I work in a store that sells haunted objects.

They weren't parlor tricks or a scam or just an outright lie -- they were actually haunted, accursed, possessed, and we sold them in spades.

I'd never wondered where my brother got them -- evil books and rings and mirrors that showed dead women, dolls that moved on their own and Ouija boards that did too.

He'd always brought them -- sourcing them from all over -- and I'd always distributed them, first online, then in our brick-and-mortar shop in New Orleans.

We had done well for ourselves -- better than well.

Then he brought me the Talking Theresa doll -- the one that spoke not of being pampered and having her diapers changed, but of death and blood and the raw, pulsing horror of what lies beyond.

I wish I had listened to Markus -- wish I'd never pulled that doll's string and listened to her scream and scream.

"I'm serious, Anna," Markus was saying as he regarded the blond-haired, blue-eyed Theresa doll in her pink dress. "This one is..."

He trailed off, looking at the spotlighted doll crumpled ominously on the worktable which hemmed one wall of our cramped stockroom.

I looked up at my brother who looked so much like me with his face screwed up into a tired knot. I'd always resented him for taking all the good genes two years before I was born. He was nearing forty, handsome as ever -- tall, strong, with a firm, sculpted face beneath a jet of black hair.

I was slightly puffy, my face more moon-like than Greek sculpture. And whereas his was tamed and effortlessly cool, my hair -- a frizzy, insane mess -- did me no favors.

Markus blew a sigh, corkscrewing his fists into tired eyes. When they came away, I saw just how burned-out he looked -- his eyes were shot through with red, his cheeks were gaunt, hollow, and he badly needed a shave.

He looked like shit. Which was odd -- my brother never looked like shit.

"Just don't toy with it," he finally said. "Put it up out front and leave it alone."

Our stock had never scared me. Our messy store -- more a busy, psycho antique shop than anything else -- was chock full of haunted things.

Cramped shelves of dusty wares, all exploding with haunted history, filled our small, claustrophobic store.

At every twist and turn you were met with an old something that clipped a bolt of cold dread through your stomach, that made your skin crawl and your hair rise and your legs dissolve to jelly.

But that was usually the extent of the haunted things' potency. Never did they levitate or burn you with a touch or shift when you were looking.

It only ever happened behind your back.

Things were always moving around, disappearing, but I was used to it by now -- I didn't mind staying after dark, rearranging shelves, updating our web-store.

It just never bothered me.

And it had never bothered Markus...until now. He looked stricken. His eyes, bleary and severe, regarded me cooly.

Waiting for me to say, "Okay, sure. I'll leave it alone."

Which I did.

Visible relief took his coiled posture and eased it of tension. He nodded, smiled, pulled me into a hug.

"Thanks Anna," he was saying. "You're not such a shitty sister after all."

I laughed and playfully thumped his shoulder.

He mock-winced, rubbing his arm as he headed out, leaving me alone with the haunted Talking Theresa.

I didn't pull the string -- not at first. It was evening. Bloody sunlight streaked through the front-facing windows, painting our menagerie of the weird and awful in inky shadows.

I tucked the Talking Theresa onto a shelf that housed a dozen other dolls and toys, before taking to my nightly duties of closing up shop.

The clock Tick-Tocked as the last customers came and went, as darkness settled in over our corner of the world, as street traffic dwindled and died and the cicada-army took to their song.

At 7 sharp I bolted the front door, threw up the Sorry We're Closed sign, and issued a long sigh that indicated I was alone.

But no, that wasn't right -- I was never truly alone.

The air was always charged, alive, shifting and swirling like slimy black water -- thick with the awful feeling of eyes crawling up your back, of heinous things judging you with insane hatred.

But like I said, I was used to it. Inoculated. Immune to the icy fear that hijacked the atmosphere like a parasite.

But that night something was different.

I don't know what I was thinking -- don't know what compelled me to the aisle of the dolls. Curiosity, maybe. The same curiosity that killed the cat -- that would nearly kill me.

I'm not sure why I ignored my brother and hauled the Talking Theresa down off the shelf -- don't know why I pulled the string beneath her dress.

But I did, and for the first time in a while, I felt terror.

The doll's abused voice-box crackled and hissed as the pulled string retracted like a snake.

I waited, breath shallow, heart crash-pounding through my chest, waiting for her to --

-- Silence slapped me in the face and I flinched.

The string had withdrawn to its idle position, and the doll had not spoken.

The silence was suffocating. It seemed to fill my lungs and force out all the air. It filled my ears with the rush of hot blood.

Theresa's dead, glassy eyes regarded me with indifference. Her smooth, molded face turned up at mine.

But behind her eyes was something, something shifting and flowing like a river of fog.

I thought it might have been...

Theresa screamed so suddenly that I jumped -- a high, earsplitting wail of agony issued in a tinny burst from the doll's voice box.

I jerked back and dropped her, covering my ears. She crashed to the ground, her porcelain child-face crumpling inward like a human skull under a sledgehammer.

The scream decayed as a terrified voice -- distant, hazy, spliced with throaty static -- growled out of the doll's ruined face, filling the shop.

At first I couldn't decipher words out of the garbled syllables -- it was an incoherent mess of torment that filled my throat with bile.

Allo hm, Allo hm, Allo hm she was chanting over and over again, her ruined, shattered face glaring up at me with animal violence.

...Allo hm, Allo hm, Allo hm...

I took a step back as the world began to shake, as the shelves in my shop trembled and the objects atop them thundered and vibrated and began levitating in unison, rising off their beds of wood as Talking Theresa chanted her three-syllable intonement again and again.

...Allo hm, Allo hm, Allo hm...

Everything was floating, books, dolls, pendants and keychains, all of them hovering in the air, vibrating with impossible and hardly restrained power -- rage and torment radiating out of them in frozen waves.

...Allo hm, Allo hm, Allo hm...

I staggered away, my heart screaming through my ribs, my chest too tight and empty of breath, the air around me thick with the reek of corruption -- of dead things. It was the smell of haunt, of existence beyond death, of --

...Allo hm, Allo hm, Allo hm...

-- It punched me in the face. I understood what she was saying.

It drilled through my chest like an arrow -- speared my heart to the back of my ribs, flooded my chest cavity with frozen dread.

She was saying Follow him.

Everything exploded. Great sprays of splintered wood and flowered metal and tufted stuffing erupted in silent detonation, as if all the haunted things in the world had been vacuumed into space and crushed into nonexistence by the Great Black Nothing.

I hauled air through my chest and boiled it into a scream.

Then I was buried alive under a mountain of haunted shrapnel and I screamed no more.

I awoke in the hospital with my brother by my side.

I was fine, unharmed spare a few superficial lacerations -- otherwise in an easy convalescence that would see me at home and in bed by morning.

Our store on the other hand...

"It's all gone," Markus moaned. "All gone...everything...our life's work..."

He was trouble, disturbed, his eyes puffy -- I saw he'd been crying.

He buried his face in his hands. Grumbled something into them.

All I could do was think about Talking Theresa.

Follow him.

The Doctor signed me out an hour later.

Markus drove me home.

He never asked if I was okay.

In my driveway, Markus told me he'd be taking a trip to a dealer in Alabama -- told me we'd need to start rebuilding our collection.

He was leaving tonight to make it there by morning -- and that I should to stay behind and clean up the store.

I hugged him, told him I loved him, and watched him drive off down the street.

I hurried inside and grabbed my lucky pendant -- a supposedly haunted crucifix Markus had found at a thrift-store and given to me nearly twenty years before. It had always brought me comfort, good luck -- had always protected me.

The crucifix in my pocket, I dove into my own car and followed my brother, not to Alabama but to the alien-like bayou that drowned out so much of our great state.

The drive was long and dark. I glided up a black highway, following the two red eyes of Markus's car. Concrete jungles were replaced by real ones -- willow trees dangled sheets of fuzz out over the road as we headed into marshland. I turned up the A/C as the ripe stench of swamp invaded off the bayou through which the highway ran.

A while later, the sky still black and dead of light, Markus turned off the highway and joined an abandoned dirt road.

I idled at the turn, counted to thirty, before following.

He led me to a fishing shack.

We were deep in the swamp. It was like a planet from Star Wars. A thin dirt road extended an artery of solid ground through the bubbling, stagnant waters of the bayou -- strange growth textured the dark environment: incredible trees with furry branches, tendrils of vine like great brown snakes, massive gators sluicing through black waters like Soviet submarines.

I doused my lights early on, navigating only by the stray bars of moonlight that fought through the hazy canopy.

I had lost Markus. I saw no lights.

I saw...

I slammed the breaks as moonlight winked off the windshield of Marcus' car.

A second later and I would've rear-ended it -- it was stopped in the road directly ahead of me.

It was dark, quiet -- no doubt empty.

I killed my engine and stepped out.

The air was thick with mosquitos and the song of insects. They descended me in buzzing waves.

I looked around, lost, confused, wondering what in the hell he could be --

-- Then I saw the fishing shack hovering out on the water. A rickety wooden dock ran to it from the dirt road, extending a finger of land out over the bayou.

The shed itself looked like a tumor, rising from the swamp like an ugly gray malady born from slimy waters. It was sagging and repaired, it's windows muddy and throbbing with faint light -- they reminded me of dumb, blind eyes.

The familiar hum of a generator carried out across the marsh, beckoning me, telling me to --

Follow him.

I hesitated.

Follow him.

I sucked air. The taste made me dizzy.

Follow him.

I started up the fishing dock which creaked and groaned with each step.

I followed him.

My brother wasn't in the shed; a girl was.

I had crept around the side of the building and wiped clean a circle in the filthy pane -- I peered in and my heart bulged and throbbed with bitter terror.

Piss-yellow light issued from an ugly overhead bulb, dousing the room, lending it a hazy, disorienting appearance.

I saw the floor first. A rusty, blood-stained drain-grate tied together a slipshod job of sheet metal.

Above that, the walls, raw timber, were warped and bulging and stained with gore. Heavy workbenches wrapped the perimeter, their surfaces displaying an assortment of torture tools -- knives, pliers, scalpels, razors.

And then there was the centerpiece.

The brown-haired girl.

Bound and gagged in a bolted down chair, her forehead knotted and bruised, hair crusted with blood, brutalized face lolling limply on her slender neck.

She couldn't have been a day over nineteen.

And my brother...

Follow him.

"Hey kiddo," Markus said.

I looked up. The feral beast that had once been my brother towered above me, eyes wild and rabid, lips drawn in a tight, pained rictus.

He didn't look like the man I knew so well.

He looked like a predator.

His fist collided with my skull before I could respond. A lightbulb popped behind me eyes.

My legs gave out and I crumpled into darkness.

A spray of mist on my face woke me up. I groaned as curtains of darkness pulled away, and the grimy world slowly resolved around me. I was handcuffed to a chair -- bound and gagged in the sickly fishing shed.

The brown-haired girl was looking at me. Her eyes, bright with terror, reminded me of animals just before slaughter.

But it was too late.

Her neck was a great ruin -- a jagged red grin. Blood roared from her severed throat to the beat of her dying heart. It drenched her like a warm, wet bib.

Blood splattered down, draining in thick black puddles through the grate in the floor. I heard it chuckling as it joined the bayou water beneath us.

I couldn't see my brother, but I could feel him. Watching from behind me.

Then the girl was dead, the light leaving her eyes, and I saw it -- a thin wisp of energy -- join a dainty Omega wristwatch on one of the tables.

It drilled through my stomach like a gut-punch.

My brother didn't just source haunted objects...

...He made them.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" He asked as he stepped into view. He wore a leather apron, the kind of yellow gloves you might use to wash dishes, and clear plastic goggles. He held a straight-edged razor. It's blade caught the bulb and screamed red light -- it was drenched in gore.

He smiled at me before turning his back. He stood over the workbench, wiping blood from metal, and talked.

"Most of us take souvenirs. A pair of panties. A pendant necklace. A lock of hair. I'm no different; but my souvenirs are special. Trapped souls, retained energy. Who-Knows how it happens or why -- it just does. Started with the first one, Becky Lane, who owned that Crucifix you're so fond of."

My heart galloped ahead. Hiding my movement, I surreptitiously reached for my back pocket.

"I was lazy at first," he continued. "Taking strays, lot lizards, cutting girls who hitchhiked hither and ho. I got smart. Found this place. The gators take care of the bodies. It's self sustaining."

I felt the crucifix in my back pocket. My fingers skimmed the chain, couldn't get a grip on it.

My brother turned. Leveling the razor -- he was going to cut me.

That was bad, but what was worse was the picture on the table behind him.

It showed us as kids -- the one he always carried around with him.

He saw me looking.

"I would never lie to you -- and I won't now. It won't be pleasant. You'll be trapped in there forever. 'Least I like to think so."

He sidled up to me, forcing his right leg between both of mine -- so that his knee was riding up my crotch.

"It won't be pleasant," he said again, raising the straight-edged razor still warm with the other girl's blood. "I'm sorry Anna. I really am -- but you always loved haunted-things so much, right? I guess bein' one might not be so bad."

My brother's eyes gleamed with animal hatred as he brought the razor down.

A bolt of adrenaline forced my hands further. The handcuffs dug into my wrists. I felt blood, warm and sticky, trickle out.

I grazed Becky Lane's tiny cross, strained harder, gripped it, and jammed it into the handcuff key.

The handcuffs fell apart just as the razor invaded my periphery, soaring in on my jugular.

I grunted, forced life into my arm, and plunged up the handcuff's ratchet -- the sharp, serrated edge that had been securing my left hand -- through my brother's left eye.

It went in like a toothpick through a blueberry. His eyeball popped -- releasing a hot rush of fluid, slimy and awful, over my hand.

Markus shrieked and reeled off, losing the razor. It clattered to the floor, landing in a puddle of blood.

The shed was filled with my brother's howls. He was wailing, clawing at his face, blindly groping for a weapon.

I grabbed at the razor but it was just out of reach -- out of the corner of my eye I saw my brother find a giant cleaver, the blade rusted and scarred, and lurch toward me.

I screamed and threw my weight forward. I caught him in the midsection, heard a woosh of air from his mouth as I sent both of us slamming down.

He fell back, his hands pinwheeling for leverage, his ruined eye bulging from its socket like a squashed frog.

Then gravity sucked him down. The back of his head clipped off the edge of a work table under the full force of his body's dead weight.

His head snapped forward on his neck with a sound like popcorn in a pan.

It was like a switch was thrown -- with frightening clarity and speed, the life left my brother's body.

It exploded out of him. Filled the air like exhaled vapor, swirled, darted forward, before the picture of us sucked it in.

His body -- empty of life, of breath -- fell like a rag-doll, landing in a loose pile of limbs and meat beside me.

I looked at him, through a blur of tears, and saw that my brother -- serial killer and maker of haunted things -- was now a haunted thing himself.

I just got home. I poured myself into a scalding-hot shower and watched blood and filth swirl down the drain.

As steam pooled and boiling water hissed, I thought about the scores -- hundreds -- of objects that had passed through our store over the last two decades. All those people. Trapped. Forgotten.

The photo has helped me cope -- the one I added to my mantle.

As I feel the world crushing in, I look up at the framed picture of my brother and I as kids.

I stare at it and hope he's trapped in there forever.