My Brother's Keeper
Prologue
For Spawn, a different kind of horror for a different kind of friend!
I remember what I was doing when the phone rang to tell me Wes was dead. I was sitting in my office, pants down around my ankles trying to pleasure myself to a game I had downloaded off the internet. In this game you had to convince a stereotypical male sex object to let you touch him and take off his clothes. This one involved a coach; the artist drew him with pointed elven ears and wisps of gray formed in the sides of his buzz cut. I was just about to make him release when the phone rang. I grabbed it immediately so no one else would come in and tell me I had a call.
"Hello?" I said, struggling to pull up my pants with one hand while balancing a cordless phone in the other.
"Is this Soul Evans?" The voice said, the voice sounded the way I had envisioned the coach on my computer would sound, already I started to rise up again. I tucked my erection in my boxer briefs and held on to the belt loop of my jeans.
"Yes this is he, May I ask who is calling?"
"This is Sam Leventhal of the Death City Police department. I am calling to inform you that your brother was found hanging in the closet of his hotel room tonight."
"Wes, "I said, "Wes was in town?"
"Yes sir and hotel security found him hanging from his closet with a belt. We'd like you to come to the station if you could?" Leventhal said.
"I'll be right there!" I said and hung up the phone. Hurriedly I buttoned my pants and pulled my Reverend Jim Jones T-shirt off the back of the chair and onto my head. I walked outside the office where
Maka sat on the couch, in her hand was a glass of pinot noir, on the table the bottle sat uncorked.
"Where do you think you're going mister?" She said.
"I don't have time for your shit Maka; I have to go to the police department."
"Fucked one of your patients, didn't cha? Told you to card em!" Her voice was like razor blades dipped in acid and wrapped with barbed wire. She was drunk off her ass.
"Maka, goddamn it, go to bed." I said, and walked out the door to the carport; I climbed in my Lexus and opened the garage door.
Things weren't always like this for me and Maka. We used to be happy together, but as time went on things began to gradually crumble. I would say it would have begun when she lost our baby Sophie Rose in 2008 due to miscarriage. The doctor said she would be torn up but that she would be fine within a few days. She was never fine after that. She became cold, distant, spending her time staring at a box of baby clothes we had picked out and guzzling wine as if it were somehow divinely turned back into water. I guess that's when the gay thing came about. I mean technically I am straight and can perform with Maka but the scenarios that I would find on the internet would make me feel more passion than she could ever give me now. These were kept secret from her; I kept all my little secrets stored on a portable hard disk in my office.
I guess I should tell you about myself. I am about six foot one with a slight athletic build and white blond hair. I wear it slicked back professionally but tonight I just let it spike up. I am a graduate of the Kent State School of Psychology with a Masters in abnormal psych and Bachelors in philosophy with an emphasis on religious mysticism. I married my shrew of a wife in 2006 and we lost our daughter in 2007. I have a brother, Wes, who is only 3 years older than me and a talented violinist. Supposedly he was going to perform tonight at a venue in town, too late now.
The polished marble sheen of the police station looked smoky and hushed in the moon light, the scent of old leaves and someone's vanilla cigarillo filled the air. My shoes made clacks up the stairs as I hurried up them, this was not my night. Wes was dead, his body found in a closet with a belt around his neck. The only details I had on his sad death, nothing more or less, just bare bones. Detective Leventhal met me at the front. He shook my hand and walked me over to a small office lit with only a desk lamp.
"I assume by your reaction you and the deceased were very close." He said.
"Yes, well, we grew apart after he left KSU but we still talked." I said.
"Well your brother didn't leave you empty handed."
"How is that?"
"He left a suicide note, short one too. Says "give him my laptop and iPod" I assume you know what those are?" I knew. My brother had an obsession with his sixty-four gigabyte iPod touch he had bought when his first album went platinum. The thing did everything but make pancakes and jacked you off, he would obsess over it on nights when Maka would be out at a teacher's function and I would invite him over for a brew and some good old fashioned NFL. He would pull it out and tell me what was going on with other teams, or he would blab about the radio stations he could pick up. I could give a fuck less, as long as he was happy I was happy. Why would Wes want me to have them though?
"How did they find him?" I said.
"Strangest fucking thing in the world ya know," He said, "Neighbors heard what sounded like rough sex coming from his room. They called the front desk and they knocked on his door, they heard some kinda mumbling and then silence. Manager got the master key and opened the door, found him hanging by his belt bare ass naked."
"That's a little odd for Wes, and then again he was quite odd." I said.
"I'll say. Listen I know you're busy, so tell Bob at the front desk to give ya that shit." I shook hands with the detective and went to talk to the middle aged fellow at the front. He went to a door off to the left of the lobby and loudly tamped down the stairs. Within minutes he brought up a manila bag and with gloved hands pulled out the iPod and the Laptop. I tucked the computed under my arm and placed the iPod in the pocket of my jacket. I left the office and into the chill of fall. I wondered what to do next. Maka would not have heeded my words and went to bed, and no matter how quiet I was walking in she would notice and we would argue. I noticed the coffee shop at the end of the street had Wi-Fi and seeing as my curiosity was frothing I decided to walk over and see what I could do with these devices. It was something I should have put out of my head.
Wes' Laptop was a Dell, running Windows 7 sixty-four bit home premium with an Intel i7 dual core processor and an unknown amount of RAM. The thing booted up like a dream, I was greeted with a password screen. Wes has had the same password for ages, our grandmother's phone number, and when I plugged in the digits I was greeted by wallpaper featuring a famous pop idol licking an ice cream cone seductively. His name was Kaito, one of the people that performed on Wes' first album. He did a rendition of a German metal band's song about a sailor, translated into English. It was popular with the Goth and EMO crowds. The video for the song won an award somewhere. I clicked on various icons, one was music creation software, since I was in public I decided not to fiddle with it, and the rest were various program folders and document folders. One folder caught my eye; it was in bold type all caps, the words "FOR SOUL" emblazoned it. Cautiously I clicked on the folder. Inside was a series of pictures, most of them medieval woodcuts and paintings it looked like and one document. The woodcuts were horrific pictures of monsters gnawing on humans, people in horrific agony; skeleton's riding horses dragging carts of dismembered flesh. I quickly clicked those away and opened the document. The document was a list of names, names of people I had heard before. Actors like Sebastian Michaels, Yusuke Urameshi, and royalty like Prince Adam of France, Prince Naveen of Maldonia, Prince Daniel of Germany, just normal big wigs of Death City, like Aldan Black, and Hans Deuch were on the list. The very bottom a note from was a note from Wes. It said, "Check the iPod for details" I clicked it on and went through his contacts, the same men only with names, phone numbers, and addresses. I wondered what he was trying to tell me as I shut down the laptop and clicked off the player. Finishing my late I walked towards the door when I bumped into someone.
"Oh, excuse me, I didn't see you there." I said. The meek raven haired maiden smiled.
"It's okay," She said, she then paused and a glint came into her eye. "Do you remember me?" I racked my brain. "I used to go out with the quarterback of the high school football team? I was teased because I was a theatre fag and choir geek?" She said.
"Tsubaki, Tsubaki Nakatsukasaa? Oh my god it's great to see you!" I said, I remembered Tsubaki from the Death City High production of "Phantom of the Opera" where she played Christine. My body would get chills just hearing her sing "All I Ask of You" my mind would drift to thoughts of her singing to me softly and crying over my wounded body in some sort of tragedy. I broke my thoughts and looked at her.
"What are you doing now?" I said.
"I am an aspiring singer, I am doing the club thing now but I got a meeting with Miku Hatsune's record label tomorrow!" she said.
"Great, I was just leaving but I can stay if you want to catch up on old times?" I said.
"I would love to." She said and we sat at a corner booth away from the crowd. Had I known what she really was I would have ran like hell.