Three Brothers - A Halloween Story (+ ParaPod Promo Art)

Hello there

I know it's not Halloween today, but this was the gap I had to include it this week.  You are more than welcome to save it for Sunday, to read around the camp fire or whatever people do.  Maybe give the kids a fright as a bedtime story? (Definitely don't).

I actually abandoned this story last night, as I was having great difficulty finishing it off.  I was all set to not post today, reluctantly, but awoke at 5 this morning and had another crack at it.  I really don't know if it's any good or not, but I had a go and it's the taking part that counts. I have proof-read it, but I am also a very shattered boy, so do take that into account.

Speaking of taking things into account, I also don't know what I should be doing by way of warning for this story.  

It's not a funny one, and has moments of horror in it.  A bit graphic maybe sometimes, but I'm not sure it warrants a full on trigger warning or anything.  I may be wrong.  I'll credit you with knowing your own levels of caution with horror/ghost/halloween stuff.  I'll also credit you with knowing what I am like with this sort of thing too, and whether my word can ever really be trusted. 

By all means have a read and see what you think. It's not daft long or owt.  

Also, I put this together last night...

I'll stick it as a downloadable at the bottom, and if you fancy you could maybe social media it? Or just print it out and put it on your wall. I know it's not the correct sizing for most social media but that is such a fuss to do. Any help helps.  

Hope you have a brilliant Thursday ahead for you, and that all is well and happy where you are.

Much love from here

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Three Brothers

Three brothers were born a year apart from each other.

As often happens, with siblings so marginally divided, a hierarchy naturally evolved and maintained, and a triumvirate of diverse personalities emerged.

The eldest brother, Tom, was a grinning mischief-maker.  He would play tricks, each one more extreme than the last, ever resistant to the concept that he would appear predictable.  He would laugh very loudly, each time his mischief came to fruition, as did all others involved in his tomfoolery. Even those who were the target.  Tom’s roguishness was drenched in charm .  He wasn’t cruel or malevolent, merely aspiring to always be fun.  When you are always trying to up the ante though, tame is ultimately sacrificed.

The youngest brother, Robert, who was both affectionately and mockingly known as Little Bob, fell unwittingly into being the target.  Not, let’s again reiterate, in a nasty way.  If Tom had thought that the pranks he curated would have actually caused a real distress, he would have tempered his activities immediately.  Still, when you hear of the prank that was the catalyst for our tale, you would certainly be forgiven for questioning how Tom could have possibly thought Little Bob would not be distressed.

The middle brother, Christian, unarguably drew the longest straw.  Without the distractions bestowed upon Little Bob, Christian was able to be studious and considered.  Christian was blessed with the most time of the three, only diverted occasionally when recruited to be a supplementary player in the mischievous scenarios.  He would be sometimes required to feed Little Bob with news that somebody was on the phone for him, or that there was a caller at the front door, but after pointing Little Bob in the direction of the awaiting Tom, his involvement was usually spent.  It was, amongst the three of them, the easiest of lives, which led to him having the most peace, which further led to him achieving the highest.

On the eve of Little Bob’s tenth birthday, he arrived home to find Christian in a state of shock.  He was trembling and mute, perched on the furthest away chair at the kitchen table. Little Bob tried, sweetly, to coax his brother’s hands into his, clasped and wringing tightly as they were.  He asked him what was wrong.  Then he asked him again, and again. Christian wouldn’t meet his gaze, his eyes were fixed and staring.  Little Bob’s voice grew louder and more concerned.  He asked if he should call their mother.

Christian didn’t respond.

He asked if this would be a time to call the police, or an ambulance.

Christian didn’t respond.

Despite his best efforts to stay sensible and calm, Little Bob began to panic.  Only then did Christian softly mutter “in the garage”.

Little Bob nodded, squeezed the hand of the middle brother, and went back out of the front door.

He hadn’t noticed, as he arrived home moments earlier, that the garage door was half-raised.  Or perhaps he had noticed but simply not registered it as unusual.  There were far more dramatic things to be pushed into his consciousness on that day.  Horrors that stayed with him.

As he ducked beneath the door, he was immediately confronted by the contents of the garage in alarming disarray.  The garden tools were scattered, the lawnmower was tipped. Books, that had been neatly boxed, were now strewn across the floor.  Amongst all this, in the centre of the garage, lay his eldest brother in a state of dismemberment.  Tom’s chest was claret-sodden and his left arm was entirely absent, a ghastly stump of ripped and bloody flesh all that remained.  It were as though he was somehow inside out. Little Bob tried to avert his eyes from the shred, only to look straight into Tom’s face.  His skin was already blue, and his gaze stared out into nothingness. Little Bob tried to scream but no sound came.  He felt as though he would faint, and couldn’t flee as his feet were numb.  He never told a soul afterwards, but he involuntarily began to wet himself, having to tense urgently to stop the flow.  Eventually the inevitable scream came.

Tom , of course, came back to life immediately, already bursting with laughter.  Little Bob found his feet and ran at his eldest brother, swinging his fists and swearing, as Tom continued to howl.  Christian, who had held the deepest reservations about this set up, voicing them consistently to Tom’s deaf ears as he taped the Papier Mache stump to Tom’s shoulder, ran into the garage and put his arms around Little Bob.  They were restrictive to stop his punching and consoling to quell the distress.

The obvious distress.

Giddy abandon for a ridiculous idea can plant trees that make it awfully difficult to see the woods.  Partly through exhaustion, but mostly through relief, Little Bob stopped punching and held his sides. He was laughing now too.

Three brothers, stood in the aftermath of a competition ending prank.  Tom declared It would never be beaten.  Little Bob would spend twenty patient years awaiting the opportunity to prove him wrong.

It came by chance, but couldn’t have been scheduled more relevantly.  The date for Tom’s operation was the eve of Little Bob’s thirtieth birthday.  He was still called Little Bob and always would be.  Tom had been niggled by a repetitive strain injury from work.  It was, in another coincidence, in the same shoulder that had been a bloody stump all those years back.  As the idea formulated in the mind of Little Bob, it seemed that fate was – pardon the pun – lending a hand.

There were reservations.  They were adults now.  The idea couldn’t be as easily explained away as the misadventures of youth.  Every time Little Bob found himself erring on the side of abandoning the prank, he remembered the garage.  Even Christian, a necessary recruit for both nostalgia reasons and the fact that he was ideally placed working in the hospital morgue, found the recollection of the garage incident to be kryptonite to any disputes.  He really didn’t think that Little Bob’s idea was a good one, but he couldn’t deny his younger brothers need for revenge.  Of course, the retribution had to further push the envelope. Tom had been too caught up in the hilarity to notice, but Christian never forgot how much Little Bob had been trembling, even weeks after the event itself.

The plan was as simple as it was emboldened.  Tom would have his operation, a relatively simple clean out of the shoulder, but would then be taken to the morgue rather than the recovery room.  This is where he would awaken, surrounded by a tearful Little Bob and Christian, who would ignore any conversation as though Tom were not speaking.  They both acknowledged that they could both only perform this feat for a short time without smiling.  Neither of them anticipated it being a particularly long stunt, but nor – in actuality – had the garage incident been.  The time sap had been the prep.  Just as with Operation Morgue-Dump now.

Lucy, the anaesthesiologist, was recruited into the clandestine stunt.  There was the hint of romance emerging between her and Christian, which Christian reluctantly exploited.  Still, Lucy declared Christian unhinged.  “It’s my brother, not me”.

Settled as he was, he still had to say that a lot in his life.

He explained that she needn’t be directly involved, it was merely a case of not questioning the movement of Tom post-operation.  She had shaken her head and said that she had to remain with him as he emerged from anaesthetic.  Christian reasoned that this was at the request of his family.  There would be no repercussion.  Lucy called him unhinged again, but in the spiral of enticing danger, somehow agreed to risk her livelihood and the safety of her patient. She explained that Tom would wake slowly, within around twenty minutes, and agreed to let him be moved unsupervised. The momentum of hedonistic madness.

Christian’s last job was to visit Tom, along with Little Bob, in pre-op.  With or without the plan, he would have done this anyway, but his role was specific.  He was to drop in ghost stories about the morgue, whilst Little Bob would feign fear.  They both knew that Tom would laugh them off, so their counter had to be one of commitment to the tales.  The truth was, there were ghost stories about the morgue.  All hospitals have them.  People who are confronted daily with the stark reality of life and death, who worked with a necessary attitude of detachment, would swear blind they were true.  Bodies being found in different refrigeration to where they had been left, relentlessly flickering lights, unexplained guests asking to see family members before disappearing, and, at Christian’s hospital, The Wailer.

The Wailer was unexplained yet documented.  You’d be hard pushed to find a member of staff in the hospital who didn’t have a recording of the terrifying monotonous shriek on their phone.  Everybody that had heard the tale, who had been brave enough to visit the morgue, had gone on to hear it.  It always happened and was never a no-show. Christian heard it most every day.  He had become so attuned to its regularity that he would feel it in the air before the noise began, and had to compose himself to not shudder.  Whatever it was, he didn’t want it to see his fear.

As he regaled this to Tom, in the pre-op room, it wasn’t a stretch for Little Bob to display his fear.  There was no feigning needed. It was perhaps compounded by the nerves and exhilaration of the prank ahead, but he found no cause for acting.  Little Bob was skittish at the best of times.  Who knows where those nerves came from.  Tom listened, and  laughed.  As Tom did.

Little Bob and Christian sat alone in the morgue and waited.  They tried to rehearse their upset faces, but there was a great deal of wide-eyed, grinning excitement and disbelief at what they were engaged in.  At one stage, they nervously considered that the shock could kill Tom. He might wake, see where he was and have a heart attack. What would happen to them?  They couldn’t think about that seriously.  This wasn’t a day for them to have terror. They were starting to scare each other, and laughter soon followed.  Of course, Tom wouldn’t have a heart attack.  You don’t get active enough to knacker your shoulder from relentless joinery without building up a peak physical fitness. Plus, he was long proven as having a stomach for the macabre. It would be ok.

It would beat the garage.

Tom was due out of surgery at 3pm.  As the clock hit 3.15, Christian was first to voice concern. They had both been silently feeling it for five long minutes. He smiled as he said it, which relieved Little Bob. Little Bob dutifully smiled back.  Christian called Lucy.  Just to be on the safe side.

The operation had been straightforward, and successful, as expected.  Tom had still been out like a light when she had left the recovery room.  There was a chance he’d been retained there to awaken in her absence, but he was probably on his way.

Christian and Little Bob waited a little longer, a slight air of disappointment now.  The plan maybe hadn’t come off.  At 3.30, they began to worry again.  Christian said they should go back up to the recovery room, and as they entered the lift they both began to concede that this was all over.  They reached the recovery room, and Christian held his pass to the reader.

Tom wasn’t there.

If he had been delivered to the morgue in the time between, they would miss it all.  They took the stairs, two at a time, back down.

Tom wasn’t there.

Another call to Lucy.  She now sounded concerned too, and looked back through her notes.  She explained that she had left a message for Chad, the porter, to move Tom to the morgue, post op, as a special request.  Lucy tried to call Chad.  The holding bleeps pierced through Christian, and he avoided the eyes of concern directed his way from Little Bob.

Chad, did not come to work that day.  A temp porter called Craig had covered him.  He had retrieved the message.  In his brief, he had been instructed, before taking patients deceased in the operating theatre to the morgue, they were to be taken for mandatory post-mortem.  Craig was diligent and aware that messing something up in a hospital could have very dire consequences.

He had followed his brief.

The post-mortem room was adjacent to the morgue. Leaving surgery at 3, which was now confirmed, Tom had been due to arrive at the morgue by 3.10 at the latest.  He would have arrived at the post-mortem room at the same time.

It was now 3.48.

As Christian dropped the phone, Little Bob urgently asked him what had happened.  Christian darted from the room, and Little Bob followed.  He kept following as Christian burst through the doors of the post-mortem surgery.

He was very aware that his feet were going numb.

For the second, and final time in his life, Little Bob saw his eldest brother inside out.

Two brothers, stood in horror, waiting and waiting for Tom to jump up and laugh.

Forever more, the wailing had a story behind it.

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