summerborn
Born in the Month of Songs
- Local time
- Today 9:46 AM
- Messages
- 128
- Age
- 23
- Pronouns
- He/Him, They/Them
The following is an interview conducted mid-August of 2016 with Ripley Esposito, twin brother of the serial killer Ryker Esposito, branded the 'Tooth Fairy' by his highly publicized trial. Ryker was found guilty in May of 2015 of fourteen cases of first degree murder, suspected involvement in the disappearances of at least 10 others. Mr. Esposito states that he had no knowledge of his brother's activities, nor does he have any information on the locations of any of the other victims' remains.
My brother Ryker and I have always been close. As you likely know, we're twins. We grew together in utero, had our own language growing up, hit each other, cried when the other cried.
We were born holding hands. We had to be literally cut away from one another to sever the connection. Our hands had been fused together at the palms; his left, my right. I still have the scar to prove it, though it's lightened over the years, now little more than a faint dark outline along the lateral edge of my palm.
All our lives, he used to wish that we looked different. I used to joke that I was the better looking one, and everyone would laugh, because we were identical, of course. Our own mother couldn't tell us apart, if we swapped clothes for the day, and half the time, we wouldn't correct her. We'd just kind of go about the day, not really even pretending to be the other. No, it was like… we were the other, in some strange way. Those days, we were seldom apart. All the memories just kind of… blended together.
Weird, huh? That you can be so close to somebody that the edges start to bleed over. And then one day, you wake up and you're not even sure who you are. If you're Ripley or Ryker. It should've felt wrong, but it didn't. It was just– us.
Ryker was more than my brother. He was my twin. The other part of me. I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to ask: 'But Ripley, if you were so close, how could you not have known? How did it slip under your nose all those years, that your brother was a deranged mass-murdering serial killer?' 'Didn't you know something was wrong with him?'
I don't know. Okay? I just don't know. Without excusing him, all I know is that I loved him. Still love him. Fuck.
We were still brothers, despite everything. We had our fights, god, we had some fights. I liked to run my mouth– still do, in fact, but when Ryker got pissed, he'd get these eyes, all hard and blue, and his jaw would tighten up like a pack of rubber bands, and out of the blue, he'd just start swinging. And I'd give back as good as I got, but that fucker was fast, and he was mean. Always did have a mean streak, Ryker. I can't count how many times either of us ended up with a fat lip or a black eye, and though this continued past our teen years, before you ask, he never hurt me. Not like that. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to understand the things that my brother did, but I know, with certainty, that he did them because he wanted to protect us.
Ryke had always been the quieter one, but after our mom passed, he got even quieter; slept less, watched the shadows more. We both had nightmares, but I never remembered mine. Ryker, on the other hand... Something had changed. And maybe it's stupid of me to even say it, but I think it was that fucking ring.
They said it was a heart attack, but the weird part was that we knew she'd never had heart problems. Never. Our mom had been an exceedingly healthy woman, someone who took painstaking care of herself. She was an extremely dignified person, someone who had this physical presence that seemed to literally draw heads whenever she entered a room. But when she was around her kids, it would soften. We knew a side of her that precious few others even got to see. She used to tell us that she'd wished on a star for the two of us. We were her two miracles, she would say.
I just know that when we got home one day, there were about six different ambulances and police cars pulled up at our shitty apartment complex, and our mom was already gone. They tried resuscitating her on the way to the hospital. Time of death was 3:44 in the afternoon. And the other thing. We found the star sapphire ring she never took off lying on the kitchen table— with the stone cracked right down the middle. It was a peculiar ring in that the stone had a glass setting, in the bottom. You could see clear through it, if you held it to your eye. She must have taken it off… before. Ryker took it. He wore it for a long time. I wish he'd never fucking put it on.
Dad had been out of the picture, even when our mom was still around. He sure as hell wasn't going to take even one of us, and we weren't going to stand to be separated– made that pretty damn clear the first three times we ran out on foster homes. The way we saw it was that it was better to be together in a goddamn refrigerator box than separate in warm beds. So eventually, the state gave up on trying to rehome us in separate homes and sent us to the first home we didn't immediately run away from. The lady's name was Courtney. Courtney Guillame.
Look. I'm not here to tell you our– my life story, so all you need to know was that she was insane. Not the kind of insane where she kept us in an attic and fed us arsenic doughnuts or anything, but just deranged. On the outside, she was a glamorous blond woman with immaculately painted fingernails who had adopted two adorable towhead orphans. (Sort of adorable? We'd just hit puberty, and I in particular had taken off like a particularly gangly weed while Ryker lagged behind with a perpetual scowl.) In reality, she was an obsessive egomaniac with control issues.
She personally oversaw our wardrobe, our schedule, how many fucking cheerios a bowl we were allowed to eat in the mornings. Checked every night, twice a night like clockwork to make sure that we were sleeping in separate beds. Ryke and I had shared a bed for literally as long as we'd been alive, though if you asked Courtney, she'd tell you that the only reason we didn't have separate rooms was because her biological daughter, Alyssa, needed her own room.
Alyssa wasn't so bad, if a little shy. She was 2 years younger than us, with her mother's sheet of blond hair and white teeth. She'd been born with a birth defect that made it almost impossible for her to walk, so she wheeled around in a wheelchair most of the time. The wheelchair had the unfortunate effect of attracting bullies like a magnet, but Ryke and I kept an eye out for her at school. Despite this, when I ended up in the principal's office for punching a kid in the face for slipping rude notes in her locker, Courtney still threw a fit about it and made me sleep on the pullout couch for a week, away from my twin. We both hated Courtney, but Ryker hated her, and I'm pretty sure Courtney hated him just as much. We stayed there for just over two years.
We were sixteen when we left, out on the streets and just trying to stay alive. I picked up pickpocketing and guitar, playing for whatever pocket change people would throw at me and "finding" people's keys for them; Ryker got good at skulking; we both got real good at spotting undercover cops, or suspicious circling cars. We weren't going to be the ones who woke up in an ice bath missing a kidney, or worse scenarios.
We'd just turned 17, and it was winter when we started doing some really dubious shit. We were desperate, plain and simple. The thing is, it's really hard to keep a steady job when you don't have a place to live. So, we lied about our ages and took up illegal pit fighting for a bit.
Yeah. I know. But before you get all self righteous on me, it was either that, fall in with the gangs, or freeze to death. You choose.
I could hold my own against most assholes, but Ryker was scary good at it. He'd finally caught up with me in height, and we'd both put on some muscle in the last year, but even before, I couldn't beat him in a fight. He just had some natural knack for it, I guess. And people got a kick out of seeing us fight together. Something about the identical thing, probably. We got our asses handed to us. A lot. But eventually, we started winning, and that shit felt good, despite all the bruises. I didn't fight for long. It was more my brother's thing.
I'm going to cut to the chase. Your news article is probably saying that my brother killed his first victim at 18. It's probably true. You're going to ask me if I knew, or noticed anything suspicious was going on, and I'm going to tell you that I didn't, and that I don't remember noticing anything was weird, and that if you ask me again, I'm going to pop you in the nose and you're going to deserve it.
We were staying at a motel with the funds, and Ryker was spending a lot of time at a gym down the road. The owner had seen us fight and felt bad for us or something, so he offered Ryke a job. I'd managed to get a job working at this pizza place. So I was out a lot, either making deliveries on the shitty bike we owned or making pies. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Anything except for that the nightmares had gotten worse. A lot fucking worse. I still never remembered mine, thank god, but Ryker, when he could sleep, would wake up screaming.
Of course it was weird not to see him as much. I still don't know what he was doing at that gym half the time, or even if that was where he was really spending his time. What I do know is that my brother started bringing some weird shit home, those next couple of years. I don't know why, or who gave it to him, or where he got it, but sometimes, I'd find these bags around the apartment.
They were full of bones. Not human bones, obviously. Animal bones. Hollow, delicate bird bones, always accompanied by a sprig of sage and one blackbird feather, bound together with a few golden threads that I now know were hair. Ryker's hair. My hair. Telling whose was whose apart was impossible without a DNA test.
I don't know why I never really thought about it. I think I mentioned it to my brother once, asking him what they were. His thumb immediately went to the ring on his opposite finger, running back and forth across its cracked blue stone, and he got this blank look on his face, though his eyes flicked back and forth across the room behind me, like he was checking the carefully shut windows. "They're to protect us. There's always a price to pay," he said, matter of fact. It's weird, the way I just… accepted that. But I did. And life continued on.
We moved from our shitty 1-bedroom apartment to a moderately less shitty 1-bedroom apartment, where we slept in the same bed, and played games on our days off on the ridiculously expensive console I had practically begged Ryker for after scraping and scrounging money for nearly half a year. I managed to land a job, a legitimate one– bartending, and thanks to the tips and a steady income, we no longer had to worry so much about rent. Ryker stopped pit fighting entirely that year, moving into the less murky world of legal cage fighting. The money was worse. A lot worse. But we didn't have to worry about getting arrested anymore.
I remember coming home after my shift, the night of my twenty second, and Ryke had a clumsily frosted cake with unlit candles waiting on the table. The gesture was almost sweeter for that he had fallen asleep next to the cake with the hand with our mother's ring curled over the lighter, and he looked strangely peaceful.
It sounds strange to say it, knowing now what I do, but those next two years were the happiest we had since our mom died. It probably doesn't help my case, admitting that. I know you lot are all convinced I was his accomplice all those years: covering for him, burying the remains the police didn't find. I've moved four times since the trial, and I still get letters in the mail telling me that I'm going to go to hell, or begging me to disclose the location of their missing loved ones. Those are the worst letters. I don't know where the bodies are. Please stop asking.
The cops came knocking on our door one afternoon around Christmastime. Ryker had been having a really rough time with the nightmares, the last month. He'd hardly been sleeping, and he looked like hell, so he'd taken the day off of work and was getting some shuteye in the other room. I had been getting ready to head in to work when I answered the door. I can tell you that the last thing I was expecting was two officers, and I was visibly taken off guard. Not a good thing, as any street rat can tell you. They were looking for a man named Alan Yan. Apparently, he lived in the same apartment complex as us, and he'd been missing for a week, now.
I, of course, didn't know anything, and told them as much. They were suspicious. That much was obvious from the way they kept peering over my shoulder into the apartment. Whey asked to have a look around, I had to oblige. I told them I had to get to work and didn't have much time, and that my brother was sleeping in the next room. They poked their noses into our living room, our kitchen, the refrigerator, even going so far as to check our washing machine, like they were expecting a load of bloody clothes or something. They were looking for something, that much was certain, but whatever it was, they didn't find it.
What actually set off the bells in the back of my head was when they opened the door to the bedroom and found nobody inside. The window was both closed and locked, the bed its usual messy state, which was how it always looked. I was getting antsy, at that point, having fielded several questions from the officers and wondering, rather frantically, where my twin was. How had he managed to sneak past my morning routine when our apartment was maybe 700 square feet? One of them dropped down on his hands and knees to check under the bed, like Ryker was somehow hiding under there, all 6'2" and 196 pounds of him, when he found one of the little bags that I'd jokingly taken to calling 'hex bags' – the one that Ryke had put under the bed, directly beneath where our pillows rested.
It had the usual bones, sage, hair, and a bird skull, along with a scattering of rough amethyst crystals and a couple of other herbs I hadn't bothered asking about. I didn't really ask about them anymore. They were just part of our lives now, another one of Ryker's quirks, one of the things he did, like the salt lines he'd periodically sprinkle along the windowsills. I'd always thought it helped him believe he'd have an easier time sleeping, like how I liked to keep the TV on at night. The officers, though– they took one look and snapped a picture. Then, they got up, thanked me for my time, and left.
After the time it took to rather frantically call Ryker's phone five times and send almost twice that many texts, I was almost forty minutes late to work. I admit, the rest of the day went by far too slowly.
When I got home that night, Ryker was still nowhere to be seen. To this day, I still don't know where he went. When he left. Or what he was doing, those next seven days. What I do know is that I couldn't sleep for the next week. And that when I did manage to catch an hour here and there, I would wake from a nightmare I still cannot remember with my heart pounding out of my chest, a cold sweat sticking my clothes to my body, feeling like something was there. Something was watching me. And whatever it was, it wished me harm.
It's ridiculous, right? I'd check all the windows, again and again, at first under the pretense of watching for my twin, but by the third night, I just couldn't lie to myself anymore. I was scared. I still don't know what was stalking me in my dreams, but whatever it was, my sleeping mind feared it above almost all else.
The fourth day, the police turned up again, this time with a warrant that had my twin's name on it. As I found out later, they'd searched Alan Yan's place prior to ours, and evidently found a hex bag like the ones scattered around our apartment tied to the underside of Yan's bed. Unlike the ones Ryker had made for us, this one had a rolled up paper with some sort of pentagram drawn on it, and a human finger bone.
They combed through the apartment, confiscating various items; most of which had absolutely no connection to the investigation whatsoever and still have yet to be returned. They took all the hex bags, samples of the salt, some of his clothes, a couple of pocket knives, a hairbrush, and our computer.
So here's where shit gets creepy. In tearing up the place, they found a loose floorboard in the kitchen that I'd had absolutely no idea existed. When they pried it up, they found a couple of books that appeared to have been written in Latin and a small wooden box. It had teeth in it. Human teeth, pulled out by the roots. Twenty four of them, all belonging to different people. Needless to say, I was also taken into custody. I couldn't tell them anything, but at least, after they took my phone, there was no reason to be polite anymore.
They kept me for about two and a half days before they were forced to let me go. I didn't sleep at all. It was a lot of time in a blank investigation room: four walls, two chairs, one table. I was starting to see things. There was... a persistent shadow, in the corner of my vision, never perceivable when I looked fully at it, but- and it's stupid to say, I know -I could feel it looking at me. Watching me. I recognized it, the same malevolent presence that had been stalking my dreams. How long had it been shadowing me, and I just never noticed? Our whole lives? I knew. I just knew that if I allowed myself to fall asleep, it would be there, waiting for me, and it would catch me. There was no protection here. Ryker was gone. I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, alone.
I was furious. And worried. And scared. I kept turning over in my head, the question: What had he done? I was seeing my brother in a different light, a light so harsh that I almost couldn't recognize it. I was in a state of disbelief, but I'd seen the teeth. I didn't yet know the extent of it, but you didn't just hide a box full of teeth, teeth that had been pulled out by the roots, no less, under the floorboards when you didn't have anything to hide. I kept thinking about his explanation, after I'd asked about the hex bags. 'They're to protect us.' Protect us from what, exactly? Other people? Shadow people? Had Ryker been seeing the shadow all along? All these years? And if he had, why had he never- told me? The stupid bastard.
I'm sorry. I'm getting... off track. I think I have been for a while now.
The police let me go the sixth day of my brother's disappearance. By now, the manhunt was in full swing, which meant the moment I opened my phone, I found that I had close to a hundred messages from concerned friends, my job- wondering where I was, and the rest of the noise. That evening, I was accompanied back to the apartment by a police car, which sat out on the curb in front of the complex, presumably in case Ryker decided to show up, which I personally found unlikely, at this point. Ryke was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Or at least, that's what I thought.
I was delirious from the whole ordeal, lack of sleep being just one of my problems. Being alone in that torn-apart apartment only compounded all of it. I was just so tired, at that point, but I was also angry. About all of it. Whatever it was that was following me, I was done running from it. After redrawing the salt lines across the windows and, in a moment of paranoia, a circle around the bed, I dropped my phone on the nightstand, collapsed onto my side of the bed and passed out.
I'm not going to tell you what I saw, that night. You wouldn't believe me anyways, and I've had quite enough of taking the piss from everyone else already. I can see the title of your article already: "Brother of 'Tooth Fairy' serial killer, Ryker Esposito, claims to have psychic connection with twin". I'm good, thanks. Here's what I'll say. Whatever that thing was that was following us, it's gone. I don't know what Ryker did, but it left that night, and it hasn't come back. My brother turned himself in the following morning. The police found him waiting for them at the location he'd disclosed, along with the remains of Alan Yan and eleven others. All of the remains were missing their teeth, some of which were recovered from the box found beneath our kitchenette floorboards. We still don't know what he did with the rest of them.
Ryke sent me a text the night before at 3:44 in the morning. I still don't entirely know what it means.
you're safe from it now. protected. don't look for the ring. don't make any wishes. love you.
You know the rest. The trial, the sentence. If you want to hear the details, you can look it up like everyone else. I've said my piece multiple times to multiple different people, too many fucking times. I get asked a lot if I miss him. Yeah. I miss him. I miss him every fucking day. It's like- there's a hole in my life. No, it's not a hole. There's a piece missing.
I still have his number in my phone, for all that he's never going to have a mobile phone ever again, and I think about texting the dead number sometimes. The scar on the side of my hand itches, and I wonder if he's thinking about me. I dream now, every night, and I remember them. Sometimes, I dream that I'm sitting in that investigation room again, staring across the table, except, the walls are closing in, and the scar is on my left palm instead, and I'm looking at my reflection through a sheet of glass. I can see the beige suit I'm wearing in the faint reflection, and he's wearing my clothes: a battered flannel, blue jeans. He reaches up, placing his right hand against the glass, and I mirror it with my left, the glass cool against the palm of my hand.
It's only in dreams, anymore, that I can feel that connection again, however vague, the bleeding over of our edges– Ryker reaching out for me, and finally being able to reach back.
My brother Ryker and I have always been close. As you likely know, we're twins. We grew together in utero, had our own language growing up, hit each other, cried when the other cried.
We were born holding hands. We had to be literally cut away from one another to sever the connection. Our hands had been fused together at the palms; his left, my right. I still have the scar to prove it, though it's lightened over the years, now little more than a faint dark outline along the lateral edge of my palm.
All our lives, he used to wish that we looked different. I used to joke that I was the better looking one, and everyone would laugh, because we were identical, of course. Our own mother couldn't tell us apart, if we swapped clothes for the day, and half the time, we wouldn't correct her. We'd just kind of go about the day, not really even pretending to be the other. No, it was like… we were the other, in some strange way. Those days, we were seldom apart. All the memories just kind of… blended together.
Weird, huh? That you can be so close to somebody that the edges start to bleed over. And then one day, you wake up and you're not even sure who you are. If you're Ripley or Ryker. It should've felt wrong, but it didn't. It was just– us.
Ryker was more than my brother. He was my twin. The other part of me. I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to ask: 'But Ripley, if you were so close, how could you not have known? How did it slip under your nose all those years, that your brother was a deranged mass-murdering serial killer?' 'Didn't you know something was wrong with him?'
I don't know. Okay? I just don't know. Without excusing him, all I know is that I loved him. Still love him. Fuck.
We were still brothers, despite everything. We had our fights, god, we had some fights. I liked to run my mouth– still do, in fact, but when Ryker got pissed, he'd get these eyes, all hard and blue, and his jaw would tighten up like a pack of rubber bands, and out of the blue, he'd just start swinging. And I'd give back as good as I got, but that fucker was fast, and he was mean. Always did have a mean streak, Ryker. I can't count how many times either of us ended up with a fat lip or a black eye, and though this continued past our teen years, before you ask, he never hurt me. Not like that. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to understand the things that my brother did, but I know, with certainty, that he did them because he wanted to protect us.
Ryke had always been the quieter one, but after our mom passed, he got even quieter; slept less, watched the shadows more. We both had nightmares, but I never remembered mine. Ryker, on the other hand... Something had changed. And maybe it's stupid of me to even say it, but I think it was that fucking ring.
They said it was a heart attack, but the weird part was that we knew she'd never had heart problems. Never. Our mom had been an exceedingly healthy woman, someone who took painstaking care of herself. She was an extremely dignified person, someone who had this physical presence that seemed to literally draw heads whenever she entered a room. But when she was around her kids, it would soften. We knew a side of her that precious few others even got to see. She used to tell us that she'd wished on a star for the two of us. We were her two miracles, she would say.
I just know that when we got home one day, there were about six different ambulances and police cars pulled up at our shitty apartment complex, and our mom was already gone. They tried resuscitating her on the way to the hospital. Time of death was 3:44 in the afternoon. And the other thing. We found the star sapphire ring she never took off lying on the kitchen table— with the stone cracked right down the middle. It was a peculiar ring in that the stone had a glass setting, in the bottom. You could see clear through it, if you held it to your eye. She must have taken it off… before. Ryker took it. He wore it for a long time. I wish he'd never fucking put it on.
Dad had been out of the picture, even when our mom was still around. He sure as hell wasn't going to take even one of us, and we weren't going to stand to be separated– made that pretty damn clear the first three times we ran out on foster homes. The way we saw it was that it was better to be together in a goddamn refrigerator box than separate in warm beds. So eventually, the state gave up on trying to rehome us in separate homes and sent us to the first home we didn't immediately run away from. The lady's name was Courtney. Courtney Guillame.
Look. I'm not here to tell you our– my life story, so all you need to know was that she was insane. Not the kind of insane where she kept us in an attic and fed us arsenic doughnuts or anything, but just deranged. On the outside, she was a glamorous blond woman with immaculately painted fingernails who had adopted two adorable towhead orphans. (Sort of adorable? We'd just hit puberty, and I in particular had taken off like a particularly gangly weed while Ryker lagged behind with a perpetual scowl.) In reality, she was an obsessive egomaniac with control issues.
She personally oversaw our wardrobe, our schedule, how many fucking cheerios a bowl we were allowed to eat in the mornings. Checked every night, twice a night like clockwork to make sure that we were sleeping in separate beds. Ryke and I had shared a bed for literally as long as we'd been alive, though if you asked Courtney, she'd tell you that the only reason we didn't have separate rooms was because her biological daughter, Alyssa, needed her own room.
Alyssa wasn't so bad, if a little shy. She was 2 years younger than us, with her mother's sheet of blond hair and white teeth. She'd been born with a birth defect that made it almost impossible for her to walk, so she wheeled around in a wheelchair most of the time. The wheelchair had the unfortunate effect of attracting bullies like a magnet, but Ryke and I kept an eye out for her at school. Despite this, when I ended up in the principal's office for punching a kid in the face for slipping rude notes in her locker, Courtney still threw a fit about it and made me sleep on the pullout couch for a week, away from my twin. We both hated Courtney, but Ryker hated her, and I'm pretty sure Courtney hated him just as much. We stayed there for just over two years.
We were sixteen when we left, out on the streets and just trying to stay alive. I picked up pickpocketing and guitar, playing for whatever pocket change people would throw at me and "finding" people's keys for them; Ryker got good at skulking; we both got real good at spotting undercover cops, or suspicious circling cars. We weren't going to be the ones who woke up in an ice bath missing a kidney, or worse scenarios.
We'd just turned 17, and it was winter when we started doing some really dubious shit. We were desperate, plain and simple. The thing is, it's really hard to keep a steady job when you don't have a place to live. So, we lied about our ages and took up illegal pit fighting for a bit.
Yeah. I know. But before you get all self righteous on me, it was either that, fall in with the gangs, or freeze to death. You choose.
I could hold my own against most assholes, but Ryker was scary good at it. He'd finally caught up with me in height, and we'd both put on some muscle in the last year, but even before, I couldn't beat him in a fight. He just had some natural knack for it, I guess. And people got a kick out of seeing us fight together. Something about the identical thing, probably. We got our asses handed to us. A lot. But eventually, we started winning, and that shit felt good, despite all the bruises. I didn't fight for long. It was more my brother's thing.
I'm going to cut to the chase. Your news article is probably saying that my brother killed his first victim at 18. It's probably true. You're going to ask me if I knew, or noticed anything suspicious was going on, and I'm going to tell you that I didn't, and that I don't remember noticing anything was weird, and that if you ask me again, I'm going to pop you in the nose and you're going to deserve it.
We were staying at a motel with the funds, and Ryker was spending a lot of time at a gym down the road. The owner had seen us fight and felt bad for us or something, so he offered Ryke a job. I'd managed to get a job working at this pizza place. So I was out a lot, either making deliveries on the shitty bike we owned or making pies. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Anything except for that the nightmares had gotten worse. A lot fucking worse. I still never remembered mine, thank god, but Ryker, when he could sleep, would wake up screaming.
Of course it was weird not to see him as much. I still don't know what he was doing at that gym half the time, or even if that was where he was really spending his time. What I do know is that my brother started bringing some weird shit home, those next couple of years. I don't know why, or who gave it to him, or where he got it, but sometimes, I'd find these bags around the apartment.
They were full of bones. Not human bones, obviously. Animal bones. Hollow, delicate bird bones, always accompanied by a sprig of sage and one blackbird feather, bound together with a few golden threads that I now know were hair. Ryker's hair. My hair. Telling whose was whose apart was impossible without a DNA test.
I don't know why I never really thought about it. I think I mentioned it to my brother once, asking him what they were. His thumb immediately went to the ring on his opposite finger, running back and forth across its cracked blue stone, and he got this blank look on his face, though his eyes flicked back and forth across the room behind me, like he was checking the carefully shut windows. "They're to protect us. There's always a price to pay," he said, matter of fact. It's weird, the way I just… accepted that. But I did. And life continued on.
We moved from our shitty 1-bedroom apartment to a moderately less shitty 1-bedroom apartment, where we slept in the same bed, and played games on our days off on the ridiculously expensive console I had practically begged Ryker for after scraping and scrounging money for nearly half a year. I managed to land a job, a legitimate one– bartending, and thanks to the tips and a steady income, we no longer had to worry so much about rent. Ryker stopped pit fighting entirely that year, moving into the less murky world of legal cage fighting. The money was worse. A lot worse. But we didn't have to worry about getting arrested anymore.
I remember coming home after my shift, the night of my twenty second, and Ryke had a clumsily frosted cake with unlit candles waiting on the table. The gesture was almost sweeter for that he had fallen asleep next to the cake with the hand with our mother's ring curled over the lighter, and he looked strangely peaceful.
It sounds strange to say it, knowing now what I do, but those next two years were the happiest we had since our mom died. It probably doesn't help my case, admitting that. I know you lot are all convinced I was his accomplice all those years: covering for him, burying the remains the police didn't find. I've moved four times since the trial, and I still get letters in the mail telling me that I'm going to go to hell, or begging me to disclose the location of their missing loved ones. Those are the worst letters. I don't know where the bodies are. Please stop asking.
The cops came knocking on our door one afternoon around Christmastime. Ryker had been having a really rough time with the nightmares, the last month. He'd hardly been sleeping, and he looked like hell, so he'd taken the day off of work and was getting some shuteye in the other room. I had been getting ready to head in to work when I answered the door. I can tell you that the last thing I was expecting was two officers, and I was visibly taken off guard. Not a good thing, as any street rat can tell you. They were looking for a man named Alan Yan. Apparently, he lived in the same apartment complex as us, and he'd been missing for a week, now.
I, of course, didn't know anything, and told them as much. They were suspicious. That much was obvious from the way they kept peering over my shoulder into the apartment. Whey asked to have a look around, I had to oblige. I told them I had to get to work and didn't have much time, and that my brother was sleeping in the next room. They poked their noses into our living room, our kitchen, the refrigerator, even going so far as to check our washing machine, like they were expecting a load of bloody clothes or something. They were looking for something, that much was certain, but whatever it was, they didn't find it.
What actually set off the bells in the back of my head was when they opened the door to the bedroom and found nobody inside. The window was both closed and locked, the bed its usual messy state, which was how it always looked. I was getting antsy, at that point, having fielded several questions from the officers and wondering, rather frantically, where my twin was. How had he managed to sneak past my morning routine when our apartment was maybe 700 square feet? One of them dropped down on his hands and knees to check under the bed, like Ryker was somehow hiding under there, all 6'2" and 196 pounds of him, when he found one of the little bags that I'd jokingly taken to calling 'hex bags' – the one that Ryke had put under the bed, directly beneath where our pillows rested.
It had the usual bones, sage, hair, and a bird skull, along with a scattering of rough amethyst crystals and a couple of other herbs I hadn't bothered asking about. I didn't really ask about them anymore. They were just part of our lives now, another one of Ryker's quirks, one of the things he did, like the salt lines he'd periodically sprinkle along the windowsills. I'd always thought it helped him believe he'd have an easier time sleeping, like how I liked to keep the TV on at night. The officers, though– they took one look and snapped a picture. Then, they got up, thanked me for my time, and left.
After the time it took to rather frantically call Ryker's phone five times and send almost twice that many texts, I was almost forty minutes late to work. I admit, the rest of the day went by far too slowly.
When I got home that night, Ryker was still nowhere to be seen. To this day, I still don't know where he went. When he left. Or what he was doing, those next seven days. What I do know is that I couldn't sleep for the next week. And that when I did manage to catch an hour here and there, I would wake from a nightmare I still cannot remember with my heart pounding out of my chest, a cold sweat sticking my clothes to my body, feeling like something was there. Something was watching me. And whatever it was, it wished me harm.
It's ridiculous, right? I'd check all the windows, again and again, at first under the pretense of watching for my twin, but by the third night, I just couldn't lie to myself anymore. I was scared. I still don't know what was stalking me in my dreams, but whatever it was, my sleeping mind feared it above almost all else.
The fourth day, the police turned up again, this time with a warrant that had my twin's name on it. As I found out later, they'd searched Alan Yan's place prior to ours, and evidently found a hex bag like the ones scattered around our apartment tied to the underside of Yan's bed. Unlike the ones Ryker had made for us, this one had a rolled up paper with some sort of pentagram drawn on it, and a human finger bone.
They combed through the apartment, confiscating various items; most of which had absolutely no connection to the investigation whatsoever and still have yet to be returned. They took all the hex bags, samples of the salt, some of his clothes, a couple of pocket knives, a hairbrush, and our computer.
So here's where shit gets creepy. In tearing up the place, they found a loose floorboard in the kitchen that I'd had absolutely no idea existed. When they pried it up, they found a couple of books that appeared to have been written in Latin and a small wooden box. It had teeth in it. Human teeth, pulled out by the roots. Twenty four of them, all belonging to different people. Needless to say, I was also taken into custody. I couldn't tell them anything, but at least, after they took my phone, there was no reason to be polite anymore.
They kept me for about two and a half days before they were forced to let me go. I didn't sleep at all. It was a lot of time in a blank investigation room: four walls, two chairs, one table. I was starting to see things. There was... a persistent shadow, in the corner of my vision, never perceivable when I looked fully at it, but- and it's stupid to say, I know -I could feel it looking at me. Watching me. I recognized it, the same malevolent presence that had been stalking my dreams. How long had it been shadowing me, and I just never noticed? Our whole lives? I knew. I just knew that if I allowed myself to fall asleep, it would be there, waiting for me, and it would catch me. There was no protection here. Ryker was gone. I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, alone.
I was furious. And worried. And scared. I kept turning over in my head, the question: What had he done? I was seeing my brother in a different light, a light so harsh that I almost couldn't recognize it. I was in a state of disbelief, but I'd seen the teeth. I didn't yet know the extent of it, but you didn't just hide a box full of teeth, teeth that had been pulled out by the roots, no less, under the floorboards when you didn't have anything to hide. I kept thinking about his explanation, after I'd asked about the hex bags. 'They're to protect us.' Protect us from what, exactly? Other people? Shadow people? Had Ryker been seeing the shadow all along? All these years? And if he had, why had he never- told me? The stupid bastard.
I'm sorry. I'm getting... off track. I think I have been for a while now.
The police let me go the sixth day of my brother's disappearance. By now, the manhunt was in full swing, which meant the moment I opened my phone, I found that I had close to a hundred messages from concerned friends, my job- wondering where I was, and the rest of the noise. That evening, I was accompanied back to the apartment by a police car, which sat out on the curb in front of the complex, presumably in case Ryker decided to show up, which I personally found unlikely, at this point. Ryke was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Or at least, that's what I thought.
I was delirious from the whole ordeal, lack of sleep being just one of my problems. Being alone in that torn-apart apartment only compounded all of it. I was just so tired, at that point, but I was also angry. About all of it. Whatever it was that was following me, I was done running from it. After redrawing the salt lines across the windows and, in a moment of paranoia, a circle around the bed, I dropped my phone on the nightstand, collapsed onto my side of the bed and passed out.
I'm not going to tell you what I saw, that night. You wouldn't believe me anyways, and I've had quite enough of taking the piss from everyone else already. I can see the title of your article already: "Brother of 'Tooth Fairy' serial killer, Ryker Esposito, claims to have psychic connection with twin". I'm good, thanks. Here's what I'll say. Whatever that thing was that was following us, it's gone. I don't know what Ryker did, but it left that night, and it hasn't come back. My brother turned himself in the following morning. The police found him waiting for them at the location he'd disclosed, along with the remains of Alan Yan and eleven others. All of the remains were missing their teeth, some of which were recovered from the box found beneath our kitchenette floorboards. We still don't know what he did with the rest of them.
Ryke sent me a text the night before at 3:44 in the morning. I still don't entirely know what it means.
you're safe from it now. protected. don't look for the ring. don't make any wishes. love you.
You know the rest. The trial, the sentence. If you want to hear the details, you can look it up like everyone else. I've said my piece multiple times to multiple different people, too many fucking times. I get asked a lot if I miss him. Yeah. I miss him. I miss him every fucking day. It's like- there's a hole in my life. No, it's not a hole. There's a piece missing.
I still have his number in my phone, for all that he's never going to have a mobile phone ever again, and I think about texting the dead number sometimes. The scar on the side of my hand itches, and I wonder if he's thinking about me. I dream now, every night, and I remember them. Sometimes, I dream that I'm sitting in that investigation room again, staring across the table, except, the walls are closing in, and the scar is on my left palm instead, and I'm looking at my reflection through a sheet of glass. I can see the beige suit I'm wearing in the faint reflection, and he's wearing my clothes: a battered flannel, blue jeans. He reaches up, placing his right hand against the glass, and I mirror it with my left, the glass cool against the palm of my hand.
It's only in dreams, anymore, that I can feel that connection again, however vague, the bleeding over of our edges– Ryker reaching out for me, and finally being able to reach back.
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