo Ranch. That night I didn’t care what happened next. For the first time in my life I didn’t think about the consequences. My mother was the one who received the phone call. A neighbor had witnessed the burning, had recognized my face from the photo that had appeared in the paper the day I won first place in the school spelling bee. We were caught, and it was all my fault. My father rounded the whole family into the living room. My mother followed close behind, a martini in one hand, eyes passive and blank. She had given up dealing with us a long time ago, choosing instead to go along with my father in all matters. I pleaded with him. “What about college?” I said. “He has to go to college. And I can’t drop out of school.” My father watched us with a face more taut than usual. His mustache hung like an executioner’s hood over the thin, angry lips that would decide our fate. My brother got up from the couch. “Let me take care of this,” he said, looking down at me. “This better be good,” my father said. My brother lifted his chin. “It’s time. I’m ready to be a man and deal with the consequences of my actions.” Silently, I mouthed the words, It’s been an honor, soldier. My father asked me to leave the room. Hours later, when they came back into the kitchen, my brother winked at me. My father told my mother he had some arrangements to make with the school, and then he headed straight for the phone. “Go to your bedroom and stay there,” he told me. My brother gave me a sad, reassuring smile and a nod. I went up there and shut the door and sat for a long time in the dark. He didn’t get to go to college, but I eventually did—and I excelled. I did it in his honor. My brother made a sacrifice so I could live life the way I was supposed to live it, and in return, I did the best I could to make him proud. Whenever I come home for the holidays, my parents embrace me with the same untainted warmth I’d received as a child. It was as if the car fire had never happened—for me, at least. I ache to see my brother, to shake his hand and look him in the eye, but it’s against the rules. And who am I to challenge them? After all, my brother was the one who made them. I know he’s still there, in the vents. He will always be there. But he will never be alone. Every summer I come home instead of taking intern positions like all my friends. I talk to him through the grate in the corner of my room. It’s not much, but I guess it could be worse. They could have locked him in the basement where we wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Sometimes I consider moving to the city and forgetting about my family’s terrible secret altogether. But I know I’d never be able to live with myself if I did that. So I get down on my stomach and whisper into those abysmal vents. I tell him stories as if he were a child. He always asks for more in that high-pitched, scratchy voice of his. One night I happened to be looking through the grate as a sliver of light from a passing helicopter slid across the wall. I saw his face, and I wish I hadn’t. Those small, inhuman eyes, blind from all his tunnel-dark years, and his misshapen, hairless head! God, how I wish I hadn’t seen it! The time between my visits grows longer as the years go by. I hope my brother knows I still think of him, just as I know he’ll always be there, listening in the dark. Read on for a sample of TRAINLAND, a horror thriller about a grieving father who follows the ghost of his four-year-old daughter into a New York City subway tunnel, and discovers another world… TRAINLAND By Richard Denoncourt Chapter 1 When Jack Devins opened his eyes to find himself leaning over the tracks, a subway train coasting toward him fast enough to kill, his first thought was: Not again. At the last second, blinded by the train’s headlights, he flung himself backward out of harm’s way. Safe by a hair. He’d been lucky the last three times. But how much longer until his luck finally ran out? The train whipped by in a smear of metal and light, finally slowing with a grinding screech that set his teeth on edge. He had almost died just now, and to think of what he would have left behind: a family in ruins, a life chugging along in the breakdown lane, a well-paying job he hated with every ounce of his soul. What was left of his soul, anyway. Not to mention the questions he would have left unanswered—like these blackouts, for instance. This was number four, and each one was worse than the one before it. How many did he have left before the end came crashing upon him, erasing him from this shitty existence forever? Picking himself up, he glanced through the windows and saw empty seats. The whole train was empty, not a living soul anywhere to be seen, including on the platform. Above him, the night sky was open and black, as if the world had been swallowed up by a beast. He was outdoors on one of those elevated train platforms over the street. Weird. He hadn’t used one of these in years. Where was he? “Stay clear o’ the closin’ doors,” came a voice over the speakers, and the train was off again, on its path toward the lights of Manhattan, where it too would be swallowed up. Strange that a New York City train would be completely empty. He looked at his watch. Of course. 1:20. It was always 1:20 when he came out of a blackout. It had been exactly 1:20 the first time, when he’d woken up on a bench in that station up in Harlem. It had been 1:20 the second time, when he had snapped awake standing in front of the security booth, a police officer frowning at him above a half-eaten hot dog. And it had been 1:20 —always 1-fucking-20—the third time, when he had opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on his back inside the F train at the Roosevelt Island stop, a half dozen people bent over him to see what was wrong. Tonight, the station sign told him he was above Steinway St. He vaguely remembered where that was. Somewhere in Queens, not too deep, only a few stops away from Manhattan. But he lived in Brooklyn, which was all the way on the other side of the city. He picked up his briefcase, realized he was still dressed in his suit and tie from work, and headed toward the stairs. He was forgetting something. Kelly’s picture. ... - tailieumienphi.vn