You know when you remember something from your childhood that didn’t make sense at the time but does now? Like that joke in a movie that all adults laugh but you just can’t see what is so funny about it. Or when your parents are worried about something but you just can’t grasp the seriousness of the situation. For some reason, I feel like a great deal of my childhood is… Plagued with inconsistencies. Things I didn’t notice until very recently. But different from a joke, my childhood inconsistencies are… Kind of unnerving.

I have been trying to write this for more than a year, since I started recalling these events in my mandatory therapy sessions. And to explain the past, I sort of have to talk a little about my present, as weird as it seems. A few years ago, I was found in the middle of the night on the roof of my university, just close to the edge and about to jump. The weirdest thing was that I had no idea how I got there, or why my shoulders were covered in bruises, as if I had been clawed by an wild animal. For obvious reasons, my university gently forced me to start taking therapy sessions.

At first I had sort of a resistance to touch on my past with Dr. Norma, my psychiatrist, but with the time, I loosened up and started telling her about my childhood, because she suspected that somehow it all started there. I objected at first, I’ve been having these blackouts and periods of time that I can’t remember what happened since forever, but doctors can be very persuasive when they want. But, I can tell from the nightmares I’ve been having since therapy started and the horrified expressions that form on her face as I recall my past, that… Something is very wrong.

-

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that… My uncle Peter appeared. For some reasons, my memories always get murky when I think about him. He’s a member of the family, he raised me, he is my freaking uncle, and yet… Sometimes I feel as if I barely know him. Or worse… As if he’s… Fake. As if he had never existed at all. As if he was a made-up memory. It is hard to explain. I want to cry, run, smile, laugh and pluck out my eyes when I think about him.

I can’t recall his face. Nor his physical attributes. I try to search for them in my memories, but they keep changing. Sometimes he is blond, sometimes he is bald. Sometimes he is dark-skinned, sometimes Caucasian. Sometimes he was the tallest person in the room, sometimes the same height as me when I was six. He is my uncle, and he lived with us for years, but I do not recall when exactly he moved in. He sort of just appeared there one day, in my apartment. And… I don’t know if he was my father’s brother or my mother’s. I asked them that several times as a kid. They always evaded the question or acted confused. I asked my grandmother (She was my father’s mom) if he was her son. She either would refuse to answer or start coughing when I asked that. The one time I asked him, he asked “Do you really wanna know?”. When I confirmed that I did, he grabbed me by the neck and suffocated me until I passed out.

Uncle Peter did not have a room. He lived with me, my mom, my father and my granny, in our old apartment. There were three bedrooms. He had no room. He could sleep in the couch if he wanted, or easily fit a small bed in the living room. But no. In the corridor that led from the entrance of the apartment to the kitchen, bathroom and living room, there was a crack. The building was old and there were cracks and sounds from the pipes, but this was not an ordinary crack. It was a big one, it almost looked like a spider web or a glass crack, because it spread all over the wall. In the center of this decadent, prominent fissure, was a black, repulsive hole. It seemed so disgusting, infinite, yet intriguing. I remember, as a small kid, staring into it, along with my parents and grandmother, as if we were hypnotized, for hours and hours. I don’t remember why I did that, but I remember doing that at least once or more per week. Uncle Peter, somehow, lived there. Inside that crack.

Uncle Peter lived inside the wall. Inside the wall between the corridor and the kitchen. It was not even thirty centimeters wide. It doesn’t make sense. I know. Dr. Norma at first thought I was mocking her. But he lived there. Every night, when we were going to sleep, he simply went to that gap, and sort of entered into it. I don’t know how the fuck he did that. Even as a child that intrigued me, but even if he lived with us and almost never went outside, I never asked him. And I just don’t know why I never did. Once I even tried to enter like he did. The fissure extended all over the wall and a bit on the ceiling, but the hole was only slightly larger than my hand. And it was so damn disgusting. But I didn’t dare put my hand in there. Only Uncle Peter could.

Since before I was born, we had a maid. I don’t remember her name or face. But I know she existed. I vividly remember her cleaning the house, and taking me to school. And I remember the last time I saw her. I was at home with grandmother watching television. Uncle Peter was out that day. It was around 5PM, my parents weren’t home yet. It was rare for him to go out, but he sometimes did. Sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for weeks. One of those times that he was not home, the maid decided to clean the gap in the wall. She tried to use a flashlight to illuminate it, but it was still pitch black. I remember this because she asked ME to bring the flashlight to her.

“What? Is this mold?” She said. And then she put a finger in there, just to touch the crack in the wall. And then she was gone. I looked around, she was nowhere to be seen. She was nowhere to be seen. Uncle Peter’s head appeared, coming out of the hole, and told me and granny that we should never go into his room. I remember the police coming and questioning us, but my parents said we never had a maid. But we did. I can’t remember her name or face or features. But I remember how she disappeared right in front of me.

-

Uncle Peter also had some weird habits. He never worked. I asked him once why he never did. He told me “I’m an athlete.” I replied “What sport do you play?” And he said “Bloodsport.” He never elaborated further, but my parents told me that he worked harder than they ever could.

Another of his strange habits was that he didn’t eat the same food as us. He liked to eat raw meat. I don’t know where he got it from, but it wasn’t food from our refrigerator. Uncle Peter also liked to stare in the corners of my room or to stay under my bed when I went to sleep. And sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, he would read for me. I knew he was reading due to his voice, but I never saw him holding a book. The books he read to me? The Shining, Maleus Maleficarum, It, the Necronomicon, TamPA, Mein Kampf, 30 Days of Sodom, among many others. Needless to say, that didn’t help me sleep. But it did help me develop precocious chronic insomnia.

He also sometimes just laid in the floor, eyes wide open, and would start screaming. Sometimes he’d do this in the early morning, sometimes way past midnight. And his screaming was… I can’t describe it. It sounded human, but not like his usual deep, raspy voice. It sounded like an animal too, but not one that I know. It was just so strange. My father once tried to beg him to stop screaming. He was lying on the ceiling, screaming, as if his bright yellow eyes were filled with terror. (Yes, he also had a habit of walking, hanging and lying on the walls and the ceiling). Uncle Peter grabbed my father by his arm and then bit and ate one of his fingers. And that wasn’t the first time he abused my parents. Every four days, he would enter their room in the middle of the night, and I’d just hear screams, whimpers, pleads for mercy and moans of pain. Both from my father and mother. Very rarely he left a mark on them, but he clearly was abusing them, and I don’t like to even think on how was he doing that.

-

Something strange also happened after my uncle appeared. Our street was poor, decrepit and filled with old buildings and housed, but a lot of people lived there. It was a no-end street, and I always hung out with the other children and the adults always came together to celebrate holidays with barbecue or watch football and drink booze together with a projector than one of our neighbors had. This abruptly ended when I was around six years old, the time that Uncle Peter started existing. The street was never heaven, but a wave of criminality and violence started. People started to go missing and move out. Neighbors stopped talking to each other, began building walls, installing cameras and buying dogs, before ultimately leaving or… Disappearing. I remember one case that was particularly bizarre, even the local press appeared at the time to investigate, even if they only stayed around for three or four days. The house just across the street from our apartment block was one where these strange acts occurred. A family lived there, they had a daughter, I used to play with her on the weekends. One day she returned from school to find her entire family dead. There was blood everywhere, but no meat could be found. Only some of their bones. With clear bite marks. She was taken to live with her grandparents in another state. I tried to add her in Facebook some years ago but she deleted her profile right after,

After a few years, most houses on the street were completely abandoned. We still attended the community meetings nevertheless, even if it was just me, my dad, mother, granny and Uncle Peter in the entire party. There was one of those barbecues, that previously had several families and now had less than ten people, that my father asked one of the few remaining attending neighbors to take a photo of our family. It is the only photo that Uncle Peter agreed to appear, he normally hated even the mention of being photographed.

-

There were other family activities we did together. He liked to watch movies. More specifically, horror movies. We would gather the entire family and watch movies almost every Friday. Something happened during those movie sessions. We never ate anything during them, nobody ever went for a bathroom break. Nobody even talked. We always sit there, either in the couch or in the floor, and watched. Uncle Peter liked to watch the most fucked-up films possible. Martyrs, Saló, Serbian Film, the Hills have Eyes, Requiem for a Dream, Halloween, Sinister, Insidious, the Exorcist, the Exorcise of Emily Rose, Saw 3D, Rosemary’s Baby, Caligula, I vividly remember watching all those movies before I was even ten. Which I now realize is completely non-sensical, since a few of them were not released the time I watched them.

After I was around ten, Uncle Peter declared I was nearly an adult, so he could show me less childish movies. The movies I mentioned before were for children in his view. I won’t say with detail what were these movies, but they more than once gave me nightmares. That is because often my Uncle was acting in them, because often there were people, real people, people that I knew, being brutally tortured in these movies. And sometimes I was in these movies. Both as a torturer and as a victim. And these movies involved far worse things than merely jumpscares. And the worst, I never remember acting in any of the movies I appeared.

There was a particular brutal one, involving our family, that we watched when I was around twelve. I will not say what exactly happened in the movie, but there was extreme pornography and gore. This was the only time we managed to break out of the TV trance. My mother, father, grandmother, all were crying in despair. I was vomiting. Uncle Peter was smiling, sitting in the corner of the room, surrounded by the shadows, laughing. My grandmother then fell over. My father hurried towards her, the experience was so overwhelming that she had a stroke. We had to take her to a mental institution after this. I visited her a couple of times, before somehow completely forgetting she ever existed, along with my parents. I still wouldn’t remember her weren’t for Dr. Norma.

I need to visit her again someday, but I fear how she will react when I reveal that I never saw her again because I literally forgot she existed.

-

Uncle Peter lived with us for a lot of years. As a pre-teenager I didn’t have many friends. My constant blackouts, memory issues, disgusting ever-appearing and unexplained wounds and weird, creepy behavior and subjects I talked about didn’t help. My schools tried to talk to my parents about these issues, to suggest that I should get psychological or medical help, or even threaten to call CPS, but they’d usually just transfer me to another school. Once a CPS agent did show up in our home, but Uncle Peter whispered something to his ear, and he literally peed himself before excusing himself out.

I was able, despite all odds, to become friends with two other guys from one of the various schools I went to. They were neighbors, and I went to their homes after school and in weekends to play videogames or go out with them. Even if the violent wave had reduced a little, it was still a dangerous neighborhood, but my parents didn’t seem to mind.

One day, I went to the house of one of my friends, as usual, after school ended at 6PM. I usually stayed until around 8:30PM, when I’d walk back home. The journey was less than ten minutes, so I was not very worried with going home in the dark. But that day I returned earlier than usual. I was playing FIFA with them, when I had to go to the bathroom.

When I exited the toilet, all lights were out. I did not see him at first, because of the darkness. But I did when my eyes adjusted. Uncle Peter was there, crawling on all fours in the wall! I asked him how, why was he there? He merely looked at me. This is one of the only times I vividly remember his face, without it being blurred or weird. It looked almost like a mask, as if he was wearing someone else’s skin. His eyes were bright yellow, a sickening, decadent, hideous yellow, shining in the dark. I could see his teeth and even some of his jawbone, through a few rifts in his “skin”. His teeth, bones, they were all dark-green. He let out one of his screams, but this time way louder and more violent than usual. At that moment, I knew that I would die if I did not leave.

I ran out of the house and went home, completely freaked out. Sometimes I think he maybe didn’t recognize me that day, or just wanted to scare me. But it is useless. I don’t understand how Uncle Peter thinks, and probably never will.

I don’t remember what happened next. But the next time I tried to visit my friend, his house had burned down. I then tried to see my other friend, and his apartment was abandoned. And worse. I can’t remember their names, nor faces. I tried to ask the neighbors if anyone knew what happened, and people always gave me contradictory answers, ranging from “No child lived there” to “They moved to São Paulo”.

A few years later, I was able to find one of those friends in Facebook. I tried to befriend him there and sent a message. He said “Leave me alone, I beg you” and deleted his profile. He did not block me, he literally deleted his profile.

-

After losing my last remaining friends, my subsequent years would be of utter social solitude were it not for her. Her name was Carol. I met her in a bakery when I around fifteen. It was owned by her mother, and she worked there to help her sometimes. I ended up getting her phone number and we started dating shortly after.

It may seem extremely weird, but for some reason, I didn’t think Uncle Peter was all that bad. He does something to you. Like, to your mind. I don’t know how. It may even seem childish, but I don’t think… He’s human. I know, I know, I’m talking nonsense. But… Everything surrounding him seems so wrong. He does something to you, you… You kind of forget, or unwillingly ignore his misdeeds. I still loved him. I still somehow do, by instinct. But even with all his brainwashing and manipulation, my abused brain somehow knew that I had to be careful with that… “Man”.

So I avoided telling him about Carol. Or anyone in my family. Not that it mattered. One day, after ten months dating, we were finally ready to do it. You know what I mean. Their parents were out of town, Uncle Peter said he’d be out for three days the day before, and my parents were at work. Also, it was storming outside, so they would surely be caught in traffic should they come back early, giving us more time. She came to my apartment. She admitted the place was creepy (I had avoided bringing her there before for obvious reasons) but we were so horny and excited that neither of us cared.

We were inside my room, my door locked, she had just undressed when the lights suddenly went out. There were a couple of seconds in darkness, she hugged me by instinct. And then lightning outside for half a second. And in that brief moment of light, I saw he was there. In the corner of the room, looking at me, smiling sickly. And I don’t remember what happened next. I just remember waking up and her being gone. I tried to call her, her father, her mother, even going to her school, house and the damn bakery. She was nowhere.

And fuck me, something in my mind forced me to not tell anyone about what happened. I didn’t even have a rational reason, I just couldn’t. Even with all of Peter’s trance, I was starting to see a pattern. My friends, my neighbors, my maid, my grandmother. It was a dirty, blurry thought. That Uncle Peter was behind it all. One that was obvious, but was always wiped from my brain in less than five seconds.

Some days later, Carol’s father called me, crying. Her…. Her body had been found. Mangled, broken, brutalized and violated in ways that should not even been possible for the human anatomy. On her bed, inside her bedroom. Her father was so furious and broken and devastated, I could feel it in his voice. I still have nightmares about that call. “Whatever did that to my… To my princess… I used to call her my princess when she was a little kid, you know… The monster who took her from me… He took all of her organs… He…” And I looked up, and in front of me I saw Uncle Peter, sitting in the kitchen and eating a raw uterus. He extended his long, creeping hand and offered me a bite. Even now, as I write this, I feel the horror I felt at the moment, the grief, the terror, the disgust, the… Sorry, I will continue.

I don’t know how it happened. But at this moment, all came together. I saw the cannibalistic thing sitting on my kitchen. It was a cryptic, a strange, bony creature, trying to disguise itself as human using rotten human skin grossly sewn together. That… Thing had been living with us for years. Torturing us. Gaslighting us. I grabbed a cleaver and jumped at him. I managed to hit the eye, a strange, corrosive green liquid squished on my forehead, burning me. To this day I have the scar.

I never saw that thing so angry as that day. Peter hit me in the face, instantly breaking my nose, and then he put me on the dinner table. He called my mother and father, held me, and forced them… He made my parents… Forced them to… Sorry, I can’t. I won’t.

-

A few months after Uncle Peter did that to me, he also did something to my father, even if I don’t know exactly what that was. I remember waking up one night to my father screaming, his voice a mix of hatred and terror. Maybe someone broke into the house or he hurt himself, I thought. I quickly got out of my room and went to the living room to check. Father and mother were completely naked, covered in blood, vomit and bruises, and Uncle Peter was in the corner of the room, grinning and holding a broken bottle of wine.

“Isaac, go to your room! You do not wanna see this!” My mother shouted. Peter was laughing. And then I saw it, in the hands of my father. A revolver.

But Peter did not seem scared. He was openly taunting them and laughing.

My dad pointed the gun at Peter’s head and shot. Three times. Within each bullet, each time he pulled the trigger, there was so much rage, so much grudge, so much bitterness. I knew that monster was family and my conscience was warning me not to, but I wanted to celebrate.

Obviously, dad’s plan didn’t work. Peter grabbed the revolver out of my father’s hand, recharged it, and then shot him in his knees six times, three bullets for each knee. Peter then entered his hole in the wall. We had to hurry my dad to the hospital. My father never walked again.

-

When I was seventeen, one night, I arrived home late, after spending the entire afternoon studying for my exams in the library. Our building was literally the only one which was not abandoned. The entire street had become a ghost town. Not even slums had houses so cheap, and yet nobody moved in. Not even crackheads or squatters tried. The place had been empty for years. But not that day. The street was swarming with people. There were even people from the news. Police cars were parked in front of the building, and some people in biohazard suits coming out of my apartment block.

“What happened? I live there!” I said to one of the police officers. He did not even answer, he pulled out his gun and ordered for me to surrender. Turns out there was a serial-killer operating in our building, thanks to an anonymous tip they found out. Hundreds of human bodies, bones and skeletons had been found all over it. And we were the prime suspects, prime suspects of killing literally all of our neighbors. Me, my mother and my father. “What about Uncle Peter?” I asked the policemen at the station. They said I did not have an Uncle named Peter. We did not even live there officially. The records said we were living literally in another city, somehow.

My parents were also imprisoned. My father was apprehended at his work, while my mother was home at the time. It obviously did not make sense. We would not be able to kill so many people. No one would. It would take an army of serial murderers to hide that many bodies. Yet, they arrested us. And as I was being led into the patrol car, I saw him one last time. I looked to the windows of my apartment, expecting to see him grinning.

“Why are you looking at those windows?” One of the cops said. I looked at the policeman. And then I noticed, his skin was completely rotten and full of stitches, his eyes were bright yellow, there were portions of a green bone visible through tears in the decadent hide. That was the last time I saw my uncle.