Dead Ringers (31 page)

Frantic, reeling at the impossibility of it, he reached for his penlight and was surprised to find it still there. With a click, he shined the narrow beam into the darkness of what could only be the cellar. His gun lay on the stones just a few feet away and he scrambled over to pick it up. Blood dripped down the back of his neck, and his knee and back throbbed as he rose shakily to his feet.

The urgent whisper came to him again, beckoning him forward. Shaking his head in mute refusal, he backed toward the stairs. Three steps, then three more, and another two before he realized the staircase could not be so far away. Steven turned to find that he'd advanced deeper into the cellar … deep enough that he now stood only half a dozen steps from a pit in the center of the room, a place where the stones had collapsed down into a yawning hole. His breath fogged the air, so cold and yet thick and humid, a greasy film coating his skin and clothes.

Despair bubbled within him and he nearly burst into tears. Penlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he took aim at that sighing, breathing pit, waiting for the moment when he would pull the trigger, when he would have something at which he could shoot.

But the voice …

The voice spoke to him so intimately, cajoling and commanding all at once. Imperious and knowing. Yes, it knew him.

The words were gibberish, the language made of words he did not imagine a human mouth could form. He could not understand those words, but he felt their meaning. The need.

The thing in the pit had a purpose for Steven. It required him. There was a task he would have to perform. He felt reborn. Baptized. Thought, this could be the start of something beautiful.

Gun in hand, he stood in the cellar of the Otis Harrison House.

And waited.

 

NINE

Tess opened the door for Frank's double as if nothing at all was amiss. She stepped back, smiling in welcome, and held the door open for him. Not-Frank walked in, worried and apologizing for the delay. As he started to ask how Maddie was handling the whole thing as if he gave a damn about the girl, Nick stepped out from behind Tess with an aluminum baseball bat.

“Don't even say her name,” Nick sneered, and swung the bat.

Not-Frank got one arm up in time, and the first crack of the bat broke his forearm. The second swing struck him in the side and then he turned as Nick rained blows down on his back. Tess wanted the thing dead, but not yet. Not now. As Nick cocked back the bat, gaze locked on Not-Frank's skull, she knew that her ex-husband had no such hesitation, and she grabbed the bat. Held it tightly.

“We need answers,” she said.

Nick looked at her. Instead of rage, his eyes were full of fear, though she knew it wasn't for himself. These people—if they had ever been people—had tried to take their daughter earlier, and the knowledge of that made the temptation to destroy them almost impossible to resist. The only way to be sure they would never succeed in taking Maddie was to make sure they never had the chance. But the only way they could truly hope to achieve that end was to find out who or what the doubles really were. They needed to know how to stop them.

Hissing, jaw set in rage, Not-Frank began to rise as if he might want to make a fight of it. Nick swung the bat hard at his broken forearm and the double cried out and went back to his knees. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the floor, blacked out from the pain.

Tess kicked him in the legs and back, trying to wake him, until Lili arrived with a glass of water and dumped it on his head. The man sputtered awake, glaring hatred at them.

“What the hell do you think you're—” he began.

Then he saw the real Frank, pale and thin and shaking, standing farther back along the hall, and it all became clear to him. The real Frank reached behind his back and his hand reappeared holding a gun.

“Jesus, Frank!” Tess cried, jerking backward at the sight of the weapon, though it wasn't pointed at her.

Not-Frank ignored the gun. He launched himself at Tess, one good hand hooked into a claw, and Nick smashed the bat across his head. The sound reminded Tess of a hammer striking the last blow on a nail, driving it at last into the wood.

With Lili and Audrey to help and the real Frank standing by and spitting on his double, weapon still aimed at him, Tess managed to drag the impostor into the kitchen. They put him in a chair and bound him with an entire roll of duct tape. Tess left his mouth uncovered—the whole point of holding him was so that they could hear what he had to say.

“Mom?” Maddie called from the hall. “Who's at the door? What was all that?”

“Go back into your room, honey!” Tess shouted, trying not to snap. She glanced up at Lili, who nodded and rushed down the corridor to make sure that Maddie did not try to come into the kitchen. In the girl's room, Tess knew Lili would turn the TV volume up.

“Frank,” Nick said coldly, “put that away. My daughter's in this house.”

The real Frank nodded, clicked on the thumb safety, and slipped the gun back into the rear waistband of his pants.

Turning to stare at the unconscious man taped to the chair, Tess marveled at how much he looked like Frank. How much better a version of Frank he was. More handsome, more confident, better dressed, better haircut, better complexion.

She slapped him hard to wake him up. When that didn't work, she poured a mug of hot tea on his head and he sputtered and shook and opened his eyes to swear at her.

“You bitch,” he growled, “you have no idea the mistakes you've made.”

Tess sat on the chair beside his and leaned forward. “Tell me all about them.”

The double's expression softened. “Why, Tess? Why are you helping the ghost?”

For half a second, the tone of his voice cut into her—betrayal, disappointment, and sorrow implying that he was the real Frank Lindbergh and the withered thing whose hand she had held at her kitchen table was the
other
. The double. But then the last word resonated in her mind and she studied him carefully.

“Is that what you all are, then? Ghosts?”

Audrey returned to the kitchen—Tess had barely noticed her absence—carrying a pair of mirrors. “Of course they're ghosts.”

Nick whacked the double in the back of the head with an open hand, came away with blood on his palm. “Pretty solid for a ghost. And he bleeds.”

“I imagine it's complicated,” Audrey said. “Now we're going to find out just how complicated. Give me a hand with these mirrors.”

“What are you doing?” Tess asked.

But Audrey had a purpose now, and she was no longer listening. The real Frank had been standing in the corner of the kitchen as if the idea of getting too close to his doppelgänger made him want to run screaming. Tess understood the urge, but now Audrey instructed him to take a seat. She handed the mirror she had taken off the wall in the living room to Nick.

“Hold that up next to his head,” Audrey said.

Nick positioned himself on Frank's left and Audrey hoisted the mirror she had taken from Tess's bedroom, holding it in place on Frank's right. They angled the mirrors so that Frank could see almost nothing but his own reflection.

“We know these … manifestations … have been siphoning your strength by imitating you,” she went on. “The more they become you and inhabit bits of your life, the more other people perceive them as you,and the more you become the ghost and they the reality.”

Audrey glanced at Nick. “Who is the man in the chair in front of you?”

Nick seemed about to argue, maybe mock Audrey's methods, but Tess saw the flicker of resignation in his eyes. They had seen too much for him to doubt anything else that might occur.

“It's Frank Lindbergh,” Nick replied.

“Tell
him
.”

“You're Frank Lindbergh. Always have been. When you're feeling better, I might just break your fucking nose for making a move on my wife when we were still married, but you're Frank fucking Lindbergh.”

Lili did a double take. “Wait, what?”

Audrey ignored her. “Tess?”

Tess couldn't see more than a sliver of Frank's features through the gap between the mirrors. She turned to look at the false Frank, the double, who seemed fascinated in spite of himself. She should have been afraid of him. If he was a ghost or revenant or whatever Audrey wanted to call him, he was dead. He ought to terrify her, but her fury had surged to the fore, tamping down the fear. They'd put their hands on Maddie, tried to take her little girl away. The fear still shivered in her heart, along with disbelief, but she would face anyone or anything that dared to threaten her little girl. She stared at the thing that was not Frank Lindbergh. As strong as the doubles were, the bastard wasn't going to be able to tear through the thick strips of duct tape they'd used to strap him to the chair.

She moved around the table and crouched beside the real Frank's chair, nudging Nick over. She took Frank's hand in both of hers and held it tenderly.

“You're Frank Lindbergh. We've both had a rough time of it the last couple of years, but I believe my best days are still ahead, and so are yours.”

He made a small noise and Tess thought he might be crying, just a little.

“Frank,” Audrey said quietly. “This may be painful, but I want you to talk now about the ugly things in your life. These manifestations have crafted perfect versions of you … of us. The idealized versions. Tell me the things the perfection can't embrace, the things you never want to say out loud.”

Tess saw him shudder, but then Frank exhaled and sat up straighter in his chair.

“You're a fool, little witch,” the doppelgänger said, but he thrashed in his seat, testing the strength of the duct tape.

“I'm no witch,” Audrey said. “I just have a sense of things. I may not really understand what you are, but I know the things you aren't.”

“Think you're so fucking—” the false thing began.

“I'm a drunk,” Frank interrupted. He exhaled. “All my life I swore I wouldn't be anything like my father. He didn't have the balls to make a better future for himself. When I was a kid I thought it was because he was a drunk. By the time I hit twenty, I realized that was just what he wanted everyone to think, but the reality was that the booze was a handy excuse. He wanted people to think he could've been something better, something more, if not for the booze.”

Tess clutched his hand and he held on tightly. She heard a moan behind her and glanced across the table at the impostor. The sight made the breath catch in her throat. Instead of the face of Frank Lindbergh, its features had become a death mask. She'd seen glimpses on her own double, the hellish, rotting faces of the malignant spirits masquerading as human beings. Tess flinched back a little, though the dead thing had stopped struggling and only sat bound to its chair, staring at the backs of the mirrors that shielded Frank's face from view.

“Keep going,” Audrey said quietly.

Frank hesitated. “I … I get it now. My dad taught me well. Anytime someone went for their dream and got even a fraction of it, I resented the hell out of them. Still do. I bitch about the universe being against me, but I know…”

He drew a shuddery breath and let the words trail off.

“How do you feel?” Audrey asked.

“Better. Stronger,” Frank replied softly. “Ashamed of myself, but not enough to try to pretend any of what I just said is something other than the truth.”

“Good,” Audrey said, and lowered the mirror.

Nick put down the other mirror, turned to lean it against the kitchen wall. Tess studied Frank and realized that he didn't look much different than before. Healthier, maybe, but not markedly so. Still pale and too thin and unshaven. The vital thing was that he looked solid and alert, like he was
all there
for the first time since he had shown up on her doorstep.

Tess glanced at his double again, only to find that he no longer looked like a living corpse nor did he still look anything like Frank Lindbergh. Taller and thinner, with high cheekbones and a sharply pointed mustache above a thin strip of beard on his chin, he looked like a man transported from another era.

He is,
she thought.
Of course he is
.

“Let's start again,” she said, moving back around the table toward him. “What's your name?”

The ghost—or incarnation, or whatever he was—lifted his chin in arrogant defiance.

Lili spoke and Tess glanced up, surprised to see that she'd returned to the kitchen.

“You seem calm,” she said, “but if you could look in one of those mirrors you'd see that the right side of your head is a bit see-through. Left shoulder, too.”

Fearful, the double glanced down at his left shoulder and saw that Lili was right. Not only had he lost the Frank masquerade, but he'd faded a little. She wondered if the duct tape could hold him now or if it would just pass right through. If he kept fading, she was pretty sure they were going to find out.

Lili walked calmly toward him, wound up, and slapped him hard across the face. Blood flew from his mouth.
Not ghosts,
Tess thought.
Not really
. Ghosts couldn't bleed. Audrey had called them manifestations and Tess had thought of this thing as an incarnation, which made more sense to her. Incarnate. In the flesh. However they had done it, they were real and solid, at least for now.

“What is your name?” Lili demanded.

Nick grabbed the baseball bat from where it leaned against the wall. He didn't swing it—didn't even raise it—but the promise was there in his eyes.

“You don't need his name,” Audrey said. “I've seen his portrait. Meet Simon Danton, the second-class magician who founded the Lesser Key.”

Tess whipped around to stare at her. “The occultists—”

“Who tried to finish the summoning Berrige started in the cellar of the Harrison House,” Audrey finished. “Danton was the ringleader of that band of—”