Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  “That’s not really true,” Audrey said after a moment. “I believe most of what people claim to be supernatural experiences is misinterpretation, hallucination, or invention. Most, not all. I’ve seen things I can’t explain. I’ve had some experiences myself.… I don’t want to go into it, really.”

  “But at the Harrison House—”

  “The Otis Harrison House creeped me the hell out because when they went down into that cellar it was full of dead people who had been trying to summon a demon to do their bidding, or whatever. But I found no evidence that…”

  She faltered.

  Lili came to a stop on the sand, watching her, and Audrey stopped as well.

  “What?” Lili prodded.

  Audrey turned to stare out at the waves. The wind kicked up and even with the sun out, the air grew colder.

  “There’s no evidence that the Society of the Lesser Key succeeded,” Audrey said, watching the surf roll in. “But I didn’t like the psychomanteum. So much malignant energy coming off it. And that pit in the cellar—”

  “Wait, you felt that stuff?” Lili asked quietly, going back over their time at the Harrison House, seeing it all again for the first time. “You never said a word.”

  “You hired me as an occult expert,” Audrey said, turning toward her again. “You didn’t want a medium. I was there to explain what you had found—who you had found—and help you determine its historical value. That’s all. Not to mention that, honestly, none of you should have needed me to tell you there was something wrong down there. You all felt it. You especially, Lili. Don’t you remember how sick you got while the pit was being excavated and all of the writing on the walls was being transcribed? There were a few days there when you couldn’t keep a bagel down, never mind a whole meal.”

  “I had a stomach bug.”

  “Yeah,” Audrey said. “There was a lot of that going around.”

  Now that she’d brought it up, Lili remembered how bad it was—how nearly every member of the team had been sick at some point.

  “Hilaria,” she said.

  Audrey nodded. “The Italian girl—”

  “Sicilian.”

  “—somebody took her over to the hospital and they had to give her drugs to stop her from throwing up. She was out for days. By the time she came back your team had dismantled the psychomanteum and filled that pit with dirt and rocks and mortar. For me, that was the end of it. Whatever unpleasant echoes were left over from the things those creepy fuckers did … they didn’t matter anymore.”

  Lili threw her hands up. “Except the psychomanteum’s out of storage. It’s been dusted off and put on display as a curiosity.”

  Audrey frowned. “The curator? Blaustein? Was this him?”

  “Nothing that simple,” Lili replied. She shook her head and gestured for Audrey to walk with her again, and they set off along the sand.

  Lili told her everything, beginning with Tess on the sidewalk with the man who looked like Nick and ending with the events of Friday night, outside First Light Gallery, and the blindfolded man sniffing the air and then staggering off into the shadows.

  “The raggedy man, I call him. In my head, anyway,” Lili said.

  Then she saw the way Audrey’s eyes had widened, the thin line of her lips where they pressed so tightly together.

  A knot of ice tightened in Lili’s stomach. She felt nauseous, as if Audrey’s reminder of her earlier sickness had summoned it up again.

  “What?” she said quietly, reaching out as Audrey stopped short on the sand.

  Audrey started back the way they’d come.

  “Hey!” Lili said. “Come on, you can’t just give me that look and then take off.”

  “We’re going back,” Audrey said.

  “What did I say?” Lili asked, hurrying to catch up. “Was it the raggedy man? I saw your eyes, Audrey. Have you seen him, too? If you know who he is, you need to—”

  She caught up and clutched Audrey’s arm.

  “I don’t know!” Audrey snapped, yanking her arm away. Her gaze went faraway a moment and then she turned to stare across the beach—across the street—back toward her home. “I have no idea who he is. I wasn’t even sure I’d really seen him. I get these … spells, I guess you’d say. I passed out a second, maybe, and I thought I saw this man and then he was gone. But it happens sometimes. I’ve seen things that are like waking dreams and…”

  Audrey stared. Put up a hand, though it wasn’t clear if the gesture was meant to halt her words and train of thought or to warn Lili to keep back.

  “I don’t want this,” she said quietly. “I don’t owe you guys anything. I like you, Lili. But I want to stick to research and helping people who are being taken advantage of by assholes pretending to talk to the dead. There’s a dark streak through all of this, something that goes back to that cellar. I felt it then and I don’t want anything to do with it now. I owe it to Julia to—”

  “I didn’t bring this to you,” Lili said.

  Audrey started for the road again, picking up her pace. “You called me, remember?”

  Lili chased after her. When Audrey crossed the road too fast, forcing a growling Ford Mustang to jerk to a halt on the pavement, Lili caught up. The driver laid on the horn and swore at them out the window, but both women ignored him. On the other side of the road, they hurried away from the water toward Audrey’s street.

  “I called you, yeah,” Lili said. “But if you saw the raggedy man, you were involved with this before I picked up the phone.”

  Audrey sagged as she walked, slowing enough that Lili didn’t have to hurry to keep up with her. Eyes closed, Audrey hung her head.

  “Fuck.”

  “You’re in it, Audrey,” Lili said gently. “And you’re the only person we know who has any hope of figuring out what the hell is going on.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” Audrey asked as they turned the corner onto her street.

  “Come to the hotel with us. Figure out who these doubles are. Maybe they’re another group like the Lesser Key assholes and this is some kind of glamour or whatever. See if you see or feel anything weird. I don’t know, Aud. This is your area.”

  Audrey gazed sadly at her house. “I don’t want it to be my area anymore.”

  “You know, on my way here I had half convinced myself it was nothing. Just coincidence, or someone screwing with us somehow. Then you started talking about what you sensed at the Harrison House and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. None of us wants anything to do with this. You’re not alone in that, and you’re not alone, period.”

  They reached the driveway. At Lili’s car, Audrey stopped and looked at her. When she spoke, it was with her voice low, just in case Julia might be within earshot of a window.

  “I’m on another case,” she said, “so I can’t do it tomorrow. I’ll meet you Tuesday. Just tell me when.”

  “Six o’clock,” Lili replied. “If you want to go earlier, we can manage, but we have jobs we’re supposed to be going to.”

  “Fine.”

  The ocean breeze kicked up, but instead of the clean salt air that Lili had smelled before, this time the wind brought that other ocean smell. Low tide and dead things.

  “One other thing,” Audrey said, pale with worry. “I’ll go with you to the hotel, but not over to the Harrison House. I don’t care how many raggedy men we see. I won’t go back to that place again.

  “Not ever.”

  MONDAY

  ONE

  Tess came awake in the middle of the night, body heavy with sleep and head full of muzzy cotton. Her eyes itched, and she blinked a few times while her head made sense of the clock she kept on top of the tall jewelry cabinet between her bedroom windows. The little red dot indicated that her alarm remained set, but it was the time that confounded her. It felt as if she’d been sleeping most of the night, but the numbers told a different story: 2:37. She’d been asleep less than three hours.

  She tugged the covers up to her neck, nestlin
g further into the bed, expecting to drift back to sleep. A tightness formed across her forehead and she felt herself tense. Insomnia had not plagued her in some time, but she was familiar with its army of small anxieties. Not tonight, she thought, shifting to make herself more comfortable. Suddenly nothing felt right to her. The pillow felt too warm, so she flipped it to the cool side. Her neck ached, and the cable box beneath the TV on her bureau buzzed too loudly.

  She sighed in frustration.

  Behind her, someone else sighed.

  Tess froze, breath trapped in her lungs. Fear crawled over every inch of her skin on tiny insect legs. Her back felt soft and yielding, the perfect home for the sharp plunge of a knife. Her itchy eyes burned with tears and her lungs with that held breath, her unvoiced scream. Seconds of paralysis ticked by without another sound and she tried to convince herself that she hadn’t heard it, but really there was only one way to do that. Only one way to know.

  How many times had she woken up in the night to a creak or a knock, or blinked and seen a jacket hanging from the closet door that for just a moment seemed an ominous shape? Only one way to ever really know for sure.

  She drew a breath, steeling herself.

  Behind her, someone else drew a breath. Followed by short exhalation, just a little thing. A quiet laugh.

  She pressed her eyes together, then opened them and stared again at the gleaming red numbers on her alarm clock.

  “Please,” she rasped. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t kill me. Please just go.

  A floorboard creaked, and a rush of very different emotion swept over her. If it meant a knife in her back or strangling hands around her throat, none of that mattered. Her visitor could not leave the room.

  Because Maddie slept right across the hall.

  This fear had a different hue, a cold and violent red, and she whipped back her covers and hurled herself off the other side of the bed. Her right hand found the nearest thing, the alarm clock, and she ripped it off the table, tugging the plug from the wall as she spun to face the sighing, laughing intruder.

  The alarm clock hung by its cord in her hand.

  Of course, Tess thought.

  The clothes were unfamiliar. Dark turtleneck sweater and yoga pants. The earrings that glittered in the dark had to be real and expensive. Otherwise, the woman was Tess. Her mirror.

  Seeing Nick on that street corner and understanding that it wasn’t really him had been one thing, but this was something different. Lili had seen the artist through the window at First Light Gallery and had paled, unraveled by it. Tess felt herself unraveling now, faced with the impossible, the simply-cannot-be. In her mind she could almost hear the tearing of fabric, as if all her life she had been wandering through a grand performance and never understood that other truths existed beyond the curtains.

  “You can’t be here,” she said.

  The double opened her hands, palms up, and gave a small shrug. “And yet I am.”

  My hands, Tess thought. My shrug.

  And in the next room, her daughter.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said, her voice lowering as she made her way around the end of the bed, heart thundering, still holding the clock by its cord. “I don’t know what you people are or what you want with us, but you can’t be here. You want to meet, tell me where and when and I’ll sit down with—”

  The woman sneered. It made her ugly.

  She took a step forward. Tess took a step back.

  That was all it took—that step back.

  The double came at her in terrible silence. Tess tried to lift the alarm clock, to swing it at the woman’s face, but the step back had set her off balance. As she whipped the clock around, the double lunged inside the arc of the swing. One hand on Tess’s throat, she thrust backward and the two of them careened into the wall just inches from a window frame.

  “Don’t you fucking—”

  “Don’t I what?” the woman whispered, tightening her grip on Tess’s throat. “Don’t I dare?”

  With her free hand, she smashed Tess in the face once, twice, a third time. Blood filled Tess’s mouth and she struggled to get an arm up, blocking the next blow. One foot against the wall, she pistoned forward and hurled the woman across the room. The double smashed into the bureau, shattering the mirror attached to its back. She cried out in pain and Tess relished the sound, wanted to make her do it again.

  My daughter, my baby, is in the other room. You think you can come in here …

  Her thoughts trailed off. The double stood there, sneering again, and Tess saw that somehow she’d snagged the cord of the alarm clock. Tess looked down at her own hand, opened and closed it, finding it empty. For half a second, she wondered if it was possible that she was the double and the other woman was Tess. What could she truly say was impossible?

  But no. Tess wore a faded Tufts University T-shirt. The bitch wore black.

  “Mumma?” Maddie called from her room, woken by the shattering mirror, voice plaintive and afraid. “Mummy?”

  The bedroom door stood open. The night-light in the hall cast a dim golden glow. Tess looked through that door and prayed that Maddie would not appear, that she would not see this. She glanced back at her double and froze, paralyzed by the sight of the woman’s face … by the desiccated skin and the wisps of hair and the gaping pit where one eye had been. Tight gray skin like dry parchment stretched tautly across the skull and the lips had receded to reveal yellow, too-sharp teeth. Something moved and buzzed beneath the dry skin of the woman’s throat and Tess blinked and took a step back when she saw. When she understood. A wasp crawled out of a split in that withered flesh—they had built a nest in there.

  Shaking, Tess barely realized she had screamed.

  Then Maddie called for her again.

  “Stay there, baby,” the double called, the skin at the edges of her mouth ripping as she grinned. “Everything’s all right. Mumma’s coming.”

  Tess could not breathe. But she could not let that happen. “Not a chance—”

  Her double whipped the clock up and around on its cord. Tess dodged too late. The woman put ferocious strength into her swing and the clock struck Tess in the skull, shattering plastic and drawing blood. She went down hard on the floor, cut her hands on broken shards of mirror, and felt the hot trickle in her hair and on her scalp, blood spilling down her cheek. The world went sideways and blurred around her, flickering like some nightmare zoetrope vision of her bedroom, her safest place, her home.

  The woman stepped in and kicked her in the gut and Tess twisted sideways and threw up on the carpet. Saw stylish boots, zipped on the side. One boot kicked her again, this time in the side, and she couldn’t breathe or think.

  Maddie cried out again, much more afraid.

  “Mumma!”

  Once again the image of Tess, as if that death face had never existed, turned toward the corridor with a thin smile on her lips. “Coming.”

  She kicked Tess again.

  Turned and left the room.

  Tess closed her eyes on darkness. Opened them on darkness, save for the golden light from the hall. Smelled her own blood but didn’t try to staunch it. Stood uneasily and propped herself with a hand against the wall, driving a shard of mirror glass deeper into her palm. Bright pain snapped her alert. The world blurred again as she stepped back but she shook her head, snarling in pain as she tugged the glass from her palm, then whipped her head around again, thinking of the hallway. The night-light.

  Her daughter.

  “No.” The word came out a whisper that did not reflect the roar building inside of her.

  Breath coming hard, she stumbled for the door and into the hall. Into that golden night-light glow where dreams and nightmares had always seemed possible to her. Tess braced herself on the wall, streaked her bloody palm along the paint, but froze just outside Maddie’s room. From within came a soft maternal shushing.

  “It’s all right, baby. I just made a mess,” the double said softly. “Sorry if I scared y
ou. Just go back to sleep and everything will be all right in the morning.”

  Tess leaned on the doorframe and turned to look inside the room. The other one—her other self—sat on the edge of the bed, hugging Maddie to her. The two of them, not-mother and daughter, had their faces buried in each other’s hair the way Tess and Maddie always did when they hugged good-night.

  “I was scared,” Maddie said quietly, the hitching remnants of a sob still in her voice. “It was loud.”

  “It was,” the other mother agreed.

  No. The other me, but Maddie only has one mother.

  It tore her heart out just to look at them. Not-Tess had perfect hair, even in the middle of the night. In the starlight streaming through the windows, her skin seemed impossibly smooth and pale and perfect. Fit and stylish and in control, all things that Tess wanted to be but never quite achieved.

  “Mumma,” Maddie said quietly, content and snuggling against a stranger. “You smell really good.”

  The double glanced up at the doorway, at Tess. Her smile had sharp edges.

  Something fled her then. Not just strength—what remained of it—but spirit. Tess staggered backward, clutching at her nightshirt and staring down at her chest as some invisible hand sank into the core of her and pulled, ripping loose a fragment of her everything. Love, passion, fear, self-image, motherhood. It all leeched from her and made her less, drained far more from her than blood loss ever could, and she felt it go.

  Whimpering, she collapsed to the floor, wanting nothing more than to lie there. To recover some of what she had lost. But in the bedroom Maddie was still cuddling with something wrong, something that shouldn’t exist. Her daughter couldn’t see that it wasn’t her mother who comforted her. If the woman who was not Tess wanted to lift her up and carry her away, Maddie would not balk. She wouldn’t know any better.

  Hate fueled Tess now as she turned and dragged herself along the hardwood, slipping once on her bloody palm but then plodding ahead, more determined. At her bedroom door, she managed to prop herself up into a crawl. Always wary of power outages, she maintained one phone in the apartment that plugged into the wall instead of being portable and battery-powered. The ugly yellow phone sat on her nightstand, and it was this that kept her moving.