“She’s okay,” Lili said, unconvincing. “Just give her a second. She’s not hurting anyone.”
“Mom?” one of the little dancers asked with just the tiniest shade of fear.
Lili ducked her head in, right beside Audrey, exuding warmth and friendliness. “Sorry. Rude, I know. She can’t help herself. She’s just fascinated by this thing. Mirrors and antiques are, like, her two favorite things, so this just blows her mind.”
The dance moms huffed.
“She could wait until we’re done,” one of them said.
“I know, right?” Lili agreed. “But since you’re just sitting here and pretty much are done, you won’t mind if she just takes a quick look.”
Audrey heard all of this, sensed the irritation from the mothers and the anxiety from the little dancers. The waitress kept saying Ma’am, as if that would get her out of the psychomanteum. It wouldn’t.
“I don’t want to have to get a manager,” the waitress said.
“Oh, come on,” Lili started.
The two mothers huffed. One of them swore, causing the little dancers to giggle, hiding their smiles behind their hands, but then they were all getting up from their chairs and nudging past Audrey and Lili in a hasty, grumbling exit.
“Look at it this way,” Lili said, “you’ll have such a story about your trip to Boston.”
“That’s enough,” the waitress said. She turned and strode off to fetch someone of greater authority.
Audrey felt Lili’s hand on her elbow.
“Better make it quick.”
Inhaling deeply, wiping her sleeve across her forehead and cheeks, Audrey stepped nearer to the mirrored panes of one wall of the psychomanteum. She stared into the mirror, studied many facets of her own features, refracted in a hundred panes from every angle, splintered into infinite variations that retreated into the sinking distance only opposing mirrors can create. An eternity of tiny realities.
She saw no faces other than her own and Lili’s. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.
But she felt it. Holy shit, did she ever.
A malice as pure, a wrongness as deep, as any she had ever felt before.
Lili nudged her. “Hey. We have to go.”
Audrey blinked, wondering how long she had been standing there, staring into the mirrored forever of the psychomanteum. Her mind had taken a sideways step somewhere, and now she looked around and saw the waitress returning with an older woman in a skirt and a coat with an important-looking name plaque pinned to her breast. The officious, skinny little guy from the host station followed up the rear as if he thought he might be called upon to physically remove the troublesome visitors. All but two tables were clear of customers now. The patient husband had finished his coffee and was slipping on his jacket, but his wife was still texting.
“We’re going,” Lili promised the parade as she took Audrey by the arm and escorted her back through the restaurant.
“Break it apart,” Audrey said, feeling hollow. Transparent. It seemed as if she herself were a ghost, drifting through the room, trying to make the living see and hear her. “You can’t keep it in here. It’s too dangerous. Don’t you feel it? You’ve got to dismantle it again.”
“Antique dealer,” Lili said. “She’s just jealous. Wants it for herself.”
“I don’t want to call the police,” the manager said, winking white lights overhead glittering off her name plaque.
“We’re already gone. Trouble over,” Lili promised.
Audrey felt Lili take her hand and she allowed herself to be tugged through the lobby and into the revolving door, which deposited the two of them one at a time on the sidewalk in front of the Nepenthe Hotel.
The cold wind whipped around her, scouring the oily film from her skin.
She gasped, inhaling deeply, and blinked as she looked around.
It felt exactly like waking from a dream, but she knew she had been awake the entire time. That bit of truth was the part that made it a nightmare. The way she had felt inside that room, near the psychomanteum … it had passed, but she knew that if she went back inside, that aura of malice would envelop her again. You couldn’t wake up from reality.
The cold bit deep into her face and hands. Audrey wrapped her jacket more tightly around her as Lili stepped into the street and flagged a cab. The vehicle’s brakes squealed as it pulled to the curb, and then Lili grabbed her arm and escorted her to the cab.
“Not the house,” Audrey managed to say.
“Audrey—”
“I told you before, I’m not going.”
Lili stared at her, perhaps fully understanding the depth of her fear for the first time. “We’ll go to Tess’s house.”
“Good,” Audrey said. “She needs us.”
“What do you—”
The cabdriver honked, gesturing at them from behind the glass. Lili opened the door and Audrey slid into the backseat. When Lili followed her, Audrey nestled close against her simply because she was another human. A tangible, ordinary person, warm and alive.
As the taxi rolled out of the city, Audrey began to feel like herself again.
But there was still no way she was going to that house.
THREE
All the time he’d been using the chain on his handcuffs to saw away at the bolts connecting the post at his back to the concrete floor, Frank had poured all of his focus into that single, repetitive act. It ought to have been maddening, but he thought that somehow it had kept him sane, down there in the stinking, musty basement. His stomach growled as he paused for a breath, shoulders sinking. His muscles burned and his wrists skidded against the metal cuffs, slick with blood from where the constant friction and strain had bruised and chafed the skin.
Fury fueled this single-mindedness. He wanted to find the other Frank—Not-Frank, he’s not Frank—and smash his skull against the concrete floor. He wanted to chain the son of a bitch down here and make him piss and shit in a bucket, make him eat a few feet away from that bucket, turn his life into the three-foot circumference around that metal post bolted to the basement floor.
He scraped metal against metal. Skinned his knuckles on the concrete. Listened to the rasp of the handcuff chain against the rusty bolt. Could smell the rust as it flaked away, the metal as he ground it down. For long periods, he thought of nothing but the rusty bolt and that sound, and in those times he forgot that such a person as Frank Lindbergh existed. The longer he worked, the more progress he felt he must be making, the emptier he felt. Memory seemed like another country, the nation where he’d been born but which he had long ago left behind. He felt bloodless and hollow, not a husk so much as a balloon that had never been fully inflated. Nausea simmered in his belly, never quite enough to boil over, and it occurred to him that he had no feeling or emotion powerful enough to boil over except for his anger at his captor and the desire to cut through that goddamned rusty bolt.
When it gave way, his hands jerked forward and down and his scabby knuckles dragged along the cement. He whimpered and pulled his hands up—or tried. The handcuff chain caught hard, jarring his swollen, contorted shoulders and sending a fresh wave of pain crashing through him.
He took a deep, ragged breath, and then his eyes went wide as understanding dawned. Tugging against the cuffs, sliding the chain back and forth, he realized that he’d sawn through the first bolt. Giddy laughter bubbled up from his chest. He hung his head and began to giggle and sigh, then banged his back against the post several times, overcome with manic glee.
When his laughter began to subside, he steadied his breathing, still trembling with happiness and exhaustion. Steeling himself, he hauled the handcuffs forward, tugging the chain farther under the post toward the single remaining bolt, the one nearer to him. The chain caught between post and concrete and he froze with a terror that screamed through the hollow place inside him without a single echo.
“No,” he whispered. Or thought he did.
He yanked against the cuffs, tried to saw them from s
ide to side. The chafed, raw flesh at his wrists began to bleed even worse, but the cuffs did not move. The bottom of the post was closer to the concrete on this side, against his back. With a groan, he pulled forward and slammed himself against the post. His skull banged off the metal and for several long seconds his vision went gray and black. When he blinked back into consciousness, he did it again, careful for his head. Six times. Nine times. A dozen times he smashed his back into the post. If he couldn’t saw away at the second rusty bolt, he would use his weight to snap it.
Shaking with dreadful weakness, he slumped, without enough energy to hurl himself backward again. After a minute’s rest, he found that the handcuff chain was no longer clamped between post and floor, and began to drag it back and forth again. The metal would scour at the concrete, but he did not know how far he had to go to reach the second bolt, or how narrow the space between post and floor might be. It would take days, he was certain.
He didn’t have days.
A whimper came from his throat and he hung his head. Tears filled his eyes. When the first one fell, it ran cold down his cheek, no warmth in it or in his flesh. With a halfhearted roar, he slammed himself back against the post again, twice, and then a third time. He banged his skull backward on purpose, listened to the ring of bone on metal.
He frowned, thinking it seemed muffled, and then he just lay back against the post. A lightness filled him. He inhaled but could no longer smell the stink of his own waste or the filthy odor of his unwashed body. Staring at the bottom of the steps, he knew he would never use them, never escape this basement.
My basement? he wondered, unable to remember where he was.
Who he was.
A name danced along the rim of his thoughts but he could not quite grasp it.
Again he felt like a balloon, but now it was as if the air had begun to slowly leak out. He would die here, nothing and no one. His throat twitched, stomach convulsing, but there was nothing for him to throw up. Just emptiness.
He looked down at his stomach and froze. In the gray nothing light, for a moment it appeared as if his shirt had faded into transparency. Not just his shirt, either, but his body. For a sliver of a second, he thought he could see all the way through his abdomen to the concrete floor. Unable to breathe or to blink, he stared at his legs, which seemed mostly solid … but only mostly. If he tilted his head slightly, he thought they faded in the gray light, both there and not there.
Turning his head, he looked at his right shoulder, which was solid as ever.
Hallucinating. My mind is slipping. I’m dying.
But when he glanced at his left shoulder, it looked ghostly. It jolted him so hard that he slid to the right, trying to get away from the transparent part of him. He heard a clink of metal and frowned, unsure of its source. Then he felt his shoulders relax, felt them hunch forward to relieve the ache in his muscles.
“How?” he whispered in that gray basement.
He brought his left hand around and stared at it, trying not to scream at the sight of his transparent fingers. His chafed wrist had stopped bleeding. Then he pulled his right hand around and saw the handcuff tight around that wrist, the other cuff dangling from the chain, still tightly cinched.
The laughter returned, madder than ever. He doubled over, shaking as it bubbled out of him, uncontrollable. Tears ran freely and dripped to fall upon his bare legs, and this time he could feel their warmth. That brought him up short, choking his tears and his laughter.
Weak, unsteady, he leaned on the post and struggled to his feet. Taking a deep breath, he turned and started for the steps, pausing twice when his thoughts fuzzed and he worried he might pass out. When he made it to the stairs he turned around and stared at the post and at the bucket and he promised himself that he would never come down here again. Then he went upstairs, hoping to kill Frank.
No, he thought. That’s not his name.
Confusion swirled inside him as he reached the door. It had a lock, but somehow he remembered that there was not much to it. Drained as he was, he only had to throw himself at the door four times before the wood around the lock splintered and the door swung into a gloomily lit hallway.
For the count of ten he waited, expecting shouts or pounding feet, but the house just breathed and creaked and then he knew he was alone. Jaw set with determination, he ignored the hungry roar of his stomach and made his way up to the second floor to the master bedroom. When he saw himself in the mirror, fresh tears sprang to his eyes. His skinny legs and dirty underpants were bad enough, but the scruff of his beard and dark circles under his eyes made him look like a savage.
He glanced around the room and a kind of weight settled on his shoulders. A good weight. Solidity. The framed photos on top of the tall bureau stirred a bitterness in him that he did not yet understand, but he knew those faces.
Go, he thought. Run.
He glanced at the clock and saw that it was just after two in the afternoon. Since he could not remember what day it might be, he could not be sure when his captor would return, but he could not leave the house half-naked and without shoes. He needed clothes … and not just clothes.
Staggering into the bathroom, he got a closer look at himself in the mirror. He turned the faucet and fresh water spilled out, turned quickly hot, and began to steam. With his hands under the hot, clear flow, he let emotion overwhelm him again. Staring into his own eyes, he turned off the sink, reached out to open the medicine cabinet, and took out shaving cream and a razor. The razor felt comfortable in his hand, but he put it down.
A shave would come after a shower.
He opened the shower door and turned the water on. Stripping off his filthy T-shirt and underpants, he gagged from his own stink. He waited for the steam to rise before stepping beneath the spray. Only then did he look closely at his left hand, turning it over and pressing it against the shower tiles. He bent to investigate his legs, thin but solid.
As he soaped his body under the hot spray, the scent of Irish Spring triggered a memory of his father. Suddenly he knew his own name, and that he had been on the verge of vanishing from the world. Of forgetting himself forever.
It all came back to him, then, and he knew he wasn’t the only one in danger. Once he had climbed from the shower and dried off, he went to the closet in his parents’ old bedroom, hoping but doubtful that his double had continued to store his father’s SIG Sauer in the same place. To put it back in the same shoe box every morning when he left the house. But when he pulled the box down from its shelf, he felt its familiar weight and he smiled.
After that, he hurried. For the first time in a very long time, there were people who were depending on him.
They just didn’t know it yet.
FOUR
Driving to pick Maddie up from school, Tess felt her strength ebb. At first she thought it was just the stress and exhaustion of recent days catching up with her. Her eyelids fluttered and she sat up straighter, clutched the streering wheel a bit tighter, and opened the window to let the chilly air flow in. When she felt a twinge of emptiness in her gut, she tried to remember what she’d eaten that day. But as she turned into the street that ran alongside the schoolyard, she slumped forward against the wheel like someone had just hit a cosmic switch and powered her body down.
The car horn blared. She couldn’t lift her head from the wheel, her cheek pressed against its ridges. From the corner of her eye she saw the chain-link fence surrounding the playground and the after-school children chasing one another across the grass. The teacher tasked with overseeing them began to turn in response to the sound of the horn. The front-end alignment had been slightly off for a while—she’d been meaning to take it into the shop—and the car drifted to the right, toward the fence. All the strength gone from her, Tess had let her foot slip off the accelerator, but even as the car slowed it had enough momentum to take a section of fence down. The bodies of small children would fare no better than the chain-link.
One breath. Teeth gritted, she sl
id her foot back onto the brake. The teacher minding the kids in the playground shouted something, but the kids hadn’t had time to really understand, or to scream. Tess mustered up all that remained of herself and pushed down on the brake. The car slowed, but only when she put her hands back on the wheel and pushed herself back against the seat was she able to overcome her weakness. The car rolled to a stop inches from the fence.
She breathed. Put it into park. Lay her head back against the seat and let the chilly breeze blow through the windows. Her shoulder and spine throbbed with the old pain, strangely distant now. The teacher shouted at her, striding angrily toward the fence as autumn leaves skittered around her ankles and children gawked at the car that had just come to a stop kitty-corner with the fence.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the teacher barked at her. Then she must have gotten a clear look at Tess through the windshield, because her anger turned to worry. “Oh, my God, are you all right?”
Thinks I had a seizure or something, Tess thought. And then, well, didn’t you?
Her injuries throbbed, but that was good in a way, because it meant she could feel again. She wasn’t herself, but she could move. The empty hollow in her chest and her gut seemed to shrink, but as she put the car in gear and drove slowly around to the front of the school, carefully joining the pickup line, fear screamed into a crescendo within her. What had her doppelgänger done now? How she felt reminded her of the night she had seen the woman holding Maddie. It had drained away some of what made her who she was, and this felt the same way, as if her essence had grown somehow thinner, the way the air thinned at high elevation. There just wasn’t as much of her to breathe.
Paranoia crackled inside her, kept her moving. She needed to call Lili, not to mention Nick. The certainty that they ought to stay together had just become concrete in her mind. None of them was safe until this was over.
The car engine idled as she waited in the line, moving up one vehicle at a time as parents picked up their kids. Three cars back from the pickup point, she could see the vice principal and two teachers who were herding the kids, ducking their heads to greet the parents through car windows. When the Ford in front of her pulled away and Tess hit the gas, advancing to the designated point at the curb, she rolled down the passenger window. Mrs. Kenner, who taught third grade, knitted her brows in confusion as Tess drew to a stop.
Dead Ringers Page 20
