My mother didn’t know it had happened at first. Jared came around a couple of days later and was actually looking better. He was clean and well-dressed, and the perpetual sour smell of the prior night’s drinking was gone. He talked to her and their mother for a bit and then headed back to town for a job interview.

Within six months, he had bought a house on the other side of town and was making good money at the accounting firm he had joined. He didn’t seem to have any friends or be dating anyone, and he didn’t come around as often, but that was all chalked up to him being so busy turning his life around.

At least by most people. To my mother, and perhaps her mother as well, something was wrong. It was hard to put your finger on it, but if you really knew Jared, you could tell the difference.

He was colder somehow. And while he would still laugh and joke on occasion, there was an underlying cruelty in some of the things that he would say. A dark contempt that had never been part of Jared, even at his lowest point. As time went on, I think they began to see the growing infrequency of his visits as something of a blessing.

But still, when they went two weeks without hearing from him at all, my mother finally went to his house to check on him. That’s where she found his body, torn to shreds and defiled, on the living room rug. When the police came, they said he had been dead for several days.

Some of the people in the attic had been dead far longer.

My mother would always get upset at this part, and I never pressed her for more details than she was willing to give. But apparently they found around ten corpses in Jared’s attic—men, women, and children that had gone missing over the last few months across five different states. The bodies had all been dismembered and desecrated. Some had pieces missing that were never found.

She swore to me that her brother would have never done that. That it was the Stranger—warping him or controlling him after it had gotten him. She even traced it back to a particular night and the bar he had passed out in, for all the good it did after the fact. And I trusted her judgment, but she wasn’t just relying on what circumstantial evidence she had gathered or what she hoped to be true. Because less than a week after Jared was found ripped open, the Stranger tried to take my mother for the first time.