Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  “Audrey!” Tess called. “Help Lili!”

  But as she and Nick kept beating the thing that had stolen Aaron’s life, she got no reply. With a final swing that caved in part of the corpse’s face, she stepped back, heart pounding and breath coming in short gasps, and turned to see Audrey trying to force the two Lilis apart.

  Nick grabbed her arm, tried to twist her around. “Tess!”

  As she shook him off she saw motion in the corner of her eye and turned to see herself approaching. Herself and Nick. Their doubles had just come into the restaurant, pushing aside the curtain that led out into the hotel, and Tess could hear ordinary voices out there as well. An employee in Victorian garb came rushing in after them and Not-Nick turned, grabbed the employee’s skull in both hands, and rammed his head against the wall. The employee went down hard, moaning as he rolled onto his side.

  “Audrey!” the real Nick shouted. “The mirrors!”

  Tess faced her double as the woman stepped toward her. In the shadows she could see the woman’s death face and wondered if this was what she herself would look like after she had spent time in the grave.

  From behind her came the sound of shattering glass and she saw her double’s gaze shift. Not-Tess gave Nick’s double a shove, sending him rushing across the restaurant to reach the psychomanteum. Nick stepped in his way. Tess swung her golf club at her double, putting all of a mother’s rage behind the assault. The woman sidestepped, reached in and grabbed her wrist and hurled her to one side with such force that Tess landed on a table, sliding off the other side in a clatter of silverware and side plates and a tangle of tablecloth.

  No, she thought, seized with panic. She couldn’t let it be so easy. Fighting the dead would get them nowhere. They might have killed the Aaron thing but they were human and fragile and the odds were against them.

  Stick to the plan.

  Tearing loose of the tablecloth, Tess rocketed to her feet, already in motion. Her double came for her, confident and calm, and Tess dodged past her. She heard Nick grunt in pain as his double began to beat him, but she could not stop. She ran for the psychomanteum, where Audrey swung again, shattering more of the mirrored interior.

  Two figures staggered across Tess’s path. Both had Lili’s face. With an anguished cry, one Lili drove the other backward into the psychomanteum, where they fell over the threshold and then scrambled to remain upright. Hands pressed into shards of mirror glass as they fell and rose and fought.

  Audrey ignored them, shattered another mirrored pane.

  Tess called her friend’s name … and then froze, watching in horror as one Lili forced the other against the last mostly intact wall inside the psychomanteum. Not against, Tess saw, but through. The two Lilis swore and clawed at each other, but the one with the leverage kept pushing and Tess could only stare, open-mouthed, as the other slipped into the mirrored wall as if she were being lowered into a silver pool of water.

  Lili whipped around. “Audrey! Give me that!” She snatched the golf club from Audrey’s grasp and began to shatter that last full wall of mirrors. Her own reflection—doubled—screamed back at her from the other side.

  Tess lowered her golf club. “Lili?”

  Then she felt a cold draft whip around her, almost caressing, and she heard a scream that sounded hauntingly like her own. Tess spun and saw the predatory silhouette of the raggedy man crouched over the ruin of Aaron’s double. She thought they had killed it, but the dead thing still lived, and now it screamed as the raggedy man dragged long, filthy fingers through its fading substance. The blindfolded thing that had been Cornell Berrige picked up the ghost and thrust it bodily into the shadows inside his jacket. The heavy coat hung open wide, a hungry maw of darkness, and when Tess got her first real glimpse inside that coat, her veins turned to ice. Sorrow like nothing she’d ever known came crashing down on her and tears spilled from her eyes, burning trails along her cheeks.

  Inside the raggedy man’s coat there were shapes, just hints of shadows, the faces of other ghosts. One of them might have been Berrige’s own, and another was the real Aaron Blaustein. She saw his torment and heard his muffled cries and regretted every time she had ever thought ill of him.

  “What have you done?” someone screamed. Her own voice.

  The raggedy man flew across the darkened restaurant and landed upon Nick’s double. The dead Nick cried out and tried to defend himself, but Berrige had the strength of cruelty in him and he began to feed the double into the suffering hell of darkness inside his coat.

  A hand grasped Tess’s arm and spun her around and she stared into eyes wide with unthinkable despair.

  Her own eyes.

  “What have you done?” her double asked again, crying the tears of the dead.

  Two more employees came rushing into the restaurant, one in Victorian clothes but the other a security guard. They started shouting, but Tess saw their faces go slack with confusion at the chaos unfurling before them. Someone ran past Tess, then, and it took her a moment to realize it was Frank Lindbergh. She glanced over her shoulder at the door to the sidewalk and saw it slowly closing, a cold wind swirling into the room from outside. Frank ran toward the employees, gun aimed at them, snapping commands at them to silence them and make sure they did not try to interfere.

  In the psychomanteum, Audrey and Lili kept swinging away, shattering pane after pane of mirrored glass. In her double’s eyes, Tess saw defeat. The dead thing knew that the raggedy man had come for her and she had nowhere left to hide.

  SIXTEEN

  As the pressure built in her head, blood rushing to her face, Kyrie tried to find the strength to smash at Audrey’s arms again. She twisted her shoulders, a primal effort to force away the hands that were strangling her to death. No air came in. Black pools formed at the edges of her vision as if her eyes were welling with shadows instead of tears. Her eyelids fluttered and she knew it was over for her. She flicked her gaze right and left, not wanting the last thing she saw to be the face of her murderer.

  “Sorry, lovely,” the killer said. “You’re just in the way.”

  Kyrie’s thoughts were leaves spinning in a dust devil. She tried to hold on to the few that remained. Her body went still but her eyes kept shifting, searching. Something moved to her right, blurry features that quickly resolved into those of a little girl. Maddie held a small lamp with a blue, stained-glass shade.

  No, Kyrie managed to think. Run.

  But then her eyelids drooped and she knew she was about to die.

  Blue glass shards showered down onto her face and neck and into her hair. For half a second she didn’t realize the hands were off her throat because she had given up trying to breathe. Then she inhaled sharply, air rushing into her burning legs. Her throat felt ragged, airways compacted but still open enough to drag oxygen painfully into her chest. The rusty wheezing of her own desperate breathing frightened her as she rolled onto her side and saw the terrified eyes of the little girl who’d been left in her charge.

  Maddie dropped the ruin of the shattered lamp. Kyrie had not even heard the sound of it crashing against Audrey’s skull. You were dead there for a moment, she thought to herself.

  “Little bitch,” Audrey sneered, wiping blood from her face. A blue shard jutted from her scalp, just behind her left ear.

  “Please,” Maddie whispered, lip quivering as she backed away.

  Kyrie dragged in another lungful of air, her brain trying to force her body to obey. She pushed herself weakly up onto one elbow, panic surging through her as Audrey started after Maddie. The little girl ran around the front of the sofa to hide.

  “Don’t…” Kyrie managed.

  Audrey strode over, murderous intent in her eyes … and then faltered. Her eyes lit up with alarm and she glanced down at her hands, then along the length of her body. Kyrie blinked hard, trying to clear her head, thinking oxygen deprivation had done something to her, or that she had begun to black out again and her perceptions could not be trusted.

 
Her attacker’s hands were transparent. Audrey’s whole body had begun to fade.

  “No!” Audrey said, but even her voice seemed diminished, as if nothing more than a quiet echo in another room.

  Voices droned away on the television, strangely loud now.

  Kyrie propped herself up, hands on her aching throat as she stared at the woman who had attacked her. Fading, her face changed. For a moment she seemed taller, her hair blond. With mournful blue eyes, the woman turned to stare at Maddie and then her eyes sank back into her head and her face began to rot.

  Maddie began to sob as they watched the ghostly woman turn into a corpse before their eyes.

  Then the intruder vanished, leaving only an afterimage hanging in the air for a few seconds until even that was gone.

  Maddie rushed to Kyrie’s side. She gathered the little girl into her arms and they sank back onto the carpet in tears. Together.

  Just a few seconds, Kyrie told herself. Then she would get herself together, get up, and call the police.

  And Nick. She would call Nick.

  Her tears dried in an instant. She clutched the weeping girl to her and stared up at the ceiling. Audrey had been with Nick before she had come here and tried to take Maddie.

  No, she thought, shuddering. Nick had to be okay. He had to.

  SEVENTEEN

  Tess wiped blood from her mouth, glaring at her double. “It’s time.”

  But amid the fear in her double’s eyes, she saw a glimmer of desperate hope. She raised the golf club, but not quickly enough. The woman with her face rushed at her, ripped the club from her hands and flung it across the room. She grabbed Tess and hurled her to the carpet near where the raggedy man rose to his feet, forcing the grasping hands of Nick’s double into the hungry shadows inside his coat.

  A few feet away, the real Nick stood frozen with uncertainty.

  “Her!” Tess’s double shouted. “It’s her you want! My name is Tess Devlin. I have a daughter named Maddie who is six years old. I have a life and friends and I live every day in pain. I’ve had my heart broken and I deserve to live, deserve a chance to keep looking for happiness.”

  “She lies!” Tess snapped, shaking her head as she backed away from the raggedy man. But as she held up her hands to fend the blindfolded man off, she realized they were partially faded. She staggered at the sudden pain in her gut as the double began to leech at her again.

  “Your master wants the Society of the Lesser Key!” the double said. “He wants the ones who tried to control him!”

  The raggedy man slid toward them, almost gliding. Behind the filthy cloth across his face, the pits of his eyes were sunken shadows. He put his head back and sniffed at the air, then cocked his head and turned toward Tess.

  “If you could see,” she said softly, “I would show you my scars.” Her shoulder and spines throbbed with vivid pain. “These ghosts—these fuckers—ordinary life isn’t enough for them. They wanted perfection. If you could look at my body you would see I’m far from perfect. No matter what she’s stolen from me, you must be able to sense that. I’m broken, inside and out, but I’m still living. I don’t know who the hell this is, but my name is Tessa Anne Boudreau Devlin. It’s my name. They’re my scars. Maddie’s my daughter.”

  “Tess,” Nick said, the echoes of their old love in his voice. Afraid for her.

  The raggedy man whipped toward him, leaned forward and inhaled deeply. His brow furrowed above that filthy blindfold and his expression hardened, as though in some dark epiphany. Slowly he turned toward Tess’s double and then took a step in that direction, hands rising and reaching, the souls inside his coat crying out. Yet with those voices was another, a deep and rumbling voice that spoke in a guttural tongue unlike anything she had ever heard.

  “No!” Tess’s double said, backing toward the shattered apparition box. “It’s not me you want. It’s not … please.”

  But the raggedy man had sensed the truth when Nick had called Tess’s name, and even the demon he served could feel it now. Not-Tess begged, backing up farther. Behind her, Audrey and Lili stepped out of the ruin of the psychomanteum. Audrey had gone pale and her eyes were full of dread, and then Tess saw why. She lifted her right hand and a long jagged shard of mirror glinted in the light from outside. The scarf she’d been wearing was wrapped around one end to protect her from its sharp edges.

  “Audrey?” Tess said.

  In her terror of the raggedy man, Not-Tess did not spare her a glance. Nick saw them, though … saw Audrey and Lili as they lunged at the double from behind, both of them with daggers of broken mirror, and began to stab. Tess expected blood and screams. She expected them to pull back the blades and stab again, but instead Lili and Audrey thrust harder, plunging the mirrored glass of the psychomanteum as deep into the double’s flesh as they could.

  Not-Tess gasped and sagged on her feet, eyes rolling backward as she began to fade. In the gloom of the room she passed into a kind of twilight of substance. In the space of what seemed only two or three seconds she slipped from solidity into nothing more than a momentary afterimage. When Tess blinked her eyes, even that had vanished.

  The room seemed to flex and breathe, a wave of malice erupting from the raggedy man and then flowing outward with such force that it staggered Tess. Curtains blew and tables shifted. Chairs overturned. Nick cried out in something like a prayer and clapped a hand over his chest, rocked by it. Lili had to catch Audrey to keep her from falling backward as the last of the mirrored panes of the psychomanteum shattered, showering onto the floor inside the apparition box.

  The raggedy man hissed through his teeth, cracked lips peeling back in a seething fury. His coat undulated with a life of its own as he sniffed the air, caught the scent of the women in front of him and then ran at them with his hands outstretched.

  Nick shouted in alarm and tried to grab hold of Berrige’s coat as the raggedy man ran by. He cried out in pain and yanked his hands back as if he’d burnt them, but Tess saw ice on his fingers and knew hell did not have to be a place of fire.

  “He’s blind!” Tess snapped, running toward Nick, turning him and propelling him along with her. “Don’t let him touch you!”

  The employees by the door had begun shouting again. Frank aimed the gun at the security guard’s head while the woman who’d come in with him knelt by the employee on the ground—the one the doppelgänger Nick had slammed into the wall.

  Audrey dropped low as Lili skirted to her left. The raggedy man sensed them, but not clearly enough. He lunged, scrabbling for them, trying to get a fistful of their clothes or hair or the substance of them, a handful of the ghost-stuff inside everyone. Soul or spirit or humanity.

  Lili stabbed him in the throat.

  “No!” Tess said. “The jacket!”

  Audrey’s eyes gleamed with understanding and she slashed at the long coat, tore a rent in the fabric. Tess heard screams but they did not issue from the raggedy man’s throat. The room vibrated with the bass thunder of the demon’s displeasure. Tess hurled herself at the raggedy man’s back and slammed into him, sent him crashing forward through the open door of the psychomanteum. He sprawled on the floor, crashed into the table and chairs the hotel managers had put inside, stabbed by a thousand broken shards of the cursed mirrors that had hung there.

  Tess followed him in. She stepped over him and ripped the thick white cloth from the table, then snatched up a long, wickedly sharp slice of broken mirror. The raggedy man tried to surge to his feet, reached up to stop her arm from descending, but scent and sense alone could not guide him. Tess batted his arm away and sank the mirror shard into the fabric of his coat, grabbed the cloth-wrapped haft with both hands and ripped downward. A gust of putrid wind enveloped her and she felt the touch of a malignance so vile that her stomach churned and she nearly collapsed beside him. Then she heard the rumble of the demon’s voice and she looked into the tear in the jacket.

  A single, terrified eye stared back at her, diaphanous and pale.

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nbsp; Tess screamed and took a step backward and that was all the raggedy man needed. He grabbed her by the throat, homing in on her scream, and lifted her off the floor. She slashed at the arms of his coat, hacked at the blindfold across his eyes, cutting his cheek and the bridge of his nose.

  Then her friends were there, pushing inside the psychomanteum, each with a mirror shard in hand. Lili and Tess and Nick brought those gleaming glass daggers down in slashing arcs, tearing through the back of the raggedy man’s coat, and he threw back his head just as her double had, mouth open in a silent scream.

  He began to fade, and hope sparked a fire in her heart.

  But when she tore her blade through that black fabric again, it fluttered in an unseen wind and seemed to expand, unfurling and billowing as it rose to hide his face. It enveloped him like a death shroud and then diminished, tightening and twisting down upon itself until it simply vanished.

  Tess heard a heart pounding and knew it was her own. The four of them stood in a small circle inside the ruin of the psychomanteum, breathing hard and flush with the grim joy of survival. They stared at one another.

  “Is he…?” Nick began.

  “He didn’t fade out,” Audrey replied.

  “No,” Tess agreed. “He ran.”

  “Only one place he’d run to,” Lili said.

  She nodded. She knew where Cornell Berrige would run. They all knew.

  “Tess!” someone shouted.

  They whipped around and saw Frank holding his gun at the three hotel employees who were still just inside the room. Tess could see in their eyes that they had seen quite a bit of what had just unfolded inside the psychomanteum, and it terrified them.