It Can't Be

May contain graphic details and difficult for some to read.

The rain had turned the cemetery dirt into black grease by the time we finished digging. It was midnight when James and I lowered the heavy pine box containing our older brother, Christopher. He had died screaming in his locked bedroom, his flesh turned a bruised, swollen purple from a sudden, violent illness the doctors couldn't name. To respect his final, frantic scrawled note—Bury me deep, bury me immediately, don’t let them see—we didn't call a funeral home. We dug the hole ourselves.

By 2:00 AM, we were back at the old family estate, shivering under the weak glare of the kitchen light, trying to wash the smell of damp earth out of our fingernails.

Then came the knocking.

It wasn't a soft sound. It was a heavy, rhythmic thud against the heavy oak front door. Thud. Thud. Thud.

James froze, the dish towel slipping from his wet hands. "Who the hell is that at this hour?"

We walked to the foyer together, our socks sliding silently over the hardwood. I looked through the brass peephole. The porch light flickered, casting long, jittery shadows across a figure standing in the rain. He wore a drenched woolen coat. His skin was pale, almost translucent under the amber bulb.

My breath caught in my throat. I tore the bolts back and yanked the door open.

Christopher stood there. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon. He smelled faintly of ozone and old copper.

"Christopher?" James whispered, backing away until his spine hit the hallway wall. "We buried you. I thought you were dead."

"I was," Christopher rasped, his voice sounding like dry autumn leaves scraping across concrete. He stepped inside, wiping a mixture of mud and rainwater from his forehead. "They made a mistake. The doctors, the pulse, everything. I woke up in the dark, Candice. I had to claw my way through six feet of mud. You have to help me. They’re still coming for me."

"Who is coming?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs. I looked at his hands. His fingernails were split down the middle, caked with the same black cemetery clay that sat on our boots in the kitchen.

"The things that gave me the sickness," Christopher said, his whole-body trembling as he locked the front door behind him. "They don't want me to leave. Look at my chest."

He pulled open his wet shirt. The purple, swollen bruise we had seen on his corpse was there, but it was moving. The veins beneath his pale skin were pulsing rhythmically, shifting like a nest of worms.

"Oh my God," James breathed, dropping to his knees. "It's an infection. We need to get you to a hospital right now."

"No!" Christopher snapped, his eyes flashing with a sudden, vicious intensity that made me step back. "No doctors. Just give me a dry shirt. And a knife. I can cut it out. I just need to get it out before it reaches my heart."

I nodded slowly, trying to hide the terror vibrating through my muscles. "I'll get the first-aid kit from the basement," I whispered. "James, help him into the living room."

I hurried down the creaking wooden stairs into the pitch-black basement. I didn't turn on the light; I knew the layout by heart. I reached the metal shelves, grabbed the heavy plastic kit, and turned to head back up.

My foot struck something soft on the concrete floor.

I stumbled, dropping the kit. Bandages and antiseptic bottles clattered into the darkness. I reached for my phone, turning on the flashlight tool, and angled the beam down toward the floor.

A pair of muddy boots.

I traced the light upward. A wet woolen coat. A bruised, swollen neck.

Christopher’s corpse was lying on the basement floor. His eyes were wide, glassy, and completely lifeless. His chest was torn open from the inside out, a hollow, bloody crater where his ribs should have been. The black cemetery dirt was smeared all over the concrete, leading from the coal chute window straight to his body.

The real Christopher had clawed his way out of the grave, just like he said. But he hadn't made it past the basement. He had died right here, hours ago.

Which meant the thing upstairs wasn't Christopher.

My blood ran completely cold. I heard footsteps directly above me—heavy, deliberate thuds moving across the kitchen ceiling.

Before I could even scream, I heard James’s voice echo down the stairwell, muffled but frantic. "Candice! Come up here! Christophers passed out, but... his skin is sloughing off! Candice, help!"

I scrambled up the basement stairs, my adrenaline overriding my terror. I burst into the kitchen, intending to grab James and run out the back door.

But I stopped dead in my tracks.

James was standing by the kitchen island, holding a bloody carving knife.

On the floor layout before him lay the thing that looked like Christopher. Its face was completely ruined, hacked into a bloody pulp by the knife in James's hand. Black, oily fluid was pooling on the linoleum around its head.

"I had to do it," James sobbed, his hands shaking violently as he dropped the blade. "It wasn't him, Candice. Its face started shifting. It tried to bite me. It wasn't Christopher."

I stared at the body on the floor, then at the knife, then at my brother. I took a slow, agonizing breath, trying to process the absolute horror of the last three minutes.

"James," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "You're right. It wasn't him. I just found Christopher's real body down in the basement. He died down there trying to get to us."

James stopped shaking. The frantic, weeping expression on his face vanished in an instant. His posture went completely rigid.

He slowly looked up at me, his eyes dead and unblinking.

"I know," James said, his voice suddenly losing all its panic, flattening into a hollow, monotone drone. "I put him down there when he crawled through the window an hour ago. He kept screaming that I wasn't his brother."

James smiled, his mouth opening entirely too wide, his jaw unhinging with a wet, sickening crack as the veins in his neck began to pulse with a vibrant, swollen purple light.

"But you didn't notice the dirt on my boots when we were in the kitchen, did you, Candice?"