The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Darren Speegle

  When I was satisfied, through our gaze, that we had an understanding—and it made no difference that the nature of that understanding was unknown to both of us—I said to him, “I have been through the most extreme trauma you can imagine, Ritter. Whatever was said—and I speak the truth when I say I don’t remember—it was said while I was in a distraught state. I would hope you would bear this in mind when considering future interrogation.”

  “What’s going on up there?” came Higgins’s voice out of the other-space.

  Ritter and I held our gaze a second longer, letting the obscure understanding root that much deeper, then our illustrious guide was offering some snide response to his mate-in-disgust. As for me, I only glanced back at the other passengers, which was sufficient time to catch the worried question in Dianna’s eye. I had no reassurances for her, so I turned to the window, watching and not watching the trees slip by. The van fell silent, as though the energy that had passed between the guide and me had exceeded its channel, permeating the vehicle’s closed interiors. I doubted the others had heard much of what we were saying, but what significance was there in vocal content when compared with the vocabulary of the face, the body? And sometimes, when given the opportunity, the mood simply alights on its own, the gravity of the path ahead settling on the common mind, suppressing its flights of fancy for a time . . . a sort of medium reached, as much gained as lost. Take Maya’s reaction test. Even as it had been potentially compromised by my bad advance surgery on the subject, a groundwork had been laid. That Ritter and I were on to each other merely deepened the intrigue. None of us, I thought, seemed very good spies.

  Maybe it was the being in the Alps, that and Higgins’s assertion that he had climbed the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland, but I suddenly found myself thinking about the Clint Eastwood movie based on the Whitaker novel that took its name from the Swiss peak. In The Eiger Sanction the assassin played by Eastwood joins a mountain climbing expedition knowing one of the members of the party is his target, but not which one. He must discover the identity of that person, a Russian killer, while on the climb. It had been a long time since I had seen the movie, and I doubted I’d ever given it much thought after the fact, though I’d enjoyed both it and the book. Was it possible that I thought about it now because my subconscious had recognized a loose parallel between its plot and the current scenario? The five of us were here and no direct link as yet discovered to the forces that moved the pieces. If you thought about it, that link could be any one of us. We didn’t know each other. We just extended twisted-up rags of trust. Rags we’d removed from our own bodies, poor spies that we were, leaving us one layer less protected. Maybe that’s the way it was to play out: layer by layer, until nothing stood between ourselves and each other, between us and the elements, the elephantine shadows, the design. Nothing but the suit of flesh, dubious as that was in a cross-world of living and dead. If that was the way of it, then so be it. At least three of us had been eroding, one perhaps for her friend, for a while now. And if a spy was in our midst, then so be that too. The Eiger Sanction, in the end, was just another detour. As often as I still took them, I’d since quit letting the possibilities absorb me. I liked to think that way anyway.

  In less than a half hour we were at our destination. We unloaded the van in continued silence, and the trailhead, a wide opening in the trees, might as well have been the maw of utter darkness. As I pulled my hunting knife from my pack to attach it to my belt, I paused, removing the blade from its sheathe and absently running the pad of my thumb along its edge. It was not unlike the knife I’d killed a man with, which probably made it not unlike the knife that had slit my daughter’s throat. I looked at the blade for several seconds, soul reaching across the Atlantic, across gulfs even greater than the Atlantic to my beloved Kristin, alone in her shell. Soon, I promised her. Soon, I will be there to bring you back into the light.

  But as I entered the forest of elephantine shadows, one among them seeming to distend from my own person, I could not resist wondering what that dawn would look like.

  FOUR

  THE WINDS OF EVOLUÇÃO

  15

  On the fifth day out we saw a wolf. The five of us, weary, hungry, and sweat-chilled, had just broken out of a patch of short alpine trees that hard weather had left in a perpetual balletic bow, and there it stood not twenty meters away, silhouetted along a blade of rock, watchful eyes shining coppery in the moonlight.

  As we froze, Higgins as usual was the first to comment, his frosted whisper like glass shattering in the cold May night. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Hush!” hissed Maya, an even sharper aftershock.

  The wolf seemed more curious than alarmed—in custom for its kind from my limited experience. Granted, in Southeast Alaska humans and coexisting mammal species were more integrated. To my knowledge, Discovery Channel knowledge, wolves hadn’t been sighted in the German Alps in a long, long time. The animal held its stationary stance, head perpendicular to its body as it took us in. I had the sudden inexplicable sense that its curiosity was a concerned one. Not for itself, but for us. As though it had made the decision in its appraisal that we didn’t belong in this unforgiving domain, particularly after the sun had gone down.

  “It’s like it wants to tell us something,” Dianna said, her characteristically soft, rounded-edged words easier on the still night. With the natural exception of our guide, she was the one among us least prone to fanciful thinking. That she lent some measure of credibility to my own, unspoken observation said something, though I was unsure what.

  Ritter looked at her. In the moonlight I could see a trace of annoyance on his face. Though he’d been working hard at concealing his biases, his impatience for the soft-spoken showed through. “Like what?” he said. “‘Could you spare a steak?’ ‘Can you give me a cameo in one of your poems?’”

  As if in response, a light flashed, and the wolf bolted. Higgins had managed to fish out his camera while the rest of us were flirting with spooking the creature the old-fashioned way.

  “Thank you, Mr. Higgins,” Ritter said. “I’m sure the others appreciate your eagerness to capture such a rare specimen on film. These animals are exceedingly rare in Germany. The only packs I know of are up around the Polish border. Where this one could have come from is a mystery to me. It might have ranged from the Swiss Alps, where the wolf has returned in recent years, from Italy. I suppose the southern Czech border is a possibility—there are a handful there. Regardless, we have the opportunity to view one of these rare prizes, and what do you do, Mr. Higgins? Chase it away with that damned camera of yours.”

  “You didn’t seem so concerned about chasing it away when you were harassing Dianna for no reason,” said Maya.

  He didn’t deign to address the remark. “Let’s move. We’ve dallied enough today.” He looked at his watch. “I cannot believe we are still on the trail. We’ll be lucky to reach the Brow by ten o’clock. Keep it slow and watch your step!”

  ***

  Situated among a staggered series of bluffs, the Brow was a projecting body of rock that resembled the creased forehead of a giant. The yawning, recessed alcove beneath the formation, a shelter Ritter regularly used on his excursions, afforded a certain perplexed aspect, as though the giant were stuck on some existential problem. But that was on first sight. When we’d settled safely and soundly in and I’d climbed back down the rocky path to try to get reception on my cell phone, my perspective had changed. Gazing up at the disproportionate head, the shadows of my companions forming moving art on the mouth’s fire-lit walls, I now saw a stricken expression, as though the giant had actually solved the problem and was aghast at what he’d found. The image was unsettling. It made me feel diminutive and ignorant, grossly out of my element among these mountains and their arcane contemplations. It wasn’t a new feeling of course. Alaska could produce such profound emotions, you forgot your identity entirely.

  As I tried the number again, Ritter emerged from the mouth in the
bluffs. Standing akimbo against the alcove’s glow, he looked around for a moment before spotting me. I have to admit that, in spite of his hardcore shtick, in spite of the fact that he took his name—which means ‘knight’ in Deutsch—way too seriously as he went nobly forth to subjugate the wild spirit of Germany’s last frontier, I liked Ritter. He had a certain flair that, while a bit long on the cock feathers, had less to do with machismo than a genuine belief in his place among the elements. I knew what he was thinking as his gaze lingered on me, and I didn’t care. Yes, rest was sacred, but tomorrow was Kristin’s fifteenth birthday and I wanted the peace of mind of knowing I’d passed along my wishes, even if they were an unheard cry in the gulf. I half wished I’d bought the skis prior to leaving in case her condition changed, but inside, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet anyway.

  Ritter remained standing on the ledge for a few minutes, breath condensing in silver-white clouds as his interest eventually turned to a sky that had become overcast. He didn’t look my way again before returning inside. I tried calling a while longer, cursing the techno gods and the seven-hundred-dollar piece of cellular junk they’d let hit the streets, then finally gave up. Telepathically wishing my daughter goodnight (though it was midday in Alaska), I went up to join the others in restful oblivion.

  Sometime in the night it began to snow. News came my way in the pre-dawn hours when Maya, presumably returning from relieving herself, stumbled over my legs in the shadows. I must have responded to her apology because she felt prompted to share in a whisper not only that weather had arrived, but that it reminded her of a trip to Norway in her youth when she and her triplet sisters sneaked out of the cabin to play in the luminous wonderland of the wintry night. It wasn’t the first glimmer to have arrived by Maya since the trek’s start, and it wouldn’t be the last. Indeed, before the sun rose I caught her at what may have been her first relevant dream. That it wasn’t original, that my own daughter had visited the same landscape on the eve of my second departure for Brazil did not lessen the concussion.

  I don’t know what woke me, whether it was her murmuring or some other disturbance in the night, but as soon as I opened my senses to the waking world, I was drawn to where she lay. Framed by the blanket she was bundled in, her face was a moving picture. Her eyelids fluttered, her lips trembled with incomprehensible words, her brows knitted and unknitted, her breath came in frosty secretive gusts. Where the dream did not touch, flickers from the dying campfire did, adding layers to the dance as I watched with artistic interest. I had never paused to consider her beauty for its own sake before, though I’d found her exotic features suggestive. Which led me to wonder if it could be said of people that they were only as real as their masks. I liked to toy with both perspective and aesthetic in my work, and for that moment in time she was an incidental case study.

  I wondered what her mind had conjured out of the depths to result in such a troubled aspect. As with Kristin that night forever ago, she didn’t appear to be having a nightmare, though she was obviously involved in the experience. I thought it would be interesting to be there with her, to know what she knew. As if in response to the thought, a word emerged out of the murmuring. Twins. I was sure I’d heard right, that it wasn’t my own mind invoking phantoms—

  A coherent stream issued from her. The words, while not exactly those Kristin had used, were uttered in that same voice of lilting wonder. And like then, their impact on me was that of a lavishly cold wind spreading over my body.

  The trees, they’re full of twins.

  I knelt there, shivering in the embrace of the wind, watching her. I knew where she was, as I’d known where Kristin was. Then, it had had no name. For me, it had been the place of choking barbed wire. For my daughter, it had assumed a form unique to her, appearing as whatever tapestry her internal associations had made of it. But for all of us, it was a place of faces. The faces of identicals. And I’d no doubt know the name of that place.

  As I returned to my sleeping bag, burrowing deep inside, the opposite of oblivion was served. A dream that was and was not my own played tantalizingly, coldly across my receptors.

  ***

  We woke to three inches on the ground, and more falling. It was a lazy shower, the flakes large and cottony on the windless air. Though we knew conditions could easily deteriorate, that footing was going to be a bitch as it was, we found ourselves admiring the scene. The firs and spruces of the opposite slope, among the last of the sub-alpine ranks, were capped in white, bringing a Christmasy feel to an otherwise raw and un-festive realm. That wonderful hush that accompanies ‘warm’ snows was present, as was the sense of soft enclosure, insular security. We went about the business of breakfast—the usual coffee and Pop-tarts—and breaking camp in a sort of wordless serenity, the only disturbance, the occasional chirping of what might have been one of those holiday birds you plug into the wall. First to finish packing, Dianna squatted at the edge of an outcropping, unintentionally showcasing her muscular fitness in the process, and composed a poem. The picture of her inspired ideas in me for a future novel, storyline involving a group of backpackers who stumble on an abandoned facility in the Bavarian mountains. She’d be in it. The snow, of course. The wolf—

  “I can hardly believe it,” came Maya’s voice.

  We stopped what we were doing to follow the path of her extended finger. At the base of the bluff to our left, head cocked slightly, ears perked, hair matted with melted snow, stood none other than our friend from last night. Only this time the animal seemed to lack the knowledge the moon had given it, and was simply curious. That or . . .

  “Hungry,” Maya said, as though receiving revelation. “That’s what she wanted to tell us. It’s been a long rough winter and she wants an easy meal.”

  “Fetch her some, then,” Ritter said, emphasizing humorously, not sarcastically. Or so said the expression he gave her before he turned abruptly to his left to address one less deserving of such courtesy. “Not you, Higgins. Go near that pack and you’ll be finding your own way today, I promise you.”

  “No need to get nasty, love. No need to get nasty. I was just going to grab some beef jerky.” Nasty came out nahsty, and I was unsure whether it was that or the endearment that compelled Dianna to look my way and wink.

  “I have some,” I said, stepping over to my backpack and retrieving the package of hiker protein.

  The wolf, which had kept its watchful posture the whole time, didn’t seem to know what to make of my snail-slow approach, my softly uttered reassurances, the bag in my hand. Pausing, I opened the package slowly, so as not to scare the animal, and let it breathe in the wolf’s direction. There was no mistaking the exact moment the animal caught the scent, because its nose twitched and its ears nearly did a twin pirouette. At this point I didn’t know whether to continue my approach or toss a piece of the jerky from where I stood. I decided on the latter, careful not to make any sudden movements as I pulled a long slab of the salt-dried meat out of the bag and lobbed it, underhanded, into the mid-space. As it arced through the air and buried in the snow, the wolf didn’t flinch. Its eyes remained on me, giving me the feeling that it wasn’t overcome by appetite after all. The scent had piqued its interest, to be sure, but it now seemed to realize I wasn’t the flesh merchant I pretended to be. Something a little more substantial if you please, said its coppery eyes. Its suddenly bared teeth. The low guttural growl it summoned. I may have parted ways with the pack, but I’m far from helpless. If you’re offering, offer well. And know the purpose of your offering. Do I look underfed to you? I am at the top of the food chain in these mountains, and all alone at my pinnacle. There is no prey. The creatures throw themselves before me, but to experience the ecstasy of my piercing fangs. If you’re offering, offer well, intruder.

  I was paralyzed by the beast. So completely at its mercy that had it wanted to take me, I would have been incapable of resistance. I could feel the eyes of the others shifting between the beast and myself in expectant, macabre fascin
ation. I felt like a caricature and an amusement, a confused plaything for a bored god-king with selective tastes.

  “Easy, Barry . . . ” came Ritter’s voice from the other side of a membrane. “I’m going to pick up this rock, nice and slow . . . ”

  When Ritter’s insertion went unchallenged by the wolf, Higgins, in his ever so patient fashion, mourned, “God, I wish I had my camera now.”

  That broke the spell.

  In a single thunderstroke of the heart, the wolf’s gaze shifted, received its sensory data, and the animal attacked. It was by me in a flash, Higgins’s stunned cry cut off in mid-utterance, replaced by a savage confusion of gnashing, thrashing, and enfeebled, almost sexual noises. Before I’d completely turned, Ritter was upon the beast. Through a tunnel eye I caught the flash of the knife, the seizing-up of the cut body, the fin-like spasm of what dry hackles were available . . . then the hole widened, the snow bled in, and the attack was over—that quickly. Higgins lay in the snow, Ritter kneeling beside his trembling body, gingerly inspecting his wounds. The wolf had flown, message interrupted but nonetheless nailed deeply home.

  If you’re offering, offer well.

  ***

  “I don’t know why the three of you insist upon applying meaning to the appearance of the wolf,” Ritter said as he inserted the needle again, causing Higgins to wince in pain. “Is it because you’re writers? Is that it? The wolf’s not a foreshadow or an omen or a metaphor. It’s a wolf. A rare case, granted, but just a fucking wolf.”