Sanctuary

- If you just wait here - he should be arriving any minute from his daily walk with his attendant.

I wait, the room is spartan but tidy and pleasant apart from the lingering odour of the institutionalized.  Probably sterilized regularly and devoid of the normal bacterial fauna we're used to from home.

Very hygienic, could belong to an OCD teenager with an obsession for tidyness.

I'm bringing my brother a Christmas present, it's the first time I've visited him in 15 years.

When he arrives, his caretaker accompanies him inside and seats himself on a chair in the corner of the room while my brother sits on the bed.  He looks up into my eyes briefly but I don't see any hint of recognition in there and he looks away.

He also wears some sort of safety cap that looks like a cross between a hockey helmet and an executioneers hood. Unsettling...

He looks sideways at something in the distance and his dried lips part in something resembling a grin without being a smile and I'm stricken by the absence of frontal incisors - his entire front row of teeth is gone. Missing. I didn't know.

Mother told me something had happened, something bad. She wouldn't say exactly what beyond vague bits and pieces and she didn't have the strength to visit him anymore so she had been hinting regularly that I should.

I ask the attendant to give us some privacy, he looks puzzled and asks if I'm sure. I tell him I am even if I am not and he leaves to get some coffee and a cigarette to go with it judging by his yellowed fingertips.

I raised my brother to a certain degree, grew up with him or rather beside him as he never grew up. His body matured and grew stronger but his mind never caught up.

After I left them mother tried to continue by herself and did so for some years until she didn't have the strength anymore to handle the outbursts of a child trapped in the body of an adult and eventually found some supportive housing for him run by an association for the mentally handicapped.

It was inevitable and always had been since the day he was diagnosed. It was the best for him and the best for her also.

- What happened?

My brother looks up, he seems to have heard my words but still no hint of recognition or understanding.

- Who did this?

Blank stare, grin.  He starts chewing on his lower lip and rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand.

- I will find them

Nothing, the lights are on but if anyone's home they aren't answering the door nor do they care for visitors.

I swallow my tears and my rage and leave, the drive home is as unreal and foggy as the visit itself but I remember this;

You beat my brother's teeth out, then you raped him.

I will find you.

I will make you hurt.

...and years later I did, but not in the way you'd think.

Fear of the dark

There was a strange building right next to the farmhouse, it looked like a cross between a cave and an artificial hill with some pieces of driftwood randomly stuck into it at odd angles and grass growing on top of it. It must have been well over a hundred years old at least by the looks of it.

There was something dark and sinister about it in the eyes of a 7-year old, no electric lighting for one thing and it housed a bull and an old cow that I never saw leave it either.

One day they were just gone as if they never existed.

I avoided the place for the most part, I didn't like the dark and the bull was a looming presence that just filled me with dread whenever I approached it.

The farmer that lived there and was married to my mother didn't really respond to my attempts to get closer to him.  I tried calling him father at some point shortly after we moved there but he didn't answer and just looked at me silently each time until I stopped trying.

He locked me in there once in the middle of winter as punishment for something I did or didn't do, I never figured out which one.

The terrifying disconnected feeling of being lost inside complete darkness with nothing linking you to reality except the deep breathing of a beast capable of goring you to death doesn't leave much room for sanity in a child.

I was however too afraid of the bull to scream... in fear that it might get angry, break loose and trample me to death. Silent tears were all I dared to cry, that and nails digging into my palms were what kept me sane for what seemed like hours but might have been minutes.

Fear of the dark, fear of the dark, fear of the dark.

Time loses all meaning in sensory deprivation, without electricity there isn't even the hope that you can find the light switch to re-enter the physical world.

A child without hope is a child without fear and I was afraid. The only option is to face your fear or go insane. The problem is you never know if you failed or succeeded afterwards.

The library on the farm had several volumes of ghost stories from the countryside and I had read them all.

The ones coming uninvited back to me as I shivered in the pitch black darkness revolved around ghost doors that would sometimes appear on the sides of the organic buildings, these would lure you inside the walls, close behind you and entomb you in there forever.

People would disappear without a trace and then years later someone would find their bones inside one of the walls.

I wondered if that could have happened here on this farm before or if it was happening right now as a door opened in one of the walls without anyone visible outside it and dark light flowed in with nothing except the slight howling of the winter chill audible in the background.

Fear of the light, fear of the light, fear of the light.

I don't remember much more from that episode, at least not getting outside although evidence would indicate I did somehow.

A couple of years later the organic building was demolished by a bulldozer, I'd never set my foot inside there again afterwards and I hadn't told anyone about what happened either.

Until now.

I watched from a safe distance as the walls came down, waiting for something to reveal itself.  I was pretty sure I saw a collection of bones at one point when a wall came down, but the belts of the bulldozer crushed them into bits and the next time they were visible they just looked like so much gravel.

Perhaps it was an unlucky lovechild from another age, perhaps it was just a dog or a cat.

Nobody made a note of it at least and I didn't share this with anyone either.

Until now.