Brother (29 page)

Mom and Dad now smiled for the camera with only the little girl between them, a Christmas tree blazing behind them. But Mom's smile was distant, and Dad looked like he was faking it. Eventually, as though succumbing to their sorrow, neither parent appeared in the pictures at all. The photos only featured a dark-haired girl. A shot of her on the swings at school. Another of her at a birthday party at a pizza place. Each one showed her age in succession until, coming to one where the girl was maybe ten or eleven, Michael could no longer pull his gaze away. There was something terrifyingly familiar about the girl's face, about her smile.

The master bedroom was nothing special—a chest of drawers, a few bedside tables, and a bed that was halfway undone. The comforter rested half on and half off the mattress. Michael looked away from the bed, the woman's panicked expression flashing through his head. A photograph of the little boy occupied one of the bedside tables. Another glass-housed pillar candle sat beside it, almost completely burned away.

Michael stalked across the hallway to another door—this one closed—and peeked his head inside. The room was dark, illuminated only by moonlight, yet he could see right away that it belonged to a girl—the one in the photos, all grown up. Various band posters covered the walls. A white, black, and red striped comforter was pulled across the bed, and pillows of varying sizes were propped up against the headboard. A dresser with a large mirror sat against one of the walls. Its top was littered with small trinkets, a stack of eight-track tapes, a few hardcover novels, a jewelry box, another photo.

It was this picture that made him lose his breath. His fingers crumpled the note in his hand as the world faded in on itself. Everything but that photo blurred.

Alice and Lucy smiled into the camera, their arms around each other's shoulders. Alice's hair was chopped into a pixie cut. She beamed at him through the glass of the picture frame.

Michael didn't get it. He couldn't put it together. His mind reeled around the details, refusing to put them in the right order, shielding him from the truth beneath a haze of confusion. But clarity eventually moved in, burning the haze away, leaving ­Michael gaping at the photograph in front of him.

He stumbled out of the room, his gaze now snagging on a picture in the hall—Mom again, a golden
M
shining in the hollow of her throat.

The woman they had abducted.

Screaming in the backyard, struggling for life.

Michael dragging her down the basement steps.

Hanging her upside down.

Cutting her throat.

Bleeding her dry.

He pressed a hand to the wall, steadying himself, sending a few pictures of a younger Alice to the floor. He tottered down the hall and back into the living room. Stopping to grab hold of the back of the couch, he shot a look to the open front door, noticing the entryway table he had missed upon entering the house. There, upon that long, skinny table, was nothing short of a shrine to the little boy who had disappeared from under this roof. The table was packed full of framed photographs—some of just the boy, others of him and his parents. A carefully arranged candle garden sat upon a metal plate in the center of the display. The largest pillar was stamped with a scripted
M
in gold relief—a perfect match to the necklace Mom had worn.

M for Michael,
Misty whispered into his ear.

We don't talk much,
Alice reminded him.

Welcome home,
Ray told him.

Michael stared at the photograph, at the golden
M
he had buried with Misty Dawn upon that hill. He tore away from the candles and spun around to look at the living room, suddenly hit by a sense of something he didn't understand. A memory he couldn't place. The scent of something sweet, like maple syrup and pine. The vague recollection of that fireplace decked in evergreen and Christmas lights. The television playing Saturday morning cartoons. The earthy smell of soot.

When he looked back to the picture, the little boy's face didn't belong to a stranger, but to the person he knew best.

He fled the house and into the front yard, his heart hammering, nausea taking over. The heat punched him in the chest. He had to squat in the grass, his fingers digging into the soil.

This had been his house.

She had been his mother.

The woman he had taped up and forced into the trunk of Ray's car had been
his mother
.

Please, Michael, don't . . .

A flash of the basement.

Of latching the delicate gold chain around Misty's neck.

Of Rebel's leper grin as he refilled Michael's bowl with a second helping of . . .

Oh God.

Hot vomit spewed from his throat, splashing across the grass and the tips of his boots. His stomach cramped, doubling him over. He threw up again as tears ran down his face, streaking his cheeks.

He cried out into the night, his yell a wounded animal's wail.

Alice . . . she was his sister—a relation that Rebel had purposefully sought out and twisted in his favor. The girl who had finally made Michael wish for more was someone he could never have.

He vomited a third time, his body wracked with bone-­creaking tenseness. Overcome with a sudden bout of chills, he shuddered so violently that he was sure he was in the beginning throes of a seizure. Epileptic shock.

He kneeled in the darkness, long strands of hair framing his sweat- and tear-drenched face. Staring across the yard, his vision drifted along the ground until it settled upon the roots of a cut-down tree. The axe handle jutted up at an angle, winking in the moonlight. It was a weapon that had been unwittingly left for him by his birth mother. An instrument of destruction to set all wrong things right.

Michael's fingers touched the dirt, the sick still burning at the back of his throat. His eyes blurred behind incredulous tears. Gathering himself as best he could, he hefted himself into an upright position. His stomach spasmed with another wave of queasiness, but he forced the feeling to the back of his mind as he pressed forward. Reaching the stump, he grabbed the axe with both hands and pulled. It came free without a fight, which was exactly how he expected the Morrows to fall.

They'd never see him coming.

He was immune to them now.

Cleansed by his own hate.

M
ICHAEL PULLED THE
Oldsmobile onto the side of the dirt road a quarter mile away from the farmhouse. Sliding out of the car, he put the keys into his pocket and opened the trunk. He stared down into the small chamber that had housed so many squirming, frantic women, a trunk that smelled of urine and fear. It was empty now, save for two things: a roll of silver duct tape that represented his past, and his mother's axe, which represented an inevitable future.

He grabbed the axe, slammed the trunk shut, and began to walk the rutted road that would lead him to his false home one final time.

The farmhouse looked almost silvery in the moonlight. There was something grotesque about it. Every angle was slightly skewed, as though the place belonged in a particularly dark fairy tale. Its odious appearance was fitting, seeing as to how it held Snow White captive in its bowels. Michael increased his grip on the axe handle as he approached. He skimmed the side of the house, passed Wade's truck, with its still-raised hood and its carburetor removed, and climbed the back porch steps with silent feet.

The house was dark. No flicker of firelight from the dining room. No sound of a phantom record playing from behind his dead sister's door. The only disturbance was the momentary creaking of stairs as Michael climbed, one step after the other, stalking upward to the second-story hallway. He nudged his bedroom door open and peeked inside. Empty.

He proceeded to Misty's room. His heart twisted at the memory of her lounging in its threshold, tying her macramé knots while she played album after album. He'd have done just about anything to hear some ABBA or Neil Diamond right then. Even Simon & Garfunkel would do. He turned the knob and let the door swing open. It too stood vacant in the dark.

Michael checked the bathroom before stopping in front of the final door at the far end of the hall—Rebel's bedroom. Hefting the axe up to rest on his shoulder, he readied himself to use it, then reached for the doorknob. He didn't understand what had driven his brother to such madness. What terrible evil had Michael committed to turn Reb into such a demon? Despite the fact that they had both grown up in a house of horrors with a monster as a mother, Rebel's attack was personal. Somehow, Michael was to blame.

His room was empty, just like the others—nothing but an unmade bed and an old night table littered with empties and crumpled cigarette packs. He turned away from the room, half-expecting to find Reb standing at the opposite side of the hall, but there was no one. Michael was alone.

He narrowed his eyes, steeled his nerves, and stalked down its length before descending the stairs. His next destination would yield results. Downstairs, at the opposite end of the house, Momma and Wade were tucked into bed. He silently unlatched the door and pushed it open with the blade of the axe. The all-encompassing darkness assured him that Wade was standing in the shadows somewhere on the opposite side of the room, a shotgun pointed squarely at Michael's chest. But his eyes adjusted quickly, the moonlight making the room glow blue. He made out the silhouettes of two people on a sleigh bed as old as the house itself. There, in the dark luster of night, Wade and Claudine Morrow appeared as nothing more than a serenely sleeping couple. Michael wondered if their eyes needed to be open to be what they were; was a killer still a killer while asleep? Did Momma see blood and hear the screaming in her dreams?

Michael hesitated, a sudden pang of guilt turning the axe heavy in his hands. He was starting to see how he could separate himself from the responsibility of the things he'd done in his life. The fear. The manipulation. The sense of duty that had been beaten into him. Without the Morrows, he would have died in the Appalachian hills, cold and alone. But the newfound ability to disconnect was burdened with a question: If Michael was allowed to slough the wrongs from his shoulders because he was never a Morrow at all, did that mean Momma could blame the abuse she had suffered for turning her into what she had become?

Sometimes things only make sense in retrospect,
Alice reminded him.

Alice. Smart. Beautiful. The only real family he had left.

He detached his doubts from his thoughts and his thoughts from his body and moved to the foot of the bed. Wade lay on his back, breathing through an open mouth. Michael raised the axe high. Its heaviness vanished, as though he was being helped by an invisible hand. Adjusting his grip on the wooden handle—a baseball player ready to swing—he took a defensive stance, one that promised no chance of him losing his balance should Wade spring out of bed like a jack-in-the-box.

The head of the axe pulled his grip back behind his shoulder.

And then he swung.

A pang of sorrow hit him as the axe flew through the air. It was a momentary jab of self-reproach reminding him that, of the three Morrows that remained, Wade was the lesser of evils. He had always been tender with Michael, teaching him how to hunt. But now, in split-second hindsight, Michael made the connection—the reason
why
Wade had taught him how to field dress the animals he caught as a kid.

Every kindness, no matter how small, was anchored in blood.

Wade was as guilty as the rest of them. By association. By silence. By ambivalence.

The axe blade connected with Wade's chest.

The crack of fracturing bone sliced through the silence.

Wade sat up, his mouth agape, a loud
hehhhh
rushing from his throat as air flew from his lungs. Michael gave the axe a firm backward pull to loosen the blade. As soon as the cutting edge was freed from Wade's chest, a geyser of glistening, moonlit blood poured down his stained tank top. His mouth worked like a fish's—silent, opening and closing. Their eyes connected in the pale darkness as Wade waited for the next blow, but ­Michael stepped away from the bed.

Momma had bolted upright, startled by the sound of her husband's chest caving in.

“Wade?”

She strained to see in the dark for a moment, not noticing Michael, who was making his way to her side of the bed.

“Wade?!”

The emotion in her voice caught him off guard. There was more feeling in it than he'd ever heard before. Her hands flew to Wade's chest and shoulders as her husband fell back onto his pillow with a gurgling sound. Blood bubbled up from between his lips. His eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling. Momma gasped, her blood-smeared hands pressing over her mouth to silence a scream. Michael couldn't help but watch her with baffled interest. It was strange to see a woman who had been so cold finally have a human response.

“Momma.”

Michael spoke the word from the shadows of the room.

She jumped at the sound, reeled around, and stared wide-eyed into the darkness, but she said nothing.

Michael stepped closer to the bed, showing himself, the dull metal of the axe blade catching the moonlight.

Her face pulled into a taut look of surprise. She was expecting someone else. Since their numbers were low, Michael could only assume her suspicion had immediately landed on ­Rebel's shoulders. He wished he was more like his phony brother just then. He wanted to manage a cold, ­emotionless smile, but he couldn't pull it off. This was the part where ­Michael was ­supposed to say something witty that would ­terrify her even more, quips that Reb could deliver like a seasoned actor.

Here's Johnny!

But Michael hadn't ever been as witty as Reb, and his silence appeared to be frightening enough.

Momma leapt from the bed. Michael was sure she was ­half-blind—her eyes hadn't had time to adjust to the night. But she managed to grab the bedside lamp off the stand and tear the plug from the wall. She held it out in front of her, as though trying to invoke the spirit of Thomas Edison, but she called a different name.