Six Days

My brother Gerald went missing last November. The police searched the woods behind our family’s property multiple times and found nothing. No footprints past the tree line, no signs of a camp, no evidence of a struggle. It was a harder search with all the rain the area had been having, and considering he was an adult of the age of twenty, they eventually called off the search.

My mother stopped sleeping. It was only her in the old farmhouse, up all night, waiting for my brother to come back. I drove up from the city and stayed in my old bedroom. Every morning I woke up expecting the phone to ring with bad news, and every morning it didn’t.

On the sixth day, Gerald walked out of the woods and knocked on the back door.

He appeared to be fine. Better than fine, actually. He’d lost a little weight, and he was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen him do since we were kids. His clothes were a bit torn and his boots were caked with mud, but otherwise he seemed to be completely unharmed. “A miracle,” my mother called it.

As he ate two sandwiches and a full can of soup, he told us and the police that he didn’t remember much from the past six days. He got turned around when he was out for a walk, he said. Then, when he couldn’t find his way back, he found a dry place to wait out the weather. Some kind of abandoned house foundation. He foraged for food until the rain cleared up, then managed to find his way back.

The police seemed satisfied with his story. Mom couldn’t stop holding his face and crying, saying how happy she was to see him again. And Gerald, he kept smiling the same smile at everyone, that ear-to-ear grin, and asking for more food. Talking like he’d never been happier.

Me, I just stood in the doorway and watched him.

Moose was eleven years old, and had been Gerald’s dog since he was a tiny puppy of a pitbull. He’d slept at the foot of Gerald’s bed every night for a decade, and greeted him excitedly at the door every time he came home, even if he’d only been gone for five minutes.

Moose had been shut in the laundry room when Gerald came home, what with all the police coming and going. Once they left, I let him out. Moose went as far as the kitchen doorway, looked at my brother sitting at the table, and backed away without a sound. Mom and Gerald didn’t notice how Moose had acted, but I did.

He slept at the foot of my bed that night.

I wish I could say I slept, but I stayed up all night, thinking about what had happened to Gerald, why he seemed so different than the brother I knew. Sometimes traumatic events have lasting effects on people, I understood that. My brother had survived for six days in the woods, all alone and probably wondering if he was going to make it out alive. And yet there was something in his eyes I didn’t trust. Something in that smile that wasn’t quite right.

At some point I dozed off, fallen into a kind of half-sleep. I was vaguely aware of my old bedroom, of the cold wind leaking through the crooked window frames, of Moose breathing softly at the end of the bed. It was a strange feeling, as if I were trapped and watching myself through a thin pane of glass.

At exactly three in the morning, according to the old alarm clock by the side of the bed, I woke up with a start. I’d heard a noise in the house, one I knew ever since Gerald and I had been adolescents with bedrooms that shared a wall, adolescents who snuck out of the house to drink with friends or otherwise get into trouble.

It was the sound of a window closing.

I snuck out of my old bedroom and down the hall, grateful but a little concerned that Moose had woken up but didn’t follow me out. I crept down the hallway, stepping carefully to avoid all the creaky floorboards I’d memorized as a kid, and made my way to Gerald’s door, opening it as slowly as possible. The bedroom was dark, but I could clearly make out the shape of Gerald lying in his bed with his back to me. The window across the room was shut, the curtains drawn. You could almost be fooled into thinking that he’d been there all night, quietly sleeping. Except for one thing.

The room was cold, cold enough to see my breath, the smell of wet soil and leaves hanging in the air. The window had to have been open for quite some time for the temperature in the room to drop that much, and for the smells of the outside to make their way in.

I hadn’t caught Gerald sneaking out.

I’d caught him sneaking back in.

The next day Gerald was still acting strangely, with a voracious appetite and a smile on his face. Mom was smiling, too, so happy to have her son safe at home again. But Moose knew better. He kept his distance, asking to be let outside and staying out there for most of the morning.

A few hours later, while mom was on at least her dozenth phone call with a neighbor who’d heard the good news, I asked Gerald about the abandoned house foundation he’d mentioned the night before, the one he’d supposedly hidden in for the last six days. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about at first. But after I pressed him on it, he seemed to suddenly remember.

“It was way out,” he said. “Somewhere near the old river, where the hill dips down. I’m not even sure how I found it.”

“Well,” I said, not wanting to raise his suspicions, “it’s just good to have you back.”

He smiled at me. That big, wide smile. I waited close to an hour before I walked out the back door. Then I grabbed Moose, and together we walked into the woods.

We walked for a long time, Moose and I, cutting through acres of forest looking for the place Gerald had described. It was a cold day, the air biting at my face, but I refused to turn back, as did Moose. Maybe I was reading into things too much, but he seemed to understand what we were doing out there.

Well after the sun had passed the highest point in the sky, we found the old river that snaked through the land west of the house. If it had a name, I’d never learned it. We rested there a minute as Moose took a drink, then we followed the river downhill looking for anything resembling a house, or where one had once stood.

Eventually, we found it. It was an old stone foundation that appeared in no records, no deeds, no land titles—I checked— just stones laid down by someone long ago, for reasons nobody had written down. The foundation was no larger than thirty feet across, with a sharp decline at the center showing it had once been dug out, but slowly filled in with dirt from time and weather.

We stepped inside and Moose sniffed around inside with considerable interest, though I couldn’t find signs of someone having spent any time there recently. No trampled leaves, no discarded berries or fruit pits, no marks from someone relieving themselves. Just an empty indentation in the earth, surrounded by the remains of four walls. It was proof the place existed, but not that Gerald had spent his six days in the woods there.

Moose and I headed back toward home, neither of us keen on sticking around that place longer than we needed to, and intent on reaching our house before sundown. Somehow, the return trip seemed even longer than the time it had taken to get there.

As we got closer to home, maybe a few hundred yards or more, my cell service must have kicked in. My phone suddenly lit up with alerts, telling me I had three missed calls from a phone number I didn’t recognize, as well as one voicemail, which I checked immediately.

“This is Detective Scariano, please call me back at this number the moment you receive this,” he said in a steady but serious tone. Adding, “It’s urgent.”

Still walking toward home, Moose picking up the pace now, I called the number back with slightly shaking hands. He answered on the first ring.

“Mister Raymond?”

“Yes, I got your message.”

“Are you at home? I tried calling the house but there was no answer.”

That was worrying. When I’d left, mom had given no signs of going out, unless maybe Gerald had finished all her food and she’d been forced to go to the supermarket. “No, I uh, was just taking the dog for a walk,” I replied. “We’re just heading back now.” Moose was almost at a jog now, and I was struggling to keep up while talking on the phone.

“When you get back to the house, you and the dog should stay outside until the units I’ve sent arrive. Just as a precaution.”

My legs went cold, and I asked him why. After the next sentences came out of his mouth, I dropped my phone and ran as fast as I could back to the house, Moose and I cutting through the trees, feet pounding the cold, hard ground, blood pumping through my ears, head throbbing. When we reached the house I ripped the back door open and tore inside, calling out to my mother, running from room to room looking for some sign of her, some proof that the Detective on the phone had been mistaken. That he’d been wrong and panicked me over nothing.

The house was empty. Mom and Gerald were gone, the car still in the driveway and the keys hung up above the fireplace. As I stood there in that empty house, Detective Scariano’s words rattled around in my head like the moth larva inside one of those novelty jumping beans.

According to him, some local fishermen had discovered a body in the river that morning, about six miles out of town. From the state it was in, it seemed to have been in the water for at least a week. It took the police a few hours to pull it out of the river and bring it in for identification, though they didn’t get any immediate matches. That was, until Detective Scariano saw the pictures and noticed how similar the body looked to the man he’d just been questioning the night before.

The man who’d spent six days in the woods, then walked home and knocked on the door.

After the police showed up to the house, they searched the woods again, this time looking for two people. I told them about the abandoned foundation I’d found, way out by the river, but they were unable to locate it, and when I demanded to show them myself where it was, I couldn’t find it, either. I must have walked up and down the side of that river a hundred times over the next few weeks, but I never spotted it again. Even Moose couldn’t track it down. He seemed as bothered by it as I was.

With my vacation and sick time all used up, I returned to my apartment in the city and took Moose with me. We were all each other had now. Scariano and the local police could offer no explanation as to who the man was that they’d questioned the night Gerald had supposedly returned. They even had the nerve to ask me if my parents had had another child they never told me about, perhaps a twin of Gerald’s, but they abandoned that theory when I cursed them right out of the house.

Moose and I settled into our new life. It was a much smaller place than he was used to, and sometimes I entertained the idea of moving into the farmhouse where the two of us had grown up. But the thought of trying to sleep in that house, with those woods waiting just outside, it just never sat right with me.

The day my mother and brother disappeared was a year ago. The anniversary passed just last week, in fact. A few nights ago, I heard something scratching at my window like it was trying to get in. Moose and I sat up in bed, the two of us listening to it, neither of us making a sound. Eventually it stopped on its own, but the next night, at the same time, it started again.

It’s come back every night since.

Always at three a.m.