Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  “Tess!” Lili screamed.

  A shadow fell over her, blocking out the light, and Tess whirled to see Berrige looming above her.

  “You hurt me,” he snarled, his voice like bones grinding together.

  Tess reached for her shard, hand closing on the loosened cloth, but too slow.

  Lili raced past her in silence, one arm up to defend herself as she plunged her own shard into Berrige’s chest. The raggedy man grunted, then let out a groan so full of despair that Tess could almost have felt sorry for him. Lili stabbed him again and Berrige grabbed a fistful of her hair … and Tess hacked at his arm, slashing with her shard. He cried out and released his grip and then they were side by side, plunging the mirror shards into him. The cloth had slipped a bit on Tess’s shard and the glass sliced into her palm. Warm blood trickled along her palm and down her forearm but she ignored it.

  Nick grabbed Berrige around the throat and ripped him to the ground, dropped down on top of him, and used both hands to spear the raggedy man through the chest. He pulled the glass knife out and prepared to stab again.

  Then Audrey was there, on one knee. “Don’t just stab him! Drive it deep! Let it do its work!”

  Tess and Lili did as she asked, drove their shards into Berrige’s flesh and pushed, forcing the sharp glass as deep as it would go. Nick stabbed his heart again. Berrige’s mouth hung wide open in a gasp of shock and pain and, Tess thought, a refusal to believe that he might be destroyed. The jacket fluttered and the raggedy man bucked against them. As Tess stared down at his withered chest, at the place where deadly edged mirror sliced deep into him, his clothes and flesh seemed to coalesce into shadows.

  “No!” she screamed. “He’s going to get away!”

  Audrey smashed her mirror shard down through Berrige’s left eye socket, slicing through the blindfold there. He twisted his head once, snapping the mirror shard, leaving most of it imbedded inside his skull. The blindfold fell away and they could all see the shadows spilling out of the empty sockets there. In the glittering red light of the road flares, she did not realize the shadows were an icy mist, but then she felt the cold seeping out of those dark sockets and saw the ice form on the scar tissue there.

  Berrige began to sink in on himself.

  “It’s not working!” Nick shouted. “He’s getting away!”

  “No,” Lili said. “Look at the shards.”

  Tess glanced down at the mirrored shard in her hands and saw that it reflected a shifting blackness, saw the flap of fabric and the button of a coat in the glass surface—but it wasn’t a reflection.

  Berrige’s flesh collapsed abruptly, misting into a cloud of shadow. With the resistance of his body removed, her hand plunged downward and the mirrored shard snapped as it hit the floor, cutting a much deeper gash into her palm. Tess cried out and rocked backward, landed on her butt with searing pain raging in her hand. As the blood seeped out she took the strip of tablecloth and wrapped it tightly around her hand, holding it against her chest.

  Berrige’s empty coat and blindfold were all that remained of him. Nick picked it up, searching to make sure nothing of the raggedy man remained … except the rags.

  “He’s gone!” Lili said, a smile lighting up her face.

  “This is wrong,” Audrey said, rising slowly. She turned in a circle, staring around the hellishly lit cellar. She hugged herself against the cold, her breath pluming, ice crystals glittering in her hair. “Nothing’s changed. Can’t you feel it? I thought if we destroyed everyone involved in the summoning, the window they opened would be closed. The demon would be gone! But it’s still here!”

  She whipped around, shivering as she stared at them with pleading, hopeless eyes. “Why is it still here?”

  Nick dropped his shard, which clinked as it broke apart on the stone floor.

  “Oh, shit,” he said softly. “What’s this now?”

  He and Lili were staring toward the pit, and Tess realized that was where they should all have been looking once they’d gotten rid of Berrige. If the evil remained, it could only come from there.

  Tess clutched her bandaged hand to her chest and turned toward the pit. She heard Audrey mutter something too low to hear. A sound came from the pit, a kind of scratching and a low, almost human groan.

  A hand reached out of the pit, scrabbled for purchase on the stone floor, and then the other hand stretched out and grabbed hold. Tess took a step away, back toward the stairs, but couldn’t avert her gaze. Nick swore.

  “Oh, shit,” Audrey said quietly. “The gun.”

  Tess had forgotten the gun but she saw it now, flickering darkly in the spitting red illumination of the road flares.

  “No,” she said, or thought she said.

  She bolted toward the pit, the stones uneven beneath her feet. The figure hauled itself from that hole in the middle of the cellar, hunched as it dragged its body up over the edge and onto the floor. One knee came up beneath it and it saw the gun, reached a long, powerful arm toward it.

  Tess cried out as she kicked the gun away. It clunked across the floor and caromed across the wall. The figure from the pit grabbed her ankle and she went down hard, tried to break her fall with both hands and screamed as her slashed palm hit the floor. Powerful hands grabbed her and she turned over, kicked out at her attacker—at the thing, the demon—and only as it reared back did she see its face in that hellish strobing glow.

  “Steven?” she said.

  The thing from the pit was Lili’s ex. He’d been beaten badly, or banged and scraped up, but she recognized his face.

  But his face meant nothing. Not here.

  The eyes were not Steven’s eyes at all. They glowed with their own light, an icy blue that could not be diminished by the hue of the road flares. He lunged for her again and she kicked him hard in the face.

  “Stop!” she shouted, and kicked him again, wondering how he could be here. Her thoughts churned. They hadn’t even known him during the Harrison House project, he never stepped inside the psychomanteum, so the dead could not have stolen his reflection. This couldn’t be a doppelgänger, but if it was the real Steven, how could he be here?

  Tess scrambled backward, started to rise.

  “Steven, stop! It’s me, Tess! Lili is here.” She pointed. “Right there! Look at her!”

  Nick and Audrey hung back as Lili approached the pit. She glanced at Tess and then moved toward Steven, searching his face for some sign of recognition.

  “Lili?” Steven rasped, his throat rusty and unused, as if it were a dead thing speaking to them. An ancient thing.

  “It’s still here,” Audrey whispered. “The demon is still here. I don’t think you should—”

  Lili reached up to touch Steven’s face with her left hand, caressing his cheek. The ice blue light in his eyes dimmed just a bit and the stone foundations of the house trembled with that moment of recognition. Deeper in the pit, something spoke, then. To Tess it sounded as if the sound came from the base of her skull, from some primeval bit of her brain, a part where only the deepest, most ancient instincts still lurked.

  Steven went rigid. Frost turned his skin a dark blue.

  He reached for Lili and Tess, hurled himself from the ground. Tess took Lili’s wrist and forced her hand forward … forced her to stab him in the abdomen. Together, their two hands plunged that shard of mirror deep into his gut.

  “Tess, no!” Nick roared.

  But the icy light in Steven’s eyes blinked out and the rumble beneath their feet went still. Steven let out a kind of sigh and began to tumble forward into Lili’s arms. Tess released her wrist and Lili dropped the shard, and then the two of them caught Steven as he fell. Nick and Audrey rushed forward to help and together they lay Steven on the stone floor just a few feet from the edge of the pit.

  Bleeding, but breathing. Eyes clear.

  TWENTY

  Tess stared at Audrey, trying to read her expression in the fading light of the road flares.

  “Is it gone?” she a
sked. “You could feel it before. Is it still here? Is it still inside him?”

  Audrey smiled. “We should go.”

  She stood and walked to the pit, stared into its darkness a moment, and then tossed in the shard of mirror she’d carried with her from the Nepenthe. Relief flooded through Tess—a relief she did not yet trust.

  “Take mine,” Lili said. “Get rid of it.”

  Tess glanced over to where Lili had dropped her fragment of the psychomanteum mirror. It had broken into several pieces, but that wasn’t enough as far as Tess was concerned. If somehow the madness and malice of Cornell Berrige lived inside that glass, she wanted to make sure it would never escape. Standing, she stamped on the shards over and over and then used the edge of her shoe to brush as many of the pieces as she could into the pit, and then did the same with her own.

  Nick flung his piece into the pit with as much force as he could muster and they all heard it shatter against the inner wall, fragments showering down into the hole.

  Lili knelt by Steven, cradling his head in her lap. When Tess rejoined her, she was surprised to see that his eyes were open. Lili shuddered as she exhaled, and only then did Tess realize that she could no longer see their breath. The icy air had begun to recede and the cellar to warm.

  “Steven—” Tess said.

  “Call 911,” Lili interrupted, glancing up at her, face blank but eyes wide with worry. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

  Tess could smell the blood. In the fading, flickering flare light, she saw the way Steven held one hand over the stab wound. She pulled out her cell phone, glanced at it, and swore.

  “No signal down here,” she said.

  Nick moved for the steps. “I’ll call from upstairs.”

  “No,” Steven grunted. “You … all of you need to go.”

  “Bullshit,” Tess said, heart quickening.

  “We’re not going to just leave you here,” Lili said, glancing around at Audrey and Tess to make sure they were on the same page.

  “No,” Steven said through gritted teeth. He gave Lili his hand. “Help me up.”

  “I don’t think—” Audrey began.

  But Steven was already moving. With or without their help, he was determined to move. Tess and Nick rushed to help Lili and together the three of them eased Steven to his feet. One arm over Nick’s shoulder, he shuffled toward the steps.

  “We get up there and I’ll make the call,” he said. “I’ll report I saw someone breaking in, came in after them, and got myself stabbed for my trouble. I’ll call Lili when they’ve stitched me up and we can talk then. Maybe you can explain the parts of tonight that—”

  “Parts of it confuse the hell out of us, too,” Tess said.

  “I was gonna say ‘scare the shit out of me,’ but either way.”

  When he laughed, it became a grimace of pain and he hissed air in through his teeth. Tess kept silent after that, letting Lili and Nick help him up the stairs. Lili whispered tender encouragements to Steven and Tess knew this night would be a new beginning for them. At least something good would come from the terror they’d endured.

  She turned to see Audrey lagging behind, staring at the pit in the cellar as the crimson flickering dimmed.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Audrey said, her voice a soft rasp. “Whatever darkness was in him, that bit of mirror drew it out. Otherwise some of us would be dead now. And it wouldn’t be so … quiet, down here.”

  Tess knew without asking that she didn’t mean the silence in the cellar, but the quiet she felt inside herself.

  “Come on,” she said. “The light’ll go out soon. You don’t want to be down here in the dark.”

  Audrey stared at the pit for another moment, then nodded slowly. She went to pick up the raggedy man’s coat. Tess wanted to shout at her, to stop her from touching the fabric. She remembered the suffering faces peering out from the darkness inside that coat. But Audrey snatched it up off the stone floor before she could say a word, carried it back to the pit, and threw it in.

  That only left the blindfold. Tess watched as Audrey used the edge of her shoe, just as she had done with the broken shards of mirror, to drag the blindfold to the pit and scrape it over the side.

  They both paused then, and Tess realized they were waiting for the same thing. A sound that didn’t belong there. A tremor in the stones beneath their feet.

  “It’s gone,” she said quietly.

  Audrey glanced at her. “So now you’re the psychic one?”

  Tess shuddered. “No, thanks. I don’t envy you that.”

  “You need to get that stitched up,” Audrey said, gesturing at the bloody cloth wrapped around Tess’s hand. “And start hoping the police don’t trace any of the blood down here back to you.”

  Tess frowned. “Thanks. I needed something else to worry about.”

  Audrey kept talking after that, a quiet but steady stream of words perhaps meant to comfort them both as they left the cellar behind. Tess barely heard Audrey, her mind racing ahead to the moment when she could be reunited with Maddie. All she wanted was to hold her girl in her arms and let her know that all was well, that they were all safe—daughter, mother, and father.

  Whatever happened in the future, whether Nick went to London with Kyrie or not, the bond the three of them shared had been made unbreakable in the past couple of days. Tess had no interest in being married to Nick, but they would do anything to keep their daughter safe, would stand shoulder to shoulder in that battle forever. They were allies, and as far as Tess was concerned, that was more than enough.

  “Let’s go,” Audrey said.

  Without another word, as the last crimson light of the road flares guttered out, Tess led the way up out of the darkness.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Frank Lindbergh sat in a chair in the restaurant at the back of the Nepenthe Hotel, wrists cuffed behind his back. A little bubble of madness kept floating up inside him, making him want to laugh out loud at the fact that he’d been cuffed again, but he kept his expression blank and impassive. A lot depended on it.

  Nearly an hour had passed since the police had first arrived. The initial response had been a pair of uniformed cops but that had quickly blossomed into nearly a dozen officers, two detectives, and several crime scene techs who spent their time lifting fingerprints off the weapons the vandals had used to demolish the psychomanteum. There was no point in dusting the rear door for prints, since there would no doubt be hundreds to choose from.

  They had already bagged his gun—his father’s unregistered gun—which they had found in the wreckage of broken glass, wiped clean of any prints.

  In the center of the room, one of the detectives engaged the hotel manager in conversation. Both women looked profoundly disturbed, and the detective kept taking deep breaths and working her jaw in frustration. At a table, the other detective sat speaking to a young blond guy named Spencer, who wiped tears from his eyes. His face was flushed a bright pink and he threw up his hands.

  “I already told you!” Spencer yelled.

  The detective hushed him, but Frank didn’t need to hear the words to know what was going on. Of the three hotel employees who had witnessed the events concerning the destruction of the psychomanteum, Spencer was the only one who had told the truth. The kid had fallen apart, terrified and jumping at shadows. The other two—including a security guard named Clyde—had wrestled Frank to the ground as the others had fled to pursue the raggedy man.

  “The cops are on the way, asshole,” Clyde had said.

  Frank had sighed, a headache coming on. “And you’re gonna tell them what? I only ask because in your shoes I’d want to still have a job tomorrow morning, and I’d be wondering what hotel management would think of the story you’re going to tell being quoted in the media. ‘Cops say ghosts vandalize hotel restaurant.’ Not the publicity your bosses are hoping for, I’m pretty sure.”

  Clyde had cussed for a few seconds, and then let him up. His pupils were widely dilated and
he seemed unsteady on his feet. No doubt he had a concussion from the way Not-Nick had slammed him into the wall, but he still had enough of his wits about him to know they needed a better story than the truth.

  The detective who’d been talking to the manager broke off suddenly and strode over to the corner where Frank sat in his cuffs. After the past week, he felt more at home with cuffs on than off.

  “Mr. Lindbergh,” she said, dark skin gleaming in the bright overhead lights.

  “Detective Nunnally.”

  “You’re going to stick with the story you’ve been telling?”

  Frank eased back in his chair, ignoring the way the cuffs bit into his wrists. “No simpler story than the truth, detective.”

  “Tell it again.”

  Frank shrugged. “I was on my way to meet a friend for a late dinner when I saw three guys waiting around by the door over there.” He nodded toward the rear door of the restaurant, the one that opened out onto the sidewalk. “The door popped open and I saw they had, like, golf clubs and stuff. One had a gun. I was maybe thirty feet away when they went inside and I hurried over. I heard glass shattering and their voices—laughing, y’know? I pulled out my phone, figured I’d just call you guys, but then I heard someone else shout and a scuffle and I ran in through the same door. One of the guys was fighting with the security guard over there. I tried to help and got my ass kicked for it. When I shook it off, the guys were gone and all the mirrors were shattered.”

  Detective Nunnally stared at him. “And you didn’t hear any of these men say anything that might suggest why they decided to break in here and vandalize this … whatever it is?”

  With a sigh, Frank rolled his eyes. “I don’t know, man. Maybe one of them got a bad omelet for breakfast one day or something. Are you going to take these cuffs off now?”