Bryce couldn’t sleep this Halloween night, 25 years after it had happened. But this was really nothing new; he suffered from from periodic episodes of insomnia, and sleep eluded him on more nights than not. He lay in bed, staring up at the whirring ceiling fan, listening to the steady patter of rain on the windows of his apartment. He tried counting sheep like a child, but it wasn’t working.

Several years ago he’d gone to a psychiatrist about his sleep problem.

“Can you attribute this insomnia to stress at work?” His doctor had asked.

Bryce was an insurance adjuster and often had clients who would become angry if the damage didn’t match what was in their policy or payments on their claim were delayed, and although this was stressful, it wasn’t the reason he couldn’t sleep. But he didn’t tell his doctor this. His psychologist had referred him to a psychiatrist who could prescribe medication. He was prescribed Ambien, and it helped some, but with some of the dreams that came with this drug-induced sleep, Bryce almost wished the medication didn’t work.

And he hadn’t told the doctor the real reason he believed he had a sleep problem.

Something had haunted him since he was twelve. He and his older brother Ben, 14, and some of the neighborhood kids would often play ‘War’ in the acres of fields and woods behind his family’s old farmhouse. Mostly they used toy guns and water pistols and homemade slingshots. But on one hot, sultry summer day 25 years ago, the other neighbor kids were all away, on family vacations or at summer league baseball games. That day it was just Bryce and Ben lounging in the barn, building a fort made from haystacks up in the cupola. They had taken a break to hydrate and scratch at the hay rash that was reddening their arms and legs when Ben decided that Bryce was now old enough to see something he’d been wanting to show him for a while.

“Ben, come on down, there’s been something I’ve wanted to lay on you,” Ben said from down below, motioning for his brother to climb down the pull-down ladder that descended from the cupola. Bryce followed, intrigued by what his older brother would conjure up. Bryce came down, and Ben reached under a loose floorboard in the barn.

Bryce’s eyes widened at the revelation of an old, dusky looking gun.

“This here’s a 14 inch Civil War era Colt .44 revolver. Same one Grampy Butler used to knock off some Billy Yanks at Manassas.”

Bryce listened and stared with rapt attention, knowing he was looking at history; he’d seen his father polishing it one night about a year earlier, but then he’d disappeared in the barn’s shadows out of sight. Bryce hadn’t even known that loose floorboard existed, but with Ben it was different; Even though his dad had shown him the gun before and had told him the story of his great-great grandfather who’d died fighting in the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, he hadn’t seen Ben watching him hide the gun and didn’t want his two young sons knowing where it was kept. But Ben, being the curious and mischievous older brother had watched, peering around a dusty corner as his father admired the old relic. Several times since then Ben had gone out to the barn alone and unearthed the gun, marveling at its familial and historical significance. Imagine how much history this thing has seen, he’d thought in these moments. He’d checked the chambers each time for that signature .44 single round.

Never was it loaded.

“Woah,” was all Bryce could manage as his brother showed him the old family heirloom for the first time. “Is this the gun dad told us about?”

“The same,” Ben affirmed.

“You wanna hold it?” Ben asked, knowing the answer. Bryce’s hands did the talking for him, reaching out of their own accord and taking the relic. He marveled at its cold, steely weight. Making sure the catch was off and still assuming the gun wasn’t loaded, he then pointed the gun at Ben in jest.

“Yew traitorous damn Yankee, yew park youself right where you stand,” Bryce said in his best imitation southern drawl. In one pivotal moment of youthful naivete, Bryce pulled the trigger. It was a moment that hung enveloped in his memory forever the same way cordite hangs in the air. His heart leapt in his chest as the gun kicked wildly in his hand and fired a report that ripped at his eardrums. A single .44 caliber round roared through the air and struck Ben in the chest. Bryce’s older brother fell over limp and without sound, like a carnival mime. Bryce’s mouth hung open in an ‘O’ of horror, an open cavern of suprise and anguish. No sound came out. Beside the loud report of the shot, everything seconds afterwards was silent, like a wordless single-act play that could not be re-rehearsed.

At first Bryce was stunned. Panic edged blackly into his consciousness. His mind whirred in a dizzying spell of possibilities. Should he call the police? Run to his neighbor’s house? His mom and dad weren’t home, and this was in an age well before cell phones. He couldn’t call them.

In the end he did what a dusty corner of his mind persuaded him to do: he dragged his brother out to the field and through the timothy grass, fetched a shovel, and buried him in a corner where the hay field met the edge of the woods. His mind buzzed in a panicked drunkenness while his hands did the work; he hardly remembered doing the deed. It was like his brain watched in panicked disapproval of what an autonomous body was doing. He did it, in his early-adolescent reasoning, because he couldn’t bare the alternatives: tell the truth and suffer the consequences, whatever they might be. He’d had a friend who’d gone to juvenile hall for six months and had described at length the hells he endured there. His parents would be in horror at what he’d done, and even if they’d believed him that it had been just a careless accident, he could imagine the grief he would be in. He’d be the pariah of the family and would be known forever around town as the kid who had shot and killed his older brother. Strangers he didn’t even know would give him long, crooked glances in the grocery store before decorum dictated they turn away. He couldn’t accept that nightmare of an existence. And anyway, telling the truth would not bring Ben back to life. It didn’t solve anything.

Still in shock as to how the gun had gotten loaded and realizing with horror that he’d flipped the safety catch on instead of off when he’d first pulled the gun out, he wiped his fingerprints off the gun with a wet rag and slid it back into its resting place under the floorboard. He spent about five minutes shifting and shimmying the umber-colored pine board more as a tick of nervous energy than to make the hatch look natural and untouched.

When Bryce’s parents had gotten home from work an hour later he was in a panic that had no need to fake. He told them he’d been watching TV when Ben had gone out to feed the chickens. He hadn’t seen him since. He told them he’d been frantically searching the area for the last two hours. His mother called the police and the Lawson’s farm, their nearest neighbor two acres of fields away, was contacted. As was the Demer’s place a hectare of woods away on the other side. Flyers were put out, as were police dispatchers, and evening news bulletins streamed across the bottoms of television screens.

But of course, Ben was never found. During haying season that year Bryce couldn’t bring himself near that far left corner of the field with the tractor, citing stomach illness that was only half feigned, and leaving his father to scratch his head and finish the job.

Years passed. Ben’s missing persons case went cold. The family went through the grieving process and moved on, but there was a hole in each of their lives where Ben used to be. Only Bryce knew what really happened, and guilt and remorse ate away at him like a cancer of the mind. But he’d never told anyone what had really happened to Ben, not even his psychiatrist.

At some point in the next five years he’d begun denying the events of that day even to himself. Sipping on the bottle, he found, made that easier.

Once in a while he’d have dreams about Ben, and sometimes in his dreams he would hear Ben come skulking up the staircase late at night when the house was dark, and Bryce would hear his footfalls scratchy on the wooden stairs from his earthen grave. He would wake up drenched in nightsweats and cold relief would wash over him that his dreams were just that. In other dreams Bryce would pull the trigger but the gun would be empty as he had assumed it was; their carefree summer afternoon of make-believe would continue unabated, like childhoods are always meant to be. When Bryce would wake up from these dreams an icy wave of depression would wash over him, that the hard realities of real life were so much crueler than the fantasy world of his imagination.

In any event life went on. Bryce went on to college, didn’t use his degree, and become an adjuster for a successful home insurance company. But he never married; he would go out with women and after four or five dates the budding relationship would end. A couple different women remarked to him that he “seemed like a haunted person.” Bryce thought that, in a way, it was true.

And it was Ben that he was thinking about when he lay awake that Halloween night, 25 years after the incident, listening to the rain trickle down his lonely apartment window outside. He looked over at his alarm clock. The glowing green digits announced that it was just after 3 a.m.—the witching hour. Technically Halloween was over.

He got out of bed and went out to the kitchen to get a glass of water. After a moment he walked over to his front door to look at the rain coming down outside; there was a small peephole mounted on each door in this apartment complex, and it was through this small convex hole that he looked out and into the night. What he saw made his heart clench in his chest like a fist pounding on the lid of a prematurely buried casket.

Standing out there in the dark of the parking lot, amid the soft but steady rainfall, was a hooded figure. The figure looked to be dressed in black but was silhouetted against the dull fluorescent glow of the few parking lot lights. Whoever it was appeared to be gazing in the direction of his door. Knowing that the figure couldn’t see him but still plenty unnerved, Bryce turned away with his back to the door. Who is that out there? Why is he staring at my door? his mind raced. It was after 3 a.m., long after trick-or-treating and Halloween parties should have been over.