by Hunter Shea
He looked at Jessica’s door and thought of knocking, but he was too afraid to face the consequences. She needed to decompress. She didn’t need his traveling pity party right now.
Back in his room, he ate the peanuts and drank half the bottle of water, then changed into a T-shirt and boxers and sat on the bed in the lotus position. After ten minutes, he began to realize that his mind was in too agitated a state to get anywhere close to where he needed to be. He wished he had the meditative abilities of a Buddhist monk, then realized how wishing to be something was a cause of suffering and only adding to his lost cause.
He considered jerking off to help ease the tension that was humming through both his mind and body, but after a few futile attempts he shot that idea down. It was impossible to bring up any of his stable of fantasies without drifting back to the debacle at the Leighs’ house and Jessica’s look of disgust when she left the car.
Frustrated, he gathered all the pillows behind his head and turned on the television.
“No peace for you tonight, dumbass,” he said.
He flipped through the channels, unable to find anything that could hold his attention, finally stopping at an old Spencer Tracy movie. It was the one where he was a one-armed guy coming to a town that held a huge secret. He’d missed the first twenty minutes but he didn’t care. Consider it a very small penance.
His heart jumped when there was a knock at his door.
He looked at the clock and rubbed his eyes in disbelief. It was three o’clock. He glanced at the TV. The Spencer Tracy movie was long gone. Claudette Colbert was on a train with Clark Gable now, the two of them bickering.
“I’ll be there in a sec,” he said, coughing to clear his throat. He grabbed his jeans from the floor and yanked them on. He was about to pull the safety chain and unlock the door when he realized he had no idea who was on the other side. It was, after all, the middle of the night.
“Is that you, Jess?”
There was no answer, just another couple of raps on the door.
Eddie opened his mind and felt Jessica sleeping in the next room. Her dreams, or at least the emotional vibe from them, were troubled, agitated, but she was most certainly under the covers and not outside his door.
“Wonderful,” he huffed.
He looked around the room for a weapon, settling on his belt. Indiana Jones had his whip, Eddie Home had his belt. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting a confrontation in a New Hampshire Best Western.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Eddie’s heart pulsed in his throat. Steeling himself, he moved his face to the door, stooping to look through the peephole. The glass had been smeared by years of dirt and neglect. He could just make out the shape of a person standing inches from the door. He attempted to connect with the person’s mind, to gain an insight into their identity and intentions. Nothing.
Just like at the Leighs’.
“Holy crap,” he said.
He darted back to the door that connected his and Jessica’s room and whispered through the crack, “Jessica, wake up, it’s Eddie!”
It was followed by the sounds of the bed creaking and covers shifting. He knocked softly and whispered again, louder.
When the lock clicked he nearly jumped. He undid the lock on his side and opened the door. Jessica looked tired, angry, disheveled and confused. She had been sleeping in her clothes.
“This better be fucking good,” she said drowsily.
“One way or another, I’m pretty sure it will be.”
The steady, sure knocking resumed at his door.
“You call for room service?” Jessica said while trying to smooth her hair.
“Yeah, at three in the morning,” he said.
“Well, who is it?”
“I can’t see and I can’t sense a thing, just like I couldn’t get a read on anything at the Leigh house.”
Realization dawned on Jessica’s face. She ran back to her room and returned with her phone. “Just in case we need to call for help.”
Together, they crept to the door. The knocking happened again, three raps on the door, then silence.
Eddie turned to Jessica. “You open the door and stay behind it. I’ll face whoever it is.”
He didn’t feel half as brave as he sounded. He motioned for Jessica to open the door.
She tugged with all her strength in an attempt to startle the person on the other side.
It didn’t work.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jessica saw the look of surprise on Eddie’s face when she pulled the door open and her heart stopped. He stood silent for a few seconds that seemed to last an eternity. She was about to peek around the door, having already dialed 9-1 in her phone when he said, “Selena! What are you doing here?”
She joined Eddie’s side and faced the girl. Selena didn’t speak, barely moved, her skin pale as milk in the moonlight. She looked as if she was in shock. Her dark eyes were wide and unblinking.
Jessica asked, “Selena, honey, are you all right? Come inside and sit down.”
Selena Leigh didn’t answer or move.
When Jessica reached out to touch her arm, Selena took a step back, keeping the same distance between them.
Eddie leaned into her ear and whispered, “How did she know we’re staying here? Better yet, how did she know this is my room?”
Everything had happened so fast, her brain hadn’t had time to think beyond the immediacy of the situation. Now that Eddie mentioned it, nothing was making sense. She felt a chill drop down her back.
“Selena, can you tell me why you’re here?”
The girl stared back at them with black, emotionless eyes.
Jessica handed Eddie her phone. She whispered, “Just click the button in the middle to take pictures. I’m going to make a rush for her.”
“What?”
“Just do it,” she hissed.
She put up her hands to show she was defenseless and meant no harm. “I want to help you, honey, but I have to know what’s bothering you. I’d really like it if you could come inside and talk to us. Isn’t that why you’re here, to talk to us?”
Without warning, she dashed out of the room. Selena took several quick steps backward, avoiding her touch, before turning her back and running into the gloomy parking lot. Jessica heard the click of her phone as Eddie snapped away. She sprinted after her, but Selena, or the thing that looked like her, was too fast. She took off like a world-class sprinter. Jessica jumped when the girl ran into a car’s side view mirror, shearing it off with a loud crash. It didn’t even slow her down and in seconds she had passed under the last streetlight and out of sight, into the night.
Jessica gave chase for several blocks, her bare feet hardly registering the pain from pounding on the hard concrete, until she gave up, realizing there was no way she would catch up with her. Eddie pulled up a moment later, panting. He bent over and clasped his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“Man, she’s freaky fast.”
“That’s because she wasn’t real.”
He looked up at her. “She seemed pretty real when she took out that mirror. I admit, she was a little strange with the wide-eyed and silent routine, but I don’t think doppelgangers can tear metal and glass off of cars.”
“Let me see the phone.”
She hit the Back button to flip through the photos Eddie had snapped. Most were too dark and grainy to make out any detail.
He continued, “I mean, I’m no doppelganger expert, but I doubt they could pull off something as real as that. She’s going to wake up with one hell of a bruise in the morning.”
Jessica clicked through to the very first photo he had taken, just as she had approached Selena outside the door. She stared at it for a while, tuning Eddie out as he expounded on his theory that only a real, flesh-and-blood person could have done what Selena did to the car.
She walked back to the hotel, Eddie by her side, still out of breath.
When they were back in the parking lot, s
he knelt by the remains of the mirror. The glass was cracked and the metal bent where it had connected with the door. It belonged to an old Mustang, an eighties vintage. Not their best decade. The mirror weighed more than most new car bumpers. She carried it with her to the porch outside their rooms.
“You want to see how I know you’re wrong?” she asked.
Eddie leaned against the open doorway. “Does the mirror have ectoplasm or something on it?”
“You’re a totally different guy at night, you know that?”
“I get cranky when I get woken up by troubled, Olympic track star teens.”
She smiled. “Well, be cranky no more.”
She held the phone’s display to his face, deriving great satisfaction when she saw his jaw go slack.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he muttered.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The next morning, Jessica and Eddie met in the breakfast area at nine. The room was packed with people loading plates with bagels, muffins, boxes of cereal and fruit. Everyone seemed to be of the same mind that a free continental breakfast meant you had to gather up enough food to hold you over until dinner. Most of the kids were already in their bathing suits and quite a few moms were wearing straw sunhats.
Eddie peeled an orange and asked to see her phone again. He studied the picture for several minutes while she chomped on a bland toasted bagel with cream cheese and grape jelly. “I was thinking that this would all seem very different in the light of day, but I was way wrong,” he said, sliding the phone across the table.
“I downloaded it to my laptop before I went to sleep so I could see it blown up. I also played around with the contrast and light so I could make her out better. I’m not afraid to admit I was a little creeped out.”
Eddie popped an orange slice in his mouth, tilted back in his chair. A passing child bumped into him and pitched him forward. He scowled, but said nothing to the kid who was just eager to join his parents as they were leaving. “We were both there, about a foot away from her, and she looked as real as anyone around us. She interacted with the physical world just as any living person would. Proof of that is in the car she steamrolled. That picture just doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it does. Eddie, we’re human. We perceive what we want to perceive and when things appear in front of us that our brains can’t comprehend, we just fill in the gaps so they fit with the paradigm we’re comfortable with. Cameras don’t have a mind or a soul. They only show us what was in front of the lens the moment the picture was taken. Doppelgangers have appeared to people in dozens of different ways, so this isn’t that far of a stretch.”
Eddie mulled her words over, then pointed an orange slice at her. “I understand that some people see doppelgangers as a living person with depth and dimension, while others have reported them to look pretty much like your average wispy ghost. What I’m having a hard time with is the discrepancy between what we saw and what the picture shows, even with your explanation.”
“That aside, do you agree something odd, possibly paranormal, happened last night?”
He chewed on the top of a corn muffin. “Yes. And I’m also wondering why I’m not picking up a damn thing around the Leigh house or Selena’s doppelganger. That could all be a personal problem and have nothing to do with them. I keep thinking that Edwin’s EB screwed me up somehow. I never made contact with a spirit that drained me physically like that.”
When they finished, they walked to the pool area. The gates had just been opened and children swarmed from every corner of the hotel to jump in, despite the water being chilly so early in the morning. They sat at a nearby picnic table and watched the controlled chaos.
Jessica said, “So, do we go pay a visit to Rita and Selena this morning? It’s Tuesday, so I’m pretty sure Greg would be at work.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. If Greg found out, and he will, that could be the end of it.”
“As far as Greg is concerned, it is over. What happened last night changes things.”
“Right, for us it changes things. Not so much for him. He’ll think we’re just making it up.”
“What about when I show him the picture?”
“He’ll assume you doctored up a picture of his daughter. It doesn’t take much to fake a ghost picture nowadays. In fact, it’s so easy that you almost have to throw out any photos taken over the past ten years.”
A soaked girl wearing water wings scampered behind Jessica, giggling. Her older brother shot her with a water pistol and they ran back into the pool. Eddie laughed when he saw that the boy had gotten Jessica’s hair wet in the process.
“Kind of hard to talk about something so weird and serious in this setting,” Eddie said.
“You think? What do you want to do next?”
“You should call Rita and tell her what happened last night. Better that than an email or text that her husband can come across. While you do that, I’m going to call Dr. Froemer at The Rhine.”
“Who’s Dr. Froemer?”
“I was the prize lab ape when I was there and he was the head scientist.” He saw the shocked look on Jessica’s face and added, “It was more like a student-professor kind of relationship. He’s as nice as he is smart, and that’s saying a lot. I’m wondering if he knows anything about doppelgangers or could at least point me in the right direction.”
Jessica smacked the table and stood. “Sounds like a plan. Knock on my door when you’re done.”
Eddie took one last look at the families having fun in the pool and tried to remember if his own family had ever had a moment like this. There was that one time they had gone to Disney Land, but then he remembered his father being separated from them, only to be found at the hotel pool later chatting up a pretty girl lounging in a bikini who was at least ten years younger than him. It was no wonder he turned out this way, talking to a dead man so he could find his ghost-hunting daughter and be accosted by poltergeists and doppelgangers. Dysfunctional childhoods led to dysfunctional adults.
He chuckled, then went to his room to call his mentor.
Dr. Froemer sounded distracted, which meant he was preparing the next day’s tests with the subject du jour. Despite that, it was good to hear his voice. Eddie never thought he’d feel homesick for The Rhine, especially so soon after leaving.
“I know you’re busy, but I was hoping you could help me out with a little situation I’ve stumbled upon here.”
“Nonsense, I’m never too busy to talk to you.” He heard a heavy thunk, as if the doctor had dropped a large book on his desk. “Now, where would here be?”
“I’m currently in New Hampshire.”
“Live free or die!”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the state slogan. One of my favorites. I thought you had moved to New York.”
Eddie turned on the air conditioner and sat at the small table beside the window. He put his feet up on the bed. “I did. I’m here for a few days. I’m with Jessica Backman. You know, the girl.”
Dr. Froemer was silent.
“I mean I came with her on an investigation,” Eddie clarified. “I’m not actually with her.”
“I have to hand it to you, Eddie, you are a very resourceful man. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that we’ve had a few wagers over the probability of your successfully meeting this mystery girl of yours. It looks like I’m out ten dollars. Oh well, easy come, easy go. So, what’s she like?”
Eddie paused and answered carefully. “She’s tough as nails and passionate in her beliefs. She’s not your average nineteen-year-old.”
“If the stories are true, I suspect she grew up very fast. So, how can I be of assistance?”
“This is actually my second investigation with her. The first involved a very peeved spirit that had power beyond anything I’ve ever heard. It knocked me out. I’ll tell you more about that another day. What we have here in sunny New England is not your typical haunting.” He thought about Selena’s do
ppelganger slamming into the car mirror, how it didn’t even slow her down, and felt a cramp in the pit of his stomach. “What do you know about doppelgangers?”
Dr. Froemer exhaled into the phone. “Whew, when you said you had something rare, you weren’t kidding. A doppelganger. Have you seen it?”
He told him about his suspicions when they pulled up to the Leighs’ house and how they had stormed it like a couple of paratroopers. He tried not to leave a single detail out as he relayed the encounter just a few hours earlier and how the Leigh family members, house and doppelganger were all coming up as psychic black holes.
“I have to admit, this is a little out of my area of expertise. I’ve read papers on the doppelganger phenomenon and how it relates to artists and the workings of their overactive subconscious. Over the years, I’ve heard of the odd case here and there of a doppelganger appearing to an individual or a family, but I’m not entirely sure I trust the sources. With you, I don’t doubt the source one bit.”
“And we have proof,” Eddie added, thinking about the photo captured on Jessica’s phone.
“Give me a moment, I have something I want to look up.”
Eddie heard his chair squeal and the doctor mumbling as he shuffled around his office. He could picture him, fingers resting on his chin, eyeballing the rows of books that surrounded his desk, his memory better than any card catalogue. There was a knock at Eddie’s door, but this time it was only housekeeping. He opened the door and asked if she could come back later, then slipped the plastic Do Not Disturb sign over the door handle. By the time the maid, a pretty blonde girl with a Russian accent, had finished apologizing, the doctor was back on the line.
“I’m not the expert on this subject, but I do know a couple that have had an experience similar to yours. The man, Morgan Stern, wrote to me ten years ago describing his multiple run-ins with the doppelganger of his father. When his father, who had been in a nursing home at the time, passed on, the doppelganger vanished, but Mr. Stern swore that the ordeal had left him with psychic abilities he’d never had previous to the apparition’s appearance. He was living with a woman, Gigi Staub, at the time, and it was through her urging that they came here to have him tested.
