Dead Ringers (24 page)

His eyes popped open.
The post
. He'd passed out in the middle of his work and as he jerked the cuffs to one side he found the chain still caught beneath the metal lip at the base of the post. With a waking groan for cover, he sawed the cuffs back and forth, but this time he pushed back, yanking them out from beneath the lip. The dust of rust and concrete would still be there. He had no time to clean up after himself.

The basement light was on. The power flickered as if a storm roared outside, but he wondered if it might not be something else—some energy that had nothing to do with electricity. Now that his momentary panic subsided, he remembered passing out … remembered the sudden irresistible fatigue that had swept over him. In the midst of working the cuffs against those rusty bolts, he had begun to tremble and then felt his muscles slump as if something had just given way inside him, his last vestiges of strength flowing out of him.

Waking to the sound of those footsteps had given him a small burst of adrenaline, but now it subsided and he bent his head, taking small sips of breath. His thoughts felt thin, his heartbeat shallow. Though he felt no hunger, the emptiness within him had gotten worse, as if there was little left of him now but a shell. In his mind, he pictured one of those Russian nesting dolls, their layers thin and fragile, and imagined himself one of them—with all of the smaller dolls removed, only the largest one, hollow and empty, left behind.

“Not feeling quite yourself tonight, are you?” a voice asked.

He blinked, jerking his feet as he glanced up. Frank Lindbergh looked down at him. The face was so familiar. He knew Frank well, but couldn't focus on how they knew each other or the nature of their acquaintance. Too tired. The pain made it hard for him to concentrate.

“Frank,” he rasped.

The visitor laughed softly. He wore a gray suit with a thin black wool scarf, very stylish. His shoes were charcoal black, barely scuffed, and he had trimmed his facial stubble so that he had a silhouette of a beard rather than an actual one. Frank looked good. Maybe better than ever. The best possible version of Frank Lindbergh.

The prisoner shifted. Smelled the stink of his own body and of his blood, felt the sting of the wounds at his wrists where the handcuffs had chafed and cut him.

The cuffs,
he thought. His brow creased as he remembered sawing the chain against the rusty bolt under the post at his back. The explanation for that memory seemed out of reach for a moment, but then he managed to reach into the fog of his thoughts and grab hold of it, drawing it close.

He lifted his eyes and stared at the stylish man. Was it cologne he smelled over the stink of his own blood and piss? He thought it was.

“I'm Frank Lindbergh,” he whispered, all that he could manage.

The other Frank crouched in front of him, black scarf dangling. The scent of his cologne grew stronger.

“You're a shadow,” he said. “Pretty soon, you'll barely be that.”

Frank focused on his breathing. In and out. He stared at the other Frank.

“Fuck you,” he grunted.

The visitor laughed softly. “I have to say, I admire the way you've held on. You didn't have much of a life to begin with, so building a better one was easy enough. Tonight really ought to have taken most of what you had left of yourself. I mean, I sat down with people who are your friends. They're scared but they're smart enough that they've started to figure out what's been happening to them, but even so, they looked at me and saw you. To them, I
am
you, and belief is a powerful thing. On top of how well things are going for me at work, I expected that to finish you. So well done. Truly. You've got my admiration.”

The man who wasn't Frank rocked back a bit on his heels, still in a crouch. He laughed, rolling his eyes.

“Hell, could that be it? What an irony if my admiration of you is keeping your self intact.”

Frank grunted. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, thirsty and repulsed by how long it had been since he had brushed his teeth, never mind bathed. He shifted, twisted his wrists inside his cuffs just a little—not enough for his visitor to pay attention to the cuffs or to come around and look at the concrete and rust that had been disturbed there, but enough to wake Frank up. Bring him back to himself.

For long moments he had let his mind slip away. It felt like he was holding on to his identity by mere threads and at any moment it might be torn from him, dragged off into an abyss. But it wasn't his doppelgänger's admiration helping him hold on. Frank felt sure of that.

It was the pain in his wrists and shoulders. The scent of his own blood. The way he gritted his teeth when he worked the handcuff chain against that rusty bolt under the post. He might be a shadow of himself, withering to nothing, but he
wasn't
nothing yet. Instead, he felt alive with the knowledge that a moment before he had forgotten that the man in front of him was
not
Frank Lindbergh. Still brittle and gutted, but maybe not completely hollow. Not yet.

Not when he knew he had made progress with that rusty bolt.

His self would continue to fade, leeched away by the bastard in front of him. Frank knew that his time was running out. But he wasn't a ghost yet.

“What are you doing to me?” he asked.

The man wearing his face smiled as if this were the most precious, most adorable question he had ever heard. He stood up from his crouch and slipped his hands into his pockets. Slowly, his smile diminished.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose you deserve to at least understand what's happening to you while there's still a ‘you' in there. Considering what you're giving up for me, I owe you that much. For you, this began the first time you stepped into the psychomanteum.”

“You mean the … the spirit box?” Frank rasped.

“The apparition box,” the man with his face replied. “Yes, the very one. You and your friends just stood there, looking into the mirrors …

“While
we
were looking out.”

 

TUESDAY

 

ONE

Steven Parmenter took the steps up from Park Street station two at a time. By the time he stepped out into the cold gray morning light, his heart was pounding in his chest and he had to draw long breaths to calm it down. He was a young man, but his gym schedule had been falling apart over the past few months and he had hurried up the steps to get in a little of the cardio he had been missing. Today was Tuesday. Captain Monahan had told him that he would know by Friday whether or not he would be promoted to detective. For the past six months he had been working his ass off, ignoring nearly everything else in his life in favor of the job. If Saturday morning came and he was still Officer Parmenter instead of Detective Parmenter, he wondered if he would feel it had all been for nothing. He hoped he would not have to find out.

With a glance up at the golden dome of the State House, he threaded his way along the path that ran parallel to Park Street, up the concrete stairs to Beacon Street, and took a right. It was worth going half a block out of his way to get a coffee from Dunkin' Donuts. Maybe on a detective's salary he would be able to afford to drink Starbucks all the time, but even then he knew he would stick to Dunkin'. Really, there was no contest.

Hot coffee in hand, he retraced his steps through the shadow of the State House, took a right up Walnut toward Mount Vernon Street. He wore jeans and a green cable-knit sweater, a black leather jacket and gloves, and a thick New England Patriots hat with a red, white, and blue pom-pom on top. He spent so much of his time immersed in serious, sometimes grim work, and the pom-pom made him feel silly. It reminded him that not every situation was life or death.

What this thing with Lili was, he had no idea. It sounded insane, but city cops encountered more than their share of crazy people, and he had never gotten that vibe off her. Which meant that something was going on, that someone had been messing with Lili and Tess, and Steven could not just let that go. He had spent the past twenty-four hours trying not to think about some of the things she had told him. Last night he had started on the sofa and ended up in her bed, but there had been no sex. Instead, he had just held her in his arms while she fell asleep and eventually drifted off himself.

As afraid as she was, the only way for him to take some of what she'd told him seriously was to assume that she and Tess had been victims of a prank or some Hollywood-level makeup FX. If he found out later that it had all been a gag—that Tess's ex-husband had done it all as some kind of joke—he would make sure Nick regretted it.

For now, though, he had decided to poke around on his own. His first stop this morning had been the Nepenthe Hotel. He'd gone into the restaurant at the back and looked at the mirrored box. It was odd, but its antiquity did make it a good fit for the room, and he could see how some of the hotel's guests might find it intriguing to have breakfast or brunch inside the whatever-it-was-called. Steven had examined it closely and found nothing but mirrors, wooden walls, bolts, and a kind of musty odor.

No ghosts, no strange faces, nothing unusual about it at all.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets as he walked through Beacon Hill. The wind whipped around him and he shivered. His coat had a collar he could have turned up, but his mind was wandering, focused on other things. The morning he had met Lilandra Pillai, he had just come off duty and had stopped into a café near Boston University for a coffee before heading home. She had turned from the counter, focused on the cup in her hand, trying to get the lid fastened properly, and she had collided with him. Hot coffee had spilled down the front of his uniform and they had both backed away from the fresh puddle of coffee on the linoleum, raising their arms like startled birds ruffling their wings.

She'd looked up at his uniform, rolling her eyes with an expression of disgust, and said the words every guy wanted to hear from the lips of a beautiful woman: “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding.”

Steven knew what she saw—a big ginger guy in a police uniform, with a coffee-stained badge and a gun at his hip. What he had seen that morning had been something entirely different, a formidable, no-bullshit woman of stunning beauty.

He wiped droplets of coffee off the front of his uniform and arched a single eyebrow. “So, is this what they mean by ‘meet cute' in all those romantic comedies?”

The question shocked her out of her momentary paralysis and then she was grabbing a handful of napkins, trying to dab at his uniform while a sighing employee came out from behind the counter with a mop. Steven had promised her it was not a big deal, that he was on his way home. She insisted on buying his coffee and they had sat in the front booth in the sunshine coming through the plate glass, talking for an hour, until she had to run or risk being late to teach a class for which she was now woefully unprepared.

That had been the beginning of the best thing that had ever happened to him. Somehow, he had managed to screw it up. Now there seemed like the possibility of rapprochement, a new start.

If he could just prove to himself that this woman he thought he might love was not completely out of her fucking mind.

The sidewalk lit up with sunlight and Steven glanced toward the sky to see a break in the clouds. The horizon remained a thick blanket of gray, but this one patch of blue had opened just ahead. The light warmed even the façades of the buildings on both sides of the street. The fall leaves burned with color, and the patch of grass on the small, raised front yard of the Otis Harrison House looked rich and green. In moments it would pass, but it was a blessing in the moment to be reminded of the vivid colors of the world.

Up ahead, a fiftyish couple moved along the sidewalk opposite the Harrison House. A taxi had pulled to the curb and an elderly woman stepped out as Steven approached. A bicyclist came around the corner, and Steven watched with a deepening frown as the rider shifted across the street—toward the taxi—buzzed within inches of the yellow cab's door, then passed Steven himself before shifting back to the other side of the street. It was as if he had gone out of his way to avoid riding directly in front of the Harrison House.

Steven paused on the sidewalk. A seagull flew overhead and he glanced up to track its passage across the sky. It sailed to the left, arcing toward the top of a row house and alighting there, lining up with several other gulls. There were other birds around, including a crow on the crest of a dormer window and a host of sparrows on a telephone cable of the sort you hardly ever saw anymore. On the branches of trees in front of the Otis Harrison House, not a single bird roosted.

Odd, certainly, but what did it mean? Nothing. Not a single thing. But the small hairs stood up at the base of Steven's neck and he felt gooseflesh rise on his forearms. There'd been a dog attack here a few days ago, not to mention the violence that had erupted with the UPS driver. How many had been killed? It shamed him that he couldn't remember. When Lili had told him about her history with the house and the connection she believed existed between the old place and the bizarre things that had been happening in her life, he had bitten his tongue to avoid mentioning the recent violence up here. He had been unwilling to add to the fear and anxiety already driving her.

Now that he had arrived, however, he had to tell himself it was all just coincidence. Had to tell himself, because he felt a frisson of something in the air, some static that made his skin crawl.

The old woman who had exited the cab slammed the door and the host of sparrows burst into the air in a cloud of flapping chaos. The birds flowed upward in the elegant stroke of a paintbrush, first one direction and then the other, moving with a single mind, in that impossible way he had always found so beautiful. The swirl of sparrows arced toward the roof of the Otis Harrison House, but just before they reached it the flock turned away. Not as one. Not in any natural way of birds. Instead, they scattered in all directions, peeling away from their previous course in what seemed a dreadful panic. One sparrow caught itself in the branches of a tree and flapped madly. Steven thought it must have injured itself, because after a moment it just stopped fighting and hung there, dead or in despair.