“Frank,” Nick said. “Jesus—”
He started to reach for the man but Lili grabbed fistfuls of his shirt to stop him. Nick started to shrug her off.
“Wait,” Tess said, staring at the emaciated thing at her door that might once have been Frank Lindbergh. “How did you get here so fast?”
Frank could barely lift his head to look her in the eye. “What?”
“I just talked to you five minutes ago,” Lili snapped. “You said half an hour!”
“No,” Frank said weakly. “You didn’t talk to me.”
SEVEN
Frank sat at Tess Devlin’s kitchen table wondering if he might be asleep and dreaming. He blinked to clear his blurry vision and took a deep breath, feeling the solidity of the wooden chair beneath him. Tucked into the rear waistband of his jeans, the gun pressed against the small of his back. His stomach felt a bit queasy, but when it growled he realized what he felt was not nausea but hunger. Nick was in the middle of asking him a question—there had been a lot of questions—but Frank found it hard to focus.
“Am I dreaming?” he asked.
“What?” Nick asked.
Audrey Pang—whom Frank had nearly forgotten before discovering her here in the kitchen with the others—leaned over and pinched his arm. Pinched hard, with a twist.
“Jesus!” Frank inhaled sharply, rubbing at the place she’d pinched, and realized that the flesh felt solid. His thoughts were clear.
“Does that feel like a dream?” Audrey asked. It was a smart-ass thing to say, but there was no smirk on her face when she said it. Frank looked into her eyes and realized that she genuinely wanted to help.
“What the hell was that?” Nick said, staring at the woman.
Audrey shrugged. “We don’t have time to be gentle. If this is the real Frank, that means the other one’s still on the way.”
“Frank,” Lili Pillai said, warming her hands around a fresh mug of coffee. “You think you can string a few sentences together now? You look like hell, and I’m inclined to believe you’re the real thing. From what we’ve seen, our doppelgängers are always slick and healthy … like the best versions of us.”
Frank heard Tess mutter something he couldn’t make out, saw the others shift uncomfortably. He laughed softly, vision blurring a bit again.
“Always liked you, Lili,” he said, blinking his eyes. “Your subtle way of saying I look like shit.”
“You showed up at the door with parts of you fucking transparent. Literally transparent,” Nick said. “Flesh and bone can’t do that. So if we have a hard time believing you’re you—”
“That’s no indicator,” Audrey interrupted. “Tess looked the same when Lili and I arrived in the middle of the chaos with your doubles.”
They all hesitated, then, staring at Frank as they tried to digest the idea that human beings could just fade into intangibility, like living ghosts.
“Can I get something to eat?” Frank asked. “I’ve been in my basement for who knows how many days, eating whatever the guy wearing my face felt like bringing me.”
“So we believe him now?” Nick asked sharply.
Frank winced at his tone and glared at him.
“Nick, don’t,” Audrey said softly, gazing at each of them in turn, a calming presence. “We’re all scared. We’d be stupid to be anything but terrified, but we need to remember that the only help we can expect is from the other people around this table. Now, Nick, what’s your issue? Why don’t you trust him?”
Nick studied him intently. “Why are you here?”
“I told you why,” Frank said. “The guy—my double, to use your word—he didn’t tell me everything but he told me he’d met with you all, that you believing he was me was one of the things letting him suck the … the me out of me.”
“No,” Nick said. “Why are you here? At Tess’s house? How did you know we would be here? How did you even know where she lives?”
Frank sighed. “I’ve been here before.”
Nick glanced at Tess for confirmation.
She nodded.
“We stayed in touch after the Harrison House project,” Frank said, glancing awkwardly at Audrey and Lili, wondering if they knew about the night at the party when he and Tess had gotten cozy. From her expression, it was clear Lili did.
“Things have not been good for me since most of you have seen me. I’ve lost both of my parents. After my mother died, I needed someone to talk to, and Tess and I met for coffee. I dropped her off here afterward.” Frank looked at Nick. “That’s all.”
Nick raised his hands. “None of my business anymore.”
“Even so,” Frank said. Then he turned to Tess. “My double talked about you. I came to you because we’re all in danger. Can I get something to eat now?”
Tess smiled wanly as she rose and turned toward the refrigerator.
“What else can you tell us?” Audrey asked. “Tell me everything you remember your double saying about us, or about what was happening to you.”
“I don’t—” Frank began.
A knock at the door interrupted him. They all froze, staring at one another. After a second or two, Nick got up and padded quickly toward the front of the house, taking pains to be as quiet as he could. Frank stood, but had to steady himself by leaning on the table a moment, stronger but still too weak to rush anywhere. He took a breath and then followed Nick into the hallway, past bedrooms and a bathroom. Nick had slipped into the living room just to the left of the foyer and Frank watched him draw back the curtains for a quick look out the window at the visitor on the front steps.
“Who is it?” Frank whispered.
Nick let the curtain fall back into place. He’d gone pale as he glanced back over his shoulder.
“It’s you, Frank.”
EIGHT
On the first floor of the Otis Harrison House, Officer Steven Parmenter leaned against an interior wall and caught his breath. The birds had stopped slamming against the door, but how long ago had that happened? He narrowed his eyes and shifted his feet, staring at the nearby window. Had the slant of afternoon light been altered? Moments ago, it had seemed the sun was higher in the sky, but now the angle of the shaft of daylight coming through the window had moved. A blizzard of dust motes floated across that span of sunshine.
Steven glanced away, listening to the muttering voices deeper inside the house, and when he looked back the light had shifted again. His legs felt stiff, as if he had been standing in that one position much longer than he imagined.
The muttering inside the house, that whispering that seemed to come from other rooms and yet from just beside his ear simultaneously … stopped. He cocked his head and listened, holding his breath, and just when he thought it had ceased completely, he heard the voice again. It spoke a language he did not understand, but that pause and the words that now flowed made him feel as if his presence had been noted. As if someone inside the Harrison House had said, You. I can see you. Come closer.
“Fuck you,” he murmured. The whisperer in the dark heart of that old home might not know English, but he was sure it would understand his tone.
He blinked and the daylight dimmed just slightly.
“Fuck you,” he said again, and forced his legs to move.
He had to drag himself forward as if he were wading up to his chest in the ocean, slogging toward the door he had used to enter. Focused on the knob, jaw clenched tight from the effort, Steven grabbed hold of it and turned. The knob rotated perhaps an eighth of an inch and then clicked. Steven rattled it back and forth. The door had been unlocked when he had needed to enter to escape the birds, but that had changed. He twisted again, heard the click, felt the resistance.
Locked.
The voice again, a variation on the same words as last time. Still unintelligible, but something inside his chest translated them as a summons. A beckoning, like a hook planted in his heart and dragging him forward. Steven turned from the door and went deeper into the dark, letting his fingers
trail along a wall. The gloom in the room had grown ever dimmer, but he did not allow himself to glance at the window again, not wanting to see how swiftly the day bled out.
He wore a thin flashlight on his belt and now he unsnapped it and clicked it on, shining the tight beam into the corridor. Visitors to the Otis Harrison House could have argued over which was truly the first floor. He had come in from the side entrance, which was on street level, but the front door of the house was elevated, the tiny front yard with its path and trees higher up than the road. The front door opened into what was technically the second floor. Steven shone his flashlight down the corridor, attentive for the whisper or creak that might reveal the location of whoever spoke to him now in that dreadful old parchment voice in that ugly, guttural language more foreign than any he had ever heard. He heard no sound, not even the natural shifting, the breathing that came with a house as old as this one.
The voice had gone silent.
As if he’d been released from the drag of the amniotic sac that had seemed to engulf him, his arms and legs were his own. He took a breath and hurried across the darkened hall. His penlight picked out the bottom treads of a stairwell going upward, and he took the steps two at a time. The hair stood up on the back of his neck and he shivered. Only as he reached the top step did he feel the bounce of his service pistol against his hip and he froze, reaching for the gun.
Why hadn’t it occurred to him to draw his weapon? He felt sure it had, but somehow he had not done so. Steven did it now, drawing the gun as he turned into the second-floor hallway. The stairwell had been almost pitch-black, but here the rooms and hall were lit by the late-afternoon light that came through the windows. Time had passed—far more than the few minutes he thought he’d spent inside the house—but it hadn’t been skimming by at the speed he had feared.
Unless it’s no longer Tuesday, he thought.
“Stop,” he whispered, angry with himself for imagining such things.
The voice returned, so cold and close and intimate that he spun around, sure whoever had uttered those words must be standing just over his shoulder. He stared back along the corridor, the dry, papery voice prickling his skin with gooseflesh, and he retreated toward the front door. Gun in one hand, he had to make a choice about what he would put down and the penlight made far more sense, so he clicked it off and snapped it to his belt. Reaching backward, he kept watch over the corridor, heart thumping so hard in his chest that every beat pained him. His fingers found the cold metal knob and he gave it a twist, not at all surprised that it did not budge. A quick glimpse showed him the dead bolt and he managed to twist it, unlocking the door.
It wouldn’t open. Steven turned to seek another lock but saw none. He twisted the knob harder and shook the door in its frame, but it was wedged firmly in place. Cursing under his breath, he moved into the front parlor. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceilings and small tumbleweeds of dust eddied about in the currents of air his entrance had disturbed. He looked out the window at the front steps and the small green patch of yard. There were dead birds on the grass and half a dozen of them on the steps. His pulse quickened when he saw the blue lights flashing and zeroed in on a pair of police cars that were parked half a block away, down at street level. Reporters were out there as well. He saw a camera truck from Channel 5 and one from the local Fox affiliate.
The voice of Harrison House whispered in his ear, and Steven batted at its insinuating tone as if it might be swatted away like a fly. The voice was more than a nuisance, but he couldn’t listen. Couldn’t think about it.
“Hey!” he shouted, slapping the glass. “Up here!”
He turned the lock on the window and tried to force it up so he could call to the officers or the press down below. The lock moved, but the window would not. As if it had swollen in its tracks, the wood refused to budge.
“That’s enough,” he said.
Stepping back to avoid flying glass, he smashed the barrel of his gun against the window, which showed no scratch or crack. Holding his breath, he tried harder, striking the glass again. The whisper came in his ear, but it seemed much louder now. Much closer. As if the thing speaking to him were inside his own skull.
Baring his teeth, Steven struck the window a third and a fourth time, then backed away from it. His hands were shaking as he wiped sweat from his brow. How could he be sweating when it was so cold in here? He left the parlor, returning to the front door, and saw his breath fogging the air. With his heart thrashing inside his chest, he did not even attempt to open the door again. Instead, he took aim and fired three times, tearing up the wood around the knob and smashing the mechanism so that it hung loosely from the hole. He fired again, shooting at the part of the doorframe where the latch protruded into the metal strike plate. With a single pull, he yanked the wreckage of the knob out of the door and it clattered to the floor. Thrusting his fingers in through the hole, he tried to pull the door toward him but it didn’t budge.
Hollowed by despair, he slumped against the door and it gave way, swinging outward. With nothing to grab hold of, he pitched onto the steps and fell, end over end, in a darkness that was impossible. The gun flew from his hand and preceded him, thumping down the stairs. He struck his right knee and the back of his head and racked his spine on the steps—too many steps—until he landed in a sprawl on cold, uneven stones, in a dank, moldy darkness that was not the late-afternoon sunlight of the front yard of the Otis Harrison House.
Frantic, reeling at the impossibility of it, he reached for his penlight and was surprised to find it still there. With a click, he shined the narrow beam into the darkness of what could only be the cellar. His gun lay on the stones just a few feet away and he scrambled over to pick it up. Blood dripped down the back of his neck, and his knee and back throbbed as he rose shakily to his feet.
The urgent whisper came to him again, beckoning him forward. Shaking his head in mute refusal, he backed toward the stairs. Three steps, then three more, and another two before he realized the staircase could not be so far away. Steven turned to find that he’d advanced deeper into the cellar … deep enough that he now stood only half a dozen steps from a pit in the center of the room, a place where the stones had collapsed down into a yawning hole. His breath fogged the air, so cold and yet thick and humid, a greasy film coating his skin and clothes.
Despair bubbled within him and he nearly burst into tears. Penlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he took aim at that sighing, breathing pit, waiting for the moment when he would pull the trigger, when he would have something at which he could shoot.
But the voice …
The voice spoke to him so intimately, cajoling and commanding all at once. Imperious and knowing. Yes, it knew him.
The words were gibberish, the language made of words he did not imagine a human mouth could form. He could not understand those words, but he felt their meaning. The need.
The thing in the pit had a purpose for Steven. It required him. There was a task he would have to perform. He felt reborn. Baptized. Thought, this could be the start of something beautiful.
Gun in hand, he stood in the cellar of the Otis Harrison House.
And waited.
NINE
Tess opened the door for Frank’s double as if nothing at all was amiss. She stepped back, smiling in welcome, and held the door open for him. Not-Frank walked in, worried and apologizing for the delay. As he started to ask how Maddie was handling the whole thing as if he gave a damn about the girl, Nick stepped out from behind Tess with an aluminum baseball bat.
“Don’t even say her name,” Nick sneered, and swung the bat.
Not-Frank got one arm up in time, and the first crack of the bat broke his forearm. The second swing struck him in the side and then he turned as Nick rained blows down on his back. Tess wanted the thing dead, but not yet. Not now. As Nick cocked back the bat, gaze locked on Not-Frank’s skull, she knew that her ex-husband had no such hesitation, and she grabbed the bat. Held it tightly.
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“We need answers,” she said.
Nick looked at her. Instead of rage, his eyes were full of fear, though she knew it wasn’t for himself. These people—if they had ever been people—had tried to take their daughter earlier, and the knowledge of that made the temptation to destroy them almost impossible to resist. The only way to be sure they would never succeed in taking Maddie was to make sure they never had the chance. But the only way they could truly hope to achieve that end was to find out who or what the doubles really were. They needed to know how to stop them.
Hissing, jaw set in rage, Not-Frank began to rise as if he might want to make a fight of it. Nick swung the bat hard at his broken forearm and the double cried out and went back to his knees. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the floor, blacked out from the pain.
Tess kicked him in the legs and back, trying to wake him, until Lili arrived with a glass of water and dumped it on his head. The man sputtered awake, glaring hatred at them.
“What the hell do you think you’re—” he began.
Then he saw the real Frank, pale and thin and shaking, standing farther back along the hall, and it all became clear to him. The real Frank reached behind his back and his hand reappeared holding a gun.
“Jesus, Frank!” Tess cried, jerking backward at the sight of the weapon, though it wasn’t pointed at her.
Not-Frank ignored the gun. He launched himself at Tess, one good hand hooked into a claw, and Nick smashed the bat across his head. The sound reminded Tess of a hammer striking the last blow on a nail, driving it at last into the wood.
Dead Ringers Page 23
