Zac ran from the room, crying hysterically. Taylor was becoming more violent every day, and it scared him shitless.
***
Tay made the final cut and stepped back to admire his work. A huge diagram was carved into the wall next to his desk. It was an old, old symbol that stood for possession, control, and chaos. It was a symbol of much power. His mom would have a cow, but he didn't care. He never cared about anything. He put the knife down and laid back on his bed. He relished having his own room. He used to share a room with Zac and Ike, but they moved into the room down the hall after they kept waking up to find Tay leaning over them, staring, a sick grin on his face, his now black hair falling onto their pillows as he laughed. Its not very easy to sleep like that.
***
Tay got up to change the CD in his CD player. He was upset momentarily when he realized that his stereo was already 6 months old. He'd have to go and snitch Zacs later. He could just buy a new one, God knows he had enough money, but he would rather make Zac cry. He liked it.
He put in a Marilyn Manson CD and sat down on the bed, letting the music throb in his ears. His stupid wussy fans actually though he went home and listened to mmmbop or some such shit. After hearing it blasted into him at concerts? No way! He hated the music he made, or rather, the music his brothers made. Unlike his brothers, he couldn't even play any instruments. It was all faked. Ike and Zac would’ve left him to form their own group after his musical talent seemed to disappear, but they stuck with him out of dumb blind brotherly loyalty and because they still needed his voice, and his face. Tay wondered what his fans would think of him now--black hair, cut shorter on the left side, a nose ring, several eyebrow rings, and a pierced tongue. His mom had looked faint when she had seen him after he had come out of his room, blood dripping down his face and out of his mouth, grinning that sick, twisted grin. She would have forbidden him to do that to himself, but besides it being too late, she was terrified of him. She had learned, as had the rest of the family, that it was smarter, and safer, not to oppose Tay.
***
His mom opened the door several hours later to find him in the same position, sitting on the bed, his eyes glazed, the CD long over. She was getting more and more used to seeing him like that. She gave him a light shove. She felt that irrational fear rising inside her and heard a tiny voice inside say in a voice more filled with terror than she thought, "oh no." as she watched his eyes unglaze as the animation flowed back into his face. He blinked and glared at her.
"What do you want?" He asked in a voice like a sneer.
"Some mail came for you....fan mail." She tried to smile. The Tay that she remembered loved his fan mail, and he loved his fans. When he was depressed, looking through it cheered him up.
He frowned. "There’s always mail. Those little fuckers won't leave me alone."
His mother stifled a gasp and choked back the reprimand rising to her lips. She knew better now than to confront Tay about his language. The last time she had told him not to speak like that he had spent just over four hours cursing and throwing things. One of the things he had thrown was his baby sister, Zoe. She broke both her legs and her right elbow when she hit the wall. Yes, she thought, its safer to suppress all motherly impulses and just let it go. She had convinced herself it was just a phase and she was deep in denial. She held out the plastic bag with some of the letters in it. He made no move to take it, just stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, looking hostile. She set the bag on his desk. As always when her back was to him, she felt a deep-seated fear of her son that was closer to complete terror than she would ever admit to herself. He stood there, staring through her, until she left. That was how he ended conversations. When he had gotten what he wanted, or had just gotten bored, he just shut off and waited until the other person gave up trying to get through to him and left.
As the door clicked shut, he sprang to it and triple locked it, hearing the bolts click loudly as they shot home. He had done it quickly on purpose, because he knew that his mom would be standing with her hand on the doorknob, and it scared her almost to death when she heard the door lock so fast when she had left him--shut off--across the room. He started away from the door, giggling evily, then thought better of it. He turned back and unlocked the door. If he left it unlocked, maybe Zac would come in and he could kick his ass again. Zac must need advice pretty desperately, to try to talk to him. Tay thought back, but his drug-fried brain couldn't remember what it was that Zac was so anxious about. Something about being in love, he thought. Whatever. He'd give him the "fuck 'er and leave 'er" advice and then kick the shit outta Zac for daring to talk to him.
With that decided, and a promising evening filled with beatings ahead, he sat at his desk and looked disinterestedly at the big bag of letters. One had slipped out of the bag and lay on the floor. Tay picked it up and opened it. Damn, no pictures. when he first became famous he was shocked at what the girls would send him but his shock had turned quickly to interest, and interest to lust. Just the thought made him excited.
He unlocked one of his desk drawers and took out a small jar filled with blood. About a week after he had killed Cindy--a sweet-hearted brunette who loved to laugh, and loved to love Tay--he had dug her up and poured some of her blood into jars like this one. He enjoyed drinking it while he read his fan mail, because that was how he had found Cindy. Just a letter, a phone call, and a plane ticket, and Cindy was on his doorstep. Add to that a knife and a shovel, and the backyard had become her final resting place. Actually, not final because when the police got around to tracing her plane ticket back to him, he would have to dig up her body again and move her. Maybe he would put her in the shed where he had "buried" his 2nd victim. The last time he had dug Cindy up, her body had gotten really spongy and was starting to smell deliciously. She had little white worms crawling where her eyes used to be. He decided that when he dug her up the next time, he just might eat her. He could start with the piece he had put under his pillow. Yummy.
***
He picked up the letter and read,
Dear Taylor,Hi, Tay! I’m sorry to hear about Zoe's accident. I’m sure you must be worried about her. You are so sensitive, I’m sure it must affect you deeply. (If only you knew the cause of Zoes "accident", Tay thought, Maybe you wouldn’t think I’m so innocent anymore) Anyway, my name is Aria and I am your number one fan! Me 'n my buddy Sara (she luvs you too, but not as much as me) have every picture ever taken of you and every interview ever. What impresses us the most about you is your ability to stay innocent. Your fame has not spoiled your gentle soul. Love, Aria and Sara
***
Jeez, what a sap, Tay thought as he crumpled up the letter, she has no idea what I’m like now. That made him think, and he slowly uncrumpled the letter.
***
"AAAAH!!!!!Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!!!"
"What?!?! What?!?!" Sara fidgeted excitedly, "Aria, calm down!"
Arias eyes flashed triumphantly. "he says...he says...he gave us...we can.."
As Aria lapsed back into unintelligible little squeaks of pleasure, Sara pried the letter from her clenched fingers and read it.
"Oh WOW!" Sara shrieked once and forcibly calmed herself down. She was a lot less high-strung then her best friend. Her little brother threw open her door and yelled in, "Dad wants to know if you’re having an orgy in here, or what."
"Or what. Now bug off turd-boy." Aria responded smartly. She seemed to be a bit calmer, although she was still flushed and flustered. She just couldn’t believe their luck. Taylor Hanson had sent them plane tickets! The only thing that worried her was that he told them not to tell anybody. She guessed it was so that other fans wouldn’t get jealous, and started packing. She would have believed it was because he was the Prince of Turkey if it meant she got to see him in person. Sara was a bit more cautious. She was still standing and looking at the letter like it was a llama or perhaps an emu.
"Come on Sara, get packing!"
Sara faced her hyper-active friend and smiled brightly, "Oh, who cares. Lets go. I don't care if he kills me. It'd be worth it, just to see him."
"Thats the spirit!" Aria replied, grinning. Both of them would do anything for Tay. "I just cant believe it! This is too good to be true!"
Unfortunatly for them, it was true but it was most definitely not good.
***
"Knock, Knock"
"Whos there?"
"Taylor"
"Taylor who?"
"Taylor Hanson, is there any other?"
"That is the lamest joke ever!! Its not even funny!"
Aria made a whatever "W" at Sara as they walked up to his door. They were both trying, without much luck, to get rid of their nervousness. Before they even got a chance to knock, the door opened and they heard Taylors voice say, "Come on in--lets go to my room." Even though the couldn't yet see him, they followed his voice eagerly, barely noticing that the whole house was pitch-black inside. It was an eerie contrast to the bright sunlight they has just come from. Aria, usually not the superstitious type, had a fleeting thought, "we're entering the cave of the monster, any second it will pop out and eat us."
When they got to his room, they wished it had stayed dark. No one would enjoy the sight of their favorite idol gone bad. They were almost too busy taking in the hair and piercings to notice that he was covered up to his elbows in thick blood. Aria gasped and Sara just gaped. A hand swam in front of her eyes, pointing at the blood, and she realized it was her own hand, and pulled it back quickly. Aria was making little gasping noises, trying to scream and not quite making it.
"What are you all upset over? This?" Tay said, motioning toward the blood. "It was just Jaxsper. I dug him up again. Kindly remind me to put him away again. He's kinda just messing up my closet right now."
"Who's Jax.. Jasp..Jaz...whatever-his-name-is? What did you do?" Sara asked, her eyes staring wildly at her former obsession.
"Jaxsper was......a close friend, lets say. He thought he knew the real me, but I surprised him in the end." Tay turned toward the open closet door and shut it, after muttering something into it that sounded to Sara like, "bye-bye, my love," but she attributed it to stress. She was trying very hard not to think that her favorite fantasy liked to dig up, and talk to, dead bodies. She started backing toward the door. Then she felt something like slimy iron encircle her wrist. It was Tays hand. He was so strong!
"Uh-uh" he said, shaking his head, making his black hair fly around catching the light. “You’re not going anywhere. You can wait down there with pretty boy while I deal with this one." He looked at Aria with open disgust and hatred. "Do I look innocent now?Can you see into my 'gentle soul' now?" He asked sarcastically.
He opened a trapdoor in the floor and threw Sara down the short steps. She expected a basement crawl space, maybe rats, but instead saw a regular room. It was pretty bare, granted, but perfectly normal otherwise. When he had said, "wait down there with pretty boy" she was afraid it was another dead body she was to wait with. She had no particular desire to hang out with a dead body.
She heard a soft sob from behind her and she whirled, panicked, visions of deathly pale rotting corpses filling her head. All it was was a boy curled up on the floor in the corner, crying as if he was used to crying and had had a lot of practice. The boy had long blond hair and looked familiar.
"He's killed again, hasn't he?" The boy asked, turning around. Even before she could see his face, Sara knew the voice. She had heard it many times singing in her room. It was odd to hear this voice coming out of an actual person, not from a set of speakers.
"Taylor?" Sara gasped, "Taylor? Is that..but what about..who..." The last half-hours stress caught up with her and she fell onto the bed in a heap. Tay ran to her and held her while she cried. As she calmed down, they talked and she realized more and more of what was happening. It was strictly soap opera stuff. They were twins. Even their mother thought the other one died at birth. She had never told Tay that he had had a twin. Tay2--as Taylor kept calling him--had never told Tay his name, only that he had been a black market baby that ended up unwanted and in foster-care. They had had fun at first, trading off at concerts and events and keeping it a secret, until Tay2 had become too greedy and had locked the real Tay under his room. He regularly came down to taunt Tay, throwing blood and setting things on fire. One thing about this absurd situation scared Sara more than all the rest. As he talked about how absolutely unmercifully evil Tay2 was there was an admiration in his eyes, and a kind of dark desire. Sara thought that the two had more in common than just looks. She also found that she didn't see Tay the same way she used to; she used to see him as an infallible god, an object of great beauty but without depth. Now she could see that he was just as scared as she was, if not more. After all, he knew what Tay2 was capable of and she could only guess.
After she finished crying, she told him how scared she was when she saw the blood.
"I don't understand. Was your friend--Aria--hurt? I don't see any blood on you and he..well, let just say that he doesn’t want to waste any of the other girls blood. Something about first kill, he said." Taylor ran his hand through his hair, pushing it back, and sighed, "Apparently, someone helped him kill others before I met him." Taylor sighed again, "He’s insane."
"Umm..well, he said that it was.." she struggled to remember the name. She thought for a minute and finally came up with it. When she saw Taylors reaction, she wished that the name had stayed forgotten.
***
Sara looked over into the corner and felt a wave of both pity and disgust wash over her. Taylor had been curled up in the corner, sobbing, for the last two days. He had been completely unconsolable, and when she tried to hold him, to comfort him, he bit her.
***
Finally he seemed to come around, and was able to eat some of the food that Tay2 had thrown down for them. Sara looked at his pale face and hollow eyes red with tears and wondered just how close these ".....close friends" were. Oh, well, not much to do about it now. They had heard some small scuffling noises in the closet above them, but even though Taylor kept hope, Sara figured it was just Aria moving around. According to Tay2, who kept yelling through the floor at them, she was too whiny to deal with, and he was leaving her in the closet to "mellow out" as he put it.
***
Suddenly the trapdoor overhead opened and Tay2 stuck his head down. "Hi!" He said amicably, as if it was totally normal to keep people captive under his room. Sara, feeling quite ridiculous, gave him a half-hearted wave. His grin widened and he motioned to her. "Come on girly, come on up and lets see what’s goin' on." Sara looked at the real Tay as she went toward the stairs. He looked so forlorn and miserable, and her heart leaped out to him. He looked directly at her, gave a sad smile, and winked. She giggled, and maybe that’s what she needed to break her daze and it sunk into her thick skull that this boy was going to kill her. When she giggled, Tay2 looked over at Taylor and that gave her her chance. She grabbed Tay2 by the hair and pulled, yanking his head forward against the top of the trapdoor hinges. He cried out as blood flowed, obscuring his vision, and he pulled back out of the opening. She moved to run up the stairs, but Tay rushed past her, charging up the stairs frantically, knocking her down. Sara thought that Taylor didn't even realize what he was doing. His expression was one of pure panic and twisted hope.
***
He was yelling and sobbing hysterically when she finally got up the stairs. Tay2 had gotten the knife from its resting place on the desk and had stabbed Tay in the leg. There was also a long scratch marring the usually creamy skin of his cheek, now flushed almost as red as the blood seeping out of various other wounds. Taylor threw Tay2 to the ground and stepped on his wrist, breaking both it, and its hold on the knife. Tay2 cried out in pain, and Taylor placed the point of the knife at Tay2s neck. Suddenly all was silent.
Tay was distraught, hurt, and full of hate, but he still couldn't kill him. He opened his mouth to speak and Tay2 smiled and threw himself upward, impaling himself on the knife. Thick blood dripped around the blade, sinking into the carpet and staining Taylors fingers a dark red. It soaked into Tay2s black hair just as Taylors own blood soaked into his own blond hair, making them look more alike than twins have any right to look.
Tay sat back, horrified, and suddenly an expression of hope so intense it was painful to see appeared on his shocked face and he rushed to the closet, throwing it open and practically diving inside. Directly in front of him was Aria, bloody and unconscious, but alive. Taylor had no eyes for her. He saw, further back, a hunched figure. A quick glance would have passed it off as a pile of clothes, but Tay must have had a 6th sense operating, because when Tay touched it, it groaned. Light shone out of Tays face and Sara didn't need an ouija board to tell her that this was the "...close friend" that she had thought must have been dead. She could tell by his expression, and the kiss that followed, that Jaxsper was going to be alright. She turned and left the room, found a phone in the kitchen and called the police and an ambulance.
***
2 WEEKS LATER--
Aria was in a cast. Tay2 had broken her arm as well as doing..well..other things. Lets just say, she’s scarred for life. Jaxsper was in the hospital (again, according to him) and the world was in shock. Once the story had broken that Taylor Hanson had an "evil twin", there was no rest for anyone. Media insanity is the only way to describe it. Little did they know that there was about to be some more insanity before this little parade of hanson-humiliation was over. Newspapers everywhere kept flashing pictures taken at Tay2s autopsy. He had carved that weird symbol on his back. God only knows how he managed to carve it on his own back. Apparently, he was psycho long before he met Tay. He had killed his foster parents and several other people. Before that had come out into the light Taylor had been arrested when the body of Cindy Carlisle was found in his backyard. Thankfully, he was cleared of that after lie detector tests, fingerprint analysis and many many interrogations.
***
At first Taylor acted nice and sweet like always except he never let Ike or Zac in his room. He never covered up the carving on the wall, and when his mom tried to have the carpet redone to wash Tay2s blood out, Taylor had such a fit that his mom was sure that it was Tay2 yelling at her. After that particular episode, she locked himself in her room and cried until she fell into a fitful sleep broken by dark and haunted dreams. One morning, Ike went to wake Tay up and had seen the edge of a scar running out from under the bottom of his t-shirt. Ike had ran from Tays room quickly and from then on, Tay woke up at whatever time he wanted. No one wanted to think about what that carving might mean. It wasn't the fact of the carving that scared Ike, it was that it had looked old, like a scar that had been healed over and then re-cut.
Late at night, when going to get a glass of water, Zac saw Taylor drinking something out of a jar. His desk drawer was standing open, and what Zac glimpsed in there made his head whirl and his stomach turn. He ran quickly back to his room and never told anyone what he saw. He never fully admitted it to himself even.
***
Slowly, Taylor was becoming more and more like his evil twin. He even dyed his hair black. He just got crueler and crueler until not even Jaxsper could stand to be with him all the time. After he first got better, they were inseparable, but now Jaxsper didn’t seem to have as much of a problem being away from him as he used to. Ever heard the term "sexual cruelty"? That would go pretty far toward describing it.
Bit by bit, his family abandoned hope on him, most chalking it up to trauma. His mom placed herself in the same peaceful world of denial she had lived in with Tay2. Zac and Ike ignored Tay. They dealt with him when it was necessary, but tried not to be with him much. They just hoped he would grow out of it. Then, finally came the last straw. Zac came home one day to find the littlest hanson brother crying in a corner while Tay was supposed to be watching him. After listening to the hysterical childs account of that afternoon, Zac was livid. When Ike got home, Zac stormed into their shared room.
"We have to do something about Taylor. He tried to rape mackie!"
***
Zac snuck out to the cemetery where Tay2 was buried. He had one of his bodyguards to help him. He was the one and only person that Zac had even hinted about the contents of Tays desk drawer to. Just the hint was enough to scare the bodygaurd into letting Zac convince him that Tay needed to be stopped. Hanson wasn't as popular since Tays "problem" became public, but they were popular enough to still need bodygaurds. This one carried a knife, a shovel, and a plastic baggie in one huge meaty fist.
***
Tay was doing a lot of drugs, so he was never really clear-headed. He never noticed the strange way his brothers were acting. Then again, he was acting pretty strange himself.
One night, after a fun-filled family evening of slapping around his mother and taunting Zac, he sat in his room smoking a joint and listening to Korn on Zacs CD player. He kept touching the Design on the wall, and every time he touched it, he got higher. He decided to take a shower. The water always felt good when he was high and the sound of the water drowned out the madness, if only for a little while. He let the water run on his face and winced at the sting as the shampoo ran down his scarred and scratched back. He started to feel the madness go, and with its leaving he felt almost empty. But that was okay, because the evil left a friend for him to play with. A friend called "guilt". He shut off the water quickly, and the madness came rushing back. He hooked his fingers into claws and scratched them across his chest, enjoying the pain and bringing his fingers to his mouth to taste his own blood.
He stepped out of the shower, wiped the steam off the mirror and shrieked. The face that he saw was distorted and ugly, rotted by the grave. Ike had removed Tays mirror and replaced it with glass late the night before while Tay was passed out on the bed, stoned out of his mind. Zac was wearing Tay2s face that he had cut off the body in the graveyard. He was glad when Tay ran out of the room shrieking so that he could remove it. He couldn't stand the smell much longer. The feel of the clammy dead flesh on his skin made him nauseous and light-headed.
Tay tripped and fell in the doorway to his room. He crawled, still shrieking, to his desk. He reached out and touched the bottom edge of the ancient symbol. Only then did he have enough energy to stand up. Unwittingly, Zac and Ike had attacked the one thing that could still hold meaning to Tay: his appearance. How could he get girls to kill if he looked like a creature from the grave? That was only a secondary consideration, though. His own face, his real face was what scared him. That was what he feared it looked like. Like the rotting creature from beyond death.
He picked up the knife from the edge of the desk and drew it over his wrists, slitting them. First the left, then the right. Dark arterial blood gushed out in a surprisingly fast flow, soaking into the carpet where Tay2 had also bled. He continued cutting into them, until the blood and pain made it to hard to tell if he was even cutting his wrists anymore, or just thin air. He fell, and one of his flailing, mutilated hands slapped the wall, directly in the middle of the symbol, leaving a dragging mark like an exclamation point, the final mark, the end of Tays life. As he fell he screamed, cursing his family, cursing everyone he knew, but most of all, cursing himself.
***
Ike and Zac ran into the room and stopped short. Ike turned and was noisily sick behind the door. They stepped tentatively toward the body, poking and prodding it until they were sure that A: This bloody mess was Taylor, and B: that he was dead. Taylor was still naked from the shower and they got their first glimpse of the carving on his back. It looked as if it had been carved over and over hundreds of times. Just looking at it made Ike slightly queasy again. Zac turned away from the sight of his dead and bloody brother. He saw the jar that Tay had been drinking from sitting open on the desk. He picked it up and sniffed it. The months-old blood smelled of death and decay. Zac swayed and was almost sick. His senses reeled and he put a hand on the wall to steady himself. That was his mistake. Somehow, he cut himself on the diagram and blood ran down his wrist like a river of red. He brought his hand to his mouth and licked the mixture of Tays blood and his own off his hand at the same time that Ike called out, without looking up, "Zac, something weird is going on! The scar on his back-- not the new ones, the oldest one--its fading away!" When this got no response, he looked up and saw Zac raise the jar of Cindys blood to his lips and drink. He turned to face his brother, who was kneeling next to Tays dead body and grinned, blood running out of his mouth and down his chin. His face contorted with pain for a second and blood started to seep through the back of his white t-shirt as jagged cuts appeared in the smooth flesh of his back.
"Zac? Uh, you’re scarin' me bro" Ikes voice shook like a leaf and he tried to suppress the feeling of dread that was nudging at his stomach. He couldn't seem to unlock his muscles to run as he knew he should. He just knelt there on the floor by his dead brother and watched as his other brother turned to the symbol and touched it. The touch was almost a caress, and the look on Zacs face was one of pure ecstasy. Slowly he turned back toward his older brother, and raising the knife slightly higher, advanced purposefully toward Ike.
