nosleep

My brother and I are ten years apart. Our parents were normal on the outside, my mother was a lawyer and my step father was a high school teacher, but at home, behind closed doors, they were monsters. I had been beaten, screamed at, had food taken away, forced to clean the house and work in the yard for hours. One time my step dad choked me until I passed out. More than anything, it was made clear to me every day that I wasn't good enough and never would be. My brother was treated better, but seeing him go through even a fraction of what I went through was worse than anything they ever did to me. I was more like a father to him than a brother and he was the reason I stayed around as long as I did. But living with my parents was unbearable and I moved out as soon as I had the means. I was so caught up in my own life I didn't see what they were doing to him. I'm so sorry, Daniel.

Daniel was always a shy kid. He was scared of the dark and spent many nights sneaking into my room to hide from the boogeyman in his closet. I noticed he was really concerned about that, more so than most kids. He believed it was real, that it lived in his closet and came out to give him nightmares. He was always safe in my room but my parents never let him sleep there. He had to stay in his own room no matter how much he screamed and cried. I tried to talk to him about it, I told him the boogeyman wasn't real, that he couldn't hurt him. I was the one that got him a night light to help and made sure his closet was closed every night. I knew that they would hurt him if he cried too much so I did everything I could to help him stay calm.

He was 8 when I had to move out and I thought seriously about just taking him and running, but I knew I would end up in jail and he would go right back to them. They said they were going to take him to a psychologist to help with his anxiety. If it was anything like how they "treated" me, they would be dumping pills down his throat until he couldn't think about how badly they were treating him. Like I said, I wasn't there when most of what happened with the other kids went down.

It was when I had come over to hang out with him that he showed me his drawings of the boogeyman and all of the journals he'd written about it and the lengths he'd gone to to protect himself. He told me mom would take away his night light if he did something wrong so he had to keep a flashlight next to his bed. They would take them whenever they found them so he had several stashed throughout his room. I could tell things were getting worse for him, but there wasn't anything I could do except help him and reassure him the boogeyman wasn't real. Then I would go home and punch my dresser until my hands looked like hamburger meat and I couldn't breathe.

Every time I went back, he had gotten worse. My stepdad took the door off his closet because he had been failing in school, so now Daniel had started drinking energy drinks to stay awake at night so he could sleep at school. One time he showed me the shoe box he had been collecting his pills in after pretending to take them. That scared me bad. All he had to do was eat a handful of those and, well, I couldn't even think about it. I took his box and told him to just flush them instead of keeping them, like I used to do.

When he told me about the group sessions he'd been going to with other kids who believed in the boogeyman, it was the happiest I'd seen him in a while. I thought he might get better, and for a while he did. But then one of the kids in the group was found dead in his closet. They called off the group sessions but it was too late. All of the kids who were in the group started to get worse.

Daniel was convinced he had pissed it off somehow, that it was killing them because they knew too much about it. He wouldn't even talk to me anymore. I tried to find out what happened to the kid but the cops said it was an accident, that he'd had some kind of freak heart attack and died. When I asked why they found him in the closet they didn't care, it was just where he ended up.

When the second kid was found dead, I started to think it might really be someone or something killing these kids. I started to have these nightmares. I'd wake up and see someone in my room, only they were gone when I tried to look at them or turn on the light. I started feeling like I was being watched everywhere I went. Every open door was like a black eye watching me. Once the third kid was found, the cops finally started to look into it as more than a coincidence and that's when they first connected it to my brother. At first they tried to say it was his fault the group sessions made things worse, like he had infected them with something.

It didn't help that my brother had become a nervous wreck, refusing to go to school or sleep anywhere that wasn't fully lit. I offered to let him stay with me but of course my mom wouldn't allow that. Can't let him get too far away from her control, he might realize what a terrible person she is. It was after a fourth kid turned up dead that my brother finally snapped.

He told me he was just trying to get something to eat, just trying to mind his own business, but mom was screaming at him about something. Just screaming in his face about what a stupid bastard he was, about how he's driving them all crazy. He said he remembers everything going black and then he was standing over mom and she was crying, begging him to stop. He just sat in a kind of stupor as the cops came and took him to jail.