by Anton Strout
“Do I have a goatee?” I asked, caught off guard by what I was seeing.
“Computer-enhanced,” Elyse said. “Actually, I think it helps hide your weak chin.”
Something in my mind snapped and I reared back with my bat. “I do not have a weak chin,” I said and swung for her.
A loud crack rang out, accompanied by a blinding flash in front of me, and my bat hit something solid, although it wasn’t Elyse. The young actress/gymnast/killer was standing at least five feet away now. My bat had connected with another figure wearing a leather coat identical to mine.
“That wasn’t nice,” a familiar voice said to me. It was my own. Standing in front of me was another version of me, complete with its phony goatee.
“How ‘Mirror, Mirror’ of you,” I said, looking past him at Elyse. “But I don’t get it. How can I be reborn when I’m not dead like the professor was?”
Elyse laughed. “We’re pioneers in our industry. He’s just a cheap carbon copy. Death isn’t a requirement to summon a quick you on the fly to kick your own ass. Just blood.”
The other Simon punched me in the arm. “Stop hitting yourself,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, focusing back on him. “This is . . .”
“Weird,” Doppel-Me finished. He pulled out his own bat and extended it. “I know, right?”
“This is going to hurt me more than it’s. . . You know what? I think this is going to hurt me just as much as it is you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
I swung my bat, going for his knee, but he came around with his bat and blocked it.
“You think you’re going to get one over on me?” he asked. “Think again.”
“Don’t think this is going to be an issue,” I said. “I’ve had years of experience beating myself up.”
I swung low, but Doppel-Me jumped high. When I lunged for him, he feinted back perfectly, avoiding the blow or countering it. If I faked left, he faked right, countering my every move.
It was no use. Other than the shoddy goatee, this Simon fought like I fought. I couldn’t get an advantage over him no matter how hard I tried.
“Give up,” I said.
“You give up,” Doppel-Me repeated. “I can do this all night.”
I shook my head. “No, you can’t,” I said. “You’ll eventually come apart at the seams like all these other playthings.”
“Actually, he won’t,” Darryl shouted out from somewhere behind me. “Like Elyse said, we’re pioneers. He’s got a better shelf life.”
“Well, crap,” I said. “Not the answer I wanted to hear. I guess we both can do this all night, then.”
The other me craned his head and I knew what he was looking for.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “There’s no way I’m letting you up the aisle and out through those curtains. You’d have to go through me to get out of here and I’m not going to let that happen.”
Doppel-Me backed away down the aisle, heading toward the door leading into the offices. Of course! I knew the only other way out was through the creepier parts of the catacombs in the far recesses the Gauntlet, and that meant he probably knew it, too. If he made it down there, I’d never catch up to him in all its twists and turns.
In the hall behind him, something stirred in the darkness.
“I do have something you don’t have, you know,” I said, pressing toward Doppel-Me.
“Me, too. I’ve got this stylin’ goatee that you don’t have. What have you got?”
The shadow in the hallway moved even closer to my doppelganger.
“Friends,” I said, and charged him. With one of my fellow agents behind him, I’d be on the dark version of myself in no time, clashing bat to bat.
Evil Simon spun around to run for the door back to the Department, but stopped in his tracks when he saw his way blocked. Two hands flashed out of the darkness, grabbed the sides of his head, and twisted. . . hard. The audible pop of bone and cartilage drove into my ears like daggers. A second later, the other me dropped to the floor, lifeless.
Out of the darkness stepped Thaddeus Wesker. He looked down at the body, and then up at me. He seemed disappointed. “I wouldn’t exactly say we were friends,” he said.
I couldn’t stop staring at myself lying there, unmoving. “Holy Hell!” I shouted over the dying sounds of combat all around us. Jane and the Inspectre held Elyse at bay at cane point and Connor had Darryl by the scruff of his hoodie. Most of the birds and rats had been dealt with or were already dissolving on their own. I walked over to Wesker, mindful not to step on prone, dead me. Wesker looked at me with an evil grin.
“That,” he said, taking the time to relish each word, “felt good.”
“That’s disturbing,” I said, freaking out at the dead look in my double’s eyes. “You did know that was a doppelganger of me, didn’t you?”
Wesker shrugged.
“What if that had been the real me?” I asked.
He walked past me. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said, heading up the aisle. “I was going to the café to see what they had for fresh pastry. Getting to kill you was just the bonus cherry in my Danish.”
Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike—still pinned through his hand to the wall—all started yelling at one another while various members of the Department fought to contain them.
“Everybody, shut up!” a voice called out. The room went silent. Trent had come out of hiding from behind his seat. When Elyse saw him, her eyes bugged out.
“Hey, pal,” she said, turning on her charm. “How are you? Glad to see you made it out of that fracas at the university alive.”
Trent came out of his row, walked down the aisle toward Elyse, and shoved her. “No thanks to you.”
“Hey!” Darryl called out from between the two Shadowers who were holding him. “Keep your hands off her.”
“Or what?” Trent exploded. “She’ll tie me up again? She’ll bleed me out to power your messed-up little project? You might want to listen to these people. They’ve got some news, and as far as I can tell, it’s true. The professor’s not dead. He’s alive and wandering this city.”
Elyse’s eyes widened, but there was too long a hesitation before it. “It worked?” Elyse said. “The professor’s alive?”
Despite the look on her face, I wasn’t buying it. “You’re going to need more acting training if you want your surprise to sound more convincing. Knock it off.”
“What is that?” Darryl said, puffing up. “A threat?”
“My boy,” the Inspectre said, walking up to him. Darryl backed away from him as best he could, but the agents holding him didn’t give him much room to move. The Inspectre looked winded from the fight, but there was anger in his voice. “There is a threat, but it is the one that Mason Redfield himself proposes. His pact for his youth, yes, but I fear it is a debt that will need constant repayment.”
Elyse’s face finally went serious. “More blood,” she said.
“Ours,” Trent said.
“Precisely,” the Inspectre said. He pulled his sword from its cane once again and started toward her. “I’m sorry, but I believe we are past the point of all civility. Now, why don’t you tell me all about this woman in green?”
Elyse stared at him. Her cocky toughness was gone. The girl was scared. Not only was she scared; her eyes were blank.
“What woman?” she asked.
The Inspectre searched her face for a moment before lowering his sword. “Bloody hell,” he said. “She doesn’t know.”
27
Given our need to avoid questions from Thaddeus Wesker, Connor and I dragged our four captives out of the theater on the basis that interrogation always went better when there was less slime to slip around in. Cramped for space and coverage, the two of us were forced to bring the professor’s students up to Allorah Daniels’s office, with Jane and the Inspectre bringing up the rear, barring any chance of their escaping. When Elyse saw our offices behind the theater, she walked through it all, lookin
g around like a tourist in Times Square.
“What is this place?” she asked. “Are you police?”
I pointed over to a bunch of chairs along one wall. “Consider this your home until we get some answers,” I said. “Sit!”
“What are you holding us on?” she said, taking her time sitting down, prim and proper. Darryl sat down next to her, but Heavy Mike sat two chairs away holding his injured hand. Trent remained standing.
“Okay, forget about tonight,” I said. “Forget about making me watch one of my least favorite people around here—Director Wesker—take a perverse joy in killing that evil goateed version of me. Let’s put that aside for now. Answer me this: Where’s your blond friend George?”
The blank look disappeared from Elyse’s face. Concern spread across it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I think he said he was heading out of town for a few days. I think he said it was his sister’s quinceañera.”
I knelt down in front of her, staring her straight in the face. “You’re lying,” I said.
“Am I?” she said with a grim smile.
I nodded.
“He used to be a thief,” Jane said. “He knows what lying is.”
“You’re a good actress, Elyse,” I said, “but you’re not that good.”
I walked away from her, went to the workbench, and grabbed George’s messenger bag off of it.
“I don’t think George is going to turn up anytime soon,” I said, walking back over to her. I flipped open the bag’s flap and pulled out the crushed remains of his laptop. “See this? See the bend in the middle, the shattered pieces flaking off of it? I have a feeling that your friend’s body probably ended up in worse shape than that. And I think you probably knew that George was dead, didn’t you?”
Elyse went green at the gills. Darryl did, too, a grayness overtaking his dark skin.
“Yes,” she said, letting out a long breath. “And it’s my fault.” She looked scared for a change, and for once, I was pretty sure she wasn’t acting. “I didn’t think the professor’s plan had worked until a few days ago. When we first took up with him, we knew he had spent years trying to get his magical process to work, but we thought it was only to further his cinematic frustrations with a lack of real fear that he felt was missing from the horror genre. I suspected there might be something more to it, but wasn’t sure what. When he ‘died’ suddenly, I started poring through his notes and at the same time I also discovered instructions he had left me on what he wanted done after his death. I was supposed to go to this lighthouse he mentioned out on Wards Island and play his final film there. He said it was already loaded into the projector and everything, but when I got to the lighthouse, it wasn’t there.”
“Guess who got there first?” I asked.
“So how does this end up with you trying to kill me?” Trent asked, incredulous. “Why?”
Elyse sighed, dropping her eyes to the floor. “I woke up the other night to discover the professor in my dorm room. . . young again and looking crazed. His notes had hinted at cheating death, but how could he be alive and so young? Darryl was with me. He saw the professor, too.”
Darryl nodded.
“Did he say what he wanted?” the Inspectre asked.
“The professor confirmed that the magic could work,” he said. “He was living proof, but he said that it came with a price none of us had counted on. He came looking for blood.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Yours?”
“That’s what we thought,” she said, “but no. He said I was his favorite. He said he’d spare me.”
“Us,” Darryl amended. “He said he’d spare us.”
“So you offered him someone,” I said. “Someone expendable. A freshman.”
“George,” Trent said, his face turning horrified as he spoke his dead friend’s name. “You gave him George.”
“I know underclassmen barely earn a blip on your radar,” I said, “but this is beyond the beyond.”
The shame on Elyse’s face was evident. Her brow grew thick with wrinkles as she broke into hysterical sobs. “I’m sorry,” she said between gasps of breath. “What do you want from me? He would have killed us instead!”
“I thought you said you were his favorite,” Jane reminded her.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “He was out for blood and if I didn’t send unsuspecting George off to him, the professor would have killed us.”
I stood there, shaking my head at her. “Don’t schools these days offer at least one course on ethics?” I asked.
“I’m afraid an ethical debate would be wasted on this young lady,” the Inspectre said, stepping over to the table. Elyse looked up at him. “Why? Why would you do this?”
None of us understood it, but I think it perplexed the Inspectre even more. He sounded as angry as he was confused.
“Have you seen how many of me there are at New York University?” she shouted. “Never mind the cost. All my little Stepford sister actresses are graduated and up to their implants in debt, and the best that any one of them could land was a tampon commercial!”
“So that’s how you justify all this?” I asked. “So you could do more than commercial work?”
“Think about what we’re talking about here,” she said. “Professor Redfield’s initial vision was revolutionary! Sure, he was using magic to try and bring it about, but it was only over time that he even hinted that there might be some darker purpose at work. And as far as my career, well. . . to be the first actress ever to appear in this type of film? We were taking reality to a whole new level.”
“Congratulations,” Connor said. “You’ve landed yourself on a hit TV show: America’s Most Wanted.”
“Quiet,” the Inspectre said. He leaned over the table. “I couldn’t care less for your vanity, young lady. I want to know why Mason Redfield—a man I considered my brother in arms at one time—why would he do all this?”
Elyse fell silent, letting her head drop. After a while, she looked up. “That, I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Me, either,” the Inspectre said. He stepped away from the table, disgusted.
Elyse looked up at me. “Sorry we tried to kill you,” she said, “with. . . well, you.”
“I bet,” I said. “I was the last me standing, but don’t worry—I’ll still have the nightmares for years to come to remember it by.”
Darryl had his arm around her. His toughness had left him and he looked to the Inspectre. “So, what happens now?” Darryl asked.
The Inspectre walked over to the couple, staring down at them. “Well, that depends on how cooperative you choose to be.”
Elyse started nodding, eagerness in her eyes. “We can be cooperative,” she said. “Like I mentioned, there are notes and film footage, computer files. . . You’ve seen what we can accomplish without a blood sacrifice . . .”
“And with a blood sacrifice, too,” Trent spat out at them, pointing to the spot on his side where Elyse had cut him and released Professor Redfield’s army of tiny office monsters.
“First things first,” the Inspectre said, stopping Trent with a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This process that Mason put himself through. . . can it be reversed?”
Elyse’s face sank. “I don’t think so,” she said. She turned to her partner in crime. “Darryl?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We hadn’t even got the process working in the first place. There wasn’t even a chance to figure out how to, umm, verse it let alone reverse it.”
“I’m confused,” Connor said.
“You’re not the only one,” I added.
Connor shot me a look that shut me up. “We’ve seen the professor in his current state. Young, agile, in shape. . . Why would he need you to kill anyone for him? Why not just do it himself? Why kill one of you, his loyal students?”
“I don’t know,” Elyse said, falling silent as she sat there, dejected.
“I think I do,” Trent said. �
��When you found me tied up on the floor, well. . . it wasn’t the first time we had tried to use blood that day.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
“Ask Elyse,” Trent said.
I turned back to the young actress. The girl looked guilty. “After we were visited by the professor and. . . sent George off to him, I thought maybe we might be able to use blood for our own gain, too. I thought if we could harness the power of a blood sacrifice somehow, maybe we could use it to our advantage. So I told Trent we wanted a little. He even agreed to it.”
I looked over at Trent and he looked down at the floor. “What do I know?” he said with defense in his words. “I’m a freshman. I thought it was a hazing ritual!”
“Problem was, the ritual worked, but just barely,” she said. “We could animate certain objects or pieces from tiny bits of film, but they didn’t last very long before they quickly ran out of juice.”
“So you decided you needed more juice,” Jane said. “More blood.”
“That still doesn’t answer my original question, though,” Connor said. “Why use his own people? Why did he use George like that?”
“The professor always talked about the power of betrayal in film class,” Elyse said. “To him, it was such a classical theme—betrayal, revenge. I think he saw a real and twisted power in it.”
“Betraying his own followers would give their blood more power,” the Inspectre said. “Enough, perhaps, to complete his transformation for good.”
“Growing his strength, prolonging his stolen life with it,” I added. “One of you better be prepared to help us figure this out. It’s not just Professor Redfield I want to take down. For instance: you acted like you didn’t know about the water woman earlier, the same way you acted like you didn’t know the professor was alive. That’s my girlfriend who’s suffering from that woman’s mark. Now, give up some details on her.”
“Tell us what you know about that woman,” Jane said, her eyes showing her desperation for answers. “Please.”
