Banishments

The storm had swollen the creek and infused it with sludge. The brothers had come to the bank to take in some of the elements’ power, perhaps even to feel rinsed and purged by these forces. But the sight of the muddied current gushing past caused Will to think that the tired cliché was untrue, for this brackish water did indeed seem thicker than the blood that supposedly bonded him to the man standing beside him.

Mutely they watched the parade of bobbing wreckage; a porch rocker, a bicycle tire, the tattered remnants of a tarp. These and more seemed to be flaunted by the roaring current, like a victor showcasing the spoils of battle; trophies from the homes this hurricane had pummeled.

Will sighed melodramatically; a wordless urging for them to be moving on. The pair stood under a dull sky. Will was secretly counting the seconds until this ritual of contrived grief over the fate of Dylan’s neighbours, most of whom had been strangers to Will since childhood, could be tastefully concluded. He opened his mouth to speak, to remind Dylan that his house had been scarcely grazed by the storm, when they witnessed Death encroaching.

It came shimmying along the bends, using the current as its pallbearer. Under a sky whose grey conveyed a celestial exhaustion, Death swam swiftly.

It came in the form of an oblong box of tarnished iron. A fat padlock in the shape of a spade bounced upon its latch, clunking against the angled side; a lone drumbeat that provided this funeral its dirge. The coffin bobbed, spun in an eddy, then jutted toward the bank behind Dylan’s home. Its motion was so forthright that for an instant Will believed the box was meant to reach them. It quickly became entangled in the low-looming branches and thickets that bearded the muddy bank.

Will watched as his brother charged down the embankment and entered the creek until its rushing waters rimmed his waist. Dylan managed to grip the end of the case just before it drifted out of reach. Dragging it toward him, Dylan nearly lost his footing, the sight of which inspired Will to leap to the water’s edge.

Both of Dylan’s hands were now clutching the oblong box. His movements were unnervingly jerky.

“Heavy!” he shouted. Will reached out to keep his brother righted.

The case struck the bank with a thump, which was soon followed by a faint sucking sound as the clay began to dutifully inter it. Will concluded that it must have been a struggle for the creek to keep this weighty thing afloat.

Dylan stood shivering. His pants sat slick upon his legs and his boots were weighted with frigid water. The brothers took a moment to study their treasure, which was, they discovered, more akin to a basket than a box. It was composed of iron bands, each approximately ten centimetres wide. The bands were woven together as one might do with wicker. The knit was airtight. Not a speck of the interior was visible. Will used the heel of his hand to wipe away some of the moisture from the lid. Two of the bands—one vertical, the other horizontal—felt rougher than the rest. Kneeling, squinting, Will surveyed the engravings.

If they were words, they were in a language of which Will knew nothing. If symbols, Will had neither faith nor imagination enough to decipher them. The markings were crude. Their asymmetry and jagged texture suggested that the engraver was rushed, or possibly enraged. The wedges, gashes, and curlicues formed a decorated cross that stood out from the rest of the iron weave.

Will was suddenly seized by a divergent memory: he hearkened back to Dylan’s and his parochial education. He envisioned the two of them now as being Pharaoh’s daughters, rescuing a floating ark from its reedy doom.

“Let’s get it inside,” Dylan said, breaking his brother’s reverie. “I’m freezing to death.”

They returned to the house. Will entered first, snapping on the chandelier as a defense against the gloom. The light made the dining room inappropriately cozy. It also illuminated Julie’s letter, which had been left on the walnut table; two tiny islands of white upon a sea of black wood. When Will had first arrived he’d found his younger sibling locked in a toxic fixation with this missive. Dylan had not merely studied it to the point of being able to recite both pages from memory but had begun to autopsy its script in search of hidden truths. Like a cryptographer, he’d started compiling lists that twisted the Dear John note into anagrams, into weird insect-looking hybrids of letters, not unlike the iron basket’s engravings in fact.

Will hurried to the table and swept away the handwritten leaves and the handsome envelope that had held them.

Dylan approached the table.

The foul runoff from the iron case made a brown stippling pattern on the carpet. Dylan grunted as he set down the box.

Will held out his hands dramatically. “What now?”

Dylan, breathing heavily, tapped the heart-shaped padlock and then exited the room. For Will the wait seemed vast. When his brother returned, he came bearing a small tool chest. Silent with focus, Dylan went about unlocking the oblong box.

A squeeze of bolt-cutters made short work of the heart-shaped lock, which fell uselessly to the floor. Will studied this heart, which, despite being made of iron, could evidently be broken as readily as any other.

“Ready?” asked Dylan. Will shrugged. He truly was unsure.

The clasps that held the lid in place made a shrill peeping noise as Dylan peeled them back. He asked for his brother’s assistance in lifting off the lid.

One glimpse of what the box contained caused Will to lose his grip. The lid crashed against the dining table, knocking over one of the high-backed chairs in its descent. Dylan brought a hand to his mouth.

The infant corpse was hideously well preserved. Its flesh, which looked as though it had been doused in powdered azure, still sat plump upon the bones. Its eyes were shut but its mouth was mangled wide, its final mewl trapped silently in time. Naked as the day it was born—if born it had been—the babe’s body glistened under the electric chandelier’s clinical light. Will, who was unable to bring himself to study the thing closely, assumed this sheen was creek water, but he made no effort to confirm this.

The creature’s head was horrible. Will was unsure whether it was supposed to be a canine or a swine. Either way it was misshapen, like a hammer-forged sculpture by an unskilled artist. It also looked like it had been skinned. Its anatomy was terribly apparent.

“Look,” urged Dylan, “come see. This figure. It’s just so…”

“Gruesome?” offered Will.

“…so real…”

He was touching it now, his fingers passing in a reverential pattern over arms, belly, and tortured face. “Feels like it’s made of wax.”

This process ended with a hiss. Will looked at his brother, whose fingers were welling up with blood.

“Its eyes are filled with pins.”

Will’s brow furrowed. He leaned into the coffin. His brother’s blood droplets sat as miniscule gems upon the infant’s livid brow, shimmering like beads of a sanguine rosary. Dylan was correct; what had been inlaid into the waxen eyelids were not lashes but rows of keen pins. The tongue appeared to be some form of curved blade. Will was also able to see the strange studded rows that lined the baby’s wrists, shoulders, waist. They were nails; rugged and angular, the kind an old-world blacksmith might have wrought with hammer and flame. Some of the nails had been welded to the coffin itself. These held the figure in place, bound it. (Though he hadn’t meant to, Will accidentally observed that the infant was sexless.)

“There’s salt in its mouth,” Will added.

Radiating from the casket’s interior was the stench of musty vegetation, the decay one smells just before winter buries autumn’s rot. Shielding his nose, Will stared down at the collection of waterlogged roots, leaves and petals that clung to the bottom of the box. This strange potpourri had formed a bed for the idol of crib death. The underside of several iron bands also bore the same mad engravings as the cross on the lid.

“We should call someone,” suggested Will.

“Like who, the police? There’s been no crime here.”

“Maybe not, but this isn’t right.”

Dylan replaced the iron lid. “We don’t even know what this is. It could be valuable. A work of art, maybe even a relic. I’ll do some online research later.” Dylan lifted the casket with a grunt.

“Where are you taking it?”

“Downstairs. I’m going to towel it off so I can get some clear pictures of those engravings. Somebody has to know what they mean.”

Will stood listening to the clunks and puttering noises coming from the basement. His brother then began to whistle some cheery, improvised tune.

 

*

 

For supper Will prepared them pork chops and steamed greens. They ate at the tiny kitchen table, for Will was unable to bear eating where the casket had been.

The only soundtrack to their meal was the sound of their own chewing. Dylan scarcely lifted his gaze from his phone, which sat next to his plate. He scrolled through photo after photo of the infant effigy, of each incised character upon the iron coffin.

“How many pictures of that thing did you take?” Will finally asked, uncapping a fresh beer. He did not take his eyes off his brother as he drank.

Dylan merely shrugged.

“Why don’t you put that thing away so we can talk about what’s really going on?”

The wooden chair creaked as Dylan leaned back. “What’s there to say? Julie left. End of story.”

“There’s a whole lot to say,” replied Will. “For starters, why don’t you tell me how it reached this point? As far as I knew, you and Julie had the perfect marriage. Not to mention a free house with no mortgage to carry.” Will could hear the edge creeping into his voice but did not care. “No kids to take your money or your time, and then two days ago I read this panicky social media post from you telling all your friends that she’s gone. When I phoned, you sounded like a shattered man. You were barely coherent. I tell you I’m coming home to see you, and now you expect me to believe that after just one day you’re fine?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Well that’s something, I suppose.” Will rubbed his chin, sighed. “Can you tell me what happened at least? I mean, not every detail, just what led to Julie walking out?”

Dylan coughed into his fist. “Two days ago, she left me that letter telling me that we’ve drifted apart,” he explained. “She said she didn’t love me anymore, so I called her cell and left a voicemail saying that if that was true I want her to stay away for good. End of story.” Coolly, he then took up his phone. “So it looks like those engravings are a mix of all sorts of different languages; Coptic, Germanic runes, ancient Greek.”

Though he didn’t fancy talking about their grotesque find, Will resigned himself to the fact that the topic of conversation had irretrievably shifted. “Did you find out what any of them mean?” he asked. He was given a simple ‘yes’ as an answer but received no elaboration. After a few frustrating moments had passed Will rose and hastily collected the plates.

Later in the evening he went down to their father’s old workroom, where the casket sat upon the antiquated workbench. Dylan had already settled onto a wooden stool and had resumed his study of the etchings, referencing them against various websites on his phone.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” Dylan’s tone was so wistful it rendered his question rhetorical. “Upstream obviously, but from where?”

“What, are you planning on returning it somehow?”

“I want to see if there’s more. I want to know.”

“Know what? Dylan, you’d better start giving me some straight answers. I came all the way back here to help you, so the least you can do is be honest with me.”

Unable to bear being ignored, Will retreated upstairs in a manner both childish and melodramatic. Storming off to the bedroom he’d occupied until he left home at sixteen felt surreal, but surreal in an ugly, off-putting way, as though he was willingly stepping back into the very cell from which he’d managed to escape years earlier. The original wardens might have perished, but the prison was still being maintained by the heir apparent.

He stood listening to a house that had grown too still. Stepping into the hall, he found it vacant and dim. Descending the stairs, Will’s nose was affronted by the scent of smoke.

“Dylan?” he called. When no reply came, Will hurried to the basement, where the smoke was thickest and its fragrance was chokingly strong. His eyes stinging, he made his way to the workbench, where faint embers spat upwards like tiny fireflies.

The floor suddenly went unstable beneath him. Will was hurled forward. Peering through the billowing plumes, he could just discern the dozens of woodscrews that carpeted the concrete and had tripped him up. Turning his gaze to the workbench, he saw the last of the embers fluttering down in grey husks to the open Mason jar that sat half-filled with the black remnants of burned paper. The jar was one of dozens their late father had used to store screws, nuts, bolts. This one had been set atop the casket.

Among the jar’s blackened leavings was a scrap of paper that had not succumbed to the flames. Will recognized Julie’s handwriting.

Again, he called his brother’s name. The only response was the patter of rain that was beginning to strike the windows.

 

*

 

Will hadn’t intended on falling asleep. He’d only retired to the living room sofa because there seemed to be little else he could do. He’d tried to watch television, but the storm had knocked out the satellite signal. The day’s paper was a jumble of meaningless words. There had been no sign of Dylan.

He’d closed his eyes and had felt a soothing numbness passing through him. He’d watched distorted memories of his own boyhood in this very house pass across his mind’s eye.

Had he always felt this way about his brother, he wondered? Always brimming with such jealousy over the ease and comfort with which Dylan’s life seemed to have been blessed? Had it not been his own decision to leave home at sixteen and allow himself to grow estranged from his kin? Not even the successive deaths of both his parents was enough to lure Will back. It took discovering that Dylan had inherited the house and was now enjoying a happy marriage.

Will had learned of this turn of events through his obsessive, covert searches on social media. He was grateful for the technology that allowed him to keep tabs on Dylan cheaply and easily. It was this same medium that had allowed Will to watch Dylan’s life dissolving. Ever a sponge sopping up attention, Dylan posted regular updates about his crumbling marriage, which gave Will the privilege of watching his brother’s life crumble in real time. Only after a particularly fatalistic-sounding post about how Julie had left for good did Will finally attempt to reach out. Dylan had positively gushed over his brother’s first communication in two decades. He’d immediately invited him back to the old house. Little did he suspect that what was driving Will’s actions was not empathy but schadenfreude.

His sadistic pleasure was short-lived. Within hours of arriving home Will found his brother’s state of mind…disquieting. Whatever heartsickness Dylan had been detailing for his online friends seemed to have been replaced by a form of mania. Will had even wondered if the whole drama had been nothing more than a ploy to bait him back to this suburban trap. But to what end?

Will’s reverie was violently disrupted by a phone ringing. Blindly he fished out his cell from his shirt pocket. It was turned off.

Across the room, Dylan’s cell phone rattled upon the dining room table. Will rose and shuffled toward it.

The caller I.D. consisted of a smiling selfie of Julie, along with her name and a tiny heart icon glowing beside it. Will took up the phone and wrestled with the idea of answering it. It went still and silent before he could decide.

Will turned and began to search the house for his brother, but his efforts were in vain. Only after he’d stepped outside to check the backyard did he spot Dylan. He was stepping through the gate at the far end of the yard. From the vantage of the back deck, Will could see beyond the wooden fence to the elegiac creek that rushed ahead in search of eventual immersion into Baintree Lake.

Dylan crossed the yard. He was soaked to the skin. His shoes were slathered with mud. As his brother climbed the deck stairs, Will was able to see that Dylan’s eyes were glassy, were fey.

“Where were you?” he asked.

Dylan pressed past him. His passage through the house left earthen footprints on the carpet. Stopping in the living room, Dylan began to peel away his dripping clothes. They plopped onto the floor. Stripped, Dylan shuffled down the hall toward the bathroom. Will heard the door click shut, then the telltale sound of running water.

Dylan finished showering and returned to the living room, dressed in socks and a terrycloth robe. He toweled his hair absentmindedly, staring at the wet stains on the carpet.

“I hung your clothes on the rack downstairs,” Will explained, “and I tried to scrub the footprints out of the carpet as best I could. Mind telling me where you were all night?”

Dylan’s mouth hitched into an unsettling half-smile. “What, you taking over for mom now that you’re back?”

“I’m not back. And I’m not resurrecting mom. I’m just worried about you.”

“There’s nothing to worry about, truly nothing.” Dylan chortled weirdly.

“Julie called your cell just before you came in.”

These words choked off Dylan’s meandering laughter. They also drained the blood from his face.

“What?”

Nonplussed, Will reached for Dylan’s cell phone and displayed it, like the bearer of proof in some grand epistemology. “Looks like she left you a voicemail.”

With a quaking hand Dylan slid the phone free. He had noticeable difficulty manipulating the keypad, but eventually he held the phone to his ear.

From where he stood, Will could just discern the mousy rasps of a shrill voice.

Dylan’s arm dropped. His phone clunked against the floor.

“What is it?” asked Will frantically, “what’d she say?” He scooped up Dylan’s dropped phone and slid it into the pocket of his trousers.

Wordlessly, Dylan advanced to the master bedroom. Will followed, spitting out a string of brief and frantic questions, none of which were answered.

Now dressed, Dylan stepped back into the hall. He was breathing heavily. “We have to return it,” was all he said before charging downstairs.

He resurfaced bearing the iron casket. Will wrested on his shoes and tried to keep pace with his brother, who was already unlatching the gate at the rear of the yard. The creek was positively roaring as Will struggled to stay at Dylan’s heels. The rain was intensifying, portending another storm.

“Where are we going?” he cried.

“Not far,” Dylan replied. “I’ll put it back. I’ll make it right.”

Together they traipsed the back of Baintree Common. In boyhood Will had played endlessly along these leafy banks, both with friends and with his brother. Though the housing complex had not appreciably changed over the years, its present aura seemed threatening.

“Here it is!” declared Dylan. “Help me with the fence.”

“Whose house is this?” Will rasped as he gripped one of the fence boards. He watched his brother reverentially slip the woven coffin through the gap and then painfully wriggle himself through. Will followed. It was obvious that quizzing Dylan was futile.

The backyard of this home was far better maintained than that of his boyhood home. Will halted when he saw Dylan approach the sliding glass door. He waited to see who would answer his brother’s rapping.

But Dylan did not knock; instead he set the casket down on the lawn and yanked at the door, throwing his weight into the task until the lock gave.

Aghast, Will began to feel as though he was watching a movie rather than experiencing the present. He saw his brother calmly take up the casket and slip past the ruined door. Panicked that he might be spotted, Will found himself following.

The strange house was immaculate in both upkeep and solitude. Standing in the kitchen, staring at the stainless-steel appliances and the polished floor, caused Will to suddenly become heartsick for his mother.

Dylan was noisily moving through the lower chambers. Will rushed to the descending stairwell. Once there he made note of a trio of framed photographs that hung in the main landing. Wedding photos, enlarged and richly coloured. The groom was a stout man with a crew-cut hairstyle and slender glasses balanced on a slightly bent nose. The bride was blonde and rather pretty.

Will’s hand felt for the stair’s railing. He gripped it and forced himself to breathe.

The bride in the photographs was Julie.

Will hissed his brother’s name, for his throat allowed for nothing louder.

“I think it came from here,” Dylan called back. “Come see.”

Will’s every step was reticent. His heart was thudding loudly. His saliva tasted of metal.

The chamber in which Dylan stood was scarcely broader than a storage closet. An old-fashioned laundry tub stood against a wall built of cinderblocks with yellowing mortar. A cold draft lifted tufts of cobwebs from the grey brickwork. They lapped at the air like spectral tongues. The tiny room was uncharacteristically neglected and decayed compared to the rest of the house.

“Look!” cried Dylan. He pressed the chisel forward so that his brother might inspect it. The chisel’s blade was caked with bluish wax. “This is what they used to sculpt it! And look down there!” Dylan pointed to the concrete floor, which had been stained barn-red. The paint was bubbled and peeling. Moving nearer, Will smelled flowers and something like old potatoes. There was a drain grill set into the floor. “I’ll bet you they just lifted this grate and sent that thing downstream toward our house. Listen! You can hear the current through the grate. I watched this house all night from the banks, just waiting for them to leave for work. I knew it must have come from them. I knew it!”

“From who?” Will managed. “Dylan, whose house is this?” He lifted his hand. “Up there. Up there I saw…” He swallowed. “Dylan…what happened to Julie?”

Dylan was already crouching down to pry the grill from its nest. He looked up at his brother. His expression was one of shock. “There is no Julie,” he said, as though it was the dullest of facts. “I made her up.”

“But her pictures…upstairs there are…”

“I know. I copied all her photos from her social media account. Her real name is Chantal. She and her husband have lived in Baintree for a few years now. I’ve never met her, I just like the way she looks, so I made her my wife.”

Will shook his head. “But there are all those photos of the two of you on your profile,” he protested. “And with other people as well.”

Dylan shrugged. “Photoshop. None of those people exist. The names of all my friends on social media? They’re all fake accounts that I created. In fact, you’re the only real person out of any of my online friends. The others are just stolen pictures and fabricated names.”

Will bent over. It was as if his brother’s revelation had struck him in the solar plexus. “Why?” he whispered. “Why, Dylan?”

“It wasn’t supposed to go this far. I never thought you’d actually come, even if I did post news about my wife leaving me. You shouldn’t have come back here.”

“Neither of us should be here, not this house. This is crazy! Now let’s go. Let’s go home. We’ll talk about it there, not here.”

“Not until I see if this is how they sent it downriver. Help me lift this grate up.”

Will was stock-still. A revelation had caused him to seize up. It took a great deal of willpower just to bring his hand to his pocket and free his brother’s cell phone.

“What is it?” Dylan spat.

“She called you. Julie called you. You heard her voice. Let me hear her message. Dylan? I want to hear that message.”

When his brother refused to yield from jimmying the grate in the floor, Will began frantically thumbing and scrolling about Dylan’s phone.

“What are you doing?” Dylan shouted. He stood and lunged for the phone. The grate slipped from his fingers and clanged down viciously upon its frame. Before Dylan was able to yank the phone away Will had managed to bring up ‘Julie’s’ number from the call history. He pressed the Dial icon. A purling noise leaked through the phone’s speaker.

A beat later this noise was overpowered by a hideous buzzing that seemed to be emanating from inside the iron coffin.

The brothers were paralyzed. They stared into one another’s fear-widened eyes. Neither of them could bring themselves to face the buzzing casket. Again and again the phone rang. Even after Will dashed his brother’s device against that decaying red floor and saw it splinter, the casket continued to hum.

Dylan eventually gripped the coffin lid. It hit the floor noisily.

The bluish thing was wriggling. Dylan took up the homeowner’s chisel and began to tear the thing to pieces.

“No!” screamed Will, though he was unsure exactly why. Rushing up alongside his brother, he peered over the rim with its arcane etchings and looked at the pristine mutilation.

The livid wax curled back in ugly whitish rinds and rained down in clumps as Dylan continued to slash and twist and gouge. Though merely an effigy, its autopsy made Will’s stomach flip. He watched the torso part and smear as his brother fished out the vibrating phone, which went still and silent the very instant it was freed from its host.

Now it was Will who began wresting free the floor grate. Dylan simply shuffled past him. Though he averted his eyes from the carnage, Will dutifully collected phone, carcass, and casket, dropping each in turn into the pipe. He heard them splash when they struck the watery base that was churning somewhere below.

He then ran as he had never run before. Outside the rain flailed and swept like great shapeless wings. Will wended the length of the raging creek, his feet puncturing the sucking clay that seemed to be slipping into the moving current moment by moment.

His relief at spotting Dylan up ahead was immense. He shouted his brother’s name, but the storm swirled his voice into its cacophony, muzzling it. Dylan was leisurely sauntering along the bank, whereas he was running full measure. Will could not seem to close the gap between them. Time and again he cried out for Dylan but received not even a backward glance.

His frustration and fear ascending, Will took up a rock and hurled it at his brother’s back. But before the stone could strike him, Dylan veered dramatically to his left.

The gate to their yard was still hanging open by the time Will reached it. He passed through and made his way toward the back deck.

He was stunned by the sight of figures, just merely visible through the glass doors, milling about their dining room. A peek into the kitchen window, which was veiled by mother’s handmade curtains, revealed similarly obscure shapes shifting, gesturing, talking. Some of the figures were familiar to Will, having seen their photoshopped life moments many times on Dylan’s social media page. The pattern of the lace curtains seemed to pixelate their faces.

The din of this unbidden gathering was audible even through the storm. The wan afternoon reduced the house’s interior to a cave, but Will guessed that these guests numbered in the dozens. He scaled the steps of the deck. He wanted nothing more than to see his brother.

Moving to the glass door, Will suddenly stumbled. He looked down to see Dylan’s shoes sitting tidily side-by-side. The downpour had already rinsed away much of the river mud. Will reached down to collect the shoes but discovered that they had been nailed to the wooden deck. The spikes that pinioned them were chunky and black, akin to the ones that pinioned the effigy to its casket.

The glass door slid back on its own. The susurrus was instantly silenced.

Something whimpered from the recesses of the house, something that sounded pained.

One of the figures stepped into the half-light and reached a flickering, blurry hand through the open doorway.

Will attempted to flee but found that he too had been rooted.