Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  With Lili and Audrey to help and the real Frank standing by and spitting on his double, weapon still aimed at him, Tess managed to drag the impostor into the kitchen. They put him in a chair and bound him with an entire roll of duct tape. Tess left his mouth uncovered—the whole point of holding him was so that they could hear what he had to say.

  “Mom?” Maddie called from the hall. “Who’s at the door? What was all that?”

  “Go back into your room, honey!” Tess shouted, trying not to snap. She glanced up at Lili, who nodded and rushed down the corridor to make sure that Maddie did not try to come into the kitchen. In the girl’s room, Tess knew Lili would turn the TV volume up.

  “Frank,” Nick said coldly, “put that away. My daughter’s in this house.”

  The real Frank nodded, clicked on the thumb safety, and slipped the gun back into the rear waistband of his pants.

  Turning to stare at the unconscious man taped to the chair, Tess marveled at how much he looked like Frank. How much better a version of Frank he was. More handsome, more confident, better dressed, better haircut, better complexion.

  She slapped him hard to wake him up. When that didn’t work, she poured a mug of hot tea on his head and he sputtered and shook and opened his eyes to swear at her.

  “You bitch,” he growled, “you have no idea the mistakes you’ve made.”

  Tess sat on the chair beside his and leaned forward. “Tell me all about them.”

  The double’s expression softened. “Why, Tess? Why are you helping the ghost?”

  For half a second, the tone of his voice cut into her—betrayal, disappointment, and sorrow implying that he was the real Frank Lindbergh and the withered thing whose hand she had held at her kitchen table was the other. The double. But then the last word resonated in her mind and she studied him carefully.

  “Is that what you all are, then? Ghosts?”

  Audrey returned to the kitchen—Tess had barely noticed her absence—carrying a pair of mirrors. “Of course they’re ghosts.”

  Nick whacked the double in the back of the head with an open hand, came away with blood on his palm. “Pretty solid for a ghost. And he bleeds.”

  “I imagine it’s complicated,” Audrey said. “Now we’re going to find out just how complicated. Give me a hand with these mirrors.”

  “What are you doing?” Tess asked.

  But Audrey had a purpose now, and she was no longer listening. The real Frank had been standing in the corner of the kitchen as if the idea of getting too close to his doppelgänger made him want to run screaming. Tess understood the urge, but now Audrey instructed him to take a seat. She handed the mirror she had taken off the wall in the living room to Nick.

  “Hold that up next to his head,” Audrey said.

  Nick positioned himself on Frank’s left and Audrey hoisted the mirror she had taken from Tess’s bedroom, holding it in place on Frank’s right. They angled the mirrors so that Frank could see almost nothing but his own reflection.

  “We know these … manifestations … have been siphoning your strength by imitating you,” she went on. “The more they become you and inhabit bits of your life, the more other people perceive them as you,and the more you become the ghost and they the reality.”

  Audrey glanced at Nick. “Who is the man in the chair in front of you?”

  Nick seemed about to argue, maybe mock Audrey’s methods, but Tess saw the flicker of resignation in his eyes. They had seen too much for him to doubt anything else that might occur.

  “It’s Frank Lindbergh,” Nick replied.

  “Tell him.”

  “You’re Frank Lindbergh. Always have been. When you’re feeling better, I might just break your fucking nose for making a move on my wife when we were still married, but you’re Frank fucking Lindbergh.”

  Lili did a double take. “Wait, what?”

  Audrey ignored her. “Tess?”

  Tess couldn’t see more than a sliver of Frank’s features through the gap between the mirrors. She turned to look at the false Frank, the double, who seemed fascinated in spite of himself. She should have been afraid of him. If he was a ghost or revenant or whatever Audrey wanted to call him, he was dead. He ought to terrify her, but her fury had surged to the fore, tamping down the fear. They’d put their hands on Maddie, tried to take her little girl away. The fear still shivered in her heart, along with disbelief, but she would face anyone or anything that dared to threaten her little girl. She stared at the thing that was not Frank Lindbergh. As strong as the doubles were, the bastard wasn’t going to be able to tear through the thick strips of duct tape they’d used to strap him to the chair.

  She moved around the table and crouched beside the real Frank’s chair, nudging Nick over. She took Frank’s hand in both of hers and held it tenderly.

  “You’re Frank Lindbergh. We’ve both had a rough time of it the last couple of years, but I believe my best days are still ahead, and so are yours.”

  He made a small noise and Tess thought he might be crying, just a little.

  “Frank,” Audrey said quietly. “This may be painful, but I want you to talk now about the ugly things in your life. These manifestations have crafted perfect versions of you … of us. The idealized versions. Tell me the things the perfection can’t embrace, the things you never want to say out loud.”

  Tess saw him shudder, but then Frank exhaled and sat up straighter in his chair.

  “You’re a fool, little witch,” the doppelgänger said, but he thrashed in his seat, testing the strength of the duct tape.

  “I’m no witch,” Audrey said. “I just have a sense of things. I may not really understand what you are, but I know the things you aren’t.”

  “Think you’re so fucking—” the false thing began.

  “I’m a drunk,” Frank interrupted. He exhaled. “All my life I swore I wouldn’t be anything like my father. He didn’t have the balls to make a better future for himself. When I was a kid I thought it was because he was a drunk. By the time I hit twenty, I realized that was just what he wanted everyone to think, but the reality was that the booze was a handy excuse. He wanted people to think he could’ve been something better, something more, if not for the booze.”

  Tess clutched his hand and he held on tightly. She heard a moan behind her and glanced across the table at the impostor. The sight made the breath catch in her throat. Instead of the face of Frank Lindbergh, its features had become a death mask. She’d seen glimpses on her own double, the hellish, rotting faces of the malignant spirits masquerading as human beings. Tess flinched back a little, though the dead thing had stopped struggling and only sat bound to its chair, staring at the backs of the mirrors that shielded Frank’s face from view.

  “Keep going,” Audrey said quietly.

  Frank hesitated. “I … I get it now. My dad taught me well. Anytime someone went for their dream and got even a fraction of it, I resented the hell out of them. Still do. I bitch about the universe being against me, but I know…”

  He drew a shuddery breath and let the words trail off.

  “How do you feel?” Audrey asked.

  “Better. Stronger,” Frank replied softly. “Ashamed of myself, but not enough to try to pretend any of what I just said is something other than the truth.”

  “Good,” Audrey said, and lowered the mirror.

  Nick put down the other mirror, turned to lean it against the kitchen wall. Tess studied Frank and realized that he didn’t look much different than before. Healthier, maybe, but not markedly so. Still pale and too thin and unshaven. The vital thing was that he looked solid and alert, like he was all there for the first time since he had shown up on her doorstep.

  Tess glanced at his double again, only to find that he no longer looked like a living corpse nor did he still look anything like Frank Lindbergh. Taller and thinner, with high cheekbones and a sharply pointed mustache above a thin strip of beard on his chin, he looked like a man transported from another era.

  He i
s, she thought. Of course he is.

  “Let’s start again,” she said, moving back around the table toward him. “What’s your name?”

  The ghost—or incarnation, or whatever he was—lifted his chin in arrogant defiance.

  Lili spoke and Tess glanced up, surprised to see that she’d returned to the kitchen.

  “You seem calm,” she said, “but if you could look in one of those mirrors you’d see that the right side of your head is a bit see-through. Left shoulder, too.”

  Fearful, the double glanced down at his left shoulder and saw that Lili was right. Not only had he lost the Frank masquerade, but he’d faded a little. She wondered if the duct tape could hold him now or if it would just pass right through. If he kept fading, she was pretty sure they were going to find out.

  Lili walked calmly toward him, wound up, and slapped him hard across the face. Blood flew from his mouth. Not ghosts, Tess thought. Not really. Ghosts couldn’t bleed. Audrey had called them manifestations and Tess had thought of this thing as an incarnation, which made more sense to her. Incarnate. In the flesh. However they had done it, they were real and solid, at least for now.

  “What is your name?” Lili demanded.

  Nick grabbed the baseball bat from where it leaned against the wall. He didn’t swing it—didn’t even raise it—but the promise was there in his eyes.

  “You don’t need his name,” Audrey said. “I’ve seen his portrait. Meet Simon Danton, the second-class magician who founded the Lesser Key.”

  Tess whipped around to stare at her. “The occultists—”

  “Who tried to finish the summoning Berrige started in the cellar of the Harrison House,” Audrey finished. “Danton was the ringleader of that band of—”

  “Mind your tongue,” Danton snapped, then turned a sneer of hatred into a grin. “You have no idea what real magic is. We came back from death. We gave ourselves new flesh!”

  Audrey dragged her chair over so that she could sit right in front of Simon Danton. Tess saw fear glittering in the woman’s eyes, beads of sweat on her forehead, and she hoped that Danton could not see how afraid Audrey was of him.

  “I know that the only magic that matters is the magic that works,” Audrey said. “If you botch the spell, that doesn’t make you a magician, it makes you a fuckup.”

  Danton made a noise in his throat as if he might spit at Audrey and Lili slapped him again. Tess stood back to make room for the blow, an observer now. She glanced over at Nick, who had put the baseball bat over his shoulder as if he was waiting for his turn at the plate. Casual, aware that these women did not need him to step in for them.

  “Let me see if I’ve got you figured out,” Audrey went on. “You built the psychomanteum because you thought you could trap the demon inside it, but you screwed up and ended up trapping yourselves instead. Maybe you were already planning how you could get out when they dismantled the thing and put it into storage. That gave you time to plan but you were stuck there until the hotel management bought the psychomanteum and reassembled it. You’d all latched on to the reflections of people who’d looked into those mirrors before it was dismantled.”

  Frank—the real Frank, more himself now—coughed quietly.

  Lili took the moment to jump in. “I don’t understand. You could make these bodies for yourselves. Black magic whatever, okay fine, but when the others slipped out they tried to build lives for themselves, separate from us. Why didn’t you?”

  The thing that had once been Simon Danton looked to Audrey, arrogant and expectant. He cocked an eyebrow.

  “No? You don’t want to offer your theories on my motivations?” Danton asked.

  Audrey glanced at Lili. “It’s the raggedy man. We suspected it was Berrige and we were right.”

  Tess shivered. She crossed her arms, hugging herself, and stared at their captive as she tried to reconcile how he could be both a dead man and a living thing, a creature who could bleed. Images of the raggedy man swam through her mind, the memory of the first time she and Lili had seen him outside the gallery, sniffing the air like a dog searching for a scent. I had the scent. I know I did.

  He’d shown up around them more than once, confusing her and her friends for the doppelgängers who were engaged in this masquerade. And then Aaron … the way Nick had described his death at the hands of the raggedy man. Tess had never liked the man, but nobody should have to die like that.

  With the way Audrey had put things together, it was as if she had laid out a puzzle with missing pieces, gaps that they were waiting for others to fill. Tess stared at Lili for a moment, thinking about the life that her double, Devani Kanda, had made. These ghosts had created bodies and identities, used magic to influence the world around them. Why would the Lesser Key work so hard to build lives for themselves and then throw it all away by coming after the people whose faces they had all stolen?

  “You knew,” she said to Danton.

  The man smiled thinly.

  “Knew what?” Frank asked.

  Nick glanced at her. “What are you—”

  “Audrey already told us they were following in Berrige’s footsteps, trying to replicate the … summoning spell or whatever that killed him,” Tess said, skin prickling with a rush of heat as little epiphanies clicked in to complete the puzzle in her head. “When we figured out the raggedy man might be Berrige, I thought they were all working together. Berrige and the doubles.”

  “They’ve all been haunting us,” Lili said. “Tormenting us.”

  “No,” Tess said, shaking her head. “That’s just it. The Lesser Key wanted nothing to do with us until I saw the one with Nick’s face and we started poking around, trying to make sense of it. When we saw the raggedy man outside the gallery he wasn’t looking for us. He was hunting your double, Lili, just like I said.”

  Nick had one hand on the back of a kitchen chair, hanging his head as he listened. Now he pushed away from the chair, snapping his head up.

  “What about Aaron? Berrige just … tore him apart. I saw it happen. Whatever Aaron had been reduced to, the old man ripped him to shreds and stuffed him inside his coat. I’ll never…” His voice broke, and Tess’s heart broke for him. Part of her would always love him and she hated to see him in pain. “I’ll never be able to scrub that image out of my head, or the way Aaron screamed.”

  Tess slid into a chair beside the thing that had once been Simon Danton and stared at it. “Berrige had no idea that was Aaron, did he?” she asked softly. “He thought it was one of your people. That’s what they’ve been doing to us, what you were doing to Frank … feeding on whatever makes us who we are, so that when Berrige came hunting he would get confused and think we were the ghosts.”

  “Of course,” Audrey said. “That’s exactly what they’ve been doing.”

  “Holy shit,” Lili whispered.

  Tess turned to Frank—the real Frank. “But Danton knew. The rest of the Lesser Key had no idea, or maybe he warned them and they didn’t listen. He figured Berrige would be out there hunting for him and the only chance he had of surviving was to become you, Frank. To replace you, so when Berrige came looking, all that would be left was something so faded and dim that the sorcerer would assume you were the ghost.”

  “Just like he did with Aaron,” Nick said.

  They all stood around the table now, staring at the fleshly manifestation of the ghost of Simon Danton. Tess caught her breath. The daylight coming through the kitchen windows had dimmed, the afternoon shadows growing long, and in the gray light she could see his true face—the withered features of the corpse—superimposed upon the false flesh like the golden aura that limned the outer edges of the moon on a foggy night.

  Tess slid to the edge of her chair, so close to the dead thing that the little hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. Her nose detected an odor she had not noticed before, the rancid stink of death, and she wondered if it was the smell of his breath. The thought smashed through her, an overpowering reminder of just what th
is creature was. Not just a dead thing. Not just a ghost. Danton had been an occultist in his lifetime, a would-be sorcerer who wanted nothing more than to summon a demon from whatever Hell might truly exist. This wasn’t just death sitting before her … it was evil.

  In her house. At her kitchen table. With her daughter down the hall.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said, so softly that the others had to lean in to hear.

  Danton arched an eybrow. The afternoon light grew dimmer and his death face began to supersede that of the man he’d once been.

  “Go on,” he urged, his voice like the rustle of dry leaves. From one angle, she could still see his eyes, but from another they were only dark hollows with the glint of sickly yellow light within.

  “I didn’t believe in ghosts or magic before all of this,” she said, even more quietly. “I live in almost constant pain and I never pray, because I know my prayers will not be answered. Yet now, here you are—”

  “You think I’m God?” Danton laughed.

  “I think you may be proof there is something out there for me to pray to,” Tess said quietly. Behind her, Lili put a hand on her shoulder and Tess went on. “You terrify me, but not the way you’d like to, because the thing we really need to be afraid of is Cornell Berrige, and he’s the one hunting the members of your cult.”

  “Tess,” Nick said, the warning of his tone very clear.

  Danton cocked his head in fascination. “I’m listening.”

  “You wanted to live again,” Tess said. “I understand that. And except for what you did to Frank out of your own fear, your people left us alone until Lili and I started interfering. So what if you tell us what you know about why Berrige is doing what he’s doing and we figure out a way to stop him? You and your friends can keep our faces. Build your own lives. We’ll promise not to go so far away that it will undermine whatever spells you’ve cast that have allowed you to escape the psychomanteum. We work together, destroy Berrige, and call it a day. Truce. Détente.”

  “No,” Nick snapped.

  Tess whipped around to glare at him.