by Hunter Shea
It was going on three fifteen when Jessica felt the temperature in the room plummet.
She jerked her attention to the ceiling fan to see if it had kicked into a higher gear. That sometimes happened with the ones that had a wireless remote control. It still spun at a moderate speed, as it had since earlier that evening.
Something was about to happen. She knew as much from the tingling at the base of her scalp as the chill that now permeated the small room.
Jessica waited, breathing slowly through her mouth to keep the amount of ambient noise in the room and in her head as low as possible. She sat forward in the chair, vigilant. Her gaze darted to Selena when she shifted in her sleep, pulling her legs up closer to her midsection until she was in a tight fetal position.
She reached for the ceiling fan remote on the desk and pressed the button to turn it off.
The silence was so perfect that her ears buzzed with a dull whine.
Selena moaned softly, drawing Jessica’s attention again. It was now as cold as a meat locker. Jessica could see the vaporous exhalations of all three girls. When Selena started shivering, she had to stop herself from covering her with a blanket. This entire tableau was being set by the unknown entity that had decided to take up residence in the house. The last thing she needed to do was upset even the smallest element.
She wanted it to feel comfortable. To feel as if it had the upper hand. To show itself.
Jessica stared into the dark closet, waiting for the double walker to emerge, preparing herself for its normal yet otherworldly appearance. It was the most unsettling thing she had witnessed in her short time of working in this field, but far from enough to scare her off. She doubted there was anything that could do that.
While she was concentrating on the closet, she heard Selena’s mattress crinkle as if a heavy weight had settled onto it. She saw a depression, about the size of a hand, form just inches below Selena’s feet.
It was here.
“Come on, show yourself,” Jessica whispered.
The depression filled back in, and was replaced by a new one next to her knees.
Jessica waited for the doppelganger to take shape, but there was only the steady progression of a phantom creeper in the bed with Selena.
“Who are you?” Jessica asked, low enough not to wake the girls. She held her digital recorder toward the bed. “What’s your name? I know you’re not Selena, no matter how much you want to look like her.”
She rose from the chair when she saw deep depressions simultaneously form in four corners around Selena. The force on the mattress had to be intense to push down as low as it had. It was as if it had boxed Selena in and was about to draw itself over her.
“I’m Jessica,” she said, louder. “Can you tell me your name?”
She knew it wasn’t going to be that easy but it was worth a try.
The bed frame creaked from the extra weight being exerted upon it. It was time to get the other girls out, now!
When Jessica reached for her walkie on the desk, it was nowhere to be found. Did I leave it downstairs? she thought, cursing herself.
It was time to break this up. Things were taking a dark turn. Selena whimpered in her sleep as if she was being hurt. The wood frame of the bed sounded stressed to the point of breaking.
Subtlety had to be thrown out the window. She had to shout for Rita and Greg to get the girls. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her lungs felt as if they had snapped shut and she was locked in a silent scream.
Selena muffled a desperate, “No!”
But like Jessica, she was meshed in place, trapped in her dream world while her body was pinned under the weight of a presence that had sinister intentions. She knew that now. Something was very wrong here. The game had changed.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Morgan Stern had asked for and received Eddie’s permission to smoke in front of him. He was surprised when the high school teacher opened a small drawer and extracted a pipe. All he needed was the tweed jacket with patches at the elbows to complete the stereotype.
“It’s a shame your generation is being robbed of the simple pleasures in life, like a good after-dinner smoke. I never did see the sense of going into the ground with a bunch of healthy parts. Might as well use them up while you have them.”
Gigi gave his arm a light slap. “Don’t go encouraging him to take up smoking. Lord, the things he comes out with. He used to smoke cigarettes. This is his way of quitting.”
“I went from two packs of cigarettes a day to one pipe an evening. Not a bad trade-off. I have one of my colleagues at school to thank for it. He thought he was getting me a gag gift for my fortieth birthday. The joke’s on him.”
The tobacco smoke carried an aroma of cherry with hints of vanilla. If it tasted as good as it smelled, Eddie could see why Morgan took up the habit.
But, he wasn’t here to talk about the pleasures of a post-repast pipe. He steered the conversation back to the interaction between Morgan, Gigi and his father’s doppelganger in the yard. It seemed as if Morgan had used the pipe as a small diversion, delaying the recitation of a painful memory. He had to let them take their time, not push things.
“Eddie, how much do you know about the myth of the doppelganger?”
“Not a whole lot. And would you call it a myth, when we have three people in this room who have seen one?”
“Absolutely. Not all myths are unfounded or stories based on false perceptions. Some myths are quite the opposite, though we as a species try our damnedest to relegate them to the world of fantasy. And do you know why we do that?”
“Because we can’t apply scientific standards to prove their existence?” Eddie answered.
Morgan drew on his pipe, allowing a moment to savor the sweet tobacco. “Not entirely. It’s because it scares the hell out of us. When the stuff of nightmares follows us into the daylight, we do anything we can to banish it back to the realm of impossibility. If you ask me, I think people see doppelgangers far more than we know. The problem is, the unmitigated fear that comes with such an experience is so terrifying, so perplexing, that our brains automatically sever the neural pathway the event navigates and deletes the source. It’s powerful stuff.”
Now Eddie was beginning to feel creeped out, despite the warm surroundings and pleasant company. Morgan was making him realize the full weight of the situation he and Jessica had blindly taken on, and it didn’t look like things were going to get any easier.
“When you said you spoke to your father’s doppelganger, was it just the one time?”
Gigi answered, “It happened the last two times, both out back. The first time, he didn’t say much, just ‘You startled me’ when we came outside to do some yard work. I remember at the time thinking that he didn’t look the least bit startled. It was as if he had consulted a book of proper phrases and decided that was the one to use when someone suddenly came upon you. We knew by then that it wasn’t Morgan’s dad, so we just stopped and stared at one another for a few seconds. Then he walked down the alley between our house and the one next door and disappeared.”
Morgan picked things up. “We didn’t have an actual back and forth conversation until a few days later. Gigi and I were sitting in the yard one night, having a glass of wine and unwinding from a long day. We jumped when we heard our gate open, then froze when we saw my father walk in and take a seat right across from us.”
“So, he was able to interact with objects around him that time?” Eddie asked.
“Just as easily as you or I,” Morgan answered. “It was then that I decided enough was enough, I had to find out what he, what it, wanted. So I just came right out and asked it.”
Gigi nodded and her shoulders bunched as if she had a chill pass through her. “I have to be honest, I almost died when it smiled and answered him.”
“Do you mind telling me what it said?” Eddie asked.
Morgan said, “Before I do, I need to ask if you know what most people associate doppelganger
s with.”
Eddie thought, but nothing came to him. Everything he had read was a jumbled mess in his brain. He was so wrapped up in Morgan and Gigi’s recounting of their experiences that he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. “To tell you the truth, I’m at a loss.”
“Death omens. It’s believed that when you see a doppelganger, it means the person the entity has chosen to represent in this world is about to die, or has already passed on. I did a little research on the subject after everything had happened and had I known then, I would have thought for sure my father was telling me goodbye the only way he could, him being ensconced in a nursing home and all. In a way, I’m glad I was ignorant of the theories because I’m not sure I would have had the courage to talk to it so freely.”
Before he could continue, Gigi said, “I think what Morgan is trying to say is that you can’t go by predominant theories when dealing with a doppelganger. In our case, it was far from a death omen. Morgan’s father lived for another year after the last appearance.”
“How long did you talk to it?”
“About five minutes or so, right?” Morgan said, looking to Gigi, who confirmed.
“After I asked him why he was here, why he kept coming to us, he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t go to Florida.’ I nearly dropped my wineglass,” Morgan said.
“What was in Florida?”
Morgan said, “Nothing, at the time. But, I was scheduled to take a six-month sabbatical after the new year. I had been toying with the idea of spending that time in Fort Myers. Gigi’s parents had recently passed away and left us a condo there. She had a ton of vacation time saved up and I thought we could spend a few months in the sun and I could work on learning to sail. It had become a new obsession of mine.”
“Had you told your father about your plans?” Eddie asked, putting to test one of the theories that doppelgangers were a type of astral projection, carrying all the knowledge of the person who inadvertently created them.
Morgan shook his head. “That’s just the thing. The only person I had discussed it with was Gigi. My father no longer even recognized me, and when I did visit, I would read books to him, all of his favorites, but there was no reason to talk about my tenuous plans.”
“Then it told him that Arizona was nice that time of year and he should take that trip to Sedona,” Gigi said.
“Another interest that no one else knew about,” Morgan said.
“It talked on and on about Arizona, places to stay, what to see, like it was a travel agent selling us on a trip. I can’t even begin to tell you how strange the whole thing was. I would have been less freaked out if it just started talking in Latin or repeating a phrase over and over again like in some horror movie.”
“So, did you go to Florida or Arizona?” Eddie asked, knowing there was still more to the story.
“That’s just it,” Morgan said. “We didn’t go anywhere. I’m not ashamed to admit, I was tripped out. After it made us promise not to go to Florida, it just got up, closed the gate behind it and left. At the time, I decided I wouldn’t go to either place. I was too afraid to take a chance. And it’s a good thing we didn’t. The condo in Fort Myers burned down in the middle of the night on Valentine’s Day. There was a gas leak, then a spark from God knows what, and the whole house went up. We would have been in the house at that time.”
Gigi leaned forward and placed a small hand on Eddie’s knee. “It saved us. I don’t know how, but it did. And for months afterwards, Morgan kept having these lifelike dreams that would sometimes come true. Little things, like knowing when one of his students was going to cut school or that my sister was pregnant with her first. That’s when we went to the Rhine Research Center, using some of that sabbatical time we had saved by not going to Fort Myers.”
“I have to admit, it was fun being the one tested instead of giving the tests. Dr. Froemer was very thorough and very understanding. Sadly, I never did turn out to be a star pupil.”
Something had just locked into place in Eddie’s mind and for the first time since coming into Jessica Backman’s crazy life, he felt as if he was on the verge of gaining the upper hand, something he had been very accustomed to thanks to his multiple gifts. Ever since the night at the McCammon house, it had been like treading water but getting nowhere. First, the EB nearly blew out his skull, then they arrived at the Leighs’ and he was thrown into a dark box where no light or sound could enter.
“For you both, then, seeing your father’s doppelganger was a positive experience,” he said.
Morgan tapped out his pipe in the ashtray. “Absolutely. Thanks to it, the fates were denied our souls, at least for the time being, to put things poetically. As a sort of epilogue, Gigi and I did eventually go to Sedona four years ago, six years after we had last seen my father’s doppelganger. We were on a tour of one of the vortexes, you know, those places in Sedona where dimensions are said to overlap, and as we were leaving, I could have sworn I saw my father entering the small tour bus. Needless to say, I jostled a few people out of my way and almost tripped getting onto the bus. He wasn’t there, but I think him, or his doppelganger, guided me to that place so my father’s true spirit could see me, and I could see him, one last time.”
Eddie thanked them both, promising to call them with the outcome of his particular doppelganger situation.
When he got back inside the Jeep, it was late. It seemed impossible, but he’d been with Morgan and Gigi for nearly five hours. The information they had shared with him was invaluable. He called Jessica and got her voicemail.
He turned on the GPS and headed back to New Hampshire. When he flipped the radio on, a traffic report said there was major night construction on I90. He slammed his palm on the wheel and hoped the delays weren’t as bad as they sounded. Pushing the Jeep faster than he normally would, he navigated through side streets, jumping on the highway and offering up a prayer to the traffic gods.
A sea of bright red brake lights and immobile cars and trucks stretched on for miles.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When Selena awoke, her wild eyes and tight grimace made her look like someone buried alive, which was very close to what she was experiencing. A deep indentation had formed around her body on the mattress, as if a moat had been dug around her. She tried to move her arms to no avail.
“Help me!”
Crissy and Julie jolted awake, both scampering away from the bed when they saw what was happening. They looked to Jessica for help.
The mute oppression that had overtaken her broke, and she shouted, “Girls, I need you out of the room, now!”
The two girls ran into Rita, Ricky and Greg as they entered the room. Rita yelped, covering her mouth with quivering hands. Jessica held her arm out to stop them from moving any closer. Selena whimpered, paralyzed as the unseen presence pushed down on her.
Jessica reached out to touch Selena’s leg and was staggered by an electric shock that was so intense, the spark momentarily lit up the room, filling it with a gut-tightening whiff of spent ozone. Everyone in the doorway shrieked with unbridled horror. Greg, no longer able to watch his daughter suffer, strode into the room.
“It’s okay, baby, I’ll get you out.”
As he went to grab her off the bed, he was hit by another shock so intense, it blew him off his feet. Selena wailed, “Daddy!”
Greg landed in a heap on the side of the bed, unconscious. Pandemonium was in full swing in the cramped room.
Holy shit, get ahold of the situation, Jessica commanded herself. Unlike everyone around her, she wasn’t frightened. She was confused, concerned and angry. This was not the work of a doppelganger. Everything happening in the room was a grim reminder of what she had seen as a small girl, and she was not going to let it go one step further.
“Let her go, now!” she said, her tone piercing, yet controlled. “Tell me who you are. What do you want with Selena? If you tell me your name, maybe I can help you.”
She hoped that the EB couldn’t detect her subterf
uge. If she was lucky, it was saying its name right now, just not in a register that could be detected with the human ear. Once it left, and it would leave, she would check her digital recorder and maybe have what she needed to put an end to this.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she continued. “I’m taking Selena, right now, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. You’re going to leave this house. You’re going to let her go and leave. Do you understand?”
She plunged her hands onto the bed and under Selena’s midsection. She felt spidery nips of electricity dance up her arms and knew that her hair, as long as it was, was standing on end. But the EB’s power had diminished greatly, and she was able to scoop a frantic Selena into her arms. The teen threw her arms around Jessica’s neck, sobbing. Jessica carried her past the crowd in the doorway and down the stairs, as far away from the room as she could get. Greg had recovered and followed everyone else into the living room. He held his head as if it might break.
After placing a teary Selena onto the couch, the girl was immediately surrounded by her mother, Julie and Ricky. The four of them heaved with sobs while casting terrified glances at the stairs. Greg remained in the middle of the room, a perplexed look on his face. Crissy was the most together, but it was plain to see that the past several minutes had jangled her.
Greg reached out to Jessica’s shoulder. “What the hell was that?” he asked, his voice raw and confused.
“I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t want any of us to get to Selena. Are you okay? Let me get you something to drink.”
She rushed to the refrigerator, not concerned that she was treating it as her own. She grabbed bottles of water and juice for everyone.
When Greg regained some of his composure, she continued, “I’m pretty sure that the entity, or EB as I call them, thought that by shocking you the way it did, the rest of us would be scared off. That’s why the energy field it had built around her was so weak when I grabbed her. When an EB is negative, it uses everything in its arsenal to induce fear. Most times, that works.” She approached Selena. “You feeling a little better, honey?”
