My dad had always said me and Mason had a connection. We really did when we were little. Everyday it was a routine. Eat breakfast, hop on the bus, go to school, probably fail a test, and arrive back at home to do homework. After we finished, the rest of our waking hours was spent playing outside. There was an old tree in our front yard. It’s trunk so sturdy it could survive a tornado. Me and Mason had made it our mission to climb to the top of the tree by the time we were out of high school.
Once middle school started, something began to happen with me and him. Instead of spending every waking moment together, Mason would go up to his room for hours. I had assumed it was just because of the amount of homework being dumped on us. There was still time for the tree, however. Just after dinner, we had about two hours to attempt another climb up it. There were these two branches that intersected and allowed us to climb easily about two feet above the ground. From there we would have to maneuver up a few more branches until we hit a spot of thin twigs just ready to be broken, about eight or nine feet in the air. That was the spot that stumped us. I remember spending a whole summer trying to figure out how to climb further.
As school became a priority, the tree became somewhat of a side project. It was no longer our dream to climb, climb, climb. Mason would much rather spend time in his room. He acted like a nerd at school, so it was obvious he was just reading. He was obsessed with those Darwin Awards books, about stupid people doing insanely stupid things. He was somewhat of a mad genius. Meanwhile, I had been spending most of my middle school career doing stupid stuff and interacting with stupid people. I wasn’t the best kid, it was obvious just by looking in my room.
My room was full of old magazines, my carpet was dirty, I hadn’t had a new bed since fifth grade, and my tv sat on the floor next to my fan. I never really bothered to venture into Mason’s room, but I remembered seeing it a few times. There had been papers all over his desk, books stacked on top of books, and I never once saw his shades drawn back. A hard worker in a hard environment was my dad’s famous phrase that he had made up just for my brother.
Then it happened.
After dinner, on my second day of high school, I went out to climb up the tree alone. Mason was apparently busy with something. So as I climbed up and reached the twig section of the tree, a big gust of wind flew through the air, which just so happened to knock me over and sent me plummeting to the ground below. I remember the last sound I heard was the thud of my body hitting the muddy lawn. After that I fell unconscious. But it didn’t feel like I was sleeping. I felt like and knew that I was asleep, and was able to think to myself. There was just darkness. Not one thing was in my line of sight. At first I panicked and thought I had died. After sometime I reassured myself this was just how it felt to fall and hit your head.
It must have been about ten minutes inside my own head until there was a sharp stinging in what I felt like was the back of my skull. There was a bright flash and I was back. I was sitting at a desk in the far side of a room. It took me a minute to realize I wasn’t back, but rather seeing something. I realized that this was Mason’s room. I was seeing what Mason was seeing! My brother got up from his chair and walked towards the door. It felt more then just odd to watch someone move in first person like this. I wasn’t in control. Mason made his way downstairs to the front yard, where he saw my body, laying on the ground.
He naturally called for my dad. I viewed them panic and call 911.
That fall left me in a coma. A very, very deep coma. Apparently I was never coming out of it, the doctors at the hospital had explained to Mason and dad. Of course, the only reason I knew this was because of my new vision. I saw through Mason, and Mason didn’t even know. It was horrible to watch as my entire family mourned me, even though I was right there with them. There was no way to communicate. Over the first days of being alone in Mason’s vision I had tried to watch carefully over him. Like a guardian angel, only I couldn’t guard anybody. In my thoughts I began to speculate if this was what the afterlife was like. You get to watch the nearest person to you for the rest of eternity? That didn’t exactly sound like fun.
On the third day of my coma I saw something I never expected Mason would do. It was early in the morning, sometime around two am. Mason pulled drawings out of a drawer next to his desk. I assumed they were just normal drawings. Nothing to speculate about. But then I saw what they were drawings of. It shook me to my core. I felt as if I saw something not just horrifying, but truly, utterly, disgusting. Something no human could or at least should have ever imagined. It was an entire detailed sketch of a necrophiliac orgy. Something in my mind told me this wasn’t Mason. That this was someone else I had been watching. But the truth was undeniable. This was my brother. This was what he truly had been working on in his room. It wasn’t just one sketch either. Multiple detailed drawings of necrophiliac actions. Each and every one distinct from each other. Mason’s pleasure was this. This. This wasn’t something I could have comprehended, ever. Not in a million years.
As weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, I had accepted my fate. The local hospital was where I was going to die, and I was going to die watching my brother commit acts I wished didn’t exist. Over his high school career, I witnessed Mason change his interests from necrophilia to zoophilia. From zoophilia to other unexplainable things.
In his junior year of high school, my brother met a girl. It took him a week to learn her name, Lisa, and a month to even speak a word to her. I could see why he would like her. She seemed awfully nice, and was definitely a person who could take charge in things. She was the school president, after all. After some amount of time Mason had acquired the courage to ask Lisa on a date. Miraculously she had said yes. Even though I knew about the things Mason did and liked, I felt compassionate for him. This made me extra mad, since only a few weeks before Mason had gotten his hands on multiple pictures of nude corpses. Of course, he had done his thing with them. Being compassionate for a monster was something that I deemed unacceptable.
I remember the exact date. November 17th, 1990. They went out to the local movie rental store and naturally rented some cheesy rom-com. After that, they headed back to Mason’s house to watch it. I wouldn’t bother calling it my house, since I had been sleeping in the same hospital room for years. I was forced to sit through an hour and a half of stale film. Only after that was when it started to get eerily frightening. Mason began to speak to Lisa.
“So, Lisa…um…do you like to, uh, draw?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Usually when I’m not busy with homework.”
“Oh, alright. Would you like to see my…my drawings? There not that…great.”
When I heard that sentence I tried screaming. But there was no mouth to scream out of. Mason opened the drawer and pulled out a folder. I knew exactly what was about to happen. I couldn’t feel my anxiousness, but I knew it was there. If I had been in my own body, it probably would have been the most stressful I had ever been.
“Here, these are my sketches of…”
Mason didn’t bother to finish the sentence. He knew what the result would be, just like I did. As we both anticipated a result, Lisa was stunned in silence. She stared at the papers. It even looked like she had stopped breathing.
“Do you…um…like them?”
The awkward pauses Mason had made only generated more terror. I felt for Lisa. What she must have been looking at. And then she let out a long, high pitched scream. Mason tried to quell her by covering her mouth. She struggled for her life, but was failing. I could almost feel Mason push on her face and squeeze her neck. For a second, I felt something. For the first time in years I felt a feeling of utter terror. I felt cold. I felt weak. And I felt myself lose all hope for my brother. In the same moment, I watched as Lisa’s life drained from her eyes, and she passed. I only hoped she wouldn’t meet a similar fate to me, and would pass on to a better place.
I realized that dad wasn’t home. I remembered him telling Mason he was going out to my aunt’s house for a game of cards. It was just Mason here. There was a minute of silence. He stared down at Lisa’s limp, purplish face. I knew what was coming. I wanted to look away. I wanted to stop it. But I couldn’t. No eyelids meant no blinking. Mason almost never blinked. I watched Mason lose both his virginity and his dignity, if he had any left. I watched as he committed acts that no human in their right mind would do. I watched as I weeped.
After my brother was finally done, which took about an hour, he carried Lisa’s now nude corpse down the stairs into the front yard. In the darkness of the late autumn evening, Mason lifted Lisa into the tree, passing the twigs by just jumping up, and reaching the top. I saw there that at the top, you could see the high school and downtown from there. We had finally reached it. Our mission was completed. The most surprising thing was that Mason had managed to carry a dead body up the entire tree.
The horror wasn’t done, however. Mason began to skin Lisa with a pocket knife he had been gifted for his tenth birthday. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream.
Mason wrapped the unrecognizable corpse around the branches. He looked down towards the street far below, and took a deep breath. At this point I had accepted all of it. I figured Mason was about to commit suicide. I figured correctly. And then he jumped.
Immediately after he hit the cold hard pavement, a sudden burst of light awoke me in my bed. I was sat under the fluorescent lights of the hospital. I was wearing a hospital gown that perfectly matched the color of the teal walls. As if time was a perfectionist, a nurse walked into the room only a few seconds later. Her jaw dropped at the sight of me, and she began to call for the doctors.
Later that same night, me and a more then ecstatic dad came home to the sight of a splattered, suffering, necrophiliac blocking our entrance to the driveway.
To this day I don’t know what kind of tree it was that was in our front yard.