The Writer and the Writer's Brother

The Writer and the Writer’s Brother

By Katurian Katurian

Once upon a time there was a little boy upon whom his mother and father showered nothing but love, kindness, warmth, all that stuff. He had his own little room in a big house in the middle of a pretty forest. He wanted for nothing: all the toys in the world were his; all the paints, all the books, paper, pens. All the seeds of creativity were implanted in him from an early age and it was writing that became his first love: short stories, fairy tales, little novels, all happy, colourful things about bears and piglets and angels and so forth, and some of them were good, some of them were very good. His parents’ experiment had worked. The first part of his parents’ experiment had worked.

It was the night of his seventh birthday that the nightmares started. The room next door to his own room had always been kept bolted and padlocked for reasons the boy was never quite sure of but never quite questioned until the low whirring of drills, the scritchety-scratch of bolts being tightened, the dull fizz of unknown things electrical, and the muffled scream of a small gagged child began to emanate through its thick brick walls. On a nightly basis. “What were all those noises last night, Mama?” he’d ask after each long, desperate, sleepless night, to which his mother would ever reply “Oh little Kat, that’s just your wonderful but over-active imagination playing tricks on you.”

 “Oh. Do all little boys of my age hear such sounds of abomination nightly?”

“No, my darling. Only the extraordinarily talented ones.”

“Oh. Cool.”

And that was that. And the boy kept on writing, and his parents kept encouraging him with the utmost love, but the sounds of the whirrs and screams kept going on and his stories got darker and darker and darker. They got better and better, due to all the love and encouragement, as is often the case, but they got darker and darker, due to the constant sound of child-torture, as is also often the case.

It was on the day of his fourteenth birthday, a day he was waiting to hear the results of a story competition he was short-listed for, that a note slipped out from under the door of the locked room. A note which read: ‘They have loved you tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don’t write about little green pigs any more, do you?’ The note was signed ‘Your brother’, and the note was written in blood.

He axed through the door to find his parents sitting in there, smiling, alone; his father doing some drill noises; his mother doing some muffled screams of a gagged child; They had a little pot of pig’s blood between them, and his father told him to look at the other side of the blood-written note. The boy did, and found he’d won the fifty-pounds first prize in the short-story competition. They all laughed. The second part of his parents’ experiment was complete.

They moved house soon after that and though the nightmare sounds had ended, his stories stayed strange and twisted but good, and he was able to thank his parents for the weirdness they’d put him through, and years later, on the day that his first book was published, he decided to revisit his childhood home for the first time since he’d left. He idled around his old bedroom, and all the toys and paints still littered around there. Then he went into the room beside it that still had the old dusty drills and padlocks and electrical cord lying around, and he smiled at the insanity of the very idea of it all, but he lost his smile when he came across the corpse of a fourteen-year-old child that had been left to rot in there, barely a bone of which wasn't broken or burned, in whose hand there lay a story, scrawled in blood. And the boy read that story, a story that could only have been written under the most sickening of circumstances, and it was the sweetest, gentlest thing he’d ever come across, but, what was even worse, it was better than anything he himself had ever written. Or ever would.

So he burnt the story, and he covered his brother back up, and he never mentioned a word of what he had seen to anybody. Not to his parents, not to his publishers, not to anybody. The final part of his parents’ experiment was over.