The first time Isaac tried to warn me, I woke up to the sound of tapping.

Before my eyes completely snapped into focus, I studied the half form standing in the dark.

The empty bed next to mine where Isaac used to sleep and beyond the bed.

On a one window, a slight movement of the moonlit curtain and the thing that looked back at me from the curtain.

The dark stain of a shadow and eclipsed with human shape.

In the moment, it takes my eyes to adjust, I listen to its tapping on the glass.

I climb out of bed, sliding on sleepwalkers' feet.

A gnawing itch in the back of my mind telling me what I already knew was there at the window.

I throw up in the curtain.

Nothing but the indifferent dark.

My brother Isaac was all bony angles and mop top hair and jewel big eyes.

He disappeared one day in late September.

I remember the day he clears anything.

The rumor in the leaves air with an oncoming bite.

On the night before it happened, in the secrecy of our room, Isaac tells me about his discovery.

I call it a fairy gate, he told me.

Eyes deadlocked on the mind twinkling across the dark between our beds.

It was five years ago.

I was the only person in the world he trusted to keep his secrets and I loved him for that.

The more I think about that night, the more I come to realize how, unlike myself,

he was to go off into the woods alone, comfortable as he was exploring his books.

He told me once that if he could, he'd build himself a fortress out of books.

...