The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Darren Speegle

  The trailhead days behind us, Dianna, Maya, and I were finally into our reaction test, the wolf having given us the opportunity. We had been discussing the mystery of the wolf while Ritter worked on the two wounds that required stitches. The one he worked on now was a nasty incision that started below the ear and ran a good three inches across the back of the neck. Higgins had several other cuts and puncture wounds, mostly about the face and hands, but our captain and doctor had deemed them ready to dress as they were.

  “Don’t you find it strange,” Maya said, “that this wolf shows up out of nowhere, in southern Germany, seems to have no fear of us, and ends up attacking Higgins?”

  Ritter stopped working entirely, looking at her. “Unusual, yes. But strange? I’ve been hiking these mountains for a long time, and I’ve seen strange things. Believe me. Comparatively, this barely qualifies as out of the ordinary. Listen, I don’t pretend to be an expert, but wolves range. At times they attack. This one is obviously alone, has likely been cut off from its pack, maybe ostracized. It might well be going through stress—we humans are not the only mammals that do that, you know—or is hardened by wear and tear. Just the other day Barry was telling me about a large brown bear that attacked two Alaska Forest Service people for no reason. When the one who avoided the mauling finally brought the bear down with his rifle, they discovered it was a fighter, its body covered in scars from confrontations with other bears. Anomalies do happen. Among bears. Among humans. Among wolves. Where is all this coming from, anyway? This . . . mysticism.”

  “Something’s not right.” I said it simply, as a statement of fact, and as I did so, I noted how truly the words rang even in a manufactured context. I might have been telling him about the powerful sense of foreboding that had scarcely left me since Maya had uttered those utterly alien and yet so inherently familiar words.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  I looked outside at the snow. At least four inches had accumulated now, and no end in sight. “I’ve been unable to get reception on my cell phone for more than two days now.”

  “So? Neither have I. We’re in the Alps.”

  “It’s never happened before. Not on this phone.”

  “And that is proof of something supernatural going on?” Ritter looked more than skeptical. He was beginning to worry about me.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Ocason?”

  “It’s my daughter’s birthday. It would have been her sisters’ as well.”

  This caused silence, in part because of its morbidity, in part because the comment was so out of context. Oddly, it was Higgins where he sat propped against the wall, face a gaunter version of Frankenstein’s creation, who finally responded. “I’m very sorry to hear those words, Barry.” He touched the sutures in his eyebrow, as if the pain he felt for me was concentrated there, between the raw lips of the gash.

  I nodded. “Thanks, Higgins. Higgins, let me ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you a triplet?”

  His brow furrowed. “Yes, Barry, as a matter of fact I am.”

  “Did you know that Dianna is also a triplet?”

  Wrecked as his face was, it could not conceal the shadow that surfaced. “No, Barry. I did not know that.” His throat tightened, voice falling significantly in volume as he supplemented, “But I know Maya is . . . ”

  “What is this?” Ritter said. He held the needle aloft, a grotesque accent to the revelations happening.

  I said, “Last night I heard Maya say something in her sleep. The kind of thing you’d normally pass off as senseless dream-speak. ‘The trees,’ she said”—I paused to let the cold recede, the hairs relax, the tear ducts shrink—“‘The trees, they’re full of twins.’”

  I was going to add more, but the words that formulated seemed insufficient, senseless themselves. Ritter, as he stared at me, was doing no better at finding words . . . though I was sure I saw something pass across his features. Something I was by no means unfamiliar with.

  Again it was Higgins to break the silence.

  “My mother used to tell us when we were young lads that we mustn’t ever think of ourselves as special. We were, but we mustn’t ever think it, because in doing so, we became other than special. We became like all the other kids. She never elaborated on how that should be the case, nor did we ask. To us—after the first time at least—it was just so much noise. But thinking back on it, I believe it was a reverse lesson. That what she was in fact trying to tell us was that we really weren’t special.”

  Beside him, Ritter’s mouth had fallen open. He looked from one to the other of us before finally letting out, “Are you conspiring? Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I’d like to be let in on it if it is,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Maya.

  “Ditto,” Dianna chimed. As could only happen with her, it moved me to hear her harmonize with me in that deceptively gentle voice, that elegant command she deployed.

  Ritter turned on Higgins. “And you?” He wielded the needle. “Do you, for all your ‘special’ talk, consider yourself part of this pact to mystify every coincidence?”

  Though there was no clock in our cave, it was tick-tocking.

  At last: “No. I quite like sushi.”

  16

  To our relief, the snow showers quit around noon, though the sky remained threatening, in moving shades of gray. A wind had risen, channeling along the opposite slope and lifting the fallen snow up in swirls, but the road before us nonetheless looked traversable. We didn’t relish the thought of trudging across treacherous terrain in the face of a cold stiff wind, but we didn’t doubt that our Teutonic Knight, Champion of the Cause of Human Endurance, would drive us on, probably double time, to our next site. He had been eyeing the weather with impatience ever since he’d finished sewing Higgins up, likely having been anxious to flee the uncomfortable silence that had descended. It nearly knocked us backward when he entered the shelter saying he thought we should wait until morning to set out again, that even if we managed to avoid more snow, we were going to find the next shelter, a lean-to he had constructed himself out of tree limbs, less comfortable.

  We rested for the day, scribbling, reading, brooding, taking naps, taking pictures, taking pains not to discuss the triplet issue before Ritter—and Higgins, for that matter—had had a chance to fully absorb the situation, insofar as it had been presented. The subject himself had provided us with the opportunity to discuss the initial results of our reaction test by sending us off on a fuel gathering mission not long after the medicine was administered. To the person, we had deemed him stripped of suspicion pending further observation, not least because we had each recognized, on the deepest personal level, the fear that had visited him during the revelations. Even through the manly camouflage, it had been as raw as the wounds he’d been doctoring; more sincere, maybe, than if he’d worn it openly. We’d had to work to find contrary arguments, and they’d been summarily and soundly shut down. Even so, we were going to continue to observe his behavior as the fruits of our disclosures spread their petals.

  Strangely, there was no great rush to that. When the initial shock had worn off, Higgins especially seemed unperturbed by what was at best an astounding coincidence and at worst a metaphysical confluence of multiples and the paths that fed them along. Queer behavior, to say the least. But then Higgins was a queer bird. I’d thought to feel him out on the matter when I’d found myself alone with him at one point, but he’d changed the subject before I’d even brought it up, apparently anticipating what I suppose would have been an awkward situation for him. It suggested that he really wasn’t unperturbed at all, but had clicked a switch somewhere. In any case there was no discussion among any of us, outside the brief review Dianna, Maya, and I had conducted, until later that afternoon when I climbed down to the tree-shaded rock under which Dianna had made a seat of her wet gear.

  Seeing me coming, she spread the
jacket out further, patting a spot beside her. She didn’t or wouldn’t look at me at first.

  “You okay, Dianna?”

  She placed her head on my shoulder. “Yeah.”

  Something in her voice prompted me to lift her chin with my forefinger, forcing her to look at me. There was the ghost of moisture in her flecked ice-blues. Gazing in them, I was conscious of the overall nearness of her; of the fact that this wasn’t the first time contact with her had stirred me. While the aura of softness that sometimes oozed out of the harder seams touched the remotest places, for me the most attractive thing about Dianna were the contrasts themselves. I wasn’t so foolish as to see her tears, if such they were, as weakness. Quite the opposite. They accentuated her toughness, the mental and physical edge she possessed, which made me wonder why I uttered the next words. They were inane enough coming from one weathered backpacker to another, but especially so when that other was Dianna. Nonetheless, I meant them.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, Dianna.”

  She continued to look at me for a moment, then her eyes fell and she returned her head to my shoulder. “Let’s not make unreasonable promises, Barry. And just so you know, I’m emotional for no other reason than that I’m a woman. My girlfriend’s paying her monthly visit, if you get my drift.”

  “Wish I were a woman and could go through it with you,” I teased.

  “No you don’t,” she said. “And what are the chances our cycles would align?”

  An opportunity presented is one taken, I say. “Checking my temperature, are you?”

  I could feel the muscles of her face expand in a smile. “Maybe.”

  “Ask the question again.”

  “What are the chances our cycles would align?”

  “Depends?”

  “On?”

  “Maya.”

  “How so?”

  I’d been looking for an answer to this question for a week now. “How do you think?”

  She paused. “I try not to, if you’re suggesting what I think you are.”

  Sooo . . . “Probably wise.”

  She laughed. “Barry, she’s my best friend.”

  “Be that as it may.”

  “Barry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we using a menstrual metaphor for our romantic compatibility?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Speaks to chemistry.”

  “Got me there.”

  I lightly pinched her thigh. She returned the flirt with exaggerated force. None of this was like the woman I’d spent the last six days with. Either she was actually opening up to me or I had overestimated the touted toughness.

  She said, “Truth be known, I thought you might be attracted to Maya.”

  This gave me pause, which I successfully concealed from Dianna by puckering my lips in mock distaste. Whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not, I did find a certain familiarity about Maya’s large captivating eyes, her rich complexion, compelling. But not, I hoped, in the way Dianna suggested.

  Slipping back on track: “Dianna?”

  “Mm?”

  “Whatever lies ahead—I mean, assuming it’s up to us—”

  She pulled back, looking up at me, face hardening in comfortable resolve. “Of course it is. It’s always up to us.”

  Yes, Dianna was the strong one. And assurances, however nobly felt, failed upon their utterance in her presence. Something troubled me about her, though, as I sat there gazing into her eyes. Just as it wasn’t the first time being near her had stirred me, it also wasn’t the first time close proximity had caused a slightly unsettled feeling in me. It was to do with her eyes. I’ve mentioned that they seemed to be able to see into spheres the rest of us couldn’t—and I suppose if I had communicated regularly with the dead I might have worn such a mark—but they also seemed to open the way to a place the rest of us didn’t wish to go, or perhaps weren’t suited for . . . or even worthy of. A place not unlike Kristin’s place, and yet not an empty gulf, but rather some arcane desert not meant for mortal passage. As I looked there now, maybe upon her very soul, I felt as though I should be trembling to be granted such access. It wasn’t until Higgins’s voice caused her to withdraw that I realized how close I had been to falling into her kiss.

  I turned to find him standing a short distance up the path, body turned at an angle to us, as though he was trying to decide whether to go back or proceed. “So sorry, mate,” he said. “If I’ve interrupted . . . ”

  “No, no,” I said. “Please join us. Spread out your jacket, picnic style.”

  “Right. Little Red Riding Hood and that.”

  He was obviously nervous. It was evident in the words that came out of his slightly swollen mouth, the twitches of his already afflicted expression, the clumsy way in which he laid out his jacket, with the inside to the snow. Only after he’d seated himself did it become clear that his awkward behavior had nothing to do with spoiling a kiss. He came right out with it, as though he’d had to build up the courage.

  “I’m ready to talk about it if you are.”

  Glancing at Dianna, I said, “Sure. Though I’m not sure where it will get us. There’s no way of knowing what the fates have in mind. We either play the thing out or we go home, and I don’t think any of us are the going-home types.” I shrugged to let him know I’d come to these simple terms with myself.

  “Do you suppose Ritter could have anything to do with it?”

  It. The designation seemed grossly inadequate, yet I could see that this was how we were going to refer to it. As I addressed the question, I found the game easier than I’d have guessed. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the game.

  “I’ve asked myself that question over and over, Higgins, but for what purpose? And how could he have known that we were triplets, or in my case, carried the gene. It’s not the sort of information you find flowing freely through the information superhighway. Unless of course it’s included in our bios. We writers tend to have encapsulations of ourselves at our websites.”

  “I have never mentioned it in a bio,” Dianna said. “Even though Dascha and I never knew Dalia, it doesn’t work to talk about two triplets or three minus one. And I’m not the kind of person to refer to the deceased, even family, in the present tense.”

  “Funny how we do that,” I said.

  She smiled, pulling her hand out of her sleeve and placing it on mine, a welcome warmth. To Higgins, she said, “My sister Dalia—that’s the name my parents were going to give her—died at birth. It might as easily have been me.” She returned her gaze to me. “But losing a sister you never knew is not the same as losing someone very close to you. I can’t imagine the pain of losing a daughter I have loved and been loved by.”

  “Nor can I,” Higgins said quietly. “May I ask what happened?”

  As I answered him, I benefited enough from the sense of detachment, that steady companion, to wonder if I came across as feeling sorry for himself. Yet, the memory of the tragedy had suddenly become very foggy, as though filtered through the surrounding snow. It was more like I was recounting something I’d read, which was another sort of detachment entirely.

  “It was sudden,” I said. “One moment Kathy was there, laughing over the breakfast table. The next . . . ” I displayed my palms. “She and her sister had been together collecting leaves for a science project, but they wandered apart. I wondered for a long time if her sister’s presence would have saved her or if we would have lost Kristin, too. Kathy took a side trail that had been eroded by rain. The earth just broke away and she fell to her death.” I paused, realizing where the words were originating. They weren’t part of the game, of some strategy to keep things sedate while the three of us in the know, if you could call it that, worked on the enigma without interference. No, they claimed darker roots. They came out of the residue of my descent, after Kristin’s hospitalization, into oblivion. This was the construct that had erected itself behind the depart
ure of the memories. I had never fully recovered, perhaps never would, but what I did have the power to recoup from, here and now, was a lie that dishonored, that violated, that killed again, in a gentler way.

  “You know what, Higgins?” I told the beleaguered mask that looked back at me. “Fuck all that. Kathy was found with her throat cut from ear to ear.” I reached to my waist, intending to pull out my knife and illustrate my point to him with the words, “by one of these,” but the knife wasn’t there. It and its case were in the shelter where I’d laid them last night.

  Deflated by the lack of material support, I said instead, “In any case, I know all about wrestling with bios.”

  “Oh, Barry,” Dianna said, so softly I could barely hear it.

  “I don’t know what to say, Barry,” Higgins said. “I’m truly, truly sorry. I guess Dianna and I should consider ourselves fortunate to have lost ours before they had a chance to know a world where such evil is possible.”

  As one, we looked at him, but there was no surprise. Not for me. Not for Dianna, who merely said, “You too?”

  He cleared his throat, a terribly mundane introduction to the words that followed. “I’ve had dreams like Maya’s.”

  The hammer falling again. The cold wind washing over me. As I looked at him, my eyes roamed her face. Her dreaming, fluttering eyelids, her trembling lips, the firelight dancing in her cheeks.

  “They started,” Higgins continued, “after I caught a lover of mine, a man I’d met in a club and known for only a week or so—Christ, can I be telling you this? I must, mustn’t I?—after I caught him stealing from me. Not money, not possessions, but something more personal. I mean, can there be anything more personal than one’s sperm? When I caught him putting the zip baggie, with the used condom inside, in one of those soft coolers you store sandwiches in, I reacted . . . violently. Out of fear, I guess. All I could think was that he was some kind of pervert, a freak. I didn’t wait to get an explanation. I forced it out of the son of a bitch. I could have killed him. I almost did kill him. But did he care, in his bloody endless coked-out stupor? He laughed at me as I clutched his wretched throat. Told me the seed wasn’t for him, but for someone he called Dumbo. Dumbo, he said, flew all over the world on his big ears dropping surprises wherever he went. He already had one dose from me and was on his way to deliver it to someone in the North. Someone who—bloody fuck, mate, are you okay?”