Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  Tess gripped the golf club in both hands and followed Lili up to the psychomanteum. “Careful for the glass.”

  “Stop!” the dead thing said, its false face wavering. Not-Aaron scrambled to his feet, touching his bleeding head. “You don’t understand.”

  Nick swung the baseball bat, breaking the dead thing’s right arm. It cried out in pain.

  “Thing is,” Nick said, “we do.”

  Tess stepped into the psychomanteum, where Lili shoved aside the table the hotel managers had put there. She cocked her arms back, ready to swing the golf club at dozens of reflections of her own face.

  Audrey began to scream. A wail tore from her throat, followed by desperate words.

  “How … oh, God, how can you not feel that?” she cried as she fell to her knees.

  As if the words had opened some window of perception in her, Tess did feel it. She doubled over, a pressure on her skull unlike anything she’d ever felt. Sweat beaded on her skin and she wanted to run, to get to fresh air, to water, to anything that might help clean the filth from her flesh. The ghosts of the Lesser Key had flesh and bone, they were solid, and somehow Tess and the others had persuaded themselves to look past what else they were. Dead things, yes, but black magicians.

  Evil.

  Three feet ahead of her, Lili leaned against the mirrored interior of the apparition box, tears streaming down her face as she used her free hand to swipe at imaginary things in her hair.

  How foolish they had been to let themselves be brave. Tess wanted to tear her own skin off. Instead, she swung the golf club as hard as she could. Two mirrored panes shattered inside the octagonal booth, shards flying. One cut her face but she ignored the sting and swung again, smashing a third pane.

  The thing that was not Aaron screamed and rushed toward the box. Nick struck him again with the baseball bat, shouting for them to keep going. Audrey struggled to her feet and staggered toward the psychomanteum, blood streaming from both of her nostrils from some kind of psychic overload.

  Tess grimaced, lifting the golf club again. “Nice try,” she managed to say, tears slipping down her face from pure revulsion and fear. “But mothers don’t run.”

  Hundreds of Tess faces looked back at her from the mirrored walls. Hundreds of reflections of her, along with hundreds of Lilis.

  “No,” Lili rasped.

  Tess glanced over at her. Beyond her. One of her reflections grew larger, looming. It wore the same clothes as Lili did and its hair looked the same, but it did not move when Lili moved. It had adapted to her reflection, but it lived, and its eyes gleamed with fury.

  “No!” Lili cried, and swung the fireplace poker at the glass.

  Too late.

  The thing that called itself Devani Kanda lunged from within the mirrors, emerging as if thrust from darkness into light. The double wrapped her hands around Lili’s throat, momentum hurling them both out of the psychomanteum.

  Lili’s double strangled her, screaming in hatred all the while.

  The dead thing wearing Aaron Blaustein’s face only laughed.

  TWELVE

  Frank sat in the backseat of the Toyota with his back against the door, as far from the revenant corpse of Simon Danton as he could get without fleeing the car. He wished he had thought to ask Lili to crack the windows because it was getting warm and close back there, despite the chilly night. Frank told himself they wouldn’t be long. The plan had been for Tess to sneak in, open the emergency door to the outside and let the others in, smash all hell out of the mirrors inside the psychomanteum and then run out the same door before they could be detained and arrested.

  Simple.

  Batshit crazy, but simple.

  He held his gun in both hands, rested on his thigh. For the first few minutes he had kept it aimed at Danton’s skull but his arms were getting tired, and if he waited until they were too weary to hold the gun up, Danton might easily get the jump on him. This way the gun still pointed in the dead man’s general direction and he could still get a shot off if Danton made a move.

  Or even if he didn’t.

  Ghost or not, dead thing or living abomination, Simon Danton had masqueraded as him, chained him in his own basement, made him shit and piss in a bucket, mocked and laughed at him. Frank wanted very much to shoot him in the face. The strange part of that, however, was that he wasn’t motivated by any of the things that Danton had done to him directly, or by horror at the hideous nature of what this inhuman thing was. He wanted to take aim and pull the trigger again and again for only one reason—because Danton had been better at being Frank Lindbergh than Frank himself had ever been.

  “I’m going to miss it,” Danton surprised him by saying.

  Frank kept his arms rigid, ready to fire. “Miss what?”

  The dead thing smiled. Frank wasn’t sure what the rest of them saw when they looked at Danton, but to him the thing looked like what it was. A haunt. A withered human scarecrow, dried and desiccated. Dead except for the little points of ugly yellow light in the pits of its eyes.

  “Miss being you,” it said, as if it could read his mind. And maybe it could, after all the bits of him it had leeched away.

  “You were never me,” Frank said. “You were wearing a costume. Hiding and praying Berrige wouldn’t come and make you pay for the evil you’d done.”

  “Is it so hard to imagine that we wanted a second chance at life?” the dead thing said, its voice the sound of autumn leaves crunching underfoot. “We weren’t hiding, we were living.”

  Frank sniffed, almost a laugh, and saw Danton go rigid.

  The dead thing swiveled its head to glare at him with those sickly, gleaming eyes. “What are you—”

  “If you weren’t hiding, you could have used your own faces.”

  The dead man glared at him, withered lips parted as if he might speak in his dusty, leathery voice, but he had nothing to say. The point had been made.

  Something slapped the window just behind Danton and they both jumped. Frank lifted the gun, afraid the man who’d stolen his face—this man who’d once persuaded a group of others to dabble in black magic—would attack him. In a split second, he realized the sound was not Danton’s doing. He’d seen that the dead man was startled but it took his conscious mind a moment to catch up with his instincts, for logic to catch up with fear.

  Outside the car, a scrap of filthy black cloth billowed against the glass and Frank’s heart beat wildly in his chest.

  He knew, then. Even before Danton turned to look out the window, already more faded and diminished than an hour before. Even before the glass shattered and long arms reached into the backseat, spindly fingers like spider’s legs closing around the dried flesh of Danton’s throat and puncturing it like it was made of papier-mâché.

  Even before he saw the grinning, thin-lipped mouth and its rows of black shark’s teeth, or the filthy blindfold that covered the raggedy man’s eyes.

  Danton screamed as the blind man dragged him from the car, half-vanished dead flesh ripping like parchment paper on the jagged shards remaining in the window frame. The raggedy man stuffed the fading remains of the ghost inside his coat, where the darkness roiled and breathed. Frank saw another screaming face in the shadows inside that coat, a damned soul trapped in a shifting indigo Hell, and beneath the screaming and the sounds of the city there came another voice, speaking a guttural, ancient language so laden with malice that Frank Lindbergh could do nothing but turn away, pressed against the opposite car door, weeping and waiting for the demon inside the raggedy man’s coat to drag him into darkness.

  When he glanced up, the raggedy man had gone and Simon Danton was no more.

  “Oh,” Frank whispered to himself. “Oh, no.”

  Then his hands were scrabbling for the door latch and the lock and he popped open the back door, stumbling into the street. A car horn blared and he turned into the bright headlights of a taxi, which swerved to avoid running him down. The driver shouted profanity out the window, but Frank ba
rely heard. Numb, he turned to look at the side of the Nepenthe Hotel. Dead leaves skittered along the sidewalk and the road, fallen from the handful of trees that lined either side of the street.

  He shut the car door softly, calmly. Pushed it to make sure it had clicked into place. For a moment he hung his head, heart thundering and face flushed, wondering if he could live with himself if he ran away now. Maybe if he hadn’t already given up on himself so many times in this life that he’d grown sick of it. Maybe if the dead thing Simon Danton—whose screams still echoed in his mind—hadn’t reduced him to a human husk before he’d reclaimed his name and his face. Maybe if he hadn’t kissed Tess Devlin that night at the party, or if he couldn’t remember how soft her lips had been and how kind her eyes on that night.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

  Frank lifted his head, stared at the hotel, and then started to run.

  Toward it.

  THIRTEEN

  In the darkness of the cellar of the Otis Harrison House, Steven found that he could still see. It made no sense, really. When he had come downstairs he had been carrying a flashlight, but now the flashlight was no longer in his hands. He vaguely recalled a cracking sound, though he admitted to himself that it might have been his skull when he had tripped over uneven stones in the floor and fallen.

  Don’t be stupid, he thought, flexing his fingers on the grip of his service weapon. His palm was dry against the surface of the gun. If you’d cracked your skull, you wouldn’t be standing here.

  Of course he wasn’t standing, was he?

  No. He was sitting, cradling the gun, letting its weight lie gently in his grasp like the hand of a lover.

  The crack had been the flashlight. Almost certainly it had. Though he thought he smelled blood and it might have been his. He had to acknowledge the possibility. After all, he was a police officer, which meant he had to be an objective observer of the evidence. The flashlight, though … it was gone, and he remembered the cracking sound and now the cellar cloaked him in darkness.

  But he could still see.

  His friend whispered to him in words he had never heard before, but just as he could still see in the dark, he understood that rasping language and the things being said to him by that voice drifting up from the pit in the middle of the cellar.

  Steven blinked his eyes, so different now. Vision so clear, so detailed there in the darkness. He sat just at the edge of the pit, dangerously close, and felt the cold draft that whispered past him as if the pit itself were breathing.

  He cradled his gun and he nodded slowly, understanding the words and the dark, matching his breaths to the breathing of the pit.

  FOURTEEN

  Belly contentedly full of mac and cheese, Kyrie sat on the sofa at Nick’s apartment with a cup of tea balanced on one leg. Maddie had been restless through the first half of Finding Dory, but at last she had rested herself against Kyrie, laid her head down on Kyrie’s lap and promptly fell asleep. After the intruder the other night and whatever bizarreness had taken place today—hinted at in the girl’s intriguing babble of an explanation—the poor thing was totally wrung out. Maddie would think it a betrayal if Kyrie watched without her. They would finish in the morning.

  With the credits rolling, Kyrie only just managed to reach the remote control without waking the girl. She exited the on-demand menu and started surfing channels.

  The knock at the door made her jump, a bit of tea sloshing out to dampen the leg of her pants. She swore quietly and glanced over her shoulder toward the front door. The knock came again and she grimaced as she slipped Maddie’s head off her lap and set the mug down on the coffee table.

  She took the chain off the door and was about to unlock it when an icy little tremor went through her. Nick and Tess had been angry and afraid. Ugly things had happened and she would be a fool not to be wary.

  Kyrie looked out through the peephole in the door and exhaled, that momentary tension evaporating. Unlocking the door, she cast a quick glance over at a still-sleeping Maddie and then pulled it open, smiling at the woman who stood outside in the hall.

  “What’s up?” Kyrie asked. “Everything all right? I didn’t expect anyone back this soon.”

  The woman smiled. “Can I come in?”

  Kyrie shrugged and stepped back to let her pass. “Sorry, what was your name again?”

  The woman stood watching Maddie sleep for a few seconds before she turned around. “Audrey.”

  “Right,” Kyrie said, closing the door. “Sorry.”

  There came a rustling from the sofa. “Kyrie?”

  Both women turned to see Maddie sitting up, sleepily rubbing her eyes.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Audrey said, moving toward the sofa. “Your parents sent me to pick you up.”

  “Whoa,” Kyrie said, digging into her pocket and tugging out her cell phone. “I’d think I would have gotten a call or a text, at least.”

  Audrey shot her a hard look, edged with irritation. “Call Nick if you want.”

  Maddie sat on one of the big cushions on the sofa, frowning at Audrey and scratching the back of her head. Kyrie hesitated. Nick and Tess—together—had asked her to watch Maddie tonight, and that alone had been strange and awkward, though Kyrie had been touched by the way Tess had spoken to her, the acceptance she had felt just before they had left. It had been a stressful couple of days, so it wasn’t impossible that their plans tonight had changed, but if that was the case—

  “Why send you?” she asked. “If they want her, why didn’t they just come get her?”

  Audrey sighed and cocked her head, staring at Kyrie. “I’m tired. Truly. Could you just call him if you’re concerned?” She glanced at the little girl. “Maddie, get your things.”

  Kyrie bristled at the woman’s bitchy attitude. She enjoyed seeing Maddie but she had given up her night for this, dropped everything to come over and help out. Her hackles raised, she starting texting Nick.

  “What’s the password?” Maddie asked.

  Kyrie looked up sharply, saw the confusion on Audrey’s face.

  “Sorry?” Audrey asked.

  The little girl crawled forward to the arm of the sofa and knelt there, studying Audrey’s face. “Mommy said not to go anywhere with anyone unless they knew the password.”

  Audrey stiffened and the corner of her mouth twitched into something close to a scowl. Kyrie’s throat went dry. What the hell was going on? She stopped in mid-text and hit Nick’s name on her contacts list instead, moving around Audrey to stand behind the sofa. Holding the phone to her ear, she listened to it ring, waiting for Nick to answer and explain it all to her.

  Kyrie reached over the back of the sofa and put a hand on Maddie’s shoulder.

  “He’s not answering,” she said, turning to glance at the girl.

  In her peripheral vision, Audrey looked dead. Rotting.

  Kyrie let out a startled cry and whipped her head back around just as the dead thing leaped at her, wrapped both hands around her throat, and drove her to the carpet. Eyes wide with terror, Maddie began to scream. Kyrie beat at Audrey’s hands and face but the woman’s grip on her throat was impossibly strong. Black stars exploded across her vision as Kyrie tried to drag in even a single breath and found she could not.

  If she could not get Audrey off her, there would be no screaming for her.

  No scream. No breath.

  No life.

  FIFTEEN

  As Tess screamed her name, she saw Lili’s double drive her to the floor just outside the psychomanteum, and then they were rolling away. Two Lilis crashed into the legs of a table. One smashed the other’s head against the carpeted floor. Tess ran toward her—toward them—and then she froze.

  The clothes were nearly the same. The hair was identical now.

  “Lili?” she said. “Lili, which is you?”

  Shame filled her—how could she not know her dearest friend? One of them glanced at her, eyes desperate, and Tess cocked back her arms to bri
ng her golf club down on the other one … when that other turned and said her name, pleading and full of emotion. Of knowing.

  Tess lowered her arms, frozen with indecision.

  “Just get them apart!” Nick said, racing past her and grabbing hold of Lili—one of them anyway.

  Golf club in one hand, Tess dropped to one knee behind the two Lilis and wrapped her free arm around the nearest one while Nick grabbed the other.

  “What are you doing, Tessa?” demanded the one she’d grabbed.

  “Just let go!” Tess snapped. “We can’t—”

  Then Tess felt a tug at her hair, hard at first, and then so much worse. She cried out in pain and raged as she was yanked backward. Twisting on the floor, she got her feet under her, going along with the momentum of her attacker to relieve the pain. She drove her head upward and smashed her skull into the bastard’s jaw, and only then—as his grip loosened and the veil of her own hair fell away—did she see the rotting corpse face of the dead thing who masqueraded as Aaron Blaustein.

  The Aaron thing grabbed her throat, cutting off her air. Her eyes went wide and she felt the desperate need immediately, the screaming lack of oxygen. The dead were stronger than the living, but Tess did not want to be one of them. Holding the golf club ahead of her, one hand on either end, she drove Aaron backward into a table, smashed her knee into his crotch and then smashed the club upward three times before she broke his grip. His hands flashed out, so fast, and tangled in her hair again. She rammed the golf club crosswise into his throat, but he had her now.

  He slammed her face onto the table and pain exploded as her nose buckled. Blood poured onto her lips and down the back of her throat as she tried to get away from him. She looked up just in time to hear the whistle of the aluminum bat as it whickered through the air. Nick stepped into his swing and the bat caromed off dead Aaron’s skull with a satisfying crack.

  The blow staggered the dead thing and it took two steps backward. Tess crushed its windpipe with a swing of her golf club, then Nick struck it again, and then they were beating it, shattering bones and driving it to the ground. Tess saw the fear in its eyes that it was about to die again, for the last time, but she tasted her own blood in her mouth and remembered the way her double had comforted Maddie that night and she kept swinging. The old pain sang in her shoulder and spine, but it had become just another part of a symphony.