Chapter 1: A certain substance hits the fan

„Yeah, yeah, I know. Bye!“

I turned away from the door, now closed and locked, and went down the hall to get something to eat. Getting my parents to finally go could be exhausting. They could get really overprotective when it came to my little brother staying home alone… well, not alone. I was here to take care of him, but, yeah. I couldn’t blame them, really. I wouldn’t want to leave a small child with a hormonal teenager home alone, either. And it’s not like it was a chore to take care of him, with the modern technology and whatnot. Just give him a tablet and let him play some Angry Birds – problem solved!

And that’s what I had done after I partook of the half-empty fridge. “Aww, look at you, all sad to see dad and mom go,” he was standing near the front doors as I grabbed him and hugged him before he could cry me a river. I picked him up – God was he heavy – so I could take him to my room where a glorious machine awaited my utmost arrival. Sitting him on my bed with a tablet he got for Christmas and making sure that he was comfortable, I went back to my computer so I could continue doing productive things. Like shooting zombies!

“I am hungry,” he said, suddenly appearing right next to me. I jumped a little.

“Holy hell, you scared the… whatever. Whatcha’ want?” I sighed.

“Pancakes!” a goofy grin graced his adorable face.

To which I answered with a groan, “I don’t know how to make pancakes!”

That was a lie. I just really didn’t want to have to make pancakes. Also, my pancakes sucked. Hard.

“Pancakes!” God dammit, why did he have to be so adorable?

“Ok, fine!” I exasperated, knowing there was no way out of this situation. Once he set his mind on something, he could be a handful. And I didn’t want to have to deal with that even more so than making pancakes. So cooking up some pancakes it was.

“Stay here and don’t do anything. Ok?” He nodded and so I descended the stairs down a hall and made a bee line straight for the kitchen. The kitchen itself wasn’t anything glorious. One wall was lined with everything – cupboards, a stove/oven, a sink and some other things. Opposite of it all was a large table with six chairs right underneath a row of three windows. The fridge had to be left in the hallway, because there was no more room for it in the kitchen itself. God bless this small house.

I took some flour, milk, sugar and eggs and got on with it. Not as soon as I wanted, there was a plate of half-burned, crispy, over-sugared pancakes. Yeah, I would be lucky if he would eat that. The smell drove my little brother down from my bedroom right as I finished them, so there was at least that. I put some orange marmalade on the table, too.

“They’re bad,” he noted matter-of-factly, like the greatest critic gourmand to ever live. I wasn’t the best at cooking. It wasn’t hard or anything. I just didn’t have the patience to spend X hours of my free time on it, so I tried to make it as fast as possible. That of course reflected poorly most of the things I cooked up. But it was still way better than surviving on ramen noodles and instant soups. I am looking at you, college students!

“I know,” I answered shamefully. They really were bad. I hadn’t even finished before he put an empty dish into the sink and went back upstairs. Boy, could he eat fast!

I immediately did the dishes, because an overfilled sink full of dirty dishes was a real mood killer, while just a few plates and a pan wasn’t anything bad. With that done, I finally returned to playing some vidya.

And that was it, really. That’s how we spent the rest of the day. Him watching TV or playing on tablet, while I did the same, only on PC. It had been a while since the sun set – it was winter, so the Sun would set earlier – before I decided it was high time for him to go to sleep. I didn’t particularly care about his sleeping schedule. I mean, I understood why he had to go to sleep earlier than me for example; I just didn’t want to be the hard-ass brother. I wanted to be the nice, I-want-to-be-like-you-when-I-grow-up brother. So I was more lenient on the rules. The hard-assness I would leave to our parents.

“Could we play a game?” was his answer when I asked him if he wanted to go catch some ‘Z’s. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do, so I decided some bonding with my little brother was in order through the best activity a small child could partake in – roughhousing. For an entire hour we play-wrestled, then I gave him a piggy-back ride across the whole house. We played some horsey, where he would be on my back and I “tried” to shake him off, and some other stuff of that nature. By the end of it, we were both exhausted. I still managed to make him brush his teeth before he fell into my bed and dozed off. I wasn’t sleepy, though, so I browsed the internet for a few more hours. It was two in the morning when I decided enough was enough and went to sleep myself. I pulled an old mattress out of the closet and put it down right next to my bed now occupied by my brother. Promptly, I fell asleep before I managed to lay my head on the pillow.

Three huge bangs roused me from my sleep. It took me a moment before my brain stopped returning blank and actually decided to give me some information. Another bang and I was immediately on my feet. Looking at my bed I realized, to my now growing dread, that my brother wasn’t there. Horrifying thoughts of how the bangs originated from him falling down the stairs filled my mind and before I knew it, I ran into the hallway screaming out his name. Taking three steps at a time I found myself downstairs, but my brother wasn’t there, for better or worse. No more bangs could be heard so I started to look for him, calling out his name now and then.

“Michael?” No one answered me. I tried to flick on the lights, but they didn’t seem to work.

“Great, just great.”

Of course they wouldn’t work now. I went into a closet where I knew I would find a flashlight. Hitting myself on things along the way, I finally fumbled through the closet until I found a long and round object in a place where the flashlight should’ve been.

“Where’s the damn switch,” I mumbled. A moment later, a column of light illuminated the dark hallway. Now with the power of light on my side, I started exploring the house. I began with the kitchen, just to see if he hadn’t been hungry and decided to get something to eat. Never happened before, but I was fumbling for straws now, and any explanation was better than none.

“Michael, where are you?” I called out rather weakly. Why did I have to play all those horror games and read all those creepypastas? I just waited until something came running around a corner, holding the dead body of my little brother in its teeth and preparing to add me to its list of victims.

Then I figuratively slapped some sense into myself. That wouldn’t do, being scared shitless of something that didn’t exist. With a newfound confidence I started to explore more quickly and calling out his name more frequently. Again, nothing and no one answered me.

“This isn’t funny!” I yelled. This had to be some kind of joke he had been playing on me. Then a thought hit me. Perhaps he was in the bathroom?

A facepalm followed my realization. “Of course he’s in the bathroom you dumb idiot.”

I went to the bathroom and tried to open it. It wasn’t locked and an unnaturally dark bathroom greeted me instead of my brother.

“Holy hell,” I breathed, a puff of air assaulting my face. It was cold in there. Actually, it had been cold the entire time I had been downstairs. Without even looking further into the bathroom, I slammed the doors closed and ran away from the creepiness of it all.

“Michael, God dammit, where are you?!” Losing the last bit of my patience, I sped through the hallway and went to check the last place where the sounds could have come from.

The living room.

With fear of what I would find there, I opened the door.

And immediately got assaulted by a thick, semi-solid, purple, almost pink cloud of… something. It looked like a mist and trying to pass through it was like browsing through water.

A small hand tried to grab my by my clothing. As there was only one person to whom the hand could belong to right now, I immediately grabbed it back.

“Hold on, Michael!” I yelled and tried to pull him from the mist. It was all in vain when his damp hand slipped my grip.

“Nooo!” Screaming, I jumped into the mist not heeding my own safety. With flailing my arms around, I tried to reach out to my brother, to find him. I couldn’t breathe. The mist was too dense, too water-like to allow me to fill my lungs with fresh air.

And then it was all over. One moment I had been suffocating, and another moment I was on my knees, coughing. As I coughed my lungs out, I got my bearings. Michael lay shivering on the floor of the living room. A small layer of mist covered the entire floor, but no longer was it semi-solid. Rather, it was a purple colored true mist now.

“Peter!” he yelled out to me and ran up right into my embrace.

“Dammit Michael, you don’t get to scare me like this.” Gladness to find my little brother safe and sound filled my heart. At least I hoped he was alright. I checked him over and he seemed fine.

“Now, what the hell happened?” I asked him. The question of what the whole mist-thing was went unasked.

“I woke up, and… and I went downstairs.”

So much for an explanation.

“Any reason?” It didn’t really matter what he was doing here. I was more concerned about what the hell was going on, and that he was alright. This strange mist had to come from somewhere. Hopefully it wasn't toxic.

“I don’t know!” I could feel a damp spot forming on my shoulder.

“Never mind, let’s just get back upstairs and let me call mom and dad. There’s something strange going on.” With those words I got up from the floor and took his left hand into mine. He stayed really close to my leg as we neared the door. As I would find out, he wasn’t close enough.

I opened the door which was now closed for some reason. A gust of wind assaulted me and as I looked at where the hallway should have been, a vortex of purple light greeted me.

It had taken me one second exactly before I slammed the door shut.

“What. The. Hell!”

Then the goddamn walls started to peel off, being torn from outside by some invisible force. Oh, and the floor and the ceiling weren’t doing any better. Spots of bright purple light started to appear everywhere on the floor and ceiling.

Powerful wind filled the room and he furniture started to rattle. My brother and I stood dumbstruck as we watched the walls and the floor disappear. And then the floor underneath Michael gave out.

I held his hand, but it wasn’t enough. I tried to catch him but I wasn’t fast enough. I jumped after him, but it was for naught.

“Nooo! Michael!” I hollered after him as he cried out my name, disappearing into the vortex.

“Noooo!” I screamed until my voice gave out, tears welling in my eyes. The one thing was - I didn’t fall down after him. Instead, some invisible force caught me and pulled me back onto the floor that was no longer crumbling down. The door of the living room opened all by itself, showing me a picture of our undisturbed house.

And I realized that whatever had caused this, whoever had caused this, didn’t want me. It didn’t want me. It wanted my brother, but not me.

Sadness and rage waged battle over my mind. A sob escaped my lips.

The wind started to force me into the door. I had none of it.

“Fuck you!” I tried to yell at whatever was causing this. Fat chance, even if someone stood half a meter away from me they wouldn’t be able to hear me through that wind. It helped to easy my nerves, though.

“I ain’t leaving my brother!” Lying down on the floor, I started to crawl to the edge. The efforts to keep me out redoubled, but I was still able to move forward, a centimeter by a centimeter, until finally my hands grabbed onto the edge, and it was only a matter of strength to pull myself over. And that’s just what I did.

I screamed wordlessly as whatever the hell this was gave up and instead threw me up into the sky that was basically the same damned purple vortex.

The last thought I had before I blacked out was of my brother, tears streaming down his face as he called my name.

Something stirred within me. A thought, then light. And at last: recognition. Senses returned to my body, the feeling of lying on something hard that felt like a carpet assaulted my mind. And in the forefront of it all: a yell, a call for help.

And then I opened my eyes. It was dark all around. It didn’t occur to me as strange, so I stretched and tried to go back to sleep. A moment later, realization struck me like a wrecking ball. The events that followed my condition flooded back into my memory.

My brother was gone; taken.

A cloudless starlit sky greeted my vision. I gazed into the most beautiful night sky I had ever seen. For a short moment, I wasn’t confused, lost and hurt anymore. But that ended soon enough as a more pressing matter lay on my heavy mind; Where was I? And where was Michael?

I stood up, noticing that it wasn’t a carpet I thought I was lying on. No, it was a mix of something hard and soft that smelled like smoke. Accidently, I inhaled some of it, which brought me into another coughing fit.

That woke me up just perfectly.

“Michael?” I called out weakly, still coughing a little. A lovingly moonlit meadow surrounded me. I very much ignored the unfamiliar place I had found myself in. Instead, I started to search for the one I had come to save, somehow.

“Michael?”

There was nothing but the echo of my own shouting.

“Michael?!” This time more forceful than before. And yet, nothing answered me. No one answered me. The meadow was perfectly clear of anything but plants and the occasional tree.

A fluttering feeling settled within my heart and tears once again threatened to escape their confines within my eyes. Something glittered in the moonlight on the ground near me. I kneeled down to get a better look at it. It was a button of the pajamas my little brother was wearing when he was taken.

With utmost care I clutched it in my hands. It was just a button, but it was also the only thing connecting me to my brother right now. A lonely tear rolled down my face.

“Brother...”