Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  Troubled, she ran on, relishing the pumping of her blood and the sound of the crashing waves. The wind cut in across the water and swept over her, but she only picked up her pace, letting the effort warm her.

  No way our house is haunted, she thought.

  Trying not to think about it. Trying and failing.

  No way. They had been living in the house more than three years. If some malignant spirit had been left behind by an earlier owner, she would have felt its presence sooner. Julia worked as a copywriter for a Boston ad agency, an ordinary-world job, but she believed in ghosts and she believed in Audrey. The two of them had insisted that the real estate agent search the history of the house to find out if anyone had ever died inside. There were no guarantees, of course. Babies died in their cribs and old folks passed in their sleep—not everything would be in the available records. Julia worried about what she called her wife’s “sensitivity,” but they had been satisfied that the house was clean.

  Three years, and now this, Audrey thought, racing along the sidewalk. A pair of fiftyish women were walking a dog ahead and she stepped off the curb, running past them in the street. It makes no sense.

  Without breaking stride, she returned to the sidewalk. The streetlamps began to flicker off, though the sun had yet to crest the horizon. Down on the beach, a tall guy in a knit cap tossed a Frisbee along the sand for his dog, who darted and barked like a happy maniac. The sight brought a smile to Audrey’s lips and finally she felt as if the last of the morning’s lingering emotions had bled out of her.

  The cramps hit her again.

  Hate and hunger like twin daggers in her gut.

  She doubled over, moving too fast, and pitched to the sidewalk. Hands too slow to break her fall, she drew them toward her instead, twisted on her side to avoid breaking an arm. Her right knee hit the sidewalk just before her shoulder and then her skull. In the back of her mind, buried deep behind the violent animus that filled her, she realized she had made a mistake. If she’d sacrificed the skin of her palms, risked a broken forearm, her skull wouldn’t have struck the sidewalk. Pain shot through her head and she blacked out, coming to a moment later in a fog of ill will. The desire to hurt someone had never been so strong. It seemed to her that only with her hands around a throat or gripping a knife with which she could draw blood—only then could she fill the void that carved itself into her core.

  Lying on the sidewalk, she felt the tears burning her cheeks. The emotions frightened and humiliated her.

  This is not me, she thought furiously. I am not made like this.

  Audrey smelled blood and knew it must be her own. Spikes of pain jabbed her skull and she could feel cold air on her right knee where her yoga pants had torn. Hot blood steamed in the chilly morning air, soaking the fabric. She felt it trickling into her hair, sticky, and she wanted to reach up to touch the spot where she’d banged her head but she worried what she might find.

  The hostility roiled in her, ebbing and flowing like the ocean.

  “Stop,” she said through gritted teeth, one hand on her belly. The nausea came in waves that matched the surging emotion and she fought them both.

  This is not me, she thought.

  Fighting the pain in her skull—real pain that belonged only to her—she used her left hand to push herself up until she could kneel. On hands and knees, body aching, right knee bleeding, she breathed deeply and tried to cycle that poisonous hatred out of her body again.

  Glancing up, she saw him.

  A homeless man in a long black coat that hung open and flapped in the wind, revealing torn rags for clothes and a lining that seemed woven of impossibly dark shadows. Across his eyes he had tied a filthy strip of a cloth like a battlefield dressing. A blindfold.

  A blind man? she thought.

  The blindfolded man—the rag man—cocked his head back and inhaled deeply, breathing in the ocean air. A fresh paroxysm of revulsion and hatred clutched at her. Pain spiked through her skull and her stomach convulsed. Audrey felt bile burning up the back of her throat and she twisted and vomited so hard that her entire body went rigid. Her vision swam with blackness and she nearly fell unconscious again. The smell of vomit forced her to shuffle on her knees, wincing in pain, away from the puddle she had made and she breathed tentatively, afraid she would throw up again.

  Distant cries reached her and at first she thought they came from seagulls wheeling overhead. She frowned deeply as she realized the cries sounded muffled, and that they came from straight-ahead.

  Again she lifted her gaze and stared at the rag man with his dirty blindfold. He had come no closer but she winced as she realized that she could smell him, and that the stink of him was worse than the smell of the puddle she’d left behind a moment ago. She groaned in disgust and stared at him, stared at the shifting black shadows inside his coat.

  The hatred drained out of her and with it that hollowness. Fear slid into the vacancy they left behind and suddenly she wanted to run.

  “Stay away,” she said, the pain from smashing her head jabbing into her with every word.

  An icy chill swept over her, gooseflesh prickling her skin, but it had not been the wind. This chill had come from inside her.

  The sun crested the eastern horizon, out over the water, and she squinted and glanced away from its brightness.

  When she glanced up again, the blindfolded man was gone.

  TWO

  As she parked her car around the corner from the Somerville Theater, Tess did her best to fight off the guilt of having left Maddie at home. It wasn’t just that she had left her daughter with the babysitter again—though just for a couple of hours today. What troubled her was that she and Nick were going to be together and she had not brought Maddie along. It would have been impossible to have the conversation that needed to take place if her daughter had been there, but she knew she was sinning by omission, not telling Maddie about it.

  Tess went to pay at the meter, irritated to find it was one of the old styles, requiring coins. She dug around in the various cup holders in her car until she had enough quarters to buy her an hour and fifteen minutes of parking, plunked the coins into the meter, and then hurried along the street. Her phone marked the time as 11:18 A.M., nearly twenty minutes after the others would have arrived. She wondered how much Lili would have told them—wondered if Nick and Aaron would even have stuck around after that.

  It was Saturday morning in Davis Square. People stood on the sidewalk and read the marquee of the Somerville Theater, which showed movies but also still hosted the occasional concert. Tess and Nick had seen The National there back before Maddie had been born. The lyrics to one song had stuck in her brain. It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders. The song had resonated with her afterward as she tried to figure out how love could ever be terrible. Eventually she realized that a love full of doubts and reservations could never be anything but terrible. Full of spiders.

  She waited for the light to cross the street. Hipsters played hacky sack. A little anti-oil demonstration had been set up on the island across from the T station. A white guy with thick dreadlocks played guitar and sang “Skinny Love” with the voice of an angel. Once, Davis Square had been run-down, just a spot students had to pass through on the way to Harvard Square, but now Harvard Square was full of chain stores and business lunches, and Davis had become the home of the authentic hipster. The hippie atmosphere had a vitality that made her glad to be there, no matter the circumstances that had brought her.

  On that crisp morning, Davis Square felt solid and real. After the previous evening’s events, she needed real.

  A chilly breeze whistled along the sidewalk as she made her way toward Diesel Cafe. Tess shuddered and turned up the collar of her jacket, wishing she’d worn a scarf. As she passed a restaurant, she glanced at her reflection in the plate glass window, and it unsettled her to see that ghostly, transparent version of herself. Others passed by in the reflection. She could see them in the glass, crossing the street. A
little Volkswagen passed by, itself the ghost of a car.

  She reached Diesel Cafe, smiling in spite of her troubles when she saw the rocket ship logo on the front door. She grabbed the door handle, glancing at her reflection in the glass door. Behind her, a woman stood on the sidewalk across the street—a woman her height, with the same curls and the same hue to her skin. A woman with her face.

  Tess froze, staring at the reflection of that distant figure. Inside the café, a man tapped on the door and she jumped, startled by the sound.

  “Sorry,” he said as he exited the café. “You looked distracted and I didn’t want to smack you with the door.”

  Tess smiled and brushed it off, barely aware of the words she was speaking. As he left, she held the open door and turned to look across the street just in time to see the woman entering a small stationery store. Not my imagination, she thought, but was this really her double, or just a woman with similar hair?

  “Tess. You coming in or are you just gonna stand there?”

  Blinking, Tess turned to see Lili standing in the open door of the Diesel Cafe. She glanced again at the stationery store, feeling the powerful urge to go over there, to see her double face-to-face, if that had indeed been her double. Her skin prickled with revulsion. If she went over there anything might happen, and she had a daughter to take care of. She told herself it wasn’t just the fear that stopped her from investigating.

  “What is it?” Lili asked, her expression darkening as she realized something was truly wrong.

  Tess shook her head. “Nothing. Something for later, maybe. Sorry I’m late.”

  Lili stared across the street as Tess entered the café, but if she saw anything strange, she said nothing. Instead, she led Tess toward the back of the café to a four-top table where Nick waited with Aaron Blaustein. It gave Tess a shiver to see Aaron, after she thought she had seen him last night at the Nepenthe Hotel. She told herself that could not have been the same man as the one sitting in the corner at the back of the café, sipping tea and picking at a slice of peach coffee cake.

  When he spotted Tess, Nick rose to greet her.

  “How’s Maddie?” he asked as he leaned in to kiss her cheek, one hand on her arm. No smile, and no recrimination for the strange phone call she’d made to him two days earlier.

  “Home, coloring with Erika,” she said.

  Aaron kept his seat in the corner. They hadn’t seen each other in more than a year, but he did not even glance up—just held his teacup and kept swirling the last of its contents in a circle as if the motion of the brown liquid mesmerized him.

  “I guess Lili’s already laid it out for you,” Tess said, glancing from Aaron to Nick.

  “You were late and they were impatient,” Lili said.

  Nick searched Tess’s eyes. “I’m trying to tell myself this is some kind of gag, that you guys are playing a joke, and maybe if we were still married that would make some sense to me. But we don’t have that kind of relationship anymore—”

  “Why don’t we sit down?”

  He hesitated, looking at her almost angrily. Lili took a seat next to Aaron, so Tess slid out a chair and sat across from her. Nick stared at her.

  “You two must be—” he started.

  Aaron set his teacup down hard enough to get their attention. “Nick. Take a fucking seat.”

  After a moment, Nick complied. He glanced at Aaron but then turned a laser focus back on his ex-wife.

  “Stop looking at her like that,” Aaron said.

  He used a fork to split off a piece of his coffee cake, breaking it up idly with no apparent intention to eat another bite. Then he dropped the fork as if he’d caught himself doing something that offended him and looked around the table.

  “This isn’t a delusion, because it wouldn’t be affecting both of you,” he said. Aaron Blaustein had always come off as something of an asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “No. It’s not a delusion,” Tess confirmed.

  “Okay,” Aaron said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “There are some things you apparently saw at the Nepenthe Hotel last night that Lili wasn’t in the room to witness. We’ve heard her version. I’d like to hear yours.”

  Tess took a deep breath, unused to speaking of impossible things to anyone other than Lili, who had reason to believe her. Still, this had been the reason they had asked the guys to meet them, so she launched into the story and told it as swiftly and succinctly as possible. When she had finished, Nick stared at her again.

  “This guy,” Nick said. “How much does he look like me, really?”

  Tess felt her skin flush. “I don’t think there’s anyone who’s seen you as up close as I have for as long a period of time. Not yet, anyway. If this guy was sitting here at the table, I think I’d be able to tell the difference, but only based on mannerisms and the fact that he’s in a little better shape than you. I doubt anyone else would be able to tell. Maybe not even Maddie.”

  “Maddie’s my daughter.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Nick swore, shaking his head.

  The server came over and smiled politely as she took their coffee orders, perhaps sensing the tension around the table. Lili ordered a cinnamon twist but Tess could not imagine eating anything.

  “Tess,” Aaron said when the server had departed, arrogant as ever, trying to be in control of something uncontrollable. “You’re sure the psychomanteum at the hotel is the one we found at the Otis Harrison House?”

  “Not a hundred percent,” she said. “How could I be? But it shouldn’t be hard to find out.”

  “Come on,” Lili said. “What are the odds of there even being another psychomanteum in Boston?”

  Aaron blinked. “Admittedly not great.”

  A quiet came upon them. The sounds of the café continued unabated, voices and clinking spoons and Amos Lee playing softly from the speakers overhead. Tess figured they were all thinking about the project that had first brought them all together, the dig that had taken place in the cellar of the Otis Harrison House. A man named Silas Ford had bought the historic mansion and hired contractors to restore it to its original grandeur. In the process, Ford’s contractor had discovered a stairwell hidden behind a false wall. Since the wall was not part of the architect’s design, the contractor had removed it and then descended into a rear cellar that was not in any of the records Aubrey Ford had found referencing the house.

  In that cellar, the contractor had found the psychomanteum, covered in dust but otherwise intact and in pristine condition. But it wasn’t the apparition box that had brought about the intervention of the New England Historical Museum and the Bostonian Society, or drawn in an archaeological team from Boston University. In the center of the room, a section of the stone floor had fallen into what the worried contractor told a justifiably panicked Aubrey could only be a sinkhole underneath the house. The walls and floor around the sinkhole had been covered in occult symbols.

  The contractor and the house’s owner cared more about that sinkhole than they did about the five withered corpses they had found in a circle around it, or the one they had discovered inside the psychomanteum itself. Though Aubrey Ford admitted to the temptation to making the bodies vanish, knowing that such a find could seriously impede his restoration of the house, his fear that the contractor and his employees would be unable to keep the discovery secret forced him to involve city officials.

  Ford’s fears had been justified. The restoration had been put on hold while experts were consulted, and soon a small archaeological team was at work beneath Beacon Hill. Lili and Nick had been brought in to oversee and catalog the work and any discoveries, with Tess and Aaron as consultants for the Bostonian Society and the museum, respectively. Given the obvious occult elements of the site, Tess and Nick had asked around and eventually brought Audrey Pang in to advise the rest of the team on what, exactly, they might be dealing with.

  It was Audrey who had identified the psychomanteum
and who had explained what she believed the dead people in that cellar had been doing on the day they died.

  Summoning a demon, she had said.

  Tess remembered the conversation well, even though two years had passed.

  You mean trying to summon a demon, Nick had replied.

  Audrey had arched an eyebrow. If you say so.

  Tess had not taken her very seriously after that. Audrey had a great deal of knowledge, but her beliefs were of the sort that the pragmatist in Tess had always scorned. Among the other items found with the corpses had been a journal in which their leader, Simon Danton, had identified them as a group of occultists who called themselves the Society of the Lesser Key, after a seventeenth-century magical grimoire entitled The Lesser Key of Solomon. In the journal, Danton had made it clear that they were conducting a séance, trying to replicate the work of someone they called “the master,” and that they had built the psychomanteum as some sort of safeguard, to prevent them from sharing his fate … whatever that had been.

  An autopsy had not offered any conclusion as to the cause of death for the six corpses in that cellar, though a journalist who had taken an interest in the case would later suggest that the occultists could have taken poison. Tess had allowed herself to believe the explanation of poison because there was something tidy about it, and it allowed her not to wonder anymore.

  Audrey had gone through Danton’s journal and translated the bits that had not been written in English, but learned little more. Frustrated, she had pursued outside research that eventually led her to uncover the writings of an arcane scholar who had actually mentioned the 1897 disappearance of the Society of the Lesser Key in his memoir. According to Audrey, the society had been following in the footsteps of Cornell Berrige, a man of distinct wealth and occult beliefs of his own. Berrige had bought the Otis Harrison House in 1868 and vanished two years later without an heir.