I had good parents growing up. They loved me and showed it, were usually patient and fair, and I never went hungry or got anything worse than a spanking. That being said, when my sister Kat was around, there wasn’t any question that she was the favorite. Part of it was because of her personality—she was lively and always funny and fun, where I tended to read a lot and keep to myself or hang out with my friends more than spending extra time with our parents. No doubt they felt closer to her because, well, they were.
But that didn’t mean I never felt left out or jealous, and I knew that a bigger part of their favoring and spoiling her was because when she was five she’d managed to climb up on the roof and fall, breaking her leg. It was a bad break, and they had to put in a titanium plate she’d keep until she was eight to make sure the bone healed well without permanently messing up her growth on that side. My parents blamed themselves and each other for her falling, and ever since then she’d gone from just being “the baby” to something more—an ongoing project to prove to themselves and each other that they wouldn’t fail her again and that she’d never want for anything.
Whatever that meant in their heads or hearts, in practice it meant she got twice as much as I ever had, and by the time she was seven she had a “toy pile” in the middle of the floor that took up half her playroom. Even at eleven I was always envious of that room and that pile, at least until the day I heard Kat’s frantic cries as I was walking past the door.
Turning to look into the room, I saw my little sister screaming and crying, her body buried up to her waist as she scrabbled on the floor to pull herself free. My first reaction was to laugh—what, did she have a toy avalanche? That was impossible, of course. There wasn’t that much stuff and most of it wasn’t heavy. I was wondering if maybe it was a weird joke or her just playing pretend, but then her eyes found me and my chest tightened with panic and fear.
She was terrified, and as she looked at me pleadingly and cried out my name, I saw her slide backward several inches as something inside the toy pile pulled her deeper in. I ran forward and tried to grab her arm, but before I could get a good grasp she was gone. I caught a last glimpse of her before a flap of dark, membranous skin pulled tight across her screaming face and tugged her downward sharply. The toy pile suddenly sank down to half height, and as I yelled for our parents, I began kicking at the pile enough to spread it around the room.
There was nothing left behind. Not Kat, not the thing that took her…nothing.
We spent months looking for her. Putting up posters, hosting search parties, going on local talk shows even. No one ever saw a sign of her again. Well, except for me.
It was five years later. My parents had divorced two years before, and me and Mom were going to be moving out ourselves as soon as I finished my sophomore year of school. I was going to miss my friends. I spent even more time with them than I had when I was younger, and only partially because of being a teenager. The bigger thing was I knew my parents blamed me for Kat disappearing. Maybe because my explanation at the time hadn’t made sense to them—everyone assumed I’d seen her abducted by some invading stranger and was just too scared or traumatized to tell the truth. Or maybe because they felt like once again they’d failed their little girl, and it was easier to pin it on me than let it go. Either way, I only talked to Dad once a month and I didn’t see Mom much more than that outside of dinner some nights. Not that I minded much. It had happened almost a third of my life ago, and I barely remembered it myself now.
So when I missed a pitch from Rudy Felton that sent the baseball rolling under our house, my only thoughts were spiders and snakes. If I’d been by myself I might have gone back later with a flashlight or just left the ball behind, but I didn’t want to look scared in front of the other guys. I told them I’d get it, and getting down on all fours, I crab-crawled under the house and started looking for the small white glow of the ball.
The light was dim under the house, but after my eyes adjusted I could still see a little ways into the murk. Muttering, I pushed deeper toward the middle of the crawlspace without any sign of the baseball. I told myself I’d look for another respectable thirty seconds and then head back out if I hadn’t found it by then. I was on 27 of my 30 count when I saw something against the far wall. Unlike the rest, this wall was solid brick all the way across, and it was hard to see in the shadows that it created. But still…something was catching the light over there. I couldn’t say for sure if it was the baseball, but I figured I should check, just in case.
Pebbles and bits of concrete bit into my palms as I crawled over, my heart beating faster as I moved further out of the main avenues of light under there. It…It wasn’t the baseball I was looking at, but a piece of metal. And it wasn’t laying against the wall or stuck in the mortar between two bricks, but protruding from a large dark grey mound that bulged out from the ground and halfway up the brick wall.
I knew it was wrong—a bad and dangerous thing that shouldn’t be there, and by extension, I shouldn’t be there looking at it, about to touch it. But something held me there—a dimly flickering memory in the back of my mind, not just of Kat and how I’d watched her be taken by something terrible and unknown, but an earlier memory too. Of Kat showing me a picture or something? I remembered her looking at me proudly, grinning her gap-toothed grin as she held it up to the light and pointed and said…
My hand touched the metal lightly, but immediately the mound began to crumble, puffing clouds of dark dust into the air and down into my lungs. Eyes watering, I started to choke, not just from the particles I had accidently sucked in, but the horrible smell of it. It was a thick, rich, earthy smell that made my head swim, the scent of manure, of rot, of death, that filled me with terror and sent me scrabbling backward and out from under the house.
I’d come out on the far side from where I had entered, and standing in the back yard in the afternoon sun, I was alone. Alone and shaking and crying, as memories of my little sister flooded through me.
When they brought her home from the hospital. The first time I held her or she took my hand. All the times we played and fought and…and the time she broke her leg. When she got home, she had showed me a copy of the x-ray my parents had gotten for her like a trophy or a souvenir. She’d been so excited to show it to me, proudly pointing to the break, but more than that, to the foreign plate of titanium they’d used to bind her leg together again. She’d laughed and pointed to it and said…something…said…
“I’m a robot now.”
I gave a short laugh that turned into a wretched sob. The taste of the thing breaking apart underneath the house was still coating my throat and tongue, but I barely noticed. All my attention was on that laughing memory of her—that and the cold, hard thing cutting the palm of my clenched fist. Blinking back tears, I forced myself to look down at it. I already knew. Of course I knew. But I was still mostly a boy, and young enough to think that sometimes wishes are enough. I wished hard to be wrong, for it to be something else, anything else, as I opened my hand to reveal what I’d taken from the dark.
A small, thin plate with several holes, one of them still holding a tiny screw like a loose tooth. I sucked in a breath as I turned it over. Glancing around, I bent down and threw it back under the house.
That night I told my mother we should go ahead and move. She’d found us a house already, and while I was sad to leave my school and move to the other side of the state, I was relieved when she agreed. A month later we were living two hundred miles away, and a few weeks later they sold the house to a young couple with a pair of twins.
I never told anyone about what I found, never warned anyone. I told myself no one would believe me anyway, and I’m sure that’s right. Still, I was relieved when, years later, Mom told me that the family we sold it to had to move away after the house burned down one night.
I’m grown now and have children of my own, but losing Kat and finding the plate years later…there’s not a day I don’t think about it. Not just the loss and the fear, but the source of it all. Just like that little bit of metal, maybe the thing that took her is still out there. Hunting and hungering. Unknown and unknowable. Crawling into our homes to take, to kill, to eat.