What Lies Beneath

Chapter Eight: Charlie

In the countryside on the outskirts of London sits a large Mansion. The family that lives there is small and cruel. There eldest son, Charlie, is the cruelest one of all.

Since he was seven years old, he had made it his mission to harass all the staff that worked on the property. Things only got worse after his mother gave birth to another son. You see, Charlie hated his brother. He didn't like sharing his parents limited attention with someone else, so he came up with a plan.

The plan was so horrible that only someone without a soul could have possibly conceived it.

On the night of his parents fifteenth anniversary party, Charlie was put in charge of his little brother. When it was time to take him upstairs for bed, he took him to the attic instead. He placed his sleeping brother in an old moldy trunk that had been discarded and forgotten about long ago. He didn't even pause to rethink as he slammed the lid down and locked it.

After his work was done, Charlie went back downstairs and enjoyed the rest of the party.

In the morning when his mother went to check on his little brother she was horrified when she discovered that his bed was empty.

She ordered the staff to search the whole house, but they did not find the young boy. You see, Charlie was very cunning when it came to his plan, during the night he made sure that the attic door would never be able to be opened again. He had locked the door and immobilized the hinges with a blow torch that he found in the work shed.

Over the next few weeks Charlie found that the more people who talked to him about his little brother, forgot about him. By the time that the second month that his brother was gone had passed, nobody remembered that he even existed. That is except his mother.

Sadly, no matter how much she would talk to Charlie about her missing child, she never forgot.

Eventually, because no one except her remembered the child, her husband put her in a psychiatric facility. She killed herself shortly after being committed.

After his mother's funeral Charlie would spend almost every day at her grave. He would sit there on the ground that covered her coffin and laugh about what he had done. He would tell her the story over and over about how he had killed his little brother, until he got bored of that story and craved another.

Soon, children around town began to disappear and just like his brother, everyone eventually forgot that they were even alive to begin with, all except their mothers of course. For some reason, no matter what he did, he could never make the mothers forget their children.

Over time the town outside of London also fell silent. The mothers locked up or dead and the families that were left behind having decided to leave the horrible place. It wasn't long before Charlie was the only one left.

When Charlie received his letter and read it, he did not hesitate to pack a bag and go. He had grown bored of being alone. So, like Karen, he too set off for the house just outside of Connecticut.