2015 October Horror Story Anthology

My Brother died when I was a child. He kept talking

We'd all known Dennis had less than a week and we'd all braced ourselves, for all the good that would do. This was going to tear us apart and leave a ragged gaping hole in all our lives. But that would be it. It would fit within our understanding of things and we could all assume he went wherever we thought people go. That would have been so much easier, so much less troubling than what actually happened. Dennis had been diagnosed with cancer a couple of days after his tenth Birthday and it was all downhill from there. There was never an upswing, never an opportunity for surgery. All the scans showed the same thing, the oily black webs having grown larger and denser. The fact that we were twins, and had looked identical right up to when he started chemo just made it worse. There I was right beside him, a perfect image of what he used to be before his hair fell out and his colour drained and his cheeks sunk down into his skull. An emaciated ghost constantly contrasted with what he should be.

And then finally the doctor shut the case, snuffed out the last wisps of hope:

'Dennis will most likely not last more than four days. A week at the most.'

So we'd all set up camp in his musty room at the hospital. The walls were freckled and pea green.The only light slanted in from between the shutters, glaring bars stretching out across the floor to end just short of Dennis' bed. The staff managed to bring in another, simpler bed for me, and my parents slept in old wicker chairs.

Dennis looked really bad at this stage. You could as good as see his skull. We all wanted to talk to him, to make the most of whatever time was left, but he slept for most of the day and when he woke up there'd just be silence. Nobody knew what to say, there were no right words, and there was this underlying fear that the moment anybody interacted with the situation, they'd somehow make it real and it would hit everyone. The first sound would knock us all off the tightrope and we'd fall into tears and chaos and we wouldn't be able to pull ourselves back up. So there was silence, my parents occasionally forcing smiles that never made it to their eyes.

The third day was when it finally happened, when the steady beeping of the heart-monitor started to break down into frantic electronic wails and Dennis began to shake feebly as a dry crackling sound rose up from his mouth.

My parents exploded out of their chairs, my mother heading straight to Dennis, grabbing his shoulders and pleading at him to stop it and be all right. My father was at the room door, screaming down the hallways for help.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital had changed lately; they'd started treating Dennis differently. Before the resuscitations were always these frantic, desperate efforts, like hundred meter sprints. There was a desperate desire to succeed in every single movement. Now it was different, more like a steady jog. These were people who were going through the motions, ticking off things they were meant to try from little checklists in their minds.

I don't think it would have made a difference either way. The cancer had finally tipped over and his system just couldn't shoulder it anymore. They called it and left, offering their condolences and saying they'd take away the body when we were ready. The door clicked shut behind us: me, Mom, Dad, and Dennis' corpse.

We all inched closer, up to the side of his bed and just looked. My mother cracked, breaking into great howling tears. My father pulled her close, trying to keep it together but losing it in his own way. No sobs from him, just the occasional tear running down his face and sharp breaths bursting through his clenched teeth.

I was just quietly staring at Dennis' face.

We all stood there for a long time. I finally realised that this wasn't just one thing, this wasn't a single event. For the first time my mind started running away with itself and unfolding all the endless implications of this, every one of them causing my gut to sink and for me to miss him so much even though he'd just been here. I was never going to talk to him again, he was never going to laugh at me again, we were never eating dinner again, we were never going to school together again, we were never going to be in the same class in school again, or talk during classes at school again. It just kept going and going as I realised that this wasn't just one person I'd lost, I'd lost a million things, something that was meant to be this constant presence was gone and nothing would ever be as good as it should be again. Everything I was going to do be soured by the certainty that I wouldn't be doing it with him, or that I wouldn't be able to tell him about it later. It had only ever been a childish assumption that any of that would happen