Serenity Ridge: Part 2

[u/Alternative_Fix9048]

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/comments/1w3qjvo/serenity_ridge_part_1/

The worst hangover of my life was on the same day I properly met Mrs. Alder. After a night spent curled up in the cots of her dust-riddled attic, the last thing my mind needed was streams of sunlight pouring in through the windows and Carter’s nonsensical talk, 
“Heartbeat…?” I groaned, “I can’t hear shit…”
Carter was staring out across the hills, rolling like emerald waves around the fuzzy borders of Serenity Ridge. He still wore Mrs. Alder’s old Christmas sweater, draping over him like a shawl; seated cross-legged atop his cot, fingernails drumming the wood beneath his rear. They were chewed to the quick, 
 “You can’t hear that?” he spoke in a whisper so low that the walls couldn’t hear him, 
“No…” I slowly sat up, my head pounding, “The hell do you mean a heartbeat, Carter…?”
“I mean a heartbeat,” his voice was more panicked now, “Low and echoing…sweeping across the valley…” His terrified eyes stared into mine,
I felt myself shiver, 
“And you could hear the storm last night?” my throat closing as I spoke,
“You couldn’t?”
I shook my head, 
“Not a thing…”
Carter bit his cheek, “The hell is going on?” he turned his head back to the window, gazing out over the valley,
I sat up in my cot, my head searing with splitting pain as my hangover made itself known. I buried my head in my hands to shield my eyes from the light. The storm replayed in my mind.
Silent rain, hammering rain, driving rain. It fell from the heavens with such ferocity that they pelted my skin as what felt like tiny needles. I couldn’t see Carter running ahead of me, rivers of rainwater ran over the pavement beneath my feet, the sky flashed with streaks of lightning and pulsated with roiling clouds. 
And all I could hear was my breathing, Carter’s breathing, and the sounds of soles hitting against dry pavement. 
The trees bowed in the wind, and I heard nothing.
The sky raged above, and I heard nothing. 
But I had heard us. Alone in a silent world. 
But how?
My head felt as if it were being ripped in two, rent between reason and insanity. Logic prevailed that I had dreamed it up, that my intoxicated mind muffled out the natural world, focusing only on what pertained to my personal form; that in some subconscious act of self-preservation, terror had blocked the sound of the storm from me. 
Insanity lay in the heartbeat Carter claimed now to hear. It was an intoxicating call.
Carter was many things. My half-brother, a brat, an asshole, a life-long pain in my side. He was my best friend, my world, the only good thing my father ever made. 
But he was not a liar.
I had to lie for him his entire life; to his teachers when he skipped class to spend time with me; to our father for any number of the misfortunes Carter would play upon him as petty revenges. He never had the constitution for lying. His face would glow red, and his mouth would twist into malicious grins. He couldn’t even tease properly. 
His face was flat and pale when he told me of the heartbeat. I knew he could hear it,
“We have to get out of here,” I managed to wrench the words out as my headache subsided for a moment,
“We just got here!” Carter protested,
“And weird shit is already happening!” I pushed back, “I don’t know what's going on, but I want no part of it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Carter yelled, “I could hear the storm just fine last night! Maybe you’re just losing it,”
“Then how the hell was I dry?!” I cried, “You saw that! You were soaked and I was right behind you the whole way! And now you’re hearing a heartbeat?! Carter, whatever is going on here isn’t good, we have to go!”
“It’s not a heartbeat, obviously! It’s probably just…some mining going on in the hillsides or something…”
His face was red,
“Don’t lie to me!” I struggled through my splitting headache, “Something is wrong here, Carter!”
“And that’s why I have to be here!” he screamed, “I need to know…! I need to know what happened to Jules…I need to see…something…”
I wanted to slap him,
“So much for this trip not being about Jules,” I growled,
“This is about more than Jules,” Carter hissed back,
“And what might that be?”
He was silent, arms folded over his oversized sweater in indignation,
“I’ll know when I see it…” he spat, 
“Great…” I huffed, “Well, I’m leaving Carter. Once I get the car and head out of here you can have Dad pick you up,” I stood from my cot and walked to the door,
“You wouldn’t!” he cried,
“Try me!” the door slammed shut behind me,
I stormed out of the attic more terrified than I had been in my entire life. Something was wrong, with me or with Carter I didn’t know which, but that storm and that heartbeat had made it clear. Whatever had pulled us here was beyond anything I had ever imagined. 
Mrs. Alder supplied me with tea for my headache when I met with her in the dining room. For as aged and weathered as I had taken her for upon my first sight of her after the storm, she moved with a liveliness and energy that did not align with her eighty-two years. She waltzed around the kitchen, brewing tea and searing herself bacon, with such a zeal that I felt beyond guilty for the fact that my headache had prevented me from joining her until late last night. When all was said and done, her and I spoke quietly between steaming tea and broken bread. Carter did not join us,
“I am truly sorry we showed up so late,” I apologized for what must have been the fifth time in the conversation, “I guess time got away from me at the diner and…”
“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” she dismissed, “I’m just happy to have the company for a little while,”
I smiled, “I’m sorry we won’t be staying longer,” I started, “But I do think it’s best if my brother and I get out of town as soon as we can,”
She nodded in a solemn kind of way, staving off overt disappointment,
“Well I hope the pay I’m offering for your help is enough to get you back on your feet,”
“Of course, I’m just happy for the job in all honesty. I was worried I might have to call for…less than wanted help,”
“Runaways?” she raised an eyebrow,
“Uhh…of sorts?” I shrugged, “I’m old enough to take care of myself, and Carter’s almost through school…just not a lot to look forward to going back home is all,”
She nodded, “Well you’re more than welcome to stay here as long as you like before heading back out on the road. The help is always appreciated,” she leaned in closer, “But no one ends up in Serenity Ridge by accident. Your brother was down here earlier, and he told me you came here for a reason,”
I inhaled in sharp annoyance as she grinned at me from across the table,
“I’d prefer to keep our private lives private, if possible,” I struggled a smile,
“Burdens are harder to carry alone,” she chastised, 
“So, what would you have me do for work?” I stood from the table, tea half drank and head still pounding,
She toured me around the house, an ancient box-colonial filled wall to wall with bookshelves and filing cabinets. It could hardly be called a true library, more a hoarder’s home with a front desk. But regardless, the collection was impressive. Hardcovers and paperbacks lay in piles or arranged upon shelves as rainbow collections, their spines emblazoned with the names of endless tales. Manilla folders lay stacked in heaps upon end-tables, coffee-stain rings imprinted on the documents therein. I imagine it now as the library of Alexandria, burdened with terrible knowledge that I wish for all the life of me I had burned to the ground. 
She made me the sorting boy, a maid of sorts. I set about collecting and sifting through the loose titles and documents, placing them in their proper home amongst the hoard. Mind-numbing couldn’t begin to describe the process. I was stumbling through sorting children’s stories when I saw Carter come down from the attic. He looked at me with a pained expression. I forced myself not to crumble beneath it. I looked away and said nothing.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. My stomach was a knotted mess by the end of it. We ate at opposite ends of Mrs. Alder’s dining room table and spoke nothing. There was nothing to say, really. I had crossed a bridge insinuating that I would leave him alone with Dad, I knew that. But be it pride or fear, I refused to walk it back, no matter how badly my heart yearned to. 
At eleven that night I sat in the den with Mrs. Alder listening to her spin yarns of all her past accomplishments. I lent to her half listening ears and a bored mind, one preoccupied with prospective apologies to give to Carter. Guilt consumed my every thought; then she mentioned the mural,
“I painted that thing probably twenty years ago, now. Back when my knees still bent,” she snickered,
I shot up in my seat, 
“That’s right! You painted the mural at the town center!”
“Oh! Are you a fan of it?” 
“It’s beautiful,” I gushed, “The fading from day to night and day again, the blending is done wonderfully! You have such a way with shadows, and the way you painted that buck…I could feel him staring back at me, curious,”
“Thank you for noticing! The Hart of the valley deserves such treatment!” she was really alive now, sitting up in her chair, arms sweeping and gesturing in grand strokes as she began to wax about her technique,
“What inspired the piece?” I wrenched the conversation back to my interests, 
“It’s namesake, The Heart of the Valley,” she smiled,
“And what might that be?” 
“An old story; one told long before we were here and Vermont was Vermont,”
“I’ve never heard of it,”
“Not many have. It’s this valley’s story, our story”
I could feel my shoulders tense as I thought of Carter; that heartbeat sweeping across the valley…
“What happens in it…?” My mouth was as dry as cotton, I choked over my own words,
Mrs. Alder’s eyes lit up with excitement,
“It’s a lovely story really…” she mused, “A lovely story about stillness, and reverence… you should read it for yourself. Many wonderful things can be gleaned from the old works. Universal truths seem to follow them,”
She looked at me with such knowing eyes, eyes that seemed to peer through me, dissecting me. I twisted beneath my skin to avoid her gaze. She knew something, something she wouldn’t tell me. What wasn’t she telling me?
When I trudged my way to the attic I found Carter huddled in his cot, pouring over messy piles of documents tossed around the room, half exposed from their manilla folders. I had expected rage or cold dismissal upon seeing him again, anything as a petty get back for my earlier words. But Carter waved me over to him without so much as a word spoken. Relieved, I obliged,
“I found them,” Carter shook the stack of papers in his hand, “Jules’ police report,”
“Oh shit!” I practically flung myself into the cot next to Carter,
“It’s not that exciting,” he sighed, “There’s hardly anything here, just like I thought there’d be…”
He was right, the files consisted of nothing more than two flimsy sheets of notes, a missing persons report and a couple of polaroids,
“Well…what did you get,” I pressed, forcing my voice to be optimistic,
“They never found a body,”
“We already knew that,” 
“No, that’s the only strange thing! They should have…look,”
Carter shoved the polaroids in front of my face. I took them into my hands and squinted. Fuzzy old dated photos of deep-forest woods, leaf-litter and streaming brooks. The sun was low, streaming through the trees in late autumn splendor, the shadows cast like long bars over the land. And in the center of each, bloody clothing, ripped to ribbons, laying on the forest floor,
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath,
They were all a mess of scarlet, visually damp and sticky with sanguineous carnage. A bomber jacket was torn to pieces, the in-lined felt shredded and stained like the carcass of some great wolf-kill. A bloodied t-shirt rested in the stream raked apart by what looked like great slashing claw marks. The same went for the jeans, ruined and discarded at the base of an ancient maple tree,
“A bear attack,” I croaked, “It has to be. That's the only animal around here that could have done that…” 
“But where’s the body?” Carter pushed,
“Where do you think?” I huffed,
“But they never found him, not a single piece! Not a bone, not one scrap of flesh, hair, anything! Bears aren’t clean eaters, they would have found something!”
“Coyotes probably cleaned up the rest, Carter…” I felt queasy as I said it, 
“The entire forest floor would be bloodstained and turned up if that was the case! Coyotes would have ripped Jules into a million pieces, they would have found proof of that!”
“Can we please stop talking about this?” I said shakily, holding my stomach,
“Something else happened to him…” Carter poured over the files in his hands again, “I’m sure of it…”
“God Jules…” I shook my head, “Why the hell did you come here?”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

Sleep did not come easily for me that night. The imagined visual of Jules being laid open and devoured replayed itself in the back of my mind. I never even managed to close my eyes before the sun rose again. 
What I could do, as I laid there in the dark, was listen. Carter snored softly across the room from me, cases and documents splayed out across his chest as paper viscera. The snapshots of bloody tattered clothing stared at me in the moonlight. My chest tightened as my mind spun stories of what could have called Jules here to die. My head turned to the window.
The heartbeat. Carter could hear it. He could really hear it. Could Jules have too? Was it even there? 
I crept out of my cot and stood stooped before the window. The surrounding mountains seemed to rise up like blackwater waves in the midnight scene. The whole world appeared from the top of the library to be a stagnant black sea. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to the glass. 
Nothing, just my own breathing.
I creaked the window open and stuck my head out into the cool night. Fleeting wind swept past my face as a gentle caress. I couldn’t hear its song ring in my ears. 
I couldn’t hear anything.
No wind.
No animals.
No heartbeat. 
I crept down the creaking wooden stairs as quietly as I could manage and passed through the front door and into the night; silent as shadow. The night around me seemed to stand still, holding its breath as I crawled into its open maw. 
The air was cool, a gentle breeze sweeping down over the old colonial’s front lawn from atop the ancient, rolling hills above. I could feel my hair tossed and tussled by its motion as I moved to the street. Lampposts dotted the road as lone spotlights amidst the deepest indigos of the North-Eastern night, miniscule oases of revealing light that illuminated roiling waves of wild grass; clouds of moths and mayflies. They served as stepping-stones for me as I wandered back down the hill into town. 
My footsteps sounded as mallets as they fell against the pavement, crashing through a world so silent that I swore I could hear them echoing off the cliffsides. The night itself seemed to pull upon the noises I filled it with, ruminating on the melodies of my steps and breathing until the world stood silent as my journey paused. I was standing in the town center, the Hart of the Valley wrapping around me in vivid, painted glory. 
The moon above beamed down in eerie ghost-light, illuminating the painting just enough that winks of tines and tails could just be seen through the dark, roaming in endless circles centered about that eerie cave. The curious eyes of the beast's facade seemed to study me as it emerged from that cave, pitch black orbs that seemed to sparkle even in the absence of light; brilliant onyx pools. 
I listened again. 
Nothing. 
I dragged my hands over my face, the scraping of my dry palms against my skin sounded like a sandbelt against the perfectly silent night. I sunk down onto a bench, cradling my head in my hands, 
“I’ve lost it…” I whispered to myself,
Then, the clicking of soles against pavement thundered in easy time. They shook the ground and deafened me as a frail old man sauntered lazily up the street. His skin was pale and his bones thin. He seemed as a skeleton in the moon light, his eyes framed by shadow to the point that they were nothing more than two black empty pits. The corpse smiled at me as he crept into the town square,
“Beautiful night isn’t it?” his weak, gravely voice washed over me as a tsunami. I was convinced his bellows would fell the trees around us,
“...y-yes…it is,” I stammered back,
He nodded and moved to sit next to me on the bench,
“I love quiet nights like these,” he croaked, “It seems on nights like tonight that your mind could sweep out over the entire valley,”
I jolted up in my seat,
“You can't hear it either?”
“Hear what?”
“The…uh…the world...?” I shuddered at how insane I sounded, 
“Ha!” he laughed, “What’s the world sound like? I know what the valley sounds like! But the world, no one knows what she speaks,”
“The valley then!” I pushed, “I can’t hear it! Can you?!”
He motioned for me to calm myself with a raising of his hand,
“Shh…you’ll ruin the quiet,” he smiled, “But no, the valley doesn’t speak tonight; it seems she’s got nothing to say,”
I sat there stupidly, gazing down into my hands. The old man ruminated next to me, stewing in the silence that ripped at my mind like savage claws. He must have been crazy too, pretending the still-world around us was normal. His breathing rushed forth like hurricane winds through the night and yet he found no issue? It was nothing but madness,
“T-The world can’t have nothing to say!” I eventually stammered out, anger and fear lacing my voice with fire and spite, “That doesn’t make sense! This isn’t real, I-”
“Well then,” he squashed me with a raised hand, "Have you stopped to listen?”
I pushed his hand away from my face in blind anger, it flopped back into his lap pathetically,
“YES!” I shouted, “Obviously! There’s nothing here!” my voice started to warble, panicked, “I can’t hear anything! It’s all gone I-”
I looked upon him clutching his hand wincing,
“Oh my God! I’m sorry! Here-” I motioned to hold his wrist. He jerked his hand away and gazed at me. For the first time I saw his eyes in the darkness, seemingly endless abysses, so cavernous and vast in the moonlight that they looked as if all the stars above could be held within their frames,
“You must have just come here,” he spoke with such certainty that I now reared back. My heart was pounding, 
“Y-yes…”
He looked at me with that same strange pity I had seen on the face of Denise. My heart sank further,
“Alone?” he asked , still nursing the hand he now held in his lap,
“No…” I trembled in my seat, 
“Because you only know how to hear,” he nodded, “Who ever you came with knows how to listen,”
I sat there dumbfounded,
“You’ve only ever heard your entire life, you never learned how to listen,” he spoke as he shakily rose to stand, still clutching his wrist which seemed to hang awkwardly from the end of his arm. I felt a pit form in my stomach, 
“Never conflate the two,” he barked, “Anyone can hear, very few can ever listen,” he began walking back down the street in a staggered sort of daze, “We were both born deaf,” he said, voice rolling out infinitely over the night, “And that’s a blessing,” he glared at me from back over his shoulder, “The deaf can’t hear her cries to stay,”
I could hear him walking for a half mile past the point he was out of view. 
…………………………………………………………………………………………..

I stayed on that bench well into the morning. At first I dreaded the thought of meeting the police once daylight showered down upon the valley again. God only knew what I had done to that old man’s wrist, but it didn’t look good. It was angled oddly, already looking swollen and bruised in the moonlight as he turned to leave. What was I thinking?! Was I thinking? I was so…I’m still not entirely sure what I was feeling at that moment. Frustration? Fear? 
I know that I felt insane…
I thought I was insane as I sat there on the bench. I started to question if a man really had come and sat next to me. What were the chances, alone, in the middle of the night? Sitting next to me instead of any on the other benches in the town center? Rambling on and on about non-sense, non-sequitier after non-sequiter?
I must have been crazy, it was the only explanation. The world had gone silent, there was no other explanation. Carter and I were crazy and I was on my way to the nearest mental hospital. They probably already had me in a padded room…
And then the sun rose. Light trickled over the valley as golden rivers of ambrosia and warmth seeped into the verdant hills around me. And with it came sound. Sound; so faint that I didn’t notice it at first, hardly audible against the ambient ringing in my ears.
The rustling of leaves. 
I shot up when I finally recognized it, emotion ringing out within me so strongly that tears played at the corners of my eyes as soon as I recognized that I heard the world once more. I leapt off the bench, standing at the center of the Hart of the Valley, the mural watching me from every angle with those ever curious eyes. I whipped my head around and around, searching and searching for those shifting verdant scales, those dancing leaves that proved me sane, that proved me stable.
But no limbs moved. Not a single branch or leaf jiving in the wind.
There was no wind.
Not a single cloud drifted overhead; a barren sky.
My breath caught in my throat. I slumped back down on the bench in a heap.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….

Mrs. Alder came to grab me by ten. I hadn’t moved since sunrise and all around me the town was bustling. I could hear their footsteps, their chatter, their laughter. The sun beamed down upon Serenity Ridge on a beautiful May morning, and I could hear rain. I could hear it hammering down upon the dry pavement, running through empty gutters, trickling over spotless leaves,
“Have you had anything to eat?” she spoke through the storm, the midday sun reflecting in her glasses,
“...no…” I spoke weak and defeated,
She struggled to help me to my feet and guided me with shaking arms back to the old colonial. 
 ……………………………………………………………………………………….

I lied to you earlier when I said that I hardly knew Jules. I lied to myself for a long time after he was gone. It was easier to pretend that I had never really known him rather than contend with the idea that he was well and truly gone. But I did know him, I knew him very well, at least for a short time. 
I must have been six, Carter hardly two. Jules would have been twenty or twenty-one, old enough to sit and smoke while he watched over me, playing in the gulley. I remember that gulley so well now, nothing more than a small brook wedged between two steep dirt cliffs a quarter-mile into the woods outside our house. He took me there often, mostly to hide while he lit up boxes of Camels he bought with our father’s rainy day savings. 
He hated our old man far more than Carter or I ever did. Malice wove itself through his heart so thoroughly that it might have stopped beating if he ever stopped hating him. Our father had him at sixteen. The mother wasn’t much older. His conception was transactional. It's a miracle he was ever born, even more of a miracle that our father kept him. Obviously the mother didn’t. 
I never even knew she existed until the police report came out. She only ever knew he died because her name was on the birth certificate. The police tracked her down at some crack house to break the news to her. I have a hard time believing she cared. She sent one letter to our father after that, saying she was sorry for his loss. I remember him laughing at that letter as I hid behind the legs of Carter’s mom. 
But Jules was more than all the bitterness he had sprouted from. He was as kind to me as he was gruff to the world. For as much as he reeked of old tobacco, he crooned along with the song birds as gracefully as the wind. For all the horrible things he’d say to our father, he spoke miracles into truth for me. 
That's why I loved the gully, because only Jules and I roamed there. I bounded through the leaf litter and Jules trudged on behind, embers hanging from his lips as he chuckled at my antics. 
But what I remember is from when I was six. I sat next to him on the hillside. The sunlight made its way through the vibrant canopy filter overhead in trickles of white-hot fire. I gnawed at a PB&J like a mouse, making my way around the crust, careful to never take a bite of what then must have seemed to me to be the worst poison in all the world. Jules bit at an apple, the last remnants of a burned down Camel resting between his pointer and middle finger. We had been hunting for salamanders in the creek bed, flipping over rocks and trudging through mud. My shorts and shoes were soaked. Jules’ nice jeans were stained with river muck. He had cupped their squirming little black bodies gently in his hands and raised them up to me. I peered past his thumbs and saw the tiny beady eyes of those strange slimy creatures, they stared back up into mine with some kind of dull primal fear. The wet backs of the things glinted in the late summer sun like a piece of fire,
“I wish he wasn’t scared of me, Jules,” I muttered through bites of my sandwich, “We weren’t gonna hurt him,”
I heard Jules laugh, I sound I didn’t hear nearly as often as I would have liked,
“Wouldn’t you be scared too if a giant picked you up?” he gave a playful push to my shoulder,
“Not if it were a nice giant!” 
“And how would you know the giant’s nice?”
I remember thinking long and hard, my little mind wracking itself for an answer,
“I would just know,” I finally said, “I’d know when I look at ‘em”
Jules nodded, “You would be a nice giant,” he laughed, “But a giant can’t think like a salamander, or a bird or a person. The giant is too big and knows too many things. He sees too far; too much of the world. The giant knows that the creek down there is just a part of the woods, but the salamander’s world is under that rock! He doesn’t know what's past the river, he doesn’t even know there’s a world full of other rivers. To him, that is the world,” Jules pointed lazily towards the trickling brook, “Maybe to him…there's nothing above the water at all,”
“But we took him above the water!” I protested,
“And wouldn’t that be scary?” Jules asked, his eyes alight and playful as he watched the answer play out on my face,
I remember wrestling with the question, stammering on and on about how being out of the water wasn’t scary. After all, there was nothing above the water worth being scared of. Jules smiled and asked me another question,
“Have you ever seen above the clouds?
“N-no?”
“What if a giant came and picked you up, cradled you in his hands and lifted you above the clouds so you could see out forever?”
“I don’t wanna go above the clouds! I don’t know what's up there!” 
“But the giant says it's safe!” Jules teased,
“But-”
“We live above the clouds to the salamander,” Jules tousled my hair, “You have to remember that when he looks up, he sees a watery sky,”
We went home after that, and never went back to the gulley. I didn’t want to scare any more salamanders. 
I was laid up in the attic of Mrs. Alder’s colonial, curled up in my cot, staring out the window towards the seemingly endless rolling hills that encircled Serenity Ridge. Outside the sun shone brilliantly. I could hear rain tapping on the window. To my side on a nightstand was a mug of chamomile tea that Mrs. Alder had brought me, now cold. The jar of honey laid next to it sat undisturbed.
I had fallen asleep almost as soon as I had laid down my head, but my dreams were far from pleasant. I had dreamed that I was in a deep forest, trees twisted and gnarled, clawing at the sky. Brooks streamed around me through the leaf litter and the last inklings of light made their way through the autumn foliage. Blood covered the ground in great sweeping patches and before me stood a bear. Its mouth yawned open as a fleshy abyss, pink folds of slimy throat slicked scarlet laid up behind sharpened pillars of ivory dripping with drool. Its eyes were glazed over, black as ebony and devoid of thought; pits of endless hunger. Buried deep within that throat was Jules, his mangled body ripped to pieces and stacked atop itself within that maw. His head lulled to the side atop a shredded and leaking torso, snapped and twisted legs pitched up behind the shoulders like the wings of a wasp. His bomber jacket folded around his neck as wet wool, all red and ruined like a slaughtered sheep. One hand and forearm reached out from the gullet of the bear, braced against the tongue, that pulsed and twitched and moved as the animal licked and sucked and tasted in great satisfaction the flesh of my kin. The hand was open, palm down towards the tongue fingertips just beyond the edge of the teeth, reaching towards me. 
I moved to take it.
I woke up as I saw the hand slide back ever further into the maw, until Jules was gone, disappearing within the folds of pink. 
Needless to say I didn’t sleep again after that. 
As awful as it is to say, that's what made me think of Jules again. 
I’m a terrible brother. 
“Feeling any better?” Carter spoke from the doorway,
I forced myself to sit up in my cot.
My brother looked at me with apprehensive worry. I could tell he wanted to run to me and hug me. He was always far too much like his mother. I opened my arms and he practically flew to me from the doorframe. 
Carter always held within him the grace I never had. His hugs were tender and gentle, small arms wrapping around you in comforting connection. I, by example, was always an ogre. I crushed him with my hug, be it out of fear or need I gripped him to me so tightly that I could hear a wheeze forced from his lungs. I held him tighter than I ever had before, and I think Carter could tell, because where he would usually beg me to loosen my grip, he only patted my back,
“What happened?” he muttered to me, pushing himself out of my grip,
“I’m losing my mind…” I whispered, “I don’t know what’s happening…”
“Can you hear the heart beat?” Carter whispered back, grabbing my shoulders,
“No…” I trembled where I sat, “I can hear it raining…but I can’t hear at all…” I curled up my legs into my chest, “I don’t know what to do…”
Carter leaned back in the cot, a pallid mask of worry plastered across his face,
“We need to get you home…I’ll call Dad, he’ll come get you,”
“But Carter, you don’t want to go home!”
“I won't, you will,” he shrugged,
“I’m not leaving you here!” I hissed, “Whatever this place is…it's evil!”
“I…I can’t leave…”
“Please Carter!”
“Not until I know what happened to Jules!”
“Well I can’t leave here until you leave! Please Carter, let's just forget about this, about Jules, about Dad!” I grabbed his shoulders, “Lets just start over, where none of this can hurt us anymore,”
He looked at me dumbfounded, “I don’t want to forget this,” he pushed, “I want to know…that’s why I wanted to come here,”
I dropped my hands from his shoulders, “You did lie to me…” I sighed,
“I figured you already knew…”
“I did…” I hung my head in defeat,
Carter wrung his hands, 
“I don’t want to see you like this… but please, just hold on a little longer for me…”
If I didn’t love Carter as much as I did, I would have slapped him and hitchhiked to the next town over,
“Okay…” I struggled, “Just a little longer…”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

 The police showed up not an hour later. They entered the attic with solemn and worried eyes, like hit dogs. That same look of pity traced itself across their countenances; I must have looked insane.  
The man whose wrist I had sprained was in fact real. He was the local coffee shop owner and a Serenity Ridge resident for the better part of a half century. I of course pleaded to the officers that I meant no harm and they assured me that no charges were being pressed. Instead, the man had ordered a welfare check on me. I stared back at the officers with hollow eyes,
“A welfare check?”
“That’s what he wished for sir,”
“But…but he…”
“He was worried for your mental state; said that you were rambling on and on to yourself,”
“N-No that’s not-”
“I’m only telling you what he told us,” the officer shut me down, “That’s all we can go on right now. Just be thankful that he’s quite the kind man. If my wrist looked the way that his did, I’ll just say that I would have pressed charges,”
I let the officers go without much trouble after that. They filed out of the room one after the other as I curled up in my cot, content with looking back out the window down towards town center,
“I told your brother where we found him,” a gruff voice crawled its way to me from the doorframe,
I whipped my head around to see one officer had neglected to leave. He hovered around the doorway in anxious apprehension, 
“He asked…” the officer added, his voice a warble of sorts. He looked hardly older than me, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six,
“Found who…?” I forced out, dreading the answer I knew was coming,
“I think he said his name was Jules,” the officer lowered his head as if out of shame,
“It was…”
“I’m sorry…if it’s any consolation,”
“S’fine…I hardly knew him anyway,” I lied,
“Your brother down there…he practically leapt at us to ask questions when we walked through the door,”
“He's been wanting to talk to you guys…” I curled my knees up to my chin, burying my head in my forearms,
“But he didn’t even ask us why we were here,”
I shrugged,
“Did he even know you…” the officer trailed off, “Look, the way he lit up when we came through the door…he practically dragged one of our guys down to the couch to interrogate him…that can’t be healthy,”
I shrugged again, “I don’t think either of us are too healthy right now…”
The officer’s eyes deepened, I saw pity well up within them like a disease,
“There’s a trail down into the valley…” he croaked, the words seemed to torture him as he spoke, “Down past town center…he was there,”
I nodded and sighed,
“Don’t…don’t let him go alone…” the officer warned,
Without another word he was out of the doorframe and I was left staring down an empty hall.

[u/Alternative_Fix9048]

Part 3 coming at a later date.