Double Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  We stroll on and no one sees our perfect imitation of normal strolling, no one anywhere close is watching anything but the TV, and each step brings us closer to joy. We can feel the rising tide of wanting it, needing it, knowing it will be soon, and we very carefully keep our steps from showing our eagerness as we approach the house and stroll past it and into the darkness of the giant hedge that hides the Honda and now hides us.

  And here we pause, looking out from our near-invisible spot beside the rusting car, and we think. We have wanted this so very much and now we are here and we will do it and nothing can stop that but—this is different. It is not just the lack of a moon that makes us hesitate and stand in the shadows and stare thoughtfully at the awful little cottage. And it is no sudden change of heart or twinge of conscience or any kind of doubt in the heartless, conscience-less darkness of our purpose. No. It is this: There are two people inside and we want only one. We need to, we must, we will, take and tape our Witness and do to him all the many wonderful things that we have waited too long to do to him but—

  That second person. A. The ex-wife.

  What do we do with her?

  We cannot leave her to watch and then tell. But to tumble her away, too, into the long forever night is against the Code of Harry, against all the very reasonable well-deserved Wickedness we have always done and hope to always do. This is unearned, unsanctioned, messy, collateral damage. It is wrong, we cannot—but we must. But we can’t— We take a deep relaxing breath. Of course we must. There is no other way. We will tell her we are very sorry, and we will make it quick for her, but we must, just this one very naughty and regrettable time, we absolutely must.

  And so we will. We look carefully at the house, making sure that all is right. One minute, then two, we do nothing at all except stand and wait and watch, trickling all our senses out into the street around us, the small yard of this dingy little house, watching and waiting for any slight sign that we are being watched, and there is nothing. We are alone in a world of dark longing that will very soon burst out into bliss and carry us along to the happy and necessary ending of this oh-so-lovely night.

  Three minutes, five—there is no sign of danger, and we can wait no more. And we take one more cool and steadying breath and then we slide deeper into the shadows of the hedge, stalking back toward the fence that blocks the backyard. A quick and silent vault over the fence, a momentary pause to be absolutely sure that we are unobserved, and then we are cat-footing along the side of the house. Nothing can possibly see us except from the two small windows, one of them up high on the wall and made of pebbled glass, a bathroom. The other window is small and cranked open six inches and we stop a few feet away from it and look inside.

  There is a faint glow of light showing in this window, coming from some interior room, but there is no sound and no sign of any living thing. We open our bag, take out our gloves, and pull them on. We are ready, and we move on past the window and into the backyard.

  The back edge of the yard is completely blocked by a fence that is overgrown with young bamboo. The shoots are slim, but already ten feet tall, and we cannot be seen from this side either and we breathe easier. On the back side of the house a little brick patio nudges up against a sliding glass door. Grass grows up shin-high between the bricks, and a rusted round grill is pushed to one edge, missing one wheel and tilting drunkenly over. Again we pause, staring into the house through the glass of the sliding door. Nothing moves inside, and a first gray finger of doubt pokes into our ribs; is anyone home? Have we come so far and been so very ready, all for nothing?

  Slowly, carefully, we move closer onto the bricks and then up to the sliding glass door, where we wait, looking and listening and sniffing the air for anything at all—and there is nothing.

  We put a hand on the metal rim of the door and push with carefully increasing pressure; the door moves. We slide it open an inch, six inches, two feet, taking half a minute to make sure there is no sound and no reaction from inside. Three feet open and we stop and wait one more cautious moment and again there is nothing and so we slip in through the door and tug it closed behind us.

  We stand in a kitchen: a rusted refrigerator in the corner next to an old stove, a cracked Formica counter with a cupboard above it, a stained and dirty sink with a dripping faucet. The room is unlit, but through a doorway in the far wall we can see a faint gleam of light in the next room. A whispered tickle of warning begins to prickle up our spine and we know there is something there, something in that room in the light. And now all of our focus is forward, into that next room, and the nylon noose is in our hand as we glide slowly across the floor toward the light with a near-drool of anticipation and the glee surges up inside at the thought of what now must come as we stalk silently to the doorway and look carefully around the doorframe and into the next room at what is waiting in that one small halo of light and we pause and peek into the room and—

  Everything stops.

  No breath, no thought, no movement. Nothing but stunned and automatic denial.

  This can’t be. It just can’t. No way, not here, not now, not this—we are not seeing this, not at all, we can’t be seeing any such thing; it’s impossible, wrong, not in the script—

  But there it is. It does not move and it does not change and it is what it certainly is:

  It is a table under a single dim hanging bulb. An old and unremarkable metal table from some thrift shop, with a chipped white finish. And spread across the tabletop in neat bundles is something that used to be a human being. The body has been carefully sliced and sectioned and stacked into orderly piles and it is all so very perfect and exactly as it should be and it spins me into an unreal moment of totally familiar and totally impossible comfort because I know just what it is—but it cannot possibly be that and I look and I look and it still is that, exactly that.

  It is a body prepared for disposal after a long and lovely session with a knife and a need and it is familiar and comforting for the simplest of all possible reasons because this is precisely the way I do it myself. And that is not possible because I did not do it and there is no one else in the world who does it exactly the same way, not even my brother, Brian, but it is there and I blink at it and look again and it is still there and it has not changed.

  And it is so impossible and so nightmare perfectly just what I was going to do that I cannot stop myself from stepping toward it through the doorway, pulled closer as if it was a giant magnet too strong to resist, and I move in without breath and without seeing anything else, step toward the thing that cannot be there even though it so clearly is: one step, two steps—

  And on the far side of the table something steps toward me out of shadow and without a thought I whip out my knife and I jump forward at this new menace—

  And it jumps forward at me with a knife in its hand.

  And I crouch and freeze with my blade raised high—

  And it crouches and freezes with its blade raised high.

  And in an endless moment of total disoriented teeth-bared panic I look and I blink and I see it blink back.…

  I slowly uncoil myself and stand up straight and stare and it does exactly as I do.

  It cannot do anything else …

  … because it is my reflection in a large, full-length mirror. It is me standing there looking back at me standing there looking back—

  Once more I am frozen, unable to think or blink or do anything but stare at the image in the mirror, because this cannot be an accident, any more than the perfectly arranged body on the table is an accident. The mirror has been set up in this precise spot to do exactly what it has done and now here I am looking at me looking back at me over a body that only I could have done like that and I am almost certain I did not do it but there it is and I do not know what to do or what to think.

  So I stand there in a dim tiny cone of unfeeling impossibility and I stare at something that someone has set up just for me—just so I will find it and do exactly what I am doing, which is
nothing but looking at it and trying not to believe that it can be at all what it truly is.

  And slowly, finally, one skittery little thought nudges up through the dumb muck that has poured all through my brain and it squeals at me just loud enough for me to hear it and I blink, take one shaky breath, and let the thought speak to me.

  Who did this?

  It is a good start, this tiny little thought, good enough to get one more thought to follow it up through the mist. Only my brother, Brian, knows my technique well enough to do this. For one flickering moment I wonder if he did; he still wanted to have some brotherly playtime with me. Could this be a small nudge in Dexter’s ribs to encourage me?

  But even as I think it I know that it is not possible. Brian would ask, he would urge, he would wheedle—but he would never do this. And other than Brian, there is no one else in the world who has seen my work and lived …

  … except my Witness, of course. That one unknown Shadow who had seen me with Valentine and blogged his way to the head of my list, the self-same maddening blatherer I had come here to turn into an exact match of what I was looking at now. And as much as it made no sense, it had to be him that had done this. He had arranged this body in my pattern and placed a mirror on the far side of it, and there could be no other explanation, but that led to one more very urgent question:

  Why?

  I have no answer. I can still only think that this is impossible and yet it is out of the hypothetical and into the here and now and I am looking at it and it is as real as the knife in my hand. And I take one more slow and helpless step toward it, as if I could make it all go away if I could just get close enough—and on the far side of the table, the other me takes a step forward and I jerk to a stop again and look at me looking back at me.

  There I am; I, Dexter. I raise a hand to touch my face, but it is the hand with the knife and I stop halfway as the wicked blade comes near my dumbly gaping face and I just look at me. Still life with knife and numbskull. The two faces of me, Dexter the Demon and Dexter the Dope. The face looks strange to me, like it belongs to somebody else—but it is my face, the one I have been wearing all these years. I stare for a long moment, frozen by the sight of me as I really am, both of me, as if I could stare hard enough to make the two faces come together into one real person.

  I can’t, of course. I let the hand with the knife drop to my side once more and look down at the table, stupidly hoping that the impossible thing there would be gone. But it is still there, still real, and still impossible. One more robot step forward and I am standing over it and looking down at what I have come to do and found already done. I stare at the disjointed leftovers, and for one idiot moment a tiny hope flutters up: Was it possible that this heap of flesh was not done by but instead done to my Shadow? Could someone else have somehow done the happy chore for me?

  I look for some clue, and from this close I can see that there are small flaws that I would never have been guilty of. And then I see a breast and I realize this is female, my Shadow is male, and the small spider-footed hope scurries away and dies. This is not my Shadow; this is someone else, and most likely his ex-wife. I move closer. Up close I can see that this is not real quality work; right there, the left hand, so messy at the wrist, hurried, chopped instead of cut with Dexter-neat skill. I reach toward it with the point of my knife and poke it to test its reality—and as I do I pause.

  I have been hearing a familiar sound this last minute and it is getting louder, and I can no longer ignore it, because it is a sound I know very well and one that I do not want to hear right now.

  It is the sound of a siren and it is absolutely coming closer.

  Once again I freeze into stupid unmoving thoughtlessness. A siren. Coming closer. To me. Here, now. To this dingy little house. Where I am standing above a chopped-up body. With a knife in my hand.

  And finally a great sick air-raid siren of alarm begins to shriek from the ramparts of Castle Dexter, rumbling up from its lowest, earth-trembling note of warning and rising to a shattering scream of panic, and we spin away from the impossibly sliced and stacked trash on the table and in one rabbit-blink of an eye we are out the sliding door and into the night. Without a pause for thought we slam into and over the back fence and windmill our arms at the bamboo, tunneling frantically through the springy shoots and falling out face-first, into the backyard of the house on the far side. And we bounce up instantly and run at the full speed of complete panic, slashing through the yard and into the street beyond just as an outside light comes on in the yard where we were lying only seconds ago.

  But we are gone now, safely away and out into the street, along a sidewalk that is just as dark and overgrown as we could wish, and we stroke down the screaming chorus of alarm and fear and force our legs to listen to the cool and soothing voice that says, Slow down; act normal. We have escaped.

  We do slow down, we do try to act normal, but the approaching siren is right there on the next street now, in front of the cottage, and its high-pitched call is winding down again to say that it has arrived, and so in spite of the wise interior words of advice to go slow, we walk a little faster than we should until we turn the corner and come back to our car where it waits beneath the banyan tree.

  And we slide gratefully into the driver’s seat and start the engine and drive slowly away from the small and crumbling house of horrors, slowly and carefully back toward the refuge of normal life. We don’t head straight home, though; we must try to think, and we must let the tremble leave the hands and the dry terror peel off from the mouth as the adrenaline fades away and we slowly morph back into something resembling a human shape before we head back to the company of real humans, and this takes much longer than it should. We drive south on U.S. 1, all the way down to Old Card Sound Road, trying to think and understand and make sense out of this surreal catastrophe of an evening—trying, and failing. Slowly the sick wet panic drains away, but the answers don’t flow in to take its place, and all the way home there is only one single thought repeating endlessly through my numb and shattered brain, one thought that tumbles and echoes through the dark stone halls of Dexter’s Dome. And no answer rises up to greet this thought and so it ricochets around in brittle confusion and repeats itself endlessly and as I finally park my car in front of my house I find that my lips are moving and repeating this same stupid single thought:

  What just happened?

  SIXTEEN

  IT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MUCH OF A SURPRISE, BUT I DID not sleep very much that night. Eyes open or eyes shut, all I could see or think about was that body in the small house, so very nearly Dexter-right, and Dexter himself standing above it gaping at his reflection, both of us drooling stupidly as the siren races closer and closer—

  It had all been a setup, a trap, flawlessly designed to catch nobody but me, and it had so nearly worked. It had been perfectly baited, drawing me in and then stunning me stupid with the body arranged just as I might have done—I had seen so many bodies just like it, and they had always brought me comfort, and it did not seem fair that this one should steal my sleep, fill me with fear, slam nearly human dread into all my thoughts. Was this what it was like to have a conscience? To roll around in bed all night with the thought that you had done something terribly wrong and at any minute it was going to rear up and crush you? I didn’t like the feeling at all, and I liked even less the thought that my Shadow had set me up so neatly and very nearly got me.

  But what could I do? What could I possibly come up with to find and finish this awful lurking menace? Tracing the Honda had been my best shot, my only shot, and I had fired it perfectly, only to find my Witness three steps ahead of me and looking back with a mocking grin. What was left for me now except to wait for his next move? Because there would be a next move; I did not doubt that for a moment. And I had no way to know what it would be, where it would come from—all I could know was that this first try had been very good, and the next one was bound to be better.

  And so I rolled across the
sheets all night, fretting and gnashing my teeth in helpless frustrated anxiety, finally dropping into blank and empty sleep around five thirty, and jerked right back out of it by the alarm clock at seven o’clock. I lay there for several stiff and numb minutes, trying to convince myself that it had all been a bad dream, but I was not nearly persuasive enough. It had happened. It was real—and I did not have even a tiny hint of what to do about it.

  I stumbled into the shower and then into my clothes, and somehow I made it all the way to the table for breakfast, hoping to find some small relief there. And Rita rose to the occasion. She had filled the tabletop with the congenial clutter of blueberry pancakes and bacon. I collapsed into my chair and she thumped a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, and then she paused, hovering over me with that strange expression of half disapproval on her face until I looked up at her.

  “You were out late,” she said, a little more grimly than I was used to from her, and I wondered why.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I had some, um, tests to run. At the lab.”

  “Oh, tests,” she said, “at the lab.” And then Astor came in and slammed herself into a chair.

  “Why do we have to have pancakes?” she said.

  “Because they’re bad for you and I want you to suffer,” Rita snapped at her, and turned away to the stove. Astor watched her with an almost comical expression of surprise on her face, which vanished right away when she saw me looking at her.

  “The blueberries get stuck in my braces,” she mumbled grumpily at me, and then Cody came in and Lily Anne threw her spoon in a perfect arc to the back of Astor’s head. Astor said, “Ow,” Cody laughed, and then all pretense of calm and dignified behavior fled from the room as Astor jumped up, knocking her plate onto the floor, where it broke into three large pieces and a scattered pile of food. She ignored the mess and erupted into self-pitying rage while Rita cleaned up, gave her another plate, and scolded her. Lily Anne started to wail, and Cody simply sat and smirked and, when he thought no one was looking, took a piece of Astor’s bacon.