My Evil Twin Is a Supervillain

by David Solomons

  “I am. I’m your brother. I’m Luke.” I gazed down at him. “Please don’t leave me again.” I could see that my words carried the same force as any superpower. His confused, angry expression melted away in front of my eyes.

  “Get out,” he said quietly, turning his back on me.

  I set the magazine and sandwiches down beside him. “In case you change your mind.” I picked up the lantern. Ducking under the low stone arch that formed the exit, I paused. “Don’t get any ideas about escaping. Your powers are too weak, and even if you did somehow manage to break through my force field, you’ll never find your way out of here.”

  Zack didn’t respond, just sat staring into space. I made my way out through a maze of tunnels, using my telekinetic power to smooth over my footprints, leaving no trace of my passing and offering no clue to anyone who happened to stumble across the entrance. I hid the lantern in an alcove and walked out into the quiet stillness of the scrubby wood. My encounter with Zack hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped and I needed to clear my head. I decided to take the long route home.

  Via the Alps.

  I flew at supersonic speeds through mountain passes, breathing in the cold, pure air. I performed a barrel-roll over Mont Blanc, scared the crampons out of a couple of mountaineers, and churned up a pretty spectacular wave on Lake Geneva. The important thing was that Zack was back. It was only natural that he would complain to begin with. There was no way back to his world – I’d made sure of that – so when he appreciated that he was here to stay, I felt sure he’d make the best of his situation. That was Zack. Always making the best of things. It wouldn’t be long before he was happy again.

  I’d cheered myself up. I hadn’t felt like this in ages. I’d rewritten the past, now the future was mine. All mine.

  OK, admittedly, that did sound a bit Evil Twin-ish.

  But I wasn’t the bad guy. I’d saved the world – my world, anyway. Millions of people owed their lives to me. So what if I’d nicked one fourteen-year-old boy from a neighbouring universe. One. Could that really be called the act of a supervillain? Hardly. And if you were to take a poll of all the people I’d saved from Nemesis, all the families I’d kept alive, I bet they’d agree with me.

  I arrived home in time for dinner. Pausing in my bedroom to hang up my costume, I glanced at my new Green Lantern alarm clock.

  Other Luke would be sitting down to dinner in his universe too. I felt an unexpected jab of guilt, but shrugged it off and went downstairs to join the rest of my family.

  Zack’s place at the table was empty, just as it had been since it happened. But thanks to me, that was about to change. I’d spent ages working out the practicalities of reintroducing him. Mind control had been my first option. I’d decided to wipe people’s minds and alter their memories of what happened. It would be as if Zack never died. One problem. I didn’t have mind control powers. And then it struck me, why was I bothering with complicated plans when there was a much simpler way to achieve the same outcome? No trace of Zack had ever been found. I’d just say there had been a terrible mistake – that he wasn’t killed by Nemesis. The asteroid strike caused amnesia and he’d wandered off. Now, at last, he’d found his way home. Mum and Dad were sure to accept him as their son. After all, he was their Zack, in almost every way – trains and sandwich fillings excepted. Of course, there was the issue of his superpowers. That was different. However, I was betting that he’d be perfectly happy to keep them under wraps and let me do all the superhero-ing in future.

  “I thought you and I were working on the bird feeder after school today,” said Dad. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Flying over the Alps,” I replied. “Everyone goes on about the Matterhorn, but really you should see the Grossglockner at sunset. Lovely peak.”

  With a weary sigh Dad assumed I was joking and passed me the potatoes.

  I almost dropped the bowl.

  “Luke! Be careful, son.”

  I wasn’t listening. I’d just had an awful thought. When I left Zack, had I remembered to switch on the force field? He was almost certainly too weak to escape, but I couldn’t take the risk. It was OK. I could activate it from here. I concentrated hard, sending my massive power out into the world, snaking through the suburbs to Zack’s hiding place. I could feel my jaw clench and beads of sweat trickle down my forehead. Force field, force field, force f—

  “Luke?” Mum interrupted my superpower-ing. She lowered her voice. “Do you need to go to the toilet?”

  “No, I don’t need the toilet,” I snapped.

  “It did look like you needed to go,” agreed Dad, heaping his plate with salad. He passed me the bowl. “Roughage.”

  After dinner I went up to my room to do my homework. Not even superpowers can get you out of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on my bed. Homework could wait. Now was the time to celebrate and I knew just how to reward myself for my success. I’d read every comic in the known universe, but that was OK. There were plenty more universes.

  In my mind I pictured what I wanted. It wasn’t long before the smell of chips filled the air and my bedroom began to shake. My sock drawer juddered out of its slot and crashed to the floor. Plaster dust rained down as a crack drew itself across the ceiling. Finally, a shimmering rectangle opened above my bed.

  A comic fluttered from the hole and landed with a slap on the floor. I swept it up, the cover confirming what I’d hoped for, and expected.

  “Batman versus Darth Vader.” The impossible crossover. Not some fan-made mock-up, this had the smell, the feel, the official logos of a licensed story. Somewhere in the infinite multiverse this comic existed and I had brought it to me just by thinking about it. How cool was that?!

  Other Luke could fret all he liked about my meddling with cosmic forces, I wasn’t worried. I figured it was a bit like that time Dad went on a diet and I caught him in his shed, elbow-deep in a can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles. He’d said two things. The first was, “Don’t tell your mum.” And then he’d added, “One more little crisp isn’t going to make a difference, is it?” Well, on that basis, one more little hole in the universe couldn’t make that much of a difference either. Could it?

  Pushing the thought to the back of my mind, I settled down to discover who would win in this, the most longed-for contest: the Caped Crusader or the Dark Lord of the Sith? As I turned to the first page I reflected on what I’d achieved. Zack was back for good. Soon Mum and Dad would be happy again.

  And we’d all live happily ever after.

  “I have eyes on the target,” said Lara. The two of us were hiding in a bush outside Stellar’s house, watching him through a lighted window. “He is sitting down to dinner. He is using his fork to spear a piece of sausage. Now he is lifting the fork with the sausage to his mouth. Now he is eating the sausage—”

  “OK, OK, I get it,” I cut her off. “When I said we needed to mount a surveillance operation on Stellar, I should’ve specified the level of detail.”

  Lara sat back and folded her arms. “I’m new to this, remember? I only just found out that in another world I’m a superhero called Dark Trucker.”

  “Dark Flutter.”

  She nodded with fresh understanding. “Ahh, that explains her complete lack of haulage superpowers.”

  Back at the tree house I’d explained to her all about Dark Flutter and Stellar and Zack. And Zorbon the Decider and gerbil-holes and Gordon the World-Eater. Once she’d stopped walking in circles with a dazed look repeating “No way,” she’d pulled herself together and asked if I had a plan.

  Of course I did. First, we would track down Stellar, then stick to him like his own shadow. At some point he would be sure to lead us to Zack.

  “After your – his – house was destroyed,” Lara told me, “Luke and his family moved to a rented one on the edge of the park. That’s where he’ll be.”

  We stopped at Lara’s house to pick up transport. Lara had a new Raleigh with 21 speed twist gr
ip gears, and she lent me her old bike, which was too small for her, and a bit embarrassing for me. I’d kept up as best as I could. It wasn’t just my bike that was wobbling, it felt like the entire multiverse had been knocked off balance by Stellar’s vaulting ambition. (Vaulting ambition was a phrase I’d learned in Mr Bonnick’s English class, which surprisingly had nothing to do with gymnastics, and more with the large-scale plans of Shakespearean villains.)

  My only comfort was that Stellar’s kidnap plan had a big problem. Even if he played the classic Zack-wasn’t-really-killed-by-the-asteroid-but-had-amnesia card, his plan was a non-starter unless he could persuade Zack to go along with it. And my brother would never do that. Would he? I could already feel poky fingers of doubt. What with risk assessment and data protection requirements, hadn’t he complained that he was fed up with life as Star Lad in our world? Here, he could give up being a superhero altogether and let Stellar do the job. And everyone Zack knew and loved already existed in this other Bromley – all just the same, more or less. Then there were the added bonuses of moving here. Hadn’t Stellar suggested that Zack and Cara were boyfriend and girlfriend in this world?

  Now that I understood Stellar’s ultimate goal, his actions in my world began to make more sense. Protecting Star Lad’s true identity, saving me from Wayne the laser-gerbil; every feat had the same aim – to impress Zack. Every deed said choose me. Even his accidental summoning of Gordon the World-Eater had ended up with him playing the hero. There was little doubt in my mind – Stellar had proved himself to be a better version of me. And that raised a fresh set of questions. What if I couldn’t persuade Zack to come home? What if he chose to stay here? Would he even miss me?

  When Lara and I arrived at Stellar’s house I’d half expected it to be some kind of fortress with an electrified fence, guard towers and a black flag flying from his bedroom turret, but instead it was just an ordinary semidetached house with pebbledash walls and a dormer. We’d secreted ourselves behind the bush and settled in to wait. It wasn’t long before he returned home.

  “Why didn’t he tell me he was a superhero?” Lara sounded hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

  She obviously hadn’t read many comics. “It’s standard operating procedure. You don’t tell anyone your secret identity.”

  “Your brother did. He told you.”

  “That was different. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing. He needed my expertise.”

  “And then you told the other Lara and Serge.”

  There wasn’t time to go into the whole Christopher Talbot kidnap saga, so I just said, “It was complicated.”

  “You mean there were insinuating circumstances,” she said sagely. “That’s when you do something different from what you’re supposed to.”

  I was pretty sure that “circumstances” were usually “extentuating”, but I found it comforting to know that this Lara was just like her counterpart in my world.

  She gestured to the kitchen window. “Eagle One is on the move.”

  “Who’s Eagle One?”

  “It’s my codename for Stellar,” she said. “In situations like this don’t you always have codenames?”

  “Can’t we just call him Stellar?”

  “OK.” She gave a reluctant sigh. “Stellar is getting up from the dinner table. He is putting his plate in the dishwasher…”

  He disappeared from the kitchen and a minute later his bedroom light flicked on.

  “He’s probably doing his homework,” said Lara.

  “Or reading a comic.” I figured that was the more likely option.

  “Either way, he’s in for the night.”

  I had to agree – Stellar wasn’t leading us to Zack tonight. We called off the surveillance and made our way back to her house.

  “If we’re going to keep eyes on him at all times then we need more boots on the ground.”

  “You need boots for eyes?” said Lara. “This is all very strange.”

  “It’s the only way to be sure he’ll lead us to Zack. In my world I can call on the services of S.C.A.R.F., the Superhero Covert Alliance Reaction Force.”

  “Is that some kind of top secret military outfit?” asked Lara.

  “Uh, no, it’s you, Zack, me and Serge.”

  “Serge?” She recoiled. “Serge LeFlaive? The most feared bully in school?”

  “The what? No, there must be some mistake.”

  Lara shook her head slowly. “When Giles Pedlar cut in front of him in the dinner queue, Serge dismantled his mountain bike then turned the pieces into a sculpture and called it le vélo triste.” Her voice fell to a hush. “The sad bicycle.”

  “That doesn’t sound like—”

  “And when Debz Holland refused to give him her maths homework to copy, he reduced her to a quivering wreck with a sonnet. Some of those rhymes were brutal.” She shivered at the memory.

  “OK, I agree, that’s not very ni—”

  “And last term he hacked into Susan Becker’s phone,” she went on, “so that every time she took a selfie, it changed her into a fat Mona Lisa.”

  “But he’s my best friend,” I said.

  “He was, at one time. But no longer. And now the one person he hates more than anyone else is you.”

  Me? Why me, of all people? This Serge had taken a very different path from the one I knew. I wondered what had turned him to the Dark Side.

  “Promise me you’ll stay out of his way,” said Lara.

  After that description it wasn’t as if I was about to suggest he and I rent a tandem and go on a cycling holiday.

  We arrived back at Lara’s house. She said I must be tired and hungry after my trans-dimensional journey and I should come in and eat something. I was going to refuse on the grounds that her family might suspect I was a traveller from another universe, but after seeing Stellar tuck away all those sausages I was famished. I figured it was worth the risk.

  “Is that you, Lara?” her mum called from the kitchen as we came through the front door.

  “Hi, Mum,” she replied. “Luke’s here too.” She hung up her coat and lowered her voice. “Cara might act a bit funny around you. Luke hasn’t been here much since, y’know, what happened to Zack. It’s possible that when she sees you she’ll cry, hug you, or both.”

  I had a thought. “Maybe we could tell her what’s going on. We need all the help we can get. And in my world Cara was highly resourceful in our fight against alien invaders.”

  Lara wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think that’s a good idea – her teenage brain might explode. They’re very unstable, from what I’ve observed. Personally, I am not relishing the onslaught of hormones.”

  Dinner passed uneventfully. There was no crying, hugging or indeed exploding, just shepherd’s pie and apple crumble. To my surprise, Lara’s parents were still happily together. This world might have been worse for my family, but it was clearly a happier place for the Lees. Or, at least, most of them. Cara sat through the meal in silence. She didn’t call me “kid”, which she did where I came from; in fact, she barely looked at me. I felt bad for her. It was obvious that she missed Zack, and my presence at dinner had only served to bring home his absence. I wondered if there was anything I could say to help.

  I lowered my spoon. “Have you ever thought that in another universe things turned out differently?”

  Cara looked up. “What?”

  “Well, for instance, what if in a parallel world Zack wasn’t killed?”

  Cara stiffened. Lara’s mum and dad exchanged anxious looks.

  “And, what if, in that world, you’re there too. And you don’t even like him much. So you wouldn’t be that sad even if he did get killed.”

  “Uh, Luke…” It was Lara. I think she shook her head, but it was such a tiny movement I couldn’t be sure, so I ploughed on.

  “And while you’re not interested in him, Zack likes you. Even though for some reason he can’t bring himself to tell you. What I’m trying to say is… It’s all right. Somewhere out the
re, in a galaxy far, far away, it’s all OK. Maybe that’s not much, but y’know, it’s something. I think.”

  There was a long pause, and then Cara laid her hand on mine.

  With nothing to show for our efforts, Lara and I called a halt to the surveillance operation and I settled down in the tree house for the evening. I felt bad for the old place. In my world it was S.C.A.R.F. central command, echoing to the busy feet of superheroes and their back-up team countering the latest global threat (so long as it originated in Bromley). In this world the tree house looked like it had been abandoned since the asteroid strike. Stellar obviously didn’t use it any more. Apart from some discarded chocolate wrappers it was dark and empty. Lara brought me a sleeping bag, a few supplies and a bunch of board games, in case I got bored. She didn’t have any comics, the closest thing being an edition of Doctor Who Monopoly.

  “Skaro, planet of the Daleks,” I said, as her Tardis piece landed on my property. We’d been playing for a while and I was winning, for a change. “You owe me two hundred pounds.”

  She counted out the money. “I’ve been thinking. Even if you find Zack, how will you get home? It’s not as if you can create a gerbil-hole and travel through it like Stellar.”

  “And neither could he, when he arrived in my world. Without me, he can’t make the holes.”

  “So how did he travel to your world in the first place?”

  “Stole Zorbon the Decider’s ship,” I said, rolling the dice. “He told me. Classic supervillain error, giving it away like that. Six!” I moved my sonic screwdriver token six places.

  “Go To Jail,” said Lara as I landed on the square in question. “But how does that help – if the ship is in your universe and you’re here?”

  I had it all figured out. “All I have to do is contact S.C.A.R.F. They’ll locate the abandoned ship, then pilot it here to rescue us.”

  Lara still wasn’t satisfied. “OK, but how do you plan on contacting them in another universe? It’s not like you can call using Other Lara’s phone.”

  “I can’t, but Zack can. His telepathic power isn’t restricted by the gulf of space-time. Once he’s back to full power he can reach out with his thoughts.”