From this angle, he had a clear view of his bedroom window. He’d seen the light come on some twenty minutes ago. Once it went off again, he’d know the clone was on his way down to the kitchen, and then out to his car in the garage. At least that used to be the routine. It couldn’t have changed much. He’d only been thankful he hadn’t seen the car parked in the driveway, where Diana used to park. That would have changed everything.
A minute later he heard the once-familiar squeak of the kitchen door opening and, before he could prepare himself for it, he saw Parker barrel down the steps to make the school bus. He hadn’t even considered that he might catch a glimpse of his son. He’d seen Parker on the monitor fifty times or more, but this was different. This was harder. He was right there, almost close enough to touch. As he passed the bush, Jeremiah held his breath and resisted the urge to jump up and call out to him, to grab him by the arm and hold him there. He noticed, with some aspect of resentment, that Parker had grown a couple inches taller since he’d been gone, and there was a certain breadth to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before. He swallowed the wave of regret that rose up in his throat and watched his son turn the corner and disappear from view. Then he breathed again. He’d see Parker soon enough, he thought, if everything went right. He turned his attention back to the matter at hand, just in time to see the light go out in the bedroom window. He swallowed hard and tightened his grip on the knife.
Minutes passed as he waited for the first whirring of the garage door opener, his signal to spring. Every muscle in his body tensed, and he worried that his own heartbeat might be enough to obscure the tiny sound he was straining to hear. This is almost over, he told himself. You can do this.
He hadn’t anticipated the sudden fear he felt in his gut. Every time he’d thought about this moment, calculating the plan down to the last second, imagining his every action, it had been fueled by anger and a fierce sense of righteousness. It had also, he admitted, been tempered by the likelihood of absolute impossibility. Somewhere inside him, even as he had clung to the idea of killing his clone, he never fully believed he’d actually get here. And here he was. He closed his eyes and tried to push his anger back to the surface, hoping it would be enough to crush the tiny web of doubt that inched out in all directions now and threatened his resolve. You can do this, he told himself again. You have to do this.
The instant Jeremiah heard the small mechanical sound he’d been waiting for, it was as though a switch had been pulled in his brain. His movements were quick and unhindered by thought. He darted out from behind the bush, dropped and rolled the few feet over the driveway and across the threshold of the garage. While the door was still in its upward motion, he sprang to his feet and hit the kill switch hard with his fist, the overhead light glinting off the six-inch blade in his hand. As the door came down behind him, he saw the clone jump and turn toward him in alarm, recognition not yet registering on his face. To his right, above his shoulder, Jeremiah found the small, innocuous gleam of the camera lens embedded in the concrete wall, exactly where Brent told him it would be. He took the blunt end of the knife handle and smashed it in with one quick jab. No one was watching now.
Jeremiah said nothing, but inched forward a little. After months of watching the clone across the impossible distance of the cameras, they were now separated by the length of a single car. The figure before him was no longer that towering image projected across an entire living room wall. He was exactly, down to the last molecule, evenly matched with Jeremiah. Looking at him now, though, he seemed even smaller. Jeremiah stared into familiar eyes and the rage he felt beginning to boil back up in him made him feel almost giddy.
The clone backed up against the door that led to the kitchen, his hand grappling behind his back for the knob. Jeremiah saw the clone’s eyes widen in a mix of terror and desperate confusion as the shock of recognition settled there. He blinked hard and his mouth began to move as if to ask a question, make a plea, but no sound came out. He pressed his back hard against the door, fumbling, unable to turn away, until his knees gave out and he began to crumple to the ground.
Jeremiah moved slowly toward him, blade first, and stared him down, unblinking. A slow smile spread across his face when he saw the fear tighten its grip over the clone, pinning him to the floor. That fear seemed to feed something in Jeremiah. The more the clone cowered, the more intense Jeremiah’s own fury burned.
“Who are you?” the clone whimpered. “What do you want?”
Jeremiah stopped a mere two feet from him and almost laughed.
“Who am I? Don’t you know?” He took a heady delight in taunting him. “Here, take a closer look.”
He spanned the space between them in a few steps and knelt down at eye level, the knife so close to the clone’s face the steel began to fog with his breath.
“Now do I look familiar?” Jeremiah sneered. “Recognize me?”
“How can...” The clone arched his back and craned his neck away from the blade, his eyes wild with confusion. “Please,” he moaned, “please, I have a son!”
The words hit Jeremiah like a slap in the face. He pushed the flat of the knife under the clone’s chin, so tight against his neck that he could feel the pulsing of his veins right through the handle, as though the weapon had become some sort of conduit connecting them.
“No!” Jeremiah spat the word out like venom. “No, I have a son! You have nothing!”
He watched in fascination as the clone’s face twisted in terror, the blood visibly draining from his cheeks, the eyes darting frantically, looking for escape.
“Please,” the clone barely managed, “please.”
It would have been so easy to kill him then. It should have been so easy. One little push into that pulsing vein on the neck. One little slice.
But the sight of that face and the terrified eyes rattled Jeremiah, just for an instant. Just long enough to make him hesitate. Long enough to register the sudden, startling sensation of looking into a mirror. Jeremiah pulled the blade just slightly away from the clone’s neck as the realization spilled over him like defeat. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t kill this thing. His hand began to tremble, his breath heavy and hard in the clone’s sniveling face. He hated him. He wanted to do it. He wanted him gone. But something in him held back. This must be, he thought, what people go through in the seconds leading up to suicide. He’d always considered it a cowardly act. In that instant, though, he understood the steely resolve it must take.
Just a few months ago, he thought, this might have been him. This was him. This cowering, frightened mess of a man was him. And Jeremiah knew that. A few months ago, he would have reacted in exactly the same way, pleading for the sake of Parker, terrified at the thought of leaving him—everything relating to the fate of his son. And it was this, Jeremiah supposed, that finally snapped his will. Simple recognition. That, and empathy. A thing he never figured on, but there it was. He had been willing to kill to get Parker back. The clone was begging to stay with him. For all his faults and weakness, for all his mistakes, this clone loved the boy every bit as fiercely as Jeremiah did. It connected them, he thought; like it or not, more than any other of a million similarities, this was what made them the same.
But even as his murderous intent ebbed away, the anger and loathing still gripped his gut. Except that, for the first time, it felt more like what it actually was—self-loathing. It was something sharp, focused inward. It felt like regret. It was a hatred for every time he had ever ignored his own best interest, for every time he’d allowed himself to be swayed off course by propriety and appearance and someone else’s ideas. He was disgusted by what he saw in front of him. And Brent’s words came flooding back to him in that moment, words that had been uttered in a forced performance, but now rang achingly true in his ears. For the first time, perhaps, with his eyes wide open, he accepted this as himself. Standing there now, he had the sensation of choking on every single
desire he’d ever forced himself to swallow. Everything he’d wasted was stuck in the back of his throat. Jeremiah suddenly found himself wanting not to kill the clone, but to change him. He wanted to warn him.
He grabbed his double by the necktie and pushed his head back down into the unforgiving cement floor with a thud. The clone let out a grunt at the impact and closed his eyes in agony.
Jeremiah got to his feet, stood over him, fuming.
“Stand up!” he shouted, and punctuated the command with his boot in the clone’s shoulder. “Stand up and fight! You used to fight! What the hell happened to you?”
He kicked him again and then a third time until the clone struggled to get his hands underneath him and push himself up to a sitting position. He sat there for a moment, dazed, and then began to scoot away backward. Jeremiah kicked him again in the side and the clone grunted and fell back down in a heap, his face buried in his arms.
“Stop sniveling!” Jeremiah shouted. “Do something! Why the hell do you just lie there and take it? You let the whole goddamn world trample on you—kick the shit out of you—until there’s nothing left! Look at me! Hit me! Fight back!”
The clone kept his face buried and Jeremiah heard muffled sounds as though he were actually sobbing on the floor in front of him.
“Look at me!” Jeremiah commanded again. The clone turned his head slowly and looked up at him, red-faced and wheezing, trying wordlessly to beg for his life, attempting to make sense of what he was seeing. But there was no making sense of this.
“I don’t know who you are,” the clone moaned. “I don’t know who you are.”
Jeremiah knelt down on one knee, the knife now at his side, and looked him hard in the eye.
“You know,” he told him. “You know exactly who I am. You just won’t see it. You’ll never see it because you’re too afraid to really look at anything. You’re too weak. Or maybe you’re just crazy. Am I really here, Jeremiah? Or have you completely lost your mind? Maybe they’ll put you away, just like Uncle Charlie!”
The clone paused and Jeremiah knew he’d struck a chord. Just like him, his double must have been plagued by the constant, menacing threat of some hereditary lunacy.
“Who are you?” the clone asked again, more frantic now, almost defiant. Hearing it satisfied something deep inside Jeremiah.
“That’s the question that will haunt you for the rest of your life,” he said. “That’s what you’ll ask yourself over and over again, every night as you lie there in the dark and try to wrap your feeble little mind around this moment. This moment! Right here! This is the moment that will define you—take over the rest of your life. Is this real? Did it really happen? Until all that’s left is that question!”
The clone just looked up at him, his expression completely blank and vacant, which only served to push Jeremiah on.
“But this isn’t the question that matters. This is meaningless. This is nothing! You need to pay attention to the right things—the questions that actually mean something. Did you read my note?” Jeremiah barked. “About Diana? Did you do what I said? Did you try to protect her? She’s dead because you didn’t pay attention! She’s dead because you’re too arrogant to believe anything that doesn’t fit in your stupid little box of a mind. That actually fucking means something!”
The clone just stared up at him stupefied, his expression tortured. Something in his face made Jeremiah certain he had read the note. Jeremiah snickered and shifted as if to leave, convinced he wouldn’t get through to him, couldn’t make him understand. How could he see if he wouldn’t open his eyes? But before he even stood up, something made him stop. He needed to do something, he decided, leave him with something to think about, something real and unforgettable to make him understand. He needed something to make him believe. Jeremiah shifted his weight again and brought one knee hard down onto the clone’s wrist, pinning his left hand flat against the garage floor. Without pausing, without a flicker of consideration, he raised the knife high above his head, machete-like, and brought the full force of it down onto the clone’s index finger—cutting through skin and flesh and halfway into the bone. The scream was high-pitched and prolonged and the clone’s whole body writhed and then buckled as the color drained from his face. From somewhere inside, Jeremiah could hear Louie barking frantically, scratching at the door. Jeremiah had to hack three more times, using the blade as an ax, before the finger was fully off the hand. Then he picked it up and put the warm, slippery thing into his pocket.
He stood up, breathing heavily after the exertion, and watched the blood pool onto the floor and pick up little swirls of incandescent dust. The clone pulled his mangled hand in tight to his body, curled up and rocked back and forth in a fetal position. Jeremiah could tell, more from his motion than from any sound he emitted, that he was sobbing. He patted his pocket and felt the warmth of the clone’s blood on his own hand.
“I want you to remember,” he said flatly. His voice sounded quiet and cold, terrible, even to his own ears. He repeated the words, softer this time, almost pleading. “I want you to remember.”
He dropped the bloody knife and left it where it fell, right beside the clone. Have fun explaining that, he thought, knowing any fingerprints or DNA would point irrefutably to self-mutilation. He knew the clone wouldn’t report anything to the authorities. What would he say when they asked for a description of the assailant?
He turned around, almost calmly, and walked through the side door of the garage, up the length of the brick walk and around to the back of the house. He kept walking until he reached the woods and found the familiar path that he had walked so many times with Louie. Once he was deep enough in the trees, he took the cell phone from his back pocket and, with shaky hands, dialed the number Brent had made him memorize.
“Change of plans,” he said when Brent answered on the first ring. “Meet me in the woods behind my street. Park at the top, go in behind the first house and just keep walking. Stick to the path. I’ll find you.”
Chapter 38
Jeremiah leaned hard against an oak tree and slid down to a sitting position. The morning air was still cold, but he didn’t feel it. What had he done? How had he managed to blow his one chance? And, more importantly, what was he going to do now? It was almost eight o’clock. By now Scott and the others knew he was missing. Certainly, they were already searching for him, and were likely starting to suspect Brent, too. And the clone was still alive.
He looked around him. There was little chance anyone would find him here. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever run into another person in these woods. But he couldn’t calm his nerves. If anyone—one of his neighbors—should happen to come by, it would be a problem. He couldn’t afford to be seen. He needed to wait for Brent and come up with another plan. But he didn’t have another plan. He hadn’t thought he’d need one.
He sat still for a few minutes, trying to focus on the sounds around him. It was silent except for a slight breeze rustling the leaves and the sporadic trill of chickadees in the trees. After a few minutes, he stood up and began walking along the path toward the top of the hill, looking for Brent.
He heard him before he caught sight of him, stumbling through the undergrowth and fallen leaves, obviously out of his element. His left shoulder was hanging limply in a sling and he held his arm gingerly against his chest as he tramped up the path.
“What the hell happened? What do you mean there was a change of plans?” Brent called breathlessly as he approached. “Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Fuck. What?”
“I couldn’t do it,” Jeremiah admitted.
“And what are we supposed to do now?” Brent was frantic, gripping the top of his head with his good hand, turning circles as though the trees themselves might offer some solution. “Scott has called me four times since they discharged me from the hospital! He keeps asking me to walk hi
m through that fight again.”
“Does he know?”
“No, I don’t think so. But it won’t take him long to figure it out once he realizes I’m not at home convalescing like I’m supposed to be. Jesus! They’re probably at my house as we speak!”
“Is Mel there?”
“No, thank God. She’s already at work, none the wiser. She doesn’t even know about this yet.” He looked down at his own injured arm. “Jeremiah, we are royally screwed. We need to get you back to the lab and just take our chances. Maybe they’ll go easy on us if we just get back there. There’s nothing else we can do. The clone isn’t dead. Maybe they’ll just look at this as a drunken rampage or something.”
“I can’t, Brent. I can’t do that. Look, I didn’t kill him, but I do have this.” He took the bloody finger from his pocket, cold now, and stiffened into a slight curl, so that any way he held it, it looked like it was pointing at Jeremiah. Brent turned his head violently at the sight of it and then turned back to Jeremiah with a shocked expression.
“What the hell? You cut off his finger? His fucking finger? What the hell?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking. I just did it.”
“Put it away. Jesus!”
Jeremiah slipped the thing back into his pocket and ran a hand through his hair, thinking.
“Maybe we can use it,” he said. “Maybe, between this and those emails, maybe it will be enough.”
The Mirror Man Page 25