The look in his eyes was pure terror, almost mirroring my own look that I remembered all too well… when I stared into my reflection in the early days. Seth stood right in front of me, his hands locked down in my grip so he wouldn’t pop off a shot from his revolver and wake up his Shelly and kids. I already cast the gun out into the woods for now, trying to hold him in place without overexerting myself and hurting him. It was a strange thing, sneaking up on Seth like this… part of me felt bad and nervous about it, but a more juvenile part was thrilled. It almost reminded me of when we were younger, and we’d scare the shit out of each other.

  I could feel him tugging vigorously like he was in quicksand, trying to get his hands free, but it was no use. It was like his hands had been stuck in cement, and it had hardened. However, the harder he pulled, the more he would hurt himself, so I had to adapt to his level of intensity as I attempted to make this work.

  Even this close, he couldn’t tell who I was. He probably thought I was one of the chupacabras Carter had told him about, or maybe just something unknown. All of those fears were coalescing into this moment, as a dark figure closed in on him in the shadows of his front yard… just like what happened to his brother… me.

  I spoke again, “Seth… You need to calm down.” I reached up with one of my hands, allowing him one of his free for just a moment, but making sure he couldn’t get away. I pushed my hood back, and I allowed him to see my face.

  There was a shift in his intensity as we connected eyes, and he could see my face in the scarce lighting from the single light beside his front door. He slowed for a second… almost calmed. There was no mistaking it… he knew exactly who he was looking at. However, there was obvious confusion as he couldn’t understand how he was seeing what he was seeing.

  Then the fighting grew even greater in intensity as he tried to snatch his hand away. He yanked so hard that he was probably close to injuring himself in the process. In a panic, he let out a fierce scream.

  “Let me go… What are you… How do you look like my brother?!” It all came out in bursts as he tried to understand what was happening.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. I just stood there regaining control of his other arm as I forced him to stand there face-to-face with me. I let him struggle, I let him rage, but I never let him go. I wanted him to realize that I wasn’t moving to hurt him in any way. I worried about his volume waking the neighbors or his family, but after a little while, I could hear his heart slowing down, if only barely. He could sense that his immediate demise might not be so imminent.

  I could tell that he was looking at me more intently, really analyzing my face as I stared at him. I used that moment to speak again.

  “Seth… It’s me, Sam. No tricks, no weird bullshit. I know you’re probably thinking I’m some monster that just looks like me… but it’s not… It’s me, Seth,” I tried to convince him with my words, almost forcing out the sincerity, if that was even possible.

  Seth had a look on his face that I couldn’t quite place. It was a mix of hope, fear, apprehension, but more than anything else, it was confusion. I already knew what he was thinking.

  How could this even be real?

  “Sam… How…?” Seth started trying to say what he wanted to believe, but I could still see something in his eyes that told me he didn’t.

  I also knew what was likely to come next, but I still wanted him to feel that I was not an active threat. That was my biggest advantage. Just don’t seem or act like something that was out for blood in any way, shape, or form.

  I had already slowly shifted myself to be positioned between Seth and his front door. Good thing too, because the moment I let go of his hands to try and let him see that I wasn’t going to hurt him, he turned around and bolted into the shadows of the trees. If I hadn’t slowly turned him, he might have tried to run inside his house and wake up Shelly.

  “Damn it…” I sighed as I watched my brother run to get away from whatever was standing in front of him.

  I let him get a little distance between us, but I didn’t let him get too far. I had already shifted my eyes and moved silently through the shadows to follow him. To my surprise, though, he really didn’t go too far before he stopped and calmed himself, slowly creeping back towards the edge of the woods to see if I was still there. I could tell it was more of his protective mind returning than a sense of curiosity or anything like that. He was beginning to realize that whatever I was, I was still in his yard near his wife and kids. So once he had the clarity of mind, he returned, stepping a toe out of the shadows of the woods. His heart was hammering in his chest as he glanced around, hoping he could find some sort of log or stick for a makeshift weapon before he closed the gap to his house.

  I saw a nice little broken tree that had fallen over at a height that would make a good seat, and I took it. I was only a few feet from where Seth stood in the darkness of the woods, looking for me in the yard. He was completely unaware of where I was in that brief moment.

  Part of me wanted to call it… to just run off and give up on this. I had already lived alone for so long that maybe I just shouldn’t fuck it all up for them.

  “Seth…” I said again, casting off the doubts that always came so easily.

  My words got his attention instantly, causing Seth to spin around quickly. It was so fast that he took a few jolted steps back, tripped over a rotten log, and fell on his ass. He flopped back into the thick layer of dry leaves and pine needles.

  He sat there trying to get back up after falling back on his hands. However, he was stuck in a position of complete vulnerability, on his back, looking straight at me. He would have to struggle to get up, spin around, and run away, while I could just easily surge forward from my seated position and take him right there… if I were a monster that is… well, the bad kind.

  We connected two pairs of the same eyes, and I could see him staring at me with a little less fear and more uncertainty. Uncertain about what he was seeing, and that maybe it could be real. I knew he was questioning it now. Why wasn’t I attacking?

  “Sam… How can you be real? How can I know for sure that you’re actually him?” he asked out loud, but it seemed like it was more to himself, like he was trying to find a reason to latch onto the belief that was slowly forming.

  I stayed seated, but I leaned forward as I spoke, “Do you remember when we were kids… Like sixth grade or some shit. We were at Granny and Pa’s house on the lake… after he’d been sick for so long.”

  The wheels were spinning inside of Seth’s head as he recalled what I was talking about, but was unsure how I could know this, unless I was who I claimed to be.

  “Yeah, I remember… what about it?” Seth challenged, waiting for something more.

  “Do you remember how, as we were there throughout the day, he slowly got worse and worse. He fell asleep, and they said his pulse got really slow, and everyone was starting to cry and break down because they thought he was going to die. Even Dad… He was trying to hold it in.” I shook my head at the memory that stirred emotion in me as I replayed it out loud for him. “Everyone wanted him to go to the hospital, not just have that nurse come out and check on him… but he was stubborn. Nobody liked that… but Granny didn’t fight him. She just wanted him comfortable.”

  I was trying to tell him something that only I would know, not even the rest of my family knew the details of what I was about to say to Seth, as we were the only two who experienced this part. “He never woke up… pulse kept getting worse throughout the day, their fears started turning into the truth. Then… he died…”

  Seth stared at me with apprehension that still clung in his mind, still waiting for more.

  “Yeah… he did…”

  I nodded slowly as I stared straight into his blue eyes, “We were outside when it happened. Sydney walked outside crying. She told us that Pa finally died, but then she ran off down to the dock to be by herself. We were still alone, just me and you sitting outside the house. Once we knew…” This was the part that only he and I knew about. “We knew he had died… But we didn’t cry… not at all. If anything, we kind of laughed. I didn’t understand it at first for a little while, not till we got a little bit older. But I think we didn't know how to feel, and then when we felt nothing, we had to laugh about something to make it seem okay. But I think at the heart of what was going on, we both know that death was inevitable. We already knew he was going to die, so when it happened, there was nothing to be sad about. We spoke about this a lot… especially after,” I tried to finish, but Seth cut me off.

  “After high school… when Granny died…” Seth took over. He didn’t need to finish the memory or the explanation of where I was going.

  He knew… without a shadow of a doubt, that the person sitting in front of him, on this fallen tree, was Sam… his brother.

  Seth slowly stood up, and I matched him, now standing about ten feet away from each other, waiting to see what he would do.

  “Sam?” Seth said with a slight quiver in his voice, the emotion slowly tearing him apart and breaking through the strong outer shell that he had put over himself for so long.

  I just slowly nodded and gave him a sad but unfortunate smile, one that he knew all too well.

  Without any more words, Seth almost exploded from his place and ran over to me and grabbed my arm, holding me at the forearm with one hand and putting his other on my shoulder, trying to feel and see if I was real. He stared at me for a split second as he analyzed me, understanding that it really was me. Then he slowly pulled me into a tight hug as he tried to fight back the emotions that were choking him through a knot in his throat.

  There might have been like ten or fifteen minutes where we really didn’t say much, other than Seth saying the same things over and over. Things like: how is this possible, is it really you, where have you been, all the usual kind of shit you’d expect after seeing your identical twin reappear after over five years of absence. He wasn’t really asking the question to be answered in the moment; it was more like he was trying to figure out how to process everything and gather himself to start the real questions.

  After that barrage of questions, Seth sat down in the dirt between the shadows of the trees. Just a few feet from each other, we both leaned our backs against some sturdy pine trees and just sat there on the ground talking.

  “What happened, man?” Seth asked the loaded question. It carried more than just the simple request; it was what happened, then what happened to keep me away for so long, and what happened to bring me back?

  I took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. Then I breathed in… and then I began.

  “The night I disappeared, I ran into something in the shed behind my house. I didn’t know what it was, but it was fucking huge, and it came after me like it wanted me dead. I tried to run, but… it got me out in those woods.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Seth watched me intently as I spoke, analyzing everything I said so he could memorize and store it away in his brain. These were the things he had searched for over the last five years. Everything he needed to know about what happened to me.

  “But then I woke up. I wasn’t in those same woods anymore; I was somewhere very far away. It didn’t take me long to realize that something inside me was different. Whatever that thing did to me, I didn’t understand it at the time, but I could feel something was inside of me that wasn’t there before. Pretty early on, before I ever even made it home again, I had a run-in with some people. Some bad guys that offered me a ride to get me back to Dallas, but they were… deadbeats. Pieces of shit that tried to steal anything I had and then kill me just for the pure pleasure in it. They shot the fuck out of me in the middle of some trees on a stretch of Interstate up north of Dallas. That's when it happened for the first time. I… turned into… something else.”

  Seth’s eyes slowly widened, but he tried to remain in control of his emotions. He couldn’t hide his erratic heartbeat, though; it was beating ninety-to-nothing.

  “Turned into what?” Seth asked with caution and intrigue.

  I decided to hold back a little for the moment.

  “In the moment, I had no clue what was happening. I just felt so much anger… hatred towards these evil sons of bitches, and I just wanted them to pay for what they did. Not just to me, but to who knows how many people before me. Basically, something else inside of me took over, and I turned into something that bullets and knives couldn’t stop. By the time I walked off that little two-track dirt road and back onto the Interstate, all three of those men were dead.” I stared at Seth hard as I watched the gears turning in his skull. And then I made sure he realized what I was saying, and then alluded to what the future held. “Those were the first people I killed.”

  My enhanced senses let me hear Seth clinches jaw, his teeth slightly grinding as they pressed against and slid across each other, and then the wet squelch of him swallowing nervously as he processed what I said. I don’t think he was afraid of me, just the seriousness of the situation, and the reality I was explaining to him. It was not something he was used to... staring into the eyes of someone he had grown up with... basically the same person... and I had killed people.

  “I knew I had become… something, and after killing those three… I was just scared. All I really wanted was to come home… back to Vicky, back to all of you guys. But I could feel this thing inside of me, the moment I saw you guys…” I shook my head, fighting off the emotion at remembering such a visceral memory. “I came back… I wanted to be back home… But what I felt inside of me, and what I knew I had just done… killing those people… I knew it wasn’t safe. I struggled with it… tried to figure out some way, but I knew what I was… figuratively, I mean. I knew I was a monster, and I had this urge inside of me to just kill,” I looked at him and reluctantly shook my head. “To kill everything… everyone. I felt like I wanted to kill you… to kill Vicky, Ben, everyone I saw the night I finally made it home. You were all there to just comfort Vicky and try to figure out what to do next. It was literally everything I could have ever wanted for her in that situation, to just have family be there with her when I couldn’t be. But still, somehow, this thing inside of me still looked at you all as a possibility. So… I left.”

  Seth’s eyes were strained, and he glanced around the floor of the woods as he tried to process everything. Questions formed and unformed in his mind as he tried to figure out what he understood and what he needed to ask. After a moment of contemplating, he looked up to me.

  “So, where have you been this whole time? Who is that, Carter, guy? You know him?” Seth asked as he realized it was highly likely, seeing as how he had just left him, and then I showed up.

  His eyes looked clearer now as he was slowly latching on to the reality laid out before him. There was still confusion, and he struggled with it, but I could see clearly that he was looking at me as his brother.

  We both adjusted ourselves a little as we remained sitting and leaning against a couple of close trees. I sent out a pulse of my enhanced senses just to ensure that Shelly and the kids were all still asleep. When the sonar-like pulse returned to me, I found them all in their beds, heartbeats slow and completely unaware of the deep conversation outside of the house and in the trees.

  “I just started walking. I didn’t really know where I was going, and I’m not really sure if it was just me walking either. Maybe this thing inside me was leading me back then,” I shook my head. But that part had to wait; that was the deep end, and I still needed to wade him out into the shallows of this situation.

  "Leading you?" Seth asked, fearful of the implications that the monster had a mind of its own.

  “This thing inside of me has the urge to kill. So I just kept moving in the direction of people who needed killing. I figured maybe I could just aim it in a direction and then set it off and hope that when the time came, I could control it enough to only hurt bad people who really deserved it. I slowly found my way to St. Louis, carving a path of death between here and there. I don’t know why I really stopped there… I just found this old, abandoned factory that was the perfect place for me to lie down for a while. Then, once in the city, I found that it was very easy to find more possibilities. Murderers, rapists, monsters in human flesh,” I emphasized the last part, knowing that Carter had said something very similar in his explanations to Seth earlier that day. “It wasn’t perfect, but the urge to kill was always growing. It was something I had to struggle against every single day… and I still do. Only now I’m much more… experienced.”

  Seth’s eyes darted around nervously for a second, “Does it... you... wanna kill right now?” he asked with a little unease.

  I nodded, “It’s always there. It never really goes away; it only lightens in intensity. I have ways to lessen the urge now, without killing. But it never truly goes away. But now I’m not only aiming it at the evil of the human world. After meeting Carter and his family, they showed me a whole new world full of fucked up things that need my attention. Creatures you wouldn’t imagine, monsters you’ve only seen in movies or read about in books. Once they started teaching me… that’s when I really started to understand more. I had been alone for two years, living day-to-day, trying to keep this monster contained until I could find someone who needed to be killed. It was a struggle unlike anything I’d ever faced before. I was so scared to be around normal people… scared that I’d kill them for no reason other than I was too weak to hold back the monster. But once I found the Chasse family, I learned about the darkness hiding beneath the city. Then, things began to get even weirder."

  “So, you’ve been around this whole time, knew where we were, but you just stayed away?” Seth asked, though he already knew the answer. I think he was asking himself, trying to make sure he understood the situation.

  I just sat still and nodded as he was processing out loud. I listened to his heartbeat, and it was faster than normal, but it was steady, just living in this heightened state of stress.

  “So why now? You stayed away for so long. What brought you back? Is it because of the chupacabras?” Seth asked in the best way possible, using my preferred name for the fuckers that I still hadn’t seen.

  I shook my head with a light smile, “No. It was only once I got here that I realized something was going on. That’s when I called Carter and his family for help. But before all that, I came here on my own… just to finally come home. To show myself to all of you and try to figure out a way to tell you the truth… not just about me… but about all of this,” I motioned around with my hands at the darkness surrounding us. “Knowing everything I know now, I want you guys to be as prepared as possible. To have you guys able to protect yourselves from the things that I found out about, too late.”

  Seth nodded slowly to himself as he was linking everything I was telling him. I could tell he was trying to figure out what he should logically think about everything that happened between the day I disappeared and the moment right now.

  But then I could almost see a visible shift in his mind as he looked at me sideways and asked, “Does Vicky know yet?”

  I shook my head with gritted teeth, a little bit of emotion clouding my eyes.

  “No. I tried to go to her but… I’m scared of what she’s gonna say… how she’ll even react to seeing me. Carter and Eleanor helped me get to you by trying to at least dip your toe in the water first. You had your first run-in with the supernatural world at the chupacabra nest. This world is weird, sometimes it’s almost like you can’t be info dumped everything at once, but slowly understand things over time.” I tried to explain it, but it was hard to put into words. Especially to someone who I could tell just wanted all the answers right then and there.

  “Do you think you would have just accepted what I’m telling you now before you saw that chupacabra nest?” I asked my brother.

  Seth really looked inside himself as I asked, not answering, but I think he was understanding what I was getting at. If he did not know the supernatural world, if I just appeared, he would have a much harder time understanding everything. Shit… just accepting it was even remotely possible would have been hard.

  “So you’re gonna tell everyone? Mom, Dad, Vicky?” Then Seth trailed off for a second as his heart surged with an increase in his pulse as he realized something. He looked at me nervously and then asked, “Do you know about Caydee?”

  I gritted my teeth, and with a swallow, I slowly nodded in the affirmative. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt a wave of grief wash over me once my brother and I both were speaking about my daughter, whom he knew I had never really known. I gritted my teeth and locked myself down emotionally, trying to squeeze everything down and keep it inside. I think Seth could see it.

  He got up and walked over to sit closer to me. He just sat down shoulder to shoulder with me and didn't say anything for a few more minutes. We just sat there… dwelling in the fucked up reality that I had a daughter, and I had never really known her. I knew how much he loved his kids just from the look on his face, and trying to imagine what it would be like to never have time with them, or for them to not even see you as anything that resembled a dad.

  “She’s still little, Sam. If you’re planning on coming back and being around everyone… I’m sure we can make it work. I’m sure everything will work out. But…” Seth shifted his mental stance and looked at me a little differently. “But how are we going to tell everyone else?”

  I slowly looked up to him as he had gotten to a knee, ready to stand up again, like he wanted to go tell everyone right then. It was in that moment that I realized he was a true believer now. There was no doubt anymore, no fear that I was some kind of supernatural creature that just looked like his brother, nothing. In his eyes, I was who I was… his twin brother, and he was ready to help me get everything back that I had lost. Well… to try.

  Seth reached his hand out toward me, and I reached up to meet his grip. We clasped hands, and he helped pull me up to my feet.

  Then, with a slight smile on his face, Seth said, “Damn, you got heavy!”

  He tried to make light of all this craziness. Both of us felt the closeness we were never known for back in the day, but hard and grief-filled times changed all that. It was an adjustment to be so open and vulnerable for either of us. It was easy to just joke instead.

  I grinned at him, “That’s all muscle, baby. Plus, you always were a weak bitch!”

  We both started laughing, and he quickly gave me a hug that we both leaned into, patting each other on the back, thankful beyond words or conscious thought that we were back together again. Just like it had always been before.

  Then we both pulled away slightly awkwardly once it started to last a little too long.

  I laughed, “What don’t you want to kiss?”

  Seth raised his eyes in fake shock, “I bet you’d like that you fuckin’ weirdo!”

  We both laughed in the darkness of the trees.

  Then Seth got serious again, “So… how do we start? How are we gonna tell everyone you’re back? Who are we going to tell first?”

  I looked at him, sizing him up, I was trying to notice the differences between us now, to really get into the details. “I’ve got an idea, but it’s going to require a little finesse.”

  Seth looked at me with a strange, inquisitive look, unsure what I meant.

  “How do you mean?”

  “We’re going to play that old game we used to play back in school. The old switch-a-roozle-doozle,” I laughed.

  “You want to swap places?” Seth asked, unsure how that would work.

  I nodded, “We can start tomorrow morning once you leave for work. You’ll go meet with Carter, Frank, and Jane to learn more about this world, and I’ll go pretend to be you. That way I can move around and see everyone while I try to work from within to set everything up.”

  “But… I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to tell you’re not me. As much as I hate to admit it, you have gotten a lot more…” Seth looked at my slightly larger form than he remembered me to have. “You're just a bit bigger… and stronger than you were before, and how I look now.”

  “So you admit that you know you’re a weak bitch!”

  Seth huffed a breath. “Yeah… so what are you going to do?”

  With that question, I reached out and grabbed his forearm, forming a kind of connection with him as I studied his features, size, and musculature. I felt deep within myself, running my mind through every inch of my primeval body. I had this thought a while back while I was traveling from St. Louis back to Texas. I only looked like me now because my mind was telling my primeval flesh that’s who I was. So, in theory, I could maybe make changes, or maybe even look like someone else entirely. I knew that was probably far from anything possible right now, but I was pretty confident that I could make myself appear more like my twin brother.

  I focused inwardly and tried to see myself as I was now, every muscle, every angle formed by my bones, anything that looked different than my brother. And then I tried to imagine everything shifting to align with the person I was looking at… the person I was touching right now.

  I felt pressure in my mind and in the middle of my chest as I urged the change to happen. It was a weird feeling, one that I wasn’t prepared for or really understood at all. However, in the course of about two to three minutes, as we stood in silence, clasping forearms: I slowly shrank down a few inches, reduced my mass and the more prominent muscles I developed after the change, and small minute parts of my face shifted, ever so slightly, to make me look like a mirror image of the man in front of me. We were already identical twins, but there were always small things; now, there was no difference between us.

  With a very raised voice, Seth just said, “What the fuuuu…”