The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Darren Speegle

  By now we had a full-fledged snowstorm on our hands and were going nowhere for a while. We managed to get a decent fire going using kindling Ritter had had the forethought to have us squeeze into our packs, and then drying, in pyramid fashion, what wood we pulled out of a stand of firs abutting the cliff. We removed our clothes to let them dry in the heat, and pulled fresh changes out of plastic bags in our packs—a matter not of forethought but basic survival in the high country. Feeling some replenishment at last, we settled in the best we could around the fire, avoiding the right side of the shelter, which lacked the protection of the trees. As the fire crackled aromatically, sending plumes of softwood smoke whirling into the swaying boughs, it occurred to me that we hadn’t been this cozy a company in a couple days. Considering what we’d just been through, conversation was inevitable.

  Maya initiated it. “Wow. Now that was hiking. I don’t think I’ve had so much fun since Dianna and I were in the Honduran jungle. I’m not sure which I prefer, bone-chilling cold and lashing wind, or hellish heat and bloodsucking insects. I think the latter.” She looked at Ritter. “So what happens if the weather doesn’t give? Hole up here for the night? Wish we could get a damn weather report.”

  “I tried last night and this morning. Still no reception,” Ritter said. “We’ll only stay here as a last resort. If we can get to a shelter I know—it’s between here and the lean-to—we’ll have plenty of hardwood and better protection against the weather. It’s out of the way by a couple of kilometers, or I would have mentioned it yesterday. It’s not perfect. Because of its location in a narrow gorge, where it is deeply recessed in the rock, the shelter stays damp most of the time. But it’s spacious, has ample ventilation, and is protected from the wind. I used the shelter in the past before finding a better route and building the lean-to.”

  “Sounds like a better spot than the lean-to,” Higgins said.

  Unstirred by what might have been construed as a criticism, Ritter said, “The lean-to is large and sturdy and well-sealed, but it’s not built for this kind of weather.” He turned his attention to Maya. “So . . . Honduras. I’ve never been to that part of the world.”

  She sighed—with too much drama, I thought. “It’s amazingly beautiful. Lush. Mysterious. And the people . . . they’re wonderful. Good-natured, interesting. Remember that village, San Viegro, Dianna? We called it San Viagra because of all the horny old men. Remember the twins—” She stopped, staring at Ritter, pretending to realize she’d broached the taboo. And making me wonder in the process just where the hell she was going with this freelance shit. Was it sport for her?

  “Oh, fuck it,” she said. “I refuse to walk on eggshells. There were these twin brothers, twelve years old. They did this telepathy thing with a deck of shuffled cards, where one looked at the cards’ faces while the other, blindfolded, received his brother’s conveyed impressions. As Dianna will confirm, these boys consistently got the color right fifty out of fifty-two times. It was remarkable. One of many strange and wondrous traits we multiples possess. Right, guys?”

  For two or three seconds no one responded. Then Higgins, who had been fiddling with his camera, said, “I can balance a broomstick on my nose while my brother watches Bewitched.”

  A single unit of laughter erupted, uncharacteristically, from Dianna’s mouth.

  “You get Bewitched in Britain?” I said to Higgins while cocking a brow at Dianna.

  “Come to think of it, I don’t believe so.”

  “You’re a strange bird, Higgins.”

  He responded to this by lifting his camera and taking a picture of himself. Looking at the digital image of his wrecked face, he said, “Oh. That spoiled the fun.”

  Chuckling, Ritter said, “I would have thought you had learned your lesson, Mr. Higgins.”

  “Poor guy,” said Maya.

  “Poor, my ass,” Ritter said. “He’s feasting on the attention. God knows, we don’t need to give him an excuse to incur the wrath of some other wild animal. Bears range, too. And the Carpathians just right over there.” He arced his arm as he pointed, jumping entire countries.

  “Um, I’ve already been down that road,” said Higgins. He waited until all eyes were on him before adding, “You know that bit about standing your ground? Don’t.”

  He stood, turned, and to our utter surprise, pulled his pants down, bending forward to reveal four pulpy scars on the underside of his left buttock.

  When he felt we’d held our mouths open long enough, he said, “Actually, I had a run-in with a till when I was a teenager.”

  At that point we were still too dumbfounded to laugh. But when it came, it came with abandon. During the two hours we spent beneath the overhang, we had other light moments, but none like that one, which holds the distinction of being the last time the five of us drank from the same life-affirming barrel together.

  ***

  The storm began to lose its intensity in the latter part of the morning, and by one o’clock, had abated significantly. We didn’t wait around to measure the duration of the lull, but set out again regenerated and in decent spirits, all things considered.

  It wouldn’t last.

  How Ritter knew what was coming, I’m not sure. The instinct that comes with years of experience, I suppose. During the interval, the sky became a strange tapestry, colors bleeding between the bands of the spectrum into fierce bruises, clouds gathering in roiling, hellish formations. But that was after Maya had dropped back into stride with Dianna and me, glancing at Higgins who followed at a short distance behind as she confided, “This is for your ears only. Ritter’s finally admitted that there’s a facility. And it’s not far. He says to tell you that he’s steering us in that direction in case the weather deteriorates to the point where it becomes necessary to take refuge there.” We didn’t question her, or him, or the déjà vu that seemed to seep out of Maya’s pores into ours as she spoke. Form. It was all according to form. The reason we hadn’t, under whatever guise, confronted Ritter about the installation before now was because we knew it was in the design’s hands. The detour neither asked for nor needed anyone’s permission. If it could be called a detour at all.

  Within an hour of this admission the next patch of weather moved in, and it was a monster. The suddenness of it was breathtaking, stupefying. Had we been given any sort of forewarning, we might have turned back, tried to outrun the main thrust of it, though I highly doubt it would have done any good. The thing came with such force as to nearly suck us away into the abyss we were unfortunate enough to have been skirting at the time. As it was, we were forced to clutch the backpack of the person in front of us, creating a chain’s resistance against the howling wind and madly spinning snow that had washed over us like a devil’s sandstorm. Visibility, forward momentum, the ability to hear each other’s warnings were instantly lost in the fury. It was as though the thing had not arrived, but sprang spontaneously into being around us, instantaneously making us its nerve center, the nexus for all its flowing rapturous emotion.

  This was only the first wave.

  Mere minutes after we found the necessary groove, the harmony of balance, central gravity, and body posture that enabled us to move through the chaos, the sky collapsed again, bringing down the renewed displeasure of the gods. The chain broke as we were driven to our hands and knees, pressed to supplication. Will, determination, and dogged defiance won out as we crawled across a naked stretch of ground—visible to each other only in snatches—toward a vertical slab of rock whose faint outline might have been that of a castle rampart to our deliriously concentrated minds. The main force of the blizzard now seemed to come from behind. If we could reach that rock, get to the other side . . .

  Wind screamed, swept the fallen snow out of its bed and hurled it like knives.

  The wall loomed as the first of us—it had to be Ritter—placed his hand in a hold in the rock and pulled himself up. As he reached his feet, he grasped the side of the slab and swung his body around its edge, but a violent gust
carried him too far through the motion and into space. He was there one second, then gone.

  Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, my mind turned. Oh Christ, save us.

  As though a sacrifice had been offered and accepted, there was a perceptible lessening of force, a subsidence among the elements, a pulling back by winds now whistling in aloof, conspiratorial mockery. Both I and Dianna in front of me started to rise, but we were blown off balance again by an abrupt gust. Snow danced in the air, washed over us in sandy waves. The air whistled and mocked. Not yet, the elements said. Not quite yet. Higgins—I could tell it was him through the whirling veil by his tall, lean figure—managed to get to his feet. He was at the wall now, securing himself by rope to a jutting arm of rock. As he inched toward the edge over which Ritter had disappeared, feeding the line out behind him, the winds seemed to grow testier, as though this was a trespass against them. Angrier, as though this grave presumption would be met with even graver punishment.

  “Mein Gott,” Dianna shouted over her shoulder. It was the first time I could remember having heard her use her native tongue, but she wasn’t really talking to me. I was just a direction in which to express her epiphany. “Der Sturmist . . . alive!”

  The word itself seemed to further animate the blizzard. Yet in spite of the storm’s rollercoaster rise and fall in ferocity, it seemed to hover, poised, awaiting its moment to strike. And no question as to its target, who now leaned out over the drop at the extent of his lifeline, boots braced against the lip itself as he reached perhaps toward some crag or island jutting up out of the emptiness. Hanging out there, tempting the storm, the fates, the very gods as the rope slipped up the snow-slick rock to which it was tied.

  “Higgins!” I called, but I knew it was useless. Even if he was able to hear, he wouldn’t.

  I pushed myself to my feet again, hunching forward, creating a low center of gravity as I crossed the twenty or so feet to where he was stretched as far as his belt would allow. I grabbed the rope at the same moment I saw a gloved hand shoot up from the void, grasping Higgins’s wrist in a Roman handshake. The rope lurched in my gloves, but I caught it, weaving my arm through the line, biceps screaming so hard I could barely hear the storm over them. Or had the storm drawn back again as I drew the rope, back like the head of the cobra at its most relished, venom-dripping moment? Higgins pulled, and I could see the contour of his shoulder blade through his jacket. I pulled, and could now see Ritter’s entire arm, his head, his shoulders and chest as he seemed to throw his lower body forward . . . yes, now using his legs to walk himself up the wall of the drop-off. I perceived two bodies come to my aid, one upon each flank, felt Dianna’s and Maya’s gloved fists tighten around the rope, experienced the abrupt change in resistance, then another decrease as the two figures whose weight we bore passed the angle of gravity’s downward pull, swinging almost with ease toward the upright—

  Then the storm struck.

  The combined pressure and noise was terrible, such that I thought my eyes would burst out of my skull before they witnessed the outcome of this final stroke. God, that they had, or at least that I’d had the ability to close them and all my senses against the experience of the rope snapping taut in our fists, the sight of Ritter flailing backwards into nothingness—too far, I knew by Higgins’s body language, the way his hands clenched and unclenched at the air, his body slumped against the harness he wore—too far to hope for any appending surface to save him, too far to hope for anything but a swift and decisive landing.

  As the storm drew back again, I focused on the bird that was Higgins. Strange bird, I thought, despairingly. Strange, death-defying, life-risking, wonderful bird. We began to haul him in, hand over hand, but something wasn’t right . . . his body, its slackness. Maya was the first to him. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, I think it’s his neck . . . ”

  But it was his face I was looking at as he lay there, broken, on his side—the snapped stitches jutting stiffly, crazily, the ice-rimmed eyes focused on some terrible and utter truth. Gazing upon that mask, it struck me, dully, that the design’s natural selection process was whittling us down according to our individual usefulness. Somewhere along the way it had deemed Higgins’s blood to be unsuited or unworthy. Who would be next? Maya? For having two living sisters? Did it even matter now? Now that the design had proven to have the mighty forces of Mother Nature herself at its disposal?

  Turning from the awful image, I stepped past Higgins’s body, cautiously leaning forward to look over the edge—and there it was. The wire. The walls. The trees. The wolf . . . dragging a child by the back of the neck through the snow, struggling to keep the body in its jaws. As though the flesh was too insubstantial. Not well offered.

  ***

  The storm wasn’t finished with us, persisting without the spine-breaking force of before, but still well armed. Unless the design also offered protection from physical laws and properties, then it was only a matter of time before hypothermia, frostbite, or the treacherous terrain incapacitated or killed another of us. Thus, after regrouping, we’d no choice but to leave the bodies of our companions, ignore the now massive foreboding we were all experiencing, and find a way down to the only refuge that had ever presented itself.

  The facility comprised several buildings, some with gaping windows by which we could gain entrance if necessary. The going was painstaking, but within an hour or so we had reached the edge of the enclosure and were walking along the tall fence looking for an entrance in the barbed wire. In short order we found a gate, but it was chained and locked. Climbing was not an option we were willing to consider before other avenues were exhausted, so we continued moving along the fence, occasionally testing the horizontal lengths of wire for tautness. After some two hundred feet or so our patience bore fruit as we found a spot where someone had made their own entrance with a pair of wire cutters. Only then did it occur to me that I could have used the Leatherman multi-tool in my pack, itself equipped with wire cutters. An oversight I can only attribute to the stress of the situation. In any case, we’d found our access point. Whether the party that had made the entrance was the same one that had seen fit to hide the trespass from casual inspection using smaller gauge spool wire that we untwisted to gain ingress was another question.

  Leaving the limp strands in the snow, we entered a wooded area of the grounds. The clustered firs provided significant protection from the elements, continuing a trend that had become evident during our descent into the almost completely walled-in hollow. We weren’t insulated from the noise of the storm, however. If anything, the treetops enhanced the din, acting as instruments in eager hands as the wind rolled from one section of foliage to another, tossing the resilient branches, voicing its progress in an eerie undulating howl. Even through the sense of dread that surrounded this homecoming—for we had reached our final destination; there was no question of that—it was all pomp and show, melodrama. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d have said we were safe now (assuming frostbite hadn’t already bitten), but these were far from ordinary circumstances, and the term ‘safe’ knew no form but the relative when it came to this excursion.

  Dianna, in quiet command of herself, suggested we pick up fuel along the way so that we could get a fire going immediately when we found an appropriate spot. It was as I was removing a branch from the piled up snow at the base of a tree that I saw the first face. I might have ignored the flash in the already active periphery but for my nerve-honed state of awareness. As it was, my eyes had to chase it from one tree to the next, but once caught, it imprinted itself. Pale oval, cherubic features, faintly luminous skin, blond hair, thin bluish lips, expression similar to that the wolf had worn on our first encounter—concerned curiosity. Then the face disappeared, and I increased my pace to match my heartbeat, knowing the face’s counterpart—

  Twin.

  —was nearby, somewhere among the trees.

  Even knowing this, its appearance startled me. Or was that the cry Maya, ahead of Dianna and me, issu
ed as she encountered her first apparition? A high, strangely false note in the otherworld we had entered. I fixed on Dianna’s back, but she did not flinch, though the young ones were emerging all around us now. In pairs, sometimes trios, pale lights blinking on in wintry twilight. Signals. Warnings. Memories. Destinations. Ghosts. Yet I knew there was substance to them. I had seen the wolf carrying one in its jaws. Struggling, yes, but dragging weight, leaving an impression, a wake in the snow. No wonder the beast had behaved schizophrenically. It had probably been called here like us, teased by dreams of flesh that wasn’t flesh, confused by scents of blood that wasn’t blood. Summoned to a place far outside its habitat, a realm imposed on its world of forests and mountains.

  Our pace had escalated to an awkward run now, Dianna and I following Maya’s lead, moving briskly as footing would allow. The trees and the faces among them blurred by, becoming part of the ocean created by the wind, the branches, the spinning snow spray. There was no sense of immediate danger, but the disturbance ran deep, through overlapping layers, through the physics of the body, the psyche. Something was terribly awry in this place, and the apparitions of the multiples were merely manifestations of it. Doors had come unsealed, perpetuating an unnatural osmosis wherein states of location, of perspective, of being bled into each other, rolling like the canopy above in an uncertain balance. One that, in spite of the tempestuous conditions, seemed ready to tip at a whisper.

  Father, a voice materialized in my mind. Father?