[#052] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 3 - Jake is Gone)

You told me not to do it. You were right.

I shouldn't have answered George's phone. I shouldn't have read the text messages.

It was 4AM Wednesday morning when I caved and snapped the phone open. It turns out the Overwatch theme wasn't just his ringtone; it was also his text message notification. I guess he wasn't feeling very creative when he picked them out. Waiting inside the phone were five texts, one for each morning the thing went off since I first tailed my cousins to the farmhouse last Friday.

• "KEVIN: Jake scared you off, didn't he? I'm not gonna give you shit, but you seriously don't want to get involved in this."
• "KEVIN: I know that's you with George's phone, dude. Please don't hate us. It's for your own good. We don't like this either."
• "KEVIN: Just say something, please. I need to talk to someone. I feel like this is all I do now. Itd be okay to just"
• "KEVIN: Hurt's bad... We need hlep and I don't care what Jake says family sticks together please"
• "JAKE: Dont u fuckin dare"

That was the final straw. I just knew they were in some shit. And I realize you guys don't know them. Hell, I barely know them. But Kevin's right: Family sticks together, even when they act like shits. Kevin and Jake needed help, and I didn't want to get them arrested if I could get them out instead.

And, yeah. I realize now how dumb that sounds. You told me not to go back to the farmhouse...

But I went back to the farmhouse.

I couldn't afford to call off again, so I delayed the trip until late afternoon. My wheels hit the ugly pavement by four, and I figured I had several hours to pop in and have a look even if my cousins decided to visit on their off-day. I even packed a survival kit full of water bottles, a pen knife, and...

Did you guys know you can just buy a crowbar? They're not even expensive.

Fear was my best guide, honestly. I probably wouldn't have remembered all those blind, bushy turns if I weren't so intimidated by them on the first trip. I did get lost for a while, but I looped around and somehow ended up reaching my destination from the opposite direction. The old, leaning farmhouse still perched like a crooked crown above the dead slope of a lawn, only now mine was the only car in sight.

I sat at the base of the rise and stared up at it for a few minutes, waiting out my own nausea and feeling at the same time like a kid with keys to the candy shop: For all the terror of the last week, I felt like something absolutely delicious and necessary finally lay within my grasp: A sense of closure. Answers. Rebellion?

Yeah, I admit I wanted to stick it to Jake. I wanted to know what was going on and why they couldn't be honest with me. On some level I think I secretly wanted in on whatever crazy secret they had, just so I could keep a crazy secret too. As long as they weren't murdering people or whatever.

When I eventually headed up to the house, I found the front door was still locked solid and barricaded on the other side. I thought about peeking through the window again, but the fear of somebody standing there staring back at me turned me right around and got me looking for the cellar entrance again. I scoured the tall, dry grass for almost half an hour before I found it, in large part because I kept glancing back at the road to make sure Jake's pickup hadn't pulled into sight.

My whole brain flipped a little when I found the cellar doors hanging ajar, and I realized after a moment the boards warped too far to shut completely. Figuring the trampling I gave them last Friday was to credit for the easy entrance, I pat myself on the back the entire time I spent pulling the heavy doors apart and peering down into the musty darkness beneath me.

Weird, splotchy mold laced the cinder block walls holding back the Earth. An awful smell like sawdust soaked with piss filled the air, and I had to crouch and shine George's tiny phone screen on the narrow steps beneath my sneakers because, for some reason, I had thought to pack five granola bars and absolutely zero flashlights. The pathway split off to the left twenty feet ahead, a single branch leading past a row of three filthy ponchos on hooks to a padlocked door. Nerves pushed me forward first, up a staircase winding into a dirty kitchen, and suddenly I found myself inside the farmhouse proper.

Stacks of takeout cartons littered the floor because the only table was absolutely covered with more beer bottles than I had ever seen in the rest of my life combined. Whatever Jake and Kevin -- and, presumably, George -- had been up to here apparently demanded more from them than they could handle sober. The blistering heat melded with the swarm of flies buzzing over the mess to form a barrage of offensive scents and sounds, and I choked on the stench just pushing toward the exit.

The only door from the kitchen lead out into the hall, and I realized I was retracing Kevin's footsteps from my last visit. From this side, I could clearly see the heavy chest of drawers shoved up against the house's front door, its surface coated edge to edge with dust save two clean handprints right in the center where someone had pushed themselves up to see out the window.

Kevin's handprints. If the texts hadn't confirmed it, these did: He definitely saw me.

The fact the chest still weighed against the door in their absence confirmed my cousins always entered the house through the cellar. I played my hands across the handles of the drawers and found they came away clean of dust. The top drawer stuck shut, with something hard jammed against the frame. The lower drawer pulled right open, and at least a dozen dirty knives and hammers lay scattered among the rusty rags inside. My guts leapt up and wrapped around my throat as I slammed it shut as quick as I could, hard enough to knock the chest up and slam it back down into the hardwood floor. The sound of it echoed through the house like a car crash, amplified by the long, empty hall behind me.

Somewhere far below, a voice cried out in response.

Hours passed in my head as I stood with my hands frozen in a claw-shape before me, inches from tossing the heavy chest away from the door and bolting for the safety of my car. I craned my neck and pointed my ears at the hall, straining for some evidence I was imagining the long, mournful sobs rising from the basement. They had to be inhumanly loud, or at least amplified by the uncanny acoustics of the house.

Finally I heard it again, and I followed it to the end of the hall because I needed the truth. I followed it all the way down the stairs and into the branching path, all the way to the door with the padlock. The crowbar leapt from my pack before I knew what I was doing, and...

It took forever, even as old as the lock was. I found myself pounding on the door and yelling to the voice inside, begging them for the calm I couldn't show myself, and I cursed and spat as I pulled and pulled at the lock until, after what felt like ages beating the crap out of my arms, it snapped off with an explosive crack.
The door must have been airtight, because the room inside curled with heavy smoke as though a wildfire blazed in the basement of this tiny house. I dropped the crowbar and spilled across the floor to escape the acrid cloud whirling out into the hall, and the sobbing grew louder and closer as I climbed to my knees until...
Until a man appeared through the haze. But he wasn't just a man.

A rusty liquid bled through the cracks in his bronze flesh, flesh that hardened and crackled like imitation leather as it shifted. The smoke trail filling the hallway with the pissy sawdust smell billowed out of his sagging mouth as he gazed at me with his round, yellow eyes and drooled. He reached out across the darkness toward me with a hand tipped in mangled nails filed into points, and his pitiful, deathly cries echoed down my spine and weighed on me like an anesthetic.

I couldn't move. I could only watch as the man slouched toward me, the claws of his left hand dragging trenches through the concrete floor beneath him with some hideous strength. I stared until the cellar doors burst open and heavy boots thundered down the steps. I woke to my name, screamed in my ear by someone looming over me in dirty jeans and a band shirt. He lifted me physically off the ground and shoved me toward the cellar doors, and I ran until I collapsed in the driver's seat of my car and shot off down the road.
George's phone didn't ring that night, or the next night after.

Mom just got off the phone with my aunt. Jake and Kevin haven't come home in days, but the cops found Jake's truck this morning all smashed up off the road five minutes from a certain farmhouse. It looked like he had wrapped it around a tree, and then that tree got up and left.

And another thing: One last text arrived on George's phone this morning:

• "KEVIN: Hurt is bad, and now he's seen you. Jake's gone. Hurt will find you after he gets me too, but he just wants to feel pain. Doont be afraid to go crazy, you cant kill him :)"

I'm not sure I understand it all, but I can figure what he means by "Jake's gone." I think I'm in this now, whatever this is. I think I have to go back to the house and help Kevin, or... I don't know. Maybe this should be my last update. I should just rest a while and let Kevin sort this out.

I think I'm starting to feel a little sick anyway.

[#051] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 2 - I Followed Jake)

Let me address this first: I couldn't decide what to do with the phone. I read every comment from the last thread (except the weird political tangent). Some folks thought I should leave well enough alone and preserve the memory of my brother, while many others begged me to indulge their curiosity.
A precious handful of comments were actually concerned about... Whatever was happening on Jake's end of the call. You guys are saints for that, but...

I know this sounds selfish, but I just don't know if I have the stomach to root through it. Whatever George was into, he was still my brother. He asked me so many times to just toss his phone that I'm starting to think it was an honest request framed as a joke he repeated to keep the idea fresh in my head.

That's not to say I don't have anything new for you.

It was Friday when I posted the first thread, so I assumed Jake and his brother, Kevin, were going back to whatever it was they did with George in the old days. Curiosity got the better of me and I may have conducted a bit of sleuthing. See, I really only speak to them at Christmas, so I didn't have any excuse to come over. That also means they haven't seen me driving the ancient Stratus I bought in March, so they wouldn't recognize my wheels if I played the detective and set up a little stake-out like in the movies.

So I called in to work and drove my car the seven miles to their house. I parked a little down the street, poised myself to dive behind the dashboard if somebody glanced my way, and I waited.

And I waited... And I waited...

I must have spent at least four hours staring at Jake's old junker pickup. It wasn't until about eight when the front door finally opened and the man himself walked out and sat down on his porch.

Jake's a lean, scruffy-looking dude. He was the only kid I knew with facial hair in the ninth grade, and by graduation he'd abused his gift by growing the kind of filthy, ragged beard you'd expect from a man who wrote manifestos in a cave somewhere. He wore a dirty band shirt and dark, almost black jeans. It looked like the kind of stuff you'd wear to paint a house.

And, at that exact moment, he looked like he was about to break down crying.

I wasn't sure what I expected. After our brief "chat" on the phone, I had convinced myself he was up to something terrible. But I had trouble believing a lack of empathy from the look on Jake's face just then. Between his wrinkled clothes, the twisted mane of hair on his head, and his red, sleepless eyes, he gave the impression of a man used up and spat out.

So there he sat, the villain who had scared the shit out of me a couple weeks ago, drained of what little color he ever had and simply waiting for the end with his head in his hands. It actually kind of reminded me of my brother's... You know. Anyway...

George's phone sat in my pocket, and I have to admit: I seriously considered just calling Jake to feign a coincidental interest in his well-being right there. Maybe I'm being naive. Maybe it'll be the death of me.
Either way, I never had the chance. Jake only sat a moment or two before Kevin stepped out of the house behind him and helped him to his feet. The two of them made their way to Jake's pickup, equally exhausted in appearance, and they climbed inside and began to drive off in the opposite direction without so much as a glance down the street.

If they really were up to no good, I was starting to wonder if their participation was involuntary. The biggest roadblock to following up on the call (aside from honoring my brother's wishes) was the slim and still unbelievable chance that my cousins would turn out to be some kind of murderous gangsters or something. The notion they might be victims themselves compelled my curiosity and...

And I followed them.

I feel like movies actually taught me something here. We drove for almost an hour, looping around sharp turns and over hills, passing through those bushy country-road intersections where you can't tell who's coming from the cross street until you're caught in the middle. I lost sight of their truck several times, and I had to make a few lucky guesses when I picked a direction. Twice I came around a corner to find them stopped too close ahead to avoid notice, but, as I'm starting to realize is actually pretty common in life, my cousins weren't really paying enough attention to the world outside their heads to realize they had a tail.
They pulled off the road entirely almost an hour out of town, driving straight down a pair of neat tire tracks crushed into the grass like they were retracing steps they'd driven again and again for years. The land rose up ahead of them, and at the very top stood a derelict farmhouse looming like a Jenga tower just before the final turn.

I figured this was the end of the line, so I let the road carry me further ahead to avoid suspicion before turning around and doubling back. Sure enough, the old pickup sat empty at the base of the hill. I parked my Stratus about a five minute hike away because, again, I've seen some movies, and I began my journey to the house by swallowing about a gallon of terrifying emotions I wouldn't admit to under oath.

The trees clustered around the road didn't grow up the hill, so the record summer heat had already beaten the long, unsheltered grass growing on the slope into a crunchy, straw-colored death. I stepped as carefully as I could, but the rise ran so steep I was more concerned with my footing than the noise my sneakers made.
Nobody survives a spooky story with a sprained ankle, after all.

Summer spent a lot of wrath on the house too, stripping off most of the baby blue paint and punching holes through the boarded windows and roof with that old Ohio windstorm fury. I circled the house a few times with what probably looked like an interpretative dance, crouch-walking and pressing myself to the walls and corners like a cartoon cat burglar. After my third pass without any sign of activity and no other obvious point of entry, I laid my hand on the handle and watched the whole screen door pop off the battered hinges and smack into the concrete porch with a loud thud.

I froze where I stood and screwed my eyes shut, waiting for some heavy boots to come pounding down the hall and... Nothing happened.

I gently leaned the screen door against the wall and turned the knob on the proper door beneath, only to discover it was locked solid. As in, the door didn't even have enough space to wiggle in its frame. It felt as though something heavy had been pushed up against the other side, and, as I stood up on my tiptoes to try to angle a view through the tiny window set into the top, a shape pulled around the far corner of the hall inside.
Kevin glanced up and met my eyes.

I barely had time to process what was happening before my legs took over and sent me barreling down the slope. At one point my feet made contact with a pair of large wooden planks like cellar doors hidden in the grass, rattling beneath my weight and threatening to break open. I'm lucky I didn't trip and roll all the way down into the road, but I managed to make it back to my car and back on the path home before I took another conscious breath.

My heart nearly beat its way out of my chest as I tried to parse what I'd seen. Kevin was wearing some kind of yellow poncho, which I've have never seen anybody wear in real life regardless of the weather. Brown liquid like rust dripped off it, and it looked like he was just glancing up from some long piece of gleaming metal in his hands when I bolted.

I wish I could pretend he didn't see me. I tried to convince myself he might have played it off as his imagination or a squirrel crawling across the door but...

Well, at around four the next morning, as I was finally starting to drift to sleep after tossing and turning and throwing up three times from anxiety, a tinny song blasted across my bedroom and woke me. It was the Overwatch theme, buzzing from the surface of my dresser.

George's phone was ringing. And it rang again the night after that and the next night after that, at the same exact time.

I still haven't answered.

[#050] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 1)

I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died.

He used to blow a lot of time on 4Chan, so I figured he picked it up from them. George was the sort of desperate social sponge who sopped up all the attitudes around him for acceptance. He wasn't a bad person at heart, though I'll never forget the time I heard him drop the N-word in a game of Overwatch because he lost to a team of six dudes playing the same character.

And let's be clear: George was white as snow. Especially after a few months on chemo.

His traitorous body only carried him past the computer desk on Friday nights, when he'd go out with a couple of our cousins. Some days he wouldn't come back until Saturday afternoon, and he would never tell us where he'd been. Mom stopped freaking out after the first few times, and we both just kind of figured he was drinking to get his mind off all the vomiting and hairloss.

But that's how we got by for months. Right up until the one Wednesday morning last month when he woke up spewing chunky, dark blood down his chest. We drove him to the hospital and he stayed the night, but everything went south fast. I was dumb enough to go home for some fucking pills I thought he'd want, and I came back to hear... That I'd missed him on his way out. Mom told me he'd asked for me, and I locked myself in my room for three days when we got home.

Anyway... The hospital put everything he brought with him in a bag and called us to come get it about a week later. Mom had somehow gone back to work at this point, so I had to pick it up and bring it back to our house. I hadn't left it on the kitchen table more than a minute before the Overwatch theme started buzzing inside, and I reached in and pulled out his old, shitty flip phone. It was a Friday evening and the name on the screen read "Jake," one of our cousins and George's drinking buddies who apparently hadn't heard yet. So I just sat there for a minute on the couch with my late brother's ringing phone in my hand trying to figure out how to answer it.

Then I opened the phone, pushed the green button, and nearly dropped it when I heard the ruckus on the other end.

This piercing, wailing sob broke through the tinny speaker, punctuated by something like a hammer pounding on a metal spike. A voice I could barely make out whispered into the receiver, "Geooooooorge, it's almost time! Better hurry!"

And then I did the second dumbest thing of my life: I spoke up. "Jake? Dude, what the hell are you doing?"
The laughter on the other end choked to a halt, and right away I heard the sound of heavy boots pounding on concrete. The cries in the background grew distant, and the sound of a slamming door muffled them almost entirely.

At last, Jake responded. He asked me what I was doing with George's phone, and my dumbfounded brain just blurted out everything at once: George's passing and how hard mom was taking it, and how I'd left at the wrong time and I was sorry we hadn't called him. For a long minute, all I could hear was the faintest trace of whatever Jake had going on behind the door on the other end.

When he finally spoke, he didn't curse or apologize for my loss or for weirding me out and blasting his creepy shit on the line. Jake didn't ask me when the funeral was or how George felt when he passed.
He simply told me to burn the phone "for your own good." Then he hung up.

I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died.

Now I'm starting to wonder.

[#049] Lucky Number Thirteen

I was just passing through the kitchen to top off my drink around 8:30 in the evening when I noticed the man waiting in my backyard. He stood on a mound of fresh dirt at the edge of my property, little more than a silhouette thanks to the day's last light pouring through the trees behind him.

I downed a gulp of whiskey, shrugged at him, and paced back to the living room.

He was still out there two hours later when I got up to take a piss. By then it was too dark to see his face, but I figured I'd seen enough already. I pulled the backdoor open and racked the shotgun I picked up from the corner, nice and loud where he could see it.

He simply waited.

Another two showed up by midnight on their own mounds, and I hit the switch for the floodlights in the back so I could see 'em better. Their clothes were filled with holes like moths or maybe worms had eaten through them, and their faces shriveled pale and yellow where the blood had drained out long ago. The first one to show looked the closest to normal, like he'd just climbed out of bed with his messy, wild hair and his untucked shirt... And the knife handle sticking out of his chest.

I sat down on the swing on my back porch and waited, one leg and two barrels of buckshot folded across my lap. I took another sip of warm Jack and waited out the dead, who soon began to claw their way in ever greater numbers from the mounds of upturned Earth they scattered across the backyard.

No matter how far away I buried them, they always found their way back.

Burrowing through the ground until dawn and whittling the light away in fresh graves, each and every one of my dozen victims slowly clawed their way back to me. And once they arrive, they always wait for more. They won't strike until they're all here. They won't leave anybody out, so long as each one of them craves revenge.

Something tells me that night is almost here. I've tried to shoot 'em, cut 'em up, burn 'em down, but they just keep rising. I've tried moving, but they only follow. And now I'm counting eleven monsters waiting in the backyard and one more sitting on the porch with his whiskey and his shotgun, all just waiting for the end.

All just waiting for lucky number thirteen.