Liu woke up to the sound of gunshots coming from inside his house. There were panicked screams.
Sounds of a violent struggle. He sat bolt upright, terrified and drenched in sweat, as he heard
footsteps getting closer to his room. It’d already been the worst year of his life, but things were
about to take another turn straight into Hell. And this time, Liu would bring a demon back with him.
A figure trudged down the hallway towards Liu’s bedroom door, having already taken two
lives that night. He gripped a kitchen knife in his scarred, twitching hand,
still dripping with the blood of its recent prey. He chuckled softly to himself,
amused at the carnage of it all. Now, he was going to add one more body to the pile.
Liu’s body.
Back in his bedroom, Liu could feel his heart rise into his throat. The door creaked open,
and he saw the figure looming in the shadows.
“Jeff?” Liu asked, seeing the figure slowly come into focus. “Is that you?”
The figure chuckled again, and raised his index finger up to its lipless mouth.
“Shhhh,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
Before Liu could get another word in, the figure - presumably his brother, Jeff - charged at him,
brandishing the blade. He couldn’t help but notice that his brother’s white hoodie was
already splattered with blood, and that he’d cut a wide, Joker-like grin into his own face.
The awful sight of his brother’s ruined face caused him to let his guard down,
just for a moment.
Big mistake.
Jeff, who’d seemingly gone utterly insane,
had no intention of cutting him any slack. In fact, his only intention was to cut him.
Jeff stabbed Liu in the belly, causing a shockwave of pain to rock through his body.
Worse than the pain was the sense of betrayal - his own brother, who he’d sacrificed so much
for - was genuinely trying to kill him. Liu cried out in pain, tears cascading down his cheeks.
Jeff stabbed him again, and whispered, “I said, go to sleep! Just like mom and dad!”
In that moment, Liu connected all the dots: The gunshots he’d heard earlier,
they were the blasts of his father’s shotgun,
fired off in an unsuccessful attempt to save him and his wife from their youngest son’s wrath.
Jeff’s mother had been the one that first discovered him in the bathroom, mutilating
his face into the nightmare we all know and fear today. Where she saw fear and disgust, Jeff had
seen beauty and potential. His mother would be punished dearly for not seeing what he saw.
She ran back into her bedroom and implored her husband to grab the gun, knowing on some primal
level that her son was already gone. But they were too slow. By the time two shells
were loaded into the gun, Jeff was already running across the room, knife at the ready.
His father unloaded both barrels, but Jeff,
now imbued with killer instinct, was able to dodge the buckshot.
A few minutes later, when Jeff left the room, both of his parents were dead
and gutted on the bed. Liu would be next, unless he got extremely lucky. Or,
depending on your perspective, extremely unlucky.
He could feel himself getting light-headed from the pain as Jeff twisted the knife
in his guts, cackling like a madman while he did it. Liu tried to hit his brother,
and throw him off, but Jeff was too strong. He seemed to just ignore the pain,
as he prepared to plunge the knife into Liu once more.
Liu reached out onto his bedside table and grabbed the first thing his desperate hand could get a
hold of: Not a weapon, but a rosary. In sheer panic, he wrapped the rosary around Jeff’s neck,
and began to pull it tight, until he could begin to see his brother strain and wheeze.
His grip on the blade was getting looser. His pale face was slowly becoming a ruddy
purple from the oxygen deprivation. All the while, Jeff slashed at Liu,
leaving a crisscross of deep cuts on his face and torso.
With the last of his strength, Liu reeled back,
and delivered a powerful kick to Jeff’s gut, knocking his brother off of his body.
Outside, police cars were converging in the suburb. Jeff and Liu’s neighborhood
was a quiet place, so gunshots and screams in the middle of the night were certain to
catch people’s attention. Incidentally, they’d arrived just in time to save Liu’s
life - but as everyone would later learn, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.
When Jeff saw the red and blue flashing lights,
he decided to cut his losses and split, leaving Liu to bleed to death on the bed.
Thoughts of sadness and betrayal swam through Liu’s head as he lost consciousness,
expecting to never wake back up again. His entire family was already dead or
murderously insane - the only question now was which one of these Liu himself would become.
How had he gotten here?
Life seemed so normal a few months back, when they were moving into the neighborhood. It was him,
Jeff, and their parents. Liu and his parents had never really seen eye to eye - Jeff was
always the golden child, they wrote Liu off early as a future burnout. But he
and his brother were thick as thieves. Liu was incredibly protective of Jeff,
and would happily put everything on the line to keep him out of trouble.
He just didn’t expect that he’d need to do it so quickly.
The incident at the bus stop changed everything. He and Jeff were just standing there,
minding their own business, when Randy, Keith, and Troy - a local gang of teenage
thugs - rolled onto the scene. What started as a hostile conversation
quickly turned into a straight-up shakedown, as the three bullies all pulled blades,
and threatened Jeff and Liu to hand over any money or valuables they had on them.
That’s when Jeff had his first little snap. Just recalling it terrified Liu. It was the
first time his sweet little baby brother didn’t seem himself, like a switch had been flipped in
his brain. He gave Randy a brutal punch in the nose, before grabbing and snapping his wrist.
Jeff then effortlessly disarmed him, and used his knife to stab Keith in the arm.
It was almost like some outside force had taken over him. Liu had known right then,
on some level, that things would never be the same again. But there would still be
a lot of pain in store for Liu before Jeff the Killer would truly be born.
Randy and Keith needed to go to the hospital. As a result,
the authorities soon came knocking on Jeff’s door. However, Liu had no intention of letting
Jeff go to Juvie for this. His brother may have been frightening in his brutality,
but he was still acting in self-defense. The bullies had threatened them first!
Liu did the only thing he could to protect his brother from his own impulsive actions:
He confessed to Jeff’s crimes, and accepted the charges. Because his parents had always thought so
little of him in the first place, they were happy to believe that he was behind the assault, and let
him take the fall for it. Liu was sentenced to a year in a brutal correctional facility
for his trouble, but at least he’d done what he believed was right, and kept his brother safe.
His time inside wasn’t kind to him. Liu may have been innocent, but many of the teens around him
were hardcore criminals in the making. He was dealt regular beatings by the other inmates,
and the sadistic guards. Night after night alone in his cell,
separated from anybody who cared about him, was beginning to take its toll.
Everyone thought he was a monster, and sometimes, a tiny voice inside him would
whisper, “If they already think you’re a monster, why not start playing the part?”
In these moments, he’d always fantasize about committing violence - about getting
back at the people who hurt him, who put him here - but he’d always suppress the
urge. He had to be good. If he became a monster, what would Jeff think of him?
Little did he know, Jeff was becoming a monster in his own right. He’d been grappling with his
own urges to kill, and when Keith, Randy, and Troy showed up for revenge at a birthday
party Jeff was attending, the floodgates finally opened. They’d arrived at the party with guns,
fully intent on killing Jeff, but things ended up very differently for the would-be murderers.
Giving in to his darkest urges, Jeff slaughtered each and every one of
the bullies with increasing ferocity. His mind snapped, he became an entirely different person,
with only one directive in mind: Kill. However, as almost everyone knows by now,
Jeff didn’t come out of the conflict unscathed. Due to a mix of fire and chemical burns,
he was left horrifically disfigured and barely clinging on to life.
When Liu heard the news in Juvie, he was horrified. He regretted every decision he
ever made - if he hadn’t taken the fall for Jeff, he wouldn’t have been left in harm’s way. But
there was one silver lining: Before his death, Randy confessed to attacking Jeff and Liu first
in front of several reliable witnesses. Their testimony was at least enough to exonerate Liu,
allowing him to return home to his family and support Jeff.
When the wrappings around Jeff’s face were taken off,
and his new disfigurements were revealed for the first time, Liu was the first to comfort him,
telling him it didn’t look too bad. And he got almost slashed to ribbons for his trouble.
When Liu woke up in the hospital, he practically looked like Frankenstein’s monster, covered in
stitches all over his face, arms, and torso where Jeff had been cutting into him. Something felt
different - not just physically, but mentally. He felt almost as though there was a different
person trapped in his brain with him, watching him, trying to take control of his actions.
There was a single nurse in the room, attending to his injuries. He asked her what had happened,
and she replied that he’d been in a coma for a few weeks now. His brother had murdered his entire
family, and since then, he’d been on a nocturnal killing spree across the country. He’d been behind
a number of murders and disappearances, and has consistently managed to evade capture.
“You’re very lucky to be alive, young man. I’ve seen the police sketches,” the nurse said.
“The little freak looks like a demon. I’d hate to run into him in a dark alley…”
Demon? Something about that word, and the tone she took, really got under his skin.
He may have been a murderous psychopath, but Jeff was still Liu’s brother,
and he didn’t want anyone badmouthing him after what he’d been through. Liu suddenly
felt this burning rage inside of him, and a little voice inside his head spoke up again.
“Kill her. Kill her now. She deserves to die.”
That’s when Liu noticed a pair of surgical scissors on a table next to his bed. With a
sudden surge of almost supernatural strength, he reached over and grabbed the scissors.
As the nurse approached to restrain him, he stabbed her through the eye with the scissors,
piercing her brain and killing her instantly. He had finally given in to his darkest urge.
And it felt...good. Fantastic, even. He hadn’t felt so alive in years.
He climbed out of bed, feeling like a new person. The voice inside his head told him
he needed to run now. If they caught him, there would be no more victims. There would
be no more fun. And most importantly of all, if he got caught, he’d never see Jeff again.
The now-Homicidal Liu climbed out of the window of his hospital room and slinked off into the dark,
that little voice inside his head encouraging him all the way. He needed to kill again,
and he needed to find Jeff. Perhaps he’d kill him. Perhaps they’d kill together. He wasn’t sure.
But one thing was for certain, he thought with a twisted smile:
When he ran into Jeff again, they’d have plenty more in common...
Now go check out “Monster Stalks Your Nightmares - Jeff The Killer EXPLAINED”
and “Scary Urban Legends That Will Freak You Out” for more terrifying nightmare fuel!