Dead Ringers (26 page)

Lili paused beside the psychomanteum, clearly intending to loiter until the little dancers and their mothers vacated the apparition box. Audrey understood this, but once she had begun moving toward the psychomanteum she could not stop. Instead, she approached the mirrored chamber and stepped inside, crowding those already within. The dancers and their moms looked up in surprise, and already the waitress had abandoned her work. Audrey sensed the woman behind her, heard her calling out.

“Excuse me, ma'am? Can I help you?” the waitress asked, an edge of alarm in her voice.

And there should be,
Audrey thought.
She should be more than alarmed. She should be fucking fleeing this place.
But of course the waitress was not unsettled by the presence of the psychomanteum. It had been the look on Audrey's face, or some slight buzz of her own sixth sense, that had set her off.

“She's okay,” Lili said, unconvincing. “Just give her a second. She's not hurting anyone.”

“Mom?” one of the little dancers asked with just the tiniest shade of fear.

Lili ducked her head in, right beside Audrey, exuding warmth and friendliness. “Sorry. Rude, I know. She can't help herself. She's just fascinated by this thing. Mirrors and antiques are, like, her two favorite things, so this just blows her mind.”

The dance moms huffed.

“She could wait until we're done,” one of them said.

“I know, right?” Lili agreed. “But since you're just sitting here and pretty much
are
done, you won't mind if she just takes a quick look.”

Audrey heard all of this, sensed the irritation from the mothers and the anxiety from the little dancers. The waitress kept saying
Ma'am,
as if that would get her out of the psychomanteum. It wouldn't.

“I don't want to have to get a manager,” the waitress said.

“Oh, come on,” Lili started.

The two mothers huffed. One of them swore, causing the little dancers to giggle, hiding their smiles behind their hands, but then they were all getting up from their chairs and nudging past Audrey and Lili in a hasty, grumbling exit.

“Look at it this way,” Lili said, “you'll have such a story about your trip to Boston.”

“That's enough,” the waitress said. She turned and strode off to fetch someone of greater authority.

Audrey felt Lili's hand on her elbow.

“Better make it quick.”

Inhaling deeply, wiping her sleeve across her forehead and cheeks, Audrey stepped nearer to the mirrored panes of one wall of the psychomanteum. She stared into the mirror, studied many facets of her own features, refracted in a hundred panes from every angle, splintered into infinite variations that retreated into the sinking distance only opposing mirrors can create. An eternity of tiny realities.

She saw no faces other than her own and Lili's. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.

But she felt it.
Holy shit,
did she ever.

A malice as pure, a wrongness as deep, as any she had ever felt before.

Lili nudged her. “Hey. We have to go.”

Audrey blinked, wondering how long she had been standing there, staring into the mirrored forever of the psychomanteum. Her mind had taken a sideways step somewhere, and now she looked around and saw the waitress returning with an older woman in a skirt and a coat with an important-looking name plaque pinned to her breast. The officious, skinny little guy from the host station followed up the rear as if he thought he might be called upon to physically remove the troublesome visitors. All but two tables were clear of customers now. The patient husband had finished his coffee and was slipping on his jacket, but his wife was still texting.

“We're going,” Lili promised the parade as she took Audrey by the arm and escorted her back through the restaurant.

“Break it apart,” Audrey said, feeling hollow. Transparent. It seemed as if she herself were a ghost, drifting through the room, trying to make the living see and hear her. “You can't keep it in here. It's too dangerous. Don't you feel it? You've got to dismantle it again.”

“Antique dealer,” Lili said. “She's just jealous. Wants it for herself.”

“I don't want to call the police,” the manager said, winking white lights overhead glittering off her name plaque.

“We're already gone. Trouble over,” Lili promised.

Audrey felt Lili take her hand and she allowed herself to be tugged through the lobby and into the revolving door, which deposited the two of them one at a time on the sidewalk in front of the Nepenthe Hotel.

The cold wind whipped around her, scouring the oily film from her skin.

She gasped, inhaling deeply, and blinked as she looked around.

It felt exactly like waking from a dream, but she knew she had been awake the entire time. That bit of truth was the part that made it a nightmare. The way she had felt inside that room, near the psychomanteum … it had passed, but she knew that if she went back inside, that aura of malice would envelop her again. You couldn't wake up from reality.

The cold bit deep into her face and hands. Audrey wrapped her jacket more tightly around her as Lili stepped into the street and flagged a cab. The vehicle's brakes squealed as it pulled to the curb, and then Lili grabbed her arm and escorted her to the cab.

“Not the house,” Audrey managed to say.

“Audrey—”

“I told you before, I'm not going.”

Lili stared at her, perhaps fully understanding the depth of her fear for the first time. “We'll go to Tess's house.”

“Good,” Audrey said. “She needs us.”

“What do you—”

The cabdriver honked, gesturing at them from behind the glass. Lili opened the door and Audrey slid into the backseat. When Lili followed her, Audrey nestled close against her simply because she was another human. A tangible, ordinary person, warm and alive.

As the taxi rolled out of the city, Audrey began to feel like herself again.

But there was still no way she was going to that house.

 

THREE

All the time he'd been using the chain on his handcuffs to saw away at the bolts connecting the post at his back to the concrete floor, Frank had poured all of his focus into that single, repetitive act. It ought to have been maddening, but he thought that somehow it had kept him sane, down there in the stinking, musty basement. His stomach growled as he paused for a breath, shoulders sinking. His muscles burned and his wrists skidded against the metal cuffs, slick with blood from where the constant friction and strain had bruised and chafed the skin.

Fury fueled this single-mindedness. He wanted to find the other Frank—
Not-Frank, he's not Frank
—and smash his skull against the concrete floor. He wanted to chain the son of a bitch down here and make him piss and shit in a bucket, make him eat a few feet away from that bucket, turn his life into the three-foot circumference around that metal post bolted to the basement floor.

He scraped metal against metal. Skinned his knuckles on the concrete. Listened to the rasp of the handcuff chain against the rusty bolt. Could smell the rust as it flaked away, the metal as he ground it down. For long periods, he thought of nothing but the rusty bolt and that sound, and in those times he forgot that such a person as Frank Lindbergh existed. The longer he worked, the more progress he felt he must be making, the emptier he felt. Memory seemed like another country, the nation where he'd been born but which he had long ago left behind. He felt bloodless and hollow, not a husk so much as a balloon that had never been fully inflated. Nausea simmered in his belly, never quite enough to boil over, and it occurred to him that he had no feeling or emotion powerful enough to boil over except for his anger at his captor and the desire to cut through that goddamned rusty bolt.

When it gave way, his hands jerked forward and down and his scabby knuckles dragged along the cement. He whimpered and pulled his hands up—or tried. The handcuff chain caught hard, jarring his swollen, contorted shoulders and sending a fresh wave of pain crashing through him.

He took a deep, ragged breath, and then his eyes went wide as understanding dawned. Tugging against the cuffs, sliding the chain back and forth, he realized that he'd sawn through the first bolt. Giddy laughter bubbled up from his chest. He hung his head and began to giggle and sigh, then banged his back against the post several times, overcome with manic glee.

When his laughter began to subside, he steadied his breathing, still trembling with happiness and exhaustion. Steeling himself, he hauled the handcuffs forward, tugging the chain farther under the post toward the single remaining bolt, the one nearer to him. The chain caught between post and concrete and he froze with a terror that screamed through the hollow place inside him without a single echo.

“No,” he whispered. Or thought he did.

He yanked against the cuffs, tried to saw them from side to side. The chafed, raw flesh at his wrists began to bleed even worse, but the cuffs did not move. The bottom of the post was closer to the concrete on this side, against his back. With a groan, he pulled forward and slammed himself against the post. His skull banged off the metal and for several long seconds his vision went gray and black. When he blinked back into consciousness, he did it again, careful for his head. Six times. Nine times. A dozen times he smashed his back into the post. If he couldn't saw away at the second rusty bolt, he would use his weight to snap it.

Shaking with dreadful weakness, he slumped, without enough energy to hurl himself backward again. After a minute's rest, he found that the handcuff chain was no longer clamped between post and floor, and began to drag it back and forth again. The metal would scour at the concrete, but he did not know how far he had to go to reach the second bolt, or how narrow the space between post and floor might be. It would take days, he was certain.

He didn't have days.

A whimper came from his throat and he hung his head. Tears filled his eyes. When the first one fell, it ran cold down his cheek, no warmth in it or in his flesh. With a halfhearted roar, he slammed himself back against the post again, twice, and then a third time. He banged his skull backward on purpose, listened to the ring of bone on metal.

He frowned, thinking it seemed muffled, and then he just lay back against the post. A lightness filled him. He inhaled but could no longer smell the stink of his own waste or the filthy odor of his unwashed body. Staring at the bottom of the steps, he knew he would never use them, never escape this basement.

My basement?
he wondered, unable to remember where he was.

Who he was.

A name danced along the rim of his thoughts but he could not quite grasp it.

Again he felt like a balloon, but now it was as if the air had begun to slowly leak out. He would die here, nothing and no one. His throat twitched, stomach convulsing, but there was nothing for him to throw up. Just emptiness.

He looked down at his stomach and froze. In the gray nothing light, for a moment it appeared as if his shirt had faded into transparency. Not just his shirt, either, but his body. For a sliver of a second, he thought he could see all the way through his abdomen to the concrete floor. Unable to breathe or to blink, he stared at his legs, which seemed mostly solid … but only mostly. If he tilted his head slightly, he thought they faded in the gray light, both there and not there.

Turning his head, he looked at his right shoulder, which was solid as ever.

Hallucinating. My mind is slipping. I'm dying.

But when he glanced at his left shoulder, it looked ghostly. It jolted him so hard that he slid to the right, trying to get away from the transparent part of him. He heard a clink of metal and frowned, unsure of its source. Then he felt his shoulders relax, felt them hunch forward to relieve the ache in his muscles.

“How?” he whispered in that gray basement.

He brought his left hand around and stared at it, trying not to scream at the sight of his transparent fingers. His chafed wrist had stopped bleeding. Then he pulled his right hand around and saw the handcuff tight around that wrist, the other cuff dangling from the chain, still tightly cinched.

The laughter returned, madder than ever. He doubled over, shaking as it bubbled out of him, uncontrollable. Tears ran freely and dripped to fall upon his bare legs, and this time he could feel their warmth. That brought him up short, choking his tears and his laughter.

Weak, unsteady, he leaned on the post and struggled to his feet. Taking a deep breath, he turned and started for the steps, pausing twice when his thoughts fuzzed and he worried he might pass out. When he made it to the stairs he turned around and stared at the post and at the bucket and he promised himself that he would never come down here again. Then he went upstairs, hoping to kill Frank.

No,
he thought.
That's not his name
.

Confusion swirled inside him as he reached the door. It had a lock, but somehow he remembered that there was not much to it. Drained as he was, he only had to throw himself at the door four times before the wood around the lock splintered and the door swung into a gloomily lit hallway.

For the count of ten he waited, expecting shouts or pounding feet, but the house just breathed and creaked and then he knew he was alone. Jaw set with determination, he ignored the hungry roar of his stomach and made his way up to the second floor to the master bedroom. When he saw himself in the mirror, fresh tears sprang to his eyes. His skinny legs and dirty underpants were bad enough, but the scruff of his beard and dark circles under his eyes made him look like a savage.

He glanced around the room and a kind of weight settled on his shoulders. A good weight. Solidity. The framed photos on top of the tall bureau stirred a bitterness in him that he did not yet understand, but he knew those faces.