Deceived

My twin brother and I were on a school camping trip. We were wandering a little further away from the campsite when we noticed a human foot in the bushes. We slowly walked to the side to get a better view when we saw a creature standing over it. It had the physique of a human, but looked more like a wild animal as it was covered with leaves, twigs, and dirt. The creature heard us and looked our way; we stepped back and froze as its eyes met ours, but to our surprise, the creature ran away.

We ran back to the campsite and told our teacher what had happened. He didn’t believe us at first, but decided to call the police anyway. The police arrived an hour later and questioned us. We were escorted to the station and asked to give a description of the creature. We knew they didn’t believe that it was truly a monster. However, one question kept creeping into my mind: why didn’t the creature attack us?

I couldn’t sleep that night. I woke up to a nightmare of the creature hunting my brother and me. Wiping off the sweat dripping down my face, I jumped out of bed and ran towards my parents’ room, but then I noticed that my brother’s room light was on. I opened the door and he began to scream from under his sheets.

“John, it’s just me!”

“Jenny, is that you? Oh, thank god.”

“I’m guessing you had a nightmare, too?”

“Yes, I can’t get that monster out of my head.”

We woke our parents and told them we were having nightmares. Our dad told us he would inspect the house and grabbed his baseball bat. Ten minutes later, he came back and said the house was empty; but as he said so, the monster crept up from behind him.

“Dad, it’s behind you!” I yelled, but he didn’t have enough time to turn around.

The creature grabbed dad and threw him against the wall. Mom picked up the bat and raised it to hit it, but she suddenly stopped. “James… Is that you?” she asked.

James was our brother who went missing six years ago. John and I were only six at the time, and James was twelve. The creature looked at her and tilted its head, as if trying to understand what she was saying. Was that thing really our brother? Whatever it was, it ran away and jumped out one of our windows. Mom called the police and told them what had happened, and that it could be James. They were able to track the creature down and capture it a week later.

DNA tests were run soon after and it was confirmed that the monster was actually our long-lost brother. James was put in a mental institute and, after three months, he began to open up about what had happened back then. Our dad had abandoned him in a forest and told him that he wasn’t his son. We soon learned that our mom had an affair with someone before she married our dad, and that dad had found out about it years later. The day he found out, he had also seen James skipping school, and took that as an opportunity to trick him, saying they could go on a short trip out of town.

Dad initially denied ever doing such a thing, but when presented with CCTV footage that said otherwise, he finally confessed. My mom asked him why he did that without just divorcing her; he said he did what he did because he didn’t want John and I to be apart from him. Dad was arrested right after and James spent another six months at the institute before he was discharged.