Dead Ringers (32 page)

“Mind your tongue,” Danton snapped, then turned a sneer of hatred into a grin. “You have no idea what real magic is. We came back from death. We gave ourselves new flesh!”

Audrey dragged her chair over so that she could sit right in front of Simon Danton. Tess saw fear glittering in the woman's eyes, beads of sweat on her forehead, and she hoped that Danton could not see how afraid Audrey was of him.

“I know that the only magic that matters is the magic that works,” Audrey said. “If you botch the spell, that doesn't make you a magician, it makes you a fuckup.”

Danton made a noise in his throat as if he might spit at Audrey and Lili slapped him again. Tess stood back to make room for the blow, an observer now. She glanced over at Nick, who had put the baseball bat over his shoulder as if he was waiting for his turn at the plate. Casual, aware that these women did not need him to step in for them.

“Let me see if I've got you figured out,” Audrey went on. “You built the psychomanteum because you thought you could trap the demon inside it, but you screwed up and ended up trapping yourselves instead. Maybe you were already planning how you could get out when they dismantled the thing and put it into storage. That gave you time to plan but you were stuck there until the hotel management bought the psychomanteum and reassembled it. You'd all latched on to the reflections of people who'd looked into those mirrors before it was dismantled.”

Frank—the real Frank, more himself now—coughed quietly.

Lili took the moment to jump in. “I don't understand. You could make these bodies for yourselves. Black magic whatever, okay fine, but when the others slipped out they tried to build lives for themselves, separate from us. Why didn't you?”

The thing that had once been Simon Danton looked to Audrey, arrogant and expectant. He cocked an eyebrow.

“No? You don't want to offer your theories on my motivations?” Danton asked.

Audrey glanced at Lili. “It's the raggedy man. We suspected it was Berrige and we were right.”

Tess shivered. She crossed her arms, hugging herself, and stared at their captive as she tried to reconcile how he could be both a dead man and a living thing, a creature who could bleed. Images of the raggedy man swam through her mind, the memory of the first time she and Lili had seen him outside the gallery, sniffing the air like a dog searching for a scent.
I had the scent. I know I did.

He'd shown up around them more than once, confusing her and her friends for the doppelgängers who were engaged in this masquerade. And then Aaron … the way Nick had described his death at the hands of the raggedy man. Tess had never liked the man, but nobody should have to die like that.

With the way Audrey had put things together, it was as if she had laid out a puzzle with missing pieces, gaps that they were waiting for others to fill. Tess stared at Lili for a moment, thinking about the life that her double, Devani Kanda, had made. These ghosts had created bodies and identities, used magic to influence the world around them. Why would the Lesser Key work so hard to build lives for themselves and then throw it all away by coming after the people whose faces they had all stolen?

“You knew,” she said to Danton.

The man smiled thinly.

“Knew what?” Frank asked.

Nick glanced at her. “What are you—”

“Audrey already told us they were following in Berrige's footsteps, trying to replicate the … summoning spell or whatever that killed him,” Tess said, skin prickling with a rush of heat as little epiphanies clicked in to complete the puzzle in her head. “When we figured out the raggedy man might be Berrige, I thought they were all working together. Berrige and the doubles.”

“They've all been haunting us,” Lili said. “Tormenting us.”

“No,” Tess said, shaking her head. “That's just it. The Lesser Key wanted nothing to do with us until I saw the one with Nick's face and we started poking around, trying to make sense of it. When we saw the raggedy man outside the gallery he wasn't looking for us. He was hunting your double, Lili, just like I said.”

Nick had one hand on the back of a kitchen chair, hanging his head as he listened. Now he pushed away from the chair, snapping his head up.

“What about Aaron? Berrige just … tore him apart. I saw it happen. Whatever Aaron had been reduced to, the old man ripped him to shreds and stuffed him inside his coat. I'll never…” His voice broke, and Tess's heart broke for him. Part of her would always love him and she hated to see him in pain. “I'll never be able to scrub that image out of my head, or the way Aaron screamed.”

Tess slid into a chair beside the thing that had once been Simon Danton and stared at it. “Berrige had no idea that was Aaron, did he?” she asked softly. “He thought it was one of your people. That's what they've been doing to us, what you were doing to Frank … feeding on whatever makes us who we are, so that when Berrige came hunting he would get confused and think we were the ghosts.”

“Of course,” Audrey said. “That's exactly what they've been doing.”

“Holy shit,” Lili whispered.

Tess turned to Frank—the real Frank. “But Danton knew. The rest of the Lesser Key had no idea, or maybe he warned them and they didn't listen. He figured Berrige would be out there hunting for him and the only chance he had of surviving was to become you, Frank. To replace you, so when Berrige came looking, all that would be left was something so faded and dim that the sorcerer would assume you were the ghost.”

“Just like he did with Aaron,” Nick said.

They all stood around the table now, staring at the fleshly manifestation of the ghost of Simon Danton. Tess caught her breath. The daylight coming through the kitchen windows had dimmed, the afternoon shadows growing long, and in the gray light she could see his true face—the withered features of the corpse—superimposed upon the false flesh like the golden aura that limned the outer edges of the moon on a foggy night.

Tess slid to the edge of her chair, so close to the dead thing that the little hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. Her nose detected an odor she had not noticed before, the rancid stink of death, and she wondered if it was the smell of his breath. The thought smashed through her, an overpowering reminder of just what this creature was. Not just a dead thing. Not just a ghost. Danton had been an occultist in his lifetime, a would-be sorcerer who wanted nothing more than to summon a demon from whatever Hell might truly exist. This wasn't just death sitting before her … it was evil.

In her house. At her kitchen table. With her daughter down the hall.

“I want to tell you something,” she said, so softly that the others had to lean in to hear.

Danton arched an eybrow. The afternoon light grew dimmer and his death face began to supersede that of the man he'd once been.

“Go on,” he urged, his voice like the rustle of dry leaves. From one angle, she could still see his eyes, but from another they were only dark hollows with the glint of sickly yellow light within.

“I didn't believe in ghosts or magic before all of this,” she said, even more quietly. “I live in almost constant pain and I never pray, because I know my prayers will not be answered. Yet now, here you are—”

“You think I'm God?” Danton laughed.

“I think you may be proof there is something out there for me to pray to,” Tess said quietly. Behind her, Lili put a hand on her shoulder and Tess went on. “You terrify me, but not the way you'd like to, because the thing we really need to be afraid of is Cornell Berrige, and he's the one hunting the members of your cult.”

“Tess,” Nick said, the warning of his tone very clear.

Danton cocked his head in fascination. “I'm listening.”

“You wanted to live again,” Tess said. “I understand that. And except for what you did to Frank out of your own fear, your people left us alone until Lili and I started interfering. So what if you tell us what you know about why Berrige is doing what he's doing and we figure out a way to stop him? You and your friends can keep our faces. Build your own lives. We'll promise not to go so far away that it will undermine whatever spells you've cast that have allowed you to escape the psychomanteum. We work together, destroy Berrige, and call it a day. Truce. Détente.”

“No,” Nick snapped.

Tess whipped around to glare at him.

Audrey shifted closer to Lili and Tess. “Hear her out, Nick.”

Across the table from Danton, Frank Lindbergh rose shakily to his feet. “Tess, do you have any idea what this fucker did to me? I've been pissing in a bucket for—”

“Sit down, Frank,” Tess said.

“I will not—”

“Sit down, Frank,” Lili barked. Then she softened and turned to him. “This is not about revenge. It's about survival.”

“After what they did to you?” Nick asked, staring at his ex-wife. “After they came here and tried to take Maddie, to push you out of your own house? Your life?”

Tess reached for his hand. Nick flinched and tried to pull away but she grabbed his hand and held on tightly. “It's Maddie I'm thinking of.”

Nick looked about to continue debating the point, but then he just clammed up and shook his head.

“Why don't you go look in on her?” Tess suggested. “Make sure she's not eavesdropping.”

After a moment's hesitation, Nick glared at Danton, then turned and left the room.

Tess turned back to face the dead man strapped to the chair beside her. “Well?”

In the fading light, the death face grinned. “If you destroy Berrige, I'm sure my friends and I will have no problem letting you live.”

Audrey dragged out a chair, its feet squealing on the kitchen floor. She sat down and stared at Danton. Tess wondered if she could see the pits of his eyes, the dead skin tight against his skull.

“Berrige tried to summon a demon. Carved out his own eyes as part of the ritual,” she began.

“Clawed them out, not carved,” Danton corrected.

“Jesus,” Lili whispered.

The name only made the death grin widen.

“We thought Berrige had failed,” Danton went on. “When we built the psychomanteum and tried to replicate the ritual in a safer environment, to infuse the magic of the ritual into our reflections, trap that power in the mirrors of the box—”

“What do you mean you ‘thought' he'd failed?” Frank asked. But unlike the others, he made no effort to move closer to the creature who had kept him captive and stolen his identity.

Danton shifted, straining against the duct tape. Tess thought he might ask her to free him, but he did not. They had a fragile peace at the moment, but he knew that did not make them allies.

“The ritual failed,” Danton went on. “But not completely. The demon rose but the summoning was flawed. It emerged only halfway into our world and became stuck there. When Berrige tried to end the ritual, it killed him and trapped his soul. It's held him there ever since, gnawing on his soul like a dog with a strip of rawhide. When we used the psychomanteum, it tried to take us, too. We were trapped, but we fled into the mirrors. The damned box saved us.”

The cadaver looked at Audrey. “The rest you know. We spent years knitting these magicks together, stealing your reflections and building substance.”

“But how can you just
make
—” Lili began.

“They're not natural flesh and blood,” he said. “They require ritual and focus to keep up the heft and weight of human bodies, to keep us tangible. But the illusion of life is better than none at all. We have to return to the psychomanteum for at least a short while each night, or we'll begin to fade out of existence.”

“Just fade?” Tess asked.

“As if we've been erased,” Danton said.

“And if you'd succeeded in diminishing me so much that you'd completely become me?” Frank asked. “You said I would have faded.”

Danton hesitated, but only for a second. “That's correct. Unless you made your way back to the psychomanteum. But that would be its own hell. You'd have been trapped there forever.”

Frank looked as if he might be sick. “You see what you're dealing with here, Tess? Those are the options he had in mind for me. Either one of them would have been worse than dying.”

Tess flushed, hating every moment, every word that came from her own lips. But she ignored him, keeping her focus on Danton.

“You said the demon had Berrige trapped. So how can he be the raggedy man? How can he be wandering around looking for you?”

Danton lowered his head. The wan, dying light of the afternoon silhouetted him, showing the wisps of hair on a corpse's head, though his living face was still visible as well, as if she might close one eye and see one visage or the other.

“I glimpsed him once,” Danton said, and she could hear the fear in his voice. Fear of the abyss of nothingness that awaited his soul if Berrige caught up to him. “Hunting me. I barely got away. It's why I went to Frank's house that night, how I knew that it was all beginning to unravel before the others did. I thought I could hide until Berrige had caught the others, thought I could feed Frank to him in my place.

“He's still in the demon's power, you see. It's the only thing that makes any sense. If Berrige is wandering free, it can only be because we've freed ourselves. He is doing the demon's bidding, like a dog hunting for his master, but he remains on a leash. Its influence will be bleeding from the house now, seeping out like an infection, but it can't get out. Somehow, though, it has managed to let Berrige out.

“I can only imagine that when we emerged from the psychomanteum, it sensed us, and now it wants us back. Perhaps Berrige has struck a deal—the six of us for his own freedom—but I can't be sure of that. Regardless, the other members of the Key know that Berrige is after them now, which is why they have been trying to … well, to diminish you, to use Frank's word. They want Berrige to take you in their places the way they did your friend Aaron, and now they know that time is fleeting.”