18 Jan Brianna Came Back

My sister Brianna went missing on April 10th, 2008.

On October 9th, 2013, Brianna came back.

Six weeks later, on November 23rd, 2013, Brianna vanished again–and our house burned down.

I was safe, sleeping over at my best friend’s house.  My mother perished in the blaze.

Since that day in 2013, sightings of Brianna have been reported all over the world.  In some of the accounts, Brianna has been seen in the company of an unidentified man.

* * * * * *

April 10th, 2008 was a Thursday.  Our small house had grown particularly chilly; through my window, I saw a fresh blanket of snow.

I felt uneasy.  I’d woken from a nightmare, and all I could remember was the tinkling crash of glass breaking.  My nine-year-old self still feared the monster in the closet and the Wolves of Abbadon, eight-legged fiends that, according to local legends, haunted the woods behind my house.  So I remained in bed, trembling under the blankets, until a resounding scream jolted me up.

This scream was my mother’s.  Brianna’s bedroom window had been shattered.  Her room had been ransacked–drawers overturned, closet violently rifled through, schoolbooks and torn-up posters littering the floor.  And Brianna was gone.

The local police came.  Then the Vermont State Police, and the FBI, and the media vans.  Law enforcement dusted for prints and commandeered Brianna’s computer.  An army of volunteers scoured the woods.  The reporters with TV cameras interviewed my mother and me.  I rewatch those interviews sometimes–my mother’s gaunt face, swollen with tears, my big brown eyes, like a lost foal in the headlights of an approaching semi.

It was all for naught.  Brianna, an eighth-grade girl with a crooked nose and long brown hair, remained missing.

She’d been taken, Mom insisted–dragged away by the Wolves of Abbadon.

After that, my mother changed.  She pulled me out of school, trashed our computer, and forbade me from accessing the internet.  She boarded up the windows of our small house, locked the doors, and hid the keys.  I wasn’t allowed to play with my friends anymore, not even Ryan, my best friend, who lived down the street with his foster parents.  My mother and I only ever left to buy groceries, or to attend sermons with Pastor Joe on Thursdays and Sundays.  Wednesdays, after dinner until nine in the evening, Mom attended Ladies’ Bible Study at the church and left me home alone, locked inside the house.

Weeks turned into months, and months into years.

When I was twelve, my Sunday school teacher once allowed us to play in the churchyard because we’d memorized all our prayers.  I let another boy, Ben, talk me into sneaking through the back gate and into the woods to look for a wild berry patch he swore he’d found.

But it wasn’t a berry patch we found, under the ash trees, by the boulder-dotted banks of the dry creek bed.  It was a man–a tall, paunchy, balding man with beady little eyes and an ancient bomber jacket.  Something about him seemed predatory, what with his long, dirt-flecked fingers and the way he snarled, revealing yellow teeth.

“Afternoon,” he growled at us.  “I’m looking for Joe Calder.”

Our teacher’s scream sent the man running.  Mom was so mad when she found out that she locked me in the cellar alone all night.  She insisted the woods were dangerous.  There, shivering in the cellar, I curled up, wrapped in nothing but a thin blanket, recalling the legend of the Wolves of Abbadon.  They were horrific creatures with knives for teeth and claws ready to tear flesh to ribbons.  If one of them bit you, as the story goes, you’d transform into one yourself.  And the Wolves had the ability to turn themselves into humans at will–to look like you or me.

* * * * * *

On October 9th, 2013, Brianna came back.

A pair of EMTs found a young girl by the side of the road outside Bennington and took her to the hospital.  She was skeletally thin, her eyes deep-set and haunted, her long brown hair filthy. After she’d been cleaned up, she told the nurses her name was Brianna.  She presented a square locket around her neck, which had belonged to our grandmother.  She showed the police the birthmark on her right shoulder, allowed her teeth to be x-rayed, and let them take a sample of her hair to conduct a DNA test.

The DNA matched.  Brianna had truly returned, though she couldn’t be coaxed by anyone to reveal where she’d been for the past five years.

Brianna was eighteen, so she didn’t need to be reunited with Mom and me–but she desperately wanted to be.  Mom acted nervous when we first met her at the police station, hanging awkwardly in the doorway, but I ran to my sister and immediately threw my arms around her neck.

“Hey, Tyler-tot,” she whispered–her special nickname for me.

I pulled away and peered into her deep brown eyes.  “What’s the name of my dog?” I asked.

Brianna frowned, then burst out laughing.  Once, while we’d relaxed together drinking hot chocolate, we’d come up with secret questions to ask each other if, for any reason, we were to be presented with an imposter.

“Doug,” she said.  “The imaginary dog Dad refused to adopt is a pug named Doug.”

I hugged her tighter, burying my face in her long hair.

* * * * * *

Mom said Brianna could live with us, so long as she followed the rules.  Brianna spent her days wandering our house, opening and closing doors, and sitting on her bed parsing through whichever of her remaining belongings our grief-stricken mother hadn’t given away.

She and Mom still seemed awkward around each other, unable to fit into each other’s rhythms, but Brianna and I were drawn together like magnets.  She’d make hot chocolate on the stove, with cinnamon and nutmeg, and we’d drink it together on my bed, watching the dusk gather over the woods.  Brianna still wore our grandmother’s locket around her neck.  Absentmindedly, she threaded her fingers through the chain.

“Wanna tell Ultimate Secrets?” I asked her one night, two weeks after her return.  Ultimate Secrets had been our special thing; we’d reveal hidden truths to each other, truths no one else was ever allowed to know.

Brianna smiled.  “Sure, Tyler-tot.”

I told her my Ultimate Secret first.  Actually, two Ultimate Secrets: the secrets I’d hidden in my long underwear drawer–a walkie-talkie, and a key.

After our father died, I’d found his key ring.  I extracted one key–the key that opened the cellar door–before Mom took the rest.  I’d taken it, initially, because Ryan told me I’d need to hide in the cellar when the zombie apocalypse happened.

The zombie apocalypse never arrived, but after Brianna disappeared my mom started locking every door to the house, with me inside.  So I hid my cellar key, alongside the walkie-talkie Ryan once gave me; he’d kept the other one.  On Wednesdays, while Mom attended Ladies’ Bible Study, I’d take out the walkie-talkie and radio Ryan.  If his foster mom, a nurse, was at work that night, Ryan would sneak over to my house.  I’d open the trapdoor in the laundry room, descend the steps to the cellar, unlock the cellar door, and let Ryan in.  We’d take turns on his Game Boy until Mom came back.

“That’s a good secret, Ty,” Brianna said.

“Well, now you’ve gotta tell me one back,” I said.  “And what I wanna know is this: when you went missing, who took you?  And where did you go?”

Brianna pulled away, suddenly cold.  “I’m sorry, little brother,” she said.

She collected our hot chocolate mugs and all but ran from the room.

For the first time, I suspected the girl next to me wasn’t actually my sister, that she’d been replaced by someone–or something–else.

* * * * * *

“Brianna, do you remember the time Dad ran over that cat with his car?  Whose cat was it?”

Brianna exhaled slowly.  She took a long sip of her cocoa, then twirled the chain of Grandma’s locket.

“I don’t remember, Tyler-tot,” she said.

The icy knot of tension in my chest loosened a little.  She’d given the right answer. As far as I knew, Dad never ran over a cat.  I’d made up the story as a test.

“But, I thought about it,” she continued.  “And…the game you and Ryan used to play in the yard was called The Black Bird Knights.  One time, a blackbird ate bread right out of your hand and you thought it meant you were ‘the chosen one.’”

The knot loosened even more.  That was the correct answer to the test question I’d asked the night before.  I gulped the rest of my hot chocolate, then leaned on my sister’s shoulder.  My eyelids grew heavy, and I let sleep overtake me.

* * * * * *

Two nights later, I bent over the toilet and puked up all my hot chocolate.  My nose was running and my stomach ached; I’d come down with the flu.

I managed to fall asleep, but I awoke in the darkness, acid burning in my throat.  I ran to the bathroom, where I lurched and wretched, not even bothering to turn on the light.  After I’d expelled the entire contents of my stomach and lay curled on the tile until the cramps numbed, I stood up to return to bed.

A light glowed from the living room.

My nerves stood on end.

Mom was awake, and I wasn’t allowed to be out of bed after nine.  It sounded like she was on the phone; I cowered in the doorway and listened.

“I have no idea what she wants,” Mom said.  “It’s not money.”

A pause.  I heard the ghost of a male voice on the other end.  Then, Mom spoke again, more virulent than I’d ever heard before.

“That thing is not my daughter!” she shouted.

With that, Mom hung up and stalked down the hall to her room.  I remained frozen.  Her room was right across from mine; she’d definitely catch me sneaking back in.

And, what had she meant?  Not my daughter?  Brianna?

I tiptoed out of the bathroom and into the kitchen.  I crouched under the table, waiting for the light in Mom’s room to go out so I could creep back to bed.

A hand clutched my shoulder, and I gasped.

It was my sister, dressed in boots, jeans, and a sweater.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed.

Brianna shrugged.  “I wanted a drink of water.”

We huddled together until Mom turned out her light.  Then, we tiptoed back to our respective rooms.

One thing still troubled my fevered mind. If Brianna had only woken for a glass of water, then why were her boots covered in mud and fresh grass?

* * * * * *

The next day, Mom spent hours in her room with the door locked, talking on the phone in hushed tones.  It was Thursday, but Pastor Joe cancelled church service.  I couldn’t figure out what had the adults in such a worried state until the following Wednesday, when Mom went to Ladies’ Bible Study, strong-armed Brianna into joining her, and locked me in the house alone.

Ryan came over.  He brought the iPhone his foster parents bought him for his birthday, and he told me a man had been found dead in the woods, viciously stabbed over six-dozen times.  We looked it up on the internet.  The police said the man was unidentifiable; the attack had been so thorough and so savagely that his body resembled ground beef.

I thought about the Wolves of Abbadon.  Of their knife-like teeth, eight legs, bloodstained claws made for slicing and dicing.  Pastor Joe still talked about the Wolves sometimes, and how they could take human form.

And I remembered my mother’s words:

“That thing is not my daughter.”

* * * * * *

Nine nights later, I pretended to drink the hot chocolate Brianna made me.  I surreptitiously poured it into a plastic bag, then pretended to fall asleep.  I squeezed my eyes shut as Brianna snuck into my room, opened my long underwear drawer, and pulled out my key to the cellar door.  Then, as soon as the trap door in the laundry room clicked shut, I climbed out of bed, put on my coat, and followed her.

Every night, I’d intended to ask Brianna where she’d gone the five years she’d been missing. I never got the chance, because every time, as soon as we finished our hot chocolate, my eyelids drooped, the edges of my thoughts blurred, and I passed out, into a deep sleep, wrapped in blankets on my bed.

It was Ryan, the next Wednesday, who’d figured it out.

“You’re such a dumbass, Tyler,” he’d teased affectionately.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You said after you drink your sister’s hot chocolate, you get tired and fall asleep.”

I nodded.  Ryan grinned like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Duh! Don’t you get it?” he said. “Brianna’s drugging you!”

He was right–Brianna was drugging me. And I intended to find out why.

I exited the basement through the cellar door and, keeping my distance, followed my sister’s flashlight-swinging form into the woods behind the house.  I realized, as soon as I reached the tree line, that I’d kept too much distance between us; Brianna had disappeared amongst the spindly, bare birch. I’d also forgotten to bring a flashlight of my own.

I steeled myself and trudged onward, through dirty, melting snow and the carpet of dead leaves littering the forest floor.  I looked for Brianna in the blue-grey light of the full moon, flinching at the calls of the whippoorwills and mockingbirds.  But my sister had managed to lose me completely.

Then, I heard a scream echoing through the naked trees.  Then another–the desperate, high-pitched screech of a man in danger.

I bolted.  Whether towards or away from the safety of my home, I wasn’t sure.  I didn’t care where I was going, so long as I put distance between myself and whatever had inspired that hopeless, animalistic scream.  I ran until my lungs burned and my legs numbed.  Then, I tripped over a jutting root and landed face-first in a pile of rocks.

Radiating waves of pain stilled my racing mind, and I felt the warmth of blood as it trickled down my chin.

That’s when I heard Brianna’s voice.

Quietly, painfully, I rolled over. It was then I realized I was in the dry creek bed.  Keeping myself low, I crawled to the edge and peered over.

Brianna was there, leaning on a large, round boulder, staring into a pit.

“When Dad took Tyler and me on a road trip to New York City,” Brianna annunciated, “what play did we see on Broadway?”

Cold tendrils of apprehension curled around my heart.  I’d asked Brianna that question as a test the night before, and she had claimed she couldn’t remember.

From the depths of the nightmarish, subterranean maw, a low-pitched, echoing voice replied. I couldn’t make out exact words, but its growling timbre triggered something buried deep in my subconscious, freezing me in terror.

“Mary Poppins,” Brianna said. “Got it.”

The tendrils tightened.  That was the answer.  We’d seen Mary Poppins: The Musical.

From the pit, another growling utterance broke the silence.

“I’ve looked all over,” Brianna responded.  “It’s not in the house.  I’ll check the church next.”

A cloud shifted, and Brianna was illuminated by moonlight.  It took every ounce of resistance I possessed not to cry out.

Brianna’s thick overcoat, face, and hair were splattered with blood.

I crawled away as quietly as I could, keeping low in the creek bed.  When I felt I’d gone far enough, I stood up and ran, following the path of the creek to my house.

Along the way, I stumbled over something soft and wet, and nearly fell.

This time, I couldn’t hold back my anguished cry of shock.

On the forest floor, crumpled in the leaves and snow, lay the blood-drenched body of a man.  He’d been stabbed so many times that chunks of his flesh were hanging from his body; his face resembled cuts of sirloin steak.

I vomited.

* * * * * *

“So,” Pastor Joe mused, leaning forward against his desk, “you think there’s something wrong with your sister.”

I nodded, sinking into the chair opposite him.  Pastor Joe was a non-assuming man with neatly-trimmed greying hair, a polite mustache, and big green eyes that seemed to stare through you.  He never raised his voice, but spoke in a way that compelled you to do exactly what he asked.

“She gave me sleeping drugs,” I said.

Pastor Joe nodded, pressing two fingers to his chin.

“She lies all the time,” I continued.

Pastor Joe nodded again.

“She sneaks out of the house and into the woods,” I said, “and she talks to a monster in a hole in the ground!”

At this, Pastor Joe flinched.  Twisted, snarling anger flashed across his face.  A second later, he composed himself and smiled indulgently.

“Tyler,” he said, “do you recall my sermons about the Wolves of Abbadon?”

“Uh-huh,” I replied.

Pastor Joe nodded.  He stood and opened a cabinet door behind him, revealing a wall safe.  He entered a combination and it swung open.  Inside, I saw stacks of money, a set of keys on a hook, and a little plastic box.

* * * * * *

The following Wednesday night, I told Brianna I wanted to make her hot chocolate for a change.  I mixed the milk, cocoa, cinnamon, and nutmeg on the stove, and poured the velvety liquid into two mugs: a green one for me, and a red one for Brianna. Then, I pulled out the little baggie of white powder Pastor Joe had given me.  He’d extracted it from that plastic box, which also contained pills and vials.  I emptied the powder into Brianna’s mug and mixed it thoroughly.

“Your sister has been changed by the Wolves of Abbadon,” Pastor Joe told me.  “The only way to save her–to turn her back–is to mix this holy concoction into her food and make sure she eats it.”

I wasn’t stupid.  I knew what he’d given me was poison.

Brianna found me in the kitchen.  She’d managed to convince Mom she had a headache and couldn’t possibly focus during Ladies’ Bible Study, so she should spend the night at home in bed.

“Hey, Tyler-tot,” she said to me with a smile, “do you remember the answer to my secret question?  The one I’d ask you if I were to be presented with an imposter?”

I nodded, setting the mugs of hot chocolate on the kitchen table.

“I told you I looked like a girl, but I’m actually a boy,” Brianna continued.  “And my actual, secret name is…”

“Garrett,” I finished.

I was seized by a surge of affection for my sister.  She’d shared with me what she couldn’t tell Mom or Pastor Joe, or anyone–that she wished she could become a boy and name herself Garrett.

Brianna reached for her hot chocolate.  I reached for the red mug and knocked it over, spilling the entire contents.  Whatever the Wolves of Abbadon had done to Brianna, she was still my sister, and I loved her. I would never hurt her.

“I’m sorry!” I said.  “Here. Take my mug, and I’ll clean up.”

The twin beams of a vehicle’s headlights flashed through our living room’s bay windows..  Outside, a car was parked, idling in the driveway.  Brianna shook her head.

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it—oh, I forgot to tell you!” Brianna said. “Mom said you can have a sleepover with Ryan tonight.”

I couldn’t believe it.  “Mom doesn’t even let me see Ryan,” I said.

Brianna grinned mischievously.  “Do you want to have the sleepover or not?”

I really did. So I packed some clothes and escaped the house via the cellar door, and met Ryan and his mom outside, where they were waiting in their car.

That night, Ryan and I ate pizza, played Mass Effect on PlayStation, and watched Adult Swim while stuffing our faces with ice cream and Reese’s peanut butter cups until the sugar high wore off, and crashed on his bean bag chair.

We were awakened abruptly, just after 2 am, by the howling siren of a fire engine.  Through the window, we saw pillars of black smoke rising from a tower of red and gold flames.

I knew, even before the grim-faced policeman appeared on the doorstep the next day, that it was my house set ablaze.

They found both bodies–Mom’s and Pastor Joe’s–on the floor of the living room.  They had been burned badly, but not so completely as to prevent the coroner from determining they’d first been attacked mercilessly–animalistically–with a sharp knife.

And Brianna was gone.

Ryan’s foster parents took me in.  They raised the two of us together, as brothers, until we grew up and left for college.  I finished my Bachelor’s in accounting, passed the CPA exam, and found a position with a firm in Boston.

If you’re wondering whether I assumed Brianna was behind the fire and the fatal attacks, if I felt guilt for not carrying out Pastor Joe’s final instructions, or if I wondered what had become of my sibling who’d become, yet again, a missing person, the answer is yes, to all of the above.

Several weeks after the fire, after the attention from police, reporters, and rubberneckers had subsided, I returned to the woods.  I followed the dry creek bed until I found the spot where I’d encountered Brianna conversing with something in a deep, dark pit.

At the bottom of the hole, I found a note.

* * * * * *

Once Ryan familiarized me with the internet, I realized why my mother had worked so hard to keep me away from the online world.  There were a whole lot of people obsessed with Brianna, who thought, since 2008, that there was something fishy about her disappearance.

“Brianna’s mom belonged to this culty church,” wrote one Reddit user.  “I did some research: the pastor, Joseph Calder, got fired from a megachurch after some teenage girls accused him of locking them in his office and… you know.  So Calder took, like, twenty of his followers and convinced them to move to the middle of nowhere, Vermont.”

I’d been three years old when my family relocated from Southern California to Vermont.  I never knew we did so at the request of Pastor Joe.

For years, I kept abreast of the online rumors regarding Brianna.  I ignored most of the supposed sightings–I highly doubted Brianna had become a yoga teacher in Rishikesh.  But the ones that placed her in the company of a young man–those, I followed more closely.

I kept the note in my wallet.

In early 2019, I traced one of the Brianna sightings to a diner off the highway between New York City and the Hudson Valley.  A young woman waited tables there, a pretty girl with long brown hair, deep-set eyes, and a crooked nose.  A brown-haired, crooked-nosed young man worked behind the grill.

Brianna was surprised to see me, but pleasantly so.  She claimed she knew I’d track her down one day.  Then, she coaxed the young man to my booth.  The young man with familiar eyes.

He told me his name was Garrett.

* * * * * *

From the time she was ten years old, Brianna knew she was a boy.  She longed to cut her hair and call herself Garrett.  But she didn’t dare, lest she incur the wrath of Mom and Pastor Joe.  Pastor Joe was obsessed with femininity–dresses, long hair, and slave-like fealty to men.

In 2008, Brianna met Gigi, a foster girl housed short-term with Ryan’s family.  The girls became best friends.  Brianna told Gigi her secret, and Gigi believed and encouraged her.  Their friendship evolved into a mutual crush.  For Gigi’s birthday, Brianna gifted her a square locket that had belonged to our grandmother.  In the locket, Brianna left a lock of her hair.

The girls’ first kiss, under the tree behind our house, was also their last.

My mom caught them.  She kept her temper in check as she sent Gigi home.  Alone, she lashed out at Brianna, enraged.  But Brianna wasn’t afraid anymore.  She confessed she no longer wished to live as a girl.  She wanted Mom to start calling her Garrett.

Mom smiled and pretended to accept her.

Then, that night, Mom drugged Brianna.

Pastor Joe and two other men carried her to the woods and locked her in an old cellar, by the dry creek bed.  They barricaded the door to the cellar with large stones and trapped Brianna there until she “accepted her place.”  Mom and Pastor Joe charged strangers–men they found on the internet–hundreds of dollars for access to the cellar, where they’d “remind” Brianna she was a woman.

Meanwhile, Gigi moved to another foster home, where she remained suspicious of Mom and our insular church.  She and Brianna looked somewhat alike; their classmates often confused the two.

So, when she turned eighteen, Gigi got a tattoo in the place where Brianna had a birthmark.  She paid a crooked dentist to modify her teeth.  She broke her nose, then re-set it to match my sibling’s.   She dirtied herself up, approached a pair of EMTs in Bennington, and identified herself as Brianna.

Luckily for her, the police officers handling her case were inexperienced.  For the DNA test, she’d tricked them into testing Brianna’s hair–the lock of hair she’d kept, for years, in her locket.

Mom and Pastor Joe knew she wasn’t actually Brianna.  They knew exactly where the real Brianna was, but they couldn’t reject the imposter, lest they attract unwanted attention.  I believe they kept her around to figure out what she knew and what her intentions were.

As soon as she had access to my spare key, Gigi began figuring things out.  She tailed my mother into the woods and located Brianna’s cellar.  She stole sleeping pills from the pharmacy in town, then attacked and killed two men who’d repeatedly paid to assault Brianna.

Brianna told her a lot about me–our secret questions, our shared memories–but she didn’t tell her everything.  I asked a lot of questions.  Gigi was forced to consult Brianna for some of the answers.  The echo in the cellar warped Brianna’s voice, which she’d practiced making deeper.

What Gigi couldn’t find was the key to unlock Brianna’s cellar door.  She scoured our house for it.  Then, she turned her attention to the church.  She installed a hidden camera, stolen from an electronics store, in Pastor Joe’s office during Ladies’ Bible Study.

When I’d sought out Pastor Joe and he had opened the safe to retrieve the poison intended for Brianna, Gigi’s recorded him entering the combination.  The cellar keys hung on a hook inside the safe.

Gigi swiped the keys and freed Brianna.  She called Ryan’s foster mom and, pretending to be our mom, asked if I could spend the night at their house.  She and Brianna waited until Mom became concerned enough about her and my absence to summon Pastor Joe.

Then the girls attacked, and burned the house down.

Finally free, Brianna and Gigi–Gigi and Garrett–disappeared to start their life together.