We were now breaking out of the trees and angling toward the first of the buildings. It looked desolate, forsaken, a specter itself with its boarded windows, its square, utilitarian aspect. Certainly no place of retreat, said the metal door set beneath a faded symbol to which my mind did not want to give definite proportions, though it knew them too well. When the structure denied us by means as well as manner, we moved on to the next building, whose windows were both barred and boarded. It, too, was secured fast against intrusion—as it had apparently been secured against extrusion. Hope sputtered to ash in so grim a construction, so faceless and isolated and random a vault.
Kristin?
Kathy?
“Is it you?” I heard Dianna utter as we rounded the corner of the structure. “Dascha?”
An abrupt gust of wind distinguished itself out of the fray, and the board over the window behind us banged against its fastenings. Dianna turned, causing me to run into her, knocking her to the ground. As I hauled her back up, she reached a hand toward the window. “Dascha?”
“It’s the wind,” I said, holding her back. “There’s no one there.”
“She’s calling to me . . . ”
“I know. I know, Dianna. I hear a voice, too.”
“My god, Barry,” she whispered, still staring at the window. “What is happening?”
Maya brought us back from the teetering edge as she called from a short distance away, “Guys, I’ve found shelter.”
In my arms an isolated shiver overtook Dianna’s already trembling body.
Shelter meant a level of certainty and commitment.
Commitment to staying.
18
It was so out of place, character, context as the trees and their denizens fell away behind us, that Dianna and I could only stare in wonderment. The pavilion-like structure, which served as a covered porch to an adjoining cinderblock building, painted a mirage-like tableau. Two sides were open, while the one that stood opposite us abutting the building was a leeward wall fashioned of slim, rough logs lashed and nailed together. The roof, resting on six knotty supports, was just as crude, but the structure was clearly sturdy, withstanding the storm in creaking though staunch motionlessness. Yet it was the shelter’s interior that sang—with its fire pit, the stack of logs in the corner, the picnic table and bench, camping chairs. The scene was surreal, Daliesque, an unapologetic imposition upon rigidity and uniformity, upon the past itself. The shelter was Ritter’s lean-to, disassembled and put back together here, where in its alienness it somehow belonged, was one more skewed piece in an accordingly skewed puzzle.
A weathered metal door like the one that had denied us minutes before was set in the wall of the building. Maya stood with its knob in her fist. “It’s locked. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a key somewhere around here. Let me check to make sure there’s not another entrance.”
As she disappeared around the side of the building, I realized Dianna and I had been standing out in the elements, transfixed. With every action we took now, even one so simple as stepping into the shelter, we were entrusting ourselves to the course of events. It was one thing to come unwittingly, but we knew now, knew that we’d arrived at the terminus, and though it was accurate to think of ourselves as marooned, there was still a degree of choice in the matter and we were choosing what every ounce of our beings told us was the greater of two evils.
I nudged her and we entered the roofed space. Helping her out of her gear, I pushed her gently into one of the chairs. As I started a fire with kindling provided in the pit, noticing in the process that the stone enclosure also contained a bed of ash and the acrid scent of use, I thought how unlike her it was to have gone inert like this. It worried me in a way the weather, even specters couldn’t. There was the hint of entropy about it. Inevitability without intent. I had the sudden unbidden image of her lying out there somewhere, like Ritter and Higgins, a wasted heap drawing the attention of nothing and no one except scavengers.
Only . . . there was an intangible, wasn’t there? A party or parties in the picture whose involvement was not yet known? Did I really believe that? If I looked closely enough, wouldn’t I find elephant hairs lying about the shelter?
Maya interrupted my thoughts as she reappeared announcing that the building had only one entrance. “There were a couple of small ventilation windows near the roof,” she said, “but that’s all. There was a generator, though. Which means power. Possibly.” She returned to the door, reaching above the frame to run her fingers along a seam in the stucco.
“Why don’t we put that off until after we’ve built up the fire and gotten into some dry clothes,” I suggested. I glanced at Dianna as I placed a twig on the Boy Scout construction I had erected around the fire’s initial flame.
“You’re right,” Maya said, but continued looking.
“Come on, Dianna, let’s get some clothes out of your pack.” She didn’t move as I placed the bag by her feet. “Do you want me to do it?” I said.
She shook her head but, like her busy friend, wasn’t bowing to suggestion.
“Jesus, people, we have to try.”
“Just what do you think I’m doing,” Maya said, “if not trying to find out where he left the fucking key.”
He?
“Why do you say ‘he’, Maya?”
Her response was completely unexpected and spoken strangely, almost reminiscently as she continued to look between logs, behind boards. “I can smell him. His sweat, his labor.” Her voice grew even more distant, more introverted, as she uttered the words, “I feel a strange comfort here, with the ghosts of the instruments surrounding me.”
The chill that visited me had nothing to do with wet clothes. “What? What did you say?”
“Something I read once . . . ”
“Yes,” Dianna said, startling me. “I have that sense, too. He works here, at the scene where events took place. This facility is his work. Terrible things happened here. Atrocities.”
As I stared at her I found myself wondering what I would have been thinking right now had I arrived here without foreknowledge. First, I’d be asking of Dianna, How can you, the tough one, the reasonable one, make that leap? But even without prior knowledge, was it such a leap? Twins. Remote mountain installation equipped with security fence, cinderblock buildings, barred windows. The prison camps the world knew of were nowhere near this isolated, or permanent. Would it have been incredible to deduce, based on nothing you could weigh in your hand, nothing you could present as evidence except the installation itself, that what we had on the dissecting block was the stuff of pulp entertainment realized? That all the specters pointed not toward madness or delirium or a series of bizarre coincidences, but rather genetic experimentation?
The cold came in advance of the quote this time, and all the more impactful because the culprit herself did the quoting.
“‘The trees,’” Maya said quietly. “‘They’re full of twins.’”
***
Night had fallen quickly, aided in its descent by a fleet of fresh clouds gathering as if for another strike before gradually dispersing to reveal a partial moon above the craggy rim of the hollow. The building’s extension continued to serve as our shelter, and not an inadequate one while the winds remained calm. The door remained fast against entry, having withstood my efforts to pry it open with my hunting knife, pick the lock with my Leatherman, dislodge the welded hinges with the small pick I carried in my pack, and kick the whole stubborn affair in with my boot. It had a mission to keep what lay behind it safe from trespass, and no amount of persuasion would alter its rigid resolve. Maya still believed there was a key, but she’d given up her efforts at finding it, if she hadn’t fully relinquished the fixation that presumably served as a diversion for her. What we’d have done with our new shelter if we had gained entry, I’m not sure. While the building was larger than the others we’d passed, starting a fire inside with only the wind-funnel of a doorway and two small ventilation windows to outlet
the exhaust might or might not have worked. More to the point, would anyone have been willing to stay in there, blind to the apparitions but not the knowledge of the semi-corporeal children and schizoid wolves and God knew what else lurking beyond the walls?
Maya and I sat by the robust fire while Dianna leaned against one of the pavilion’s supports, her back to us as she perhaps traced the moon’s silvery crescent, or the suggestion in the darkness of the building with the barred windows. That grim structure, as much as anything, seemed to be the source of her continued worrisome behavior. The idea of her sister being trapped in there—not the departed one, but the living one, Dascha, which idea was somehow more frightening—had imbedded its talons deeply. I don’t think she actually believed this, but the moment had stayed with her, in much the same way as that chilling proclamation from Maya’s sleeping lips had remained with me. I’d tended to Dianna as best I could, but stopped shy of pressing her to emerge from her shell. She was responsive; that was the important thing. The problem was, her responses sometimes took unpleasant forms, as now, with the fit of shivering that visited her for the nth time.
“Come back to the fire, Dianna,” I said.
“Yes, please, sweetie,” Maya joined.
Dianna lifted a hand as if to dismiss us, then apparently reconsidered, turning to face her prodders. “What do you want of me? To act according to your prescription? To huddle? Well, I’m huddling. Believe me, I am.”
Maya looked at me. I don’t know what she was thinking, but for me, Dianna’s reaction was encouraging. It was proof that she was aware of her condition.
“We want you to be warm,” Maya said.
“Come, Dianna. Sit by the fire.”
She complied, taking the lawn chair next to mine. Maya, who sat opposite us on the corner of the bench, said, “Why don’t you eat something, hun.”
Dianna had refused to join us in our cold dinner earlier and judging by her silence, apparently had no appetite now.
“Hun?”
“Stop with the huns and sweeties,” I told Maya. “She’ll eat when she’s ready.”
Before Maya could respond to my petty irritability, Dianna, in a haunted voice, said, “It wasn’t only Dascha who spoke to me today. Dalia did too. It’s happened once or twice before outside of sleep, but never like this. Never so . . . directly. This place . . . the events that occurred here have resulted in a medium of some sort. A medium that channels twins, triplets . . . the dead.”
The last word hung there a moment. I nodded, slowly, as much to myself as to her. “And not just siblings. Their fathers as well. Kimberly spoke to me. She called to me and she called to Kristin. Funny thing, though . . . ” I was seized by a possibility whose implications were too complex to consider. “They seemed two different voices. As though . . . ”
“As though . . . ?” prompted Maya. Too eagerly.
“As though . . . ” I said, trying to make my mind conform to it. “As though they were speaking to each other and I was just on the same channel. Which means . . . ” I looked at Dianna. It was she who would understand the depth of its meaning to me. “It wasn’t Kimberly at all.”
She faced me now, her eyes reflecting my own cautious joy. “It was Kathy and Kristin. That’s wonderful, Barry. It tells us Kristin’s cognizant on at least that level.”
The joy dissipated as the last words assumed a meaning that she had not intended. “That or . . . Kristin’s with her sister now.”
“No, Barry,” she said gently. “That’s at odds with the premise your mission is built on. That Kristin can be reached where she is. Her state is probably similar to a dream state, and we know dreams provide a channel with the dead.”
“Yes,” I said, allowing it for now. “Welcome back, by the way.” I smiled, but was suddenly very weary, the toll of it all feeling like a mountain on my back. “I think we should let everything go for now. I’m simply too beat to think. We need rest. All of us.”
“Can we sleep, knowing what’s out there?” Maya said. As I watched her scan the trees, which had remained quiet since we left their shadows, I noted that falseness again, like the cry she had let in the forest. Perhaps she was sensing that her place in events wasn’t as secure as Dianna’s and mine, that she was dispensable like Ritter and Higgins. Or perhaps something else as her eyes now landed on me, triggering a poignant familiarity, a something I should be in tune with but which instead had fallen into company with the glimmers that haunted the periphery. That it had forsaken obscurity for their orbit only deepened the disturbance. For while other glimpses had carried the flavor of a coming together, this one smacked of a coming apart, a taste I didn’t care for at all.
“What?” she said. In her mouth, a smile.
As I studied her, I was conscious of Dianna watching the both of us. I imagined she sensed what I was feeling—a strange connection with this woman from across the world. There was a strain of mystery in Maya that at my most egotistical moments I’d observed in myself. And with it, a touch of arrogance, and just a hair of wickedness, some perverse delight in the secrets she inwardly communed with. But that was still not getting to the core of it. I felt I knew her somehow, in a similarly intimate way that Dianna and I, by virtue of our own secrets, knew each other. In the case of Maya and me, the distribution wasn’t equitable. She held the cards. Hers was a better understanding of her own legend, and perhaps mine too. And partially because of this one-sidedness, I felt an ambivalence toward her. One part of me—and I was realizing this now for the first time—was fond of her. The other, contrarily, was deeply suspicious. It was as though I was looking in a mirror, recognizing those traits I tried to avoid contact with in myself.
“Are you just going to stare at me or come out with what’s on your mind?” she said, for what I knew was Dianna’s benefit. Had we been alone, she would not have shied from confrontation. Funny, I couldn’t remember having been alone with her for any length of time. As if I’d intentionally avoided that very situation.
“I’ll take fire duty first,” I said, finally parting with her gaze. “Do you think you will be able to get some rest, Dianna? We really should try. Hopefully the morning will bring fresh . . . ” I left the thought unfinished. What power had I, with my euphemisms and clichés, to influence the tides?
Besides: Do they ever come, the mornings?
***
“Dianna,” I whispered. “Wake up.”
“Mm . . . ?” she said, squinting at me. “I was dreaming. Maya—she wasn’t who she was supposed to be.”
“Dianna,” I said, more urgently.
She rose to her elbows, following my eyes out into the fresh, wind-driven snow. As she saw what I saw, her face underwent an abrupt, severe change. “Oh Gott,” she breathed.
The children surrounded us, twins and triplets, sets of identical multiples all. Gone was the curiosity I’d observed upon first seeing them. The ovals of their faces were now contorted, features shriveled by rage, eyes frenzied. The bodies they belonged to stood crooked and unmoving, supported by pale, bony legs sticking out of rags, thrusting up out of snow. Their throats strained against barbed wire necklaces, their fists clenched shiny instruments, their bare upper bodies pulsed with swollen scars. Snarling, laughing, hissing, they glared as one at the presence of these adults, these new wheels in the machinery of the compound.
To our right Maya sat up in her blanket, too abruptly, and en masse the children’s bodies conformed to the will of their faces, and they moved in, transmogrifying as they came into gnashing wolves, cackling Higginses, salivating Ritters, every imaginable association to the petrified effigies the three of us had become. I scrambled out of my blanket, hauled Dianna to her feet, hissed at Maya to move as I backed instinctively toward the only door present.
A voice distinguished itself out of, apart from, the fray.
Father?
Then another, separately: Dad?
The shapes around us, now almost to the porch, blurred into a tempest of color and motion as
the knob turned in my fist, the door parted with its frame, and I shoved Dianna, then Maya, then hauled myself inside, shutting the door behind me. As I turned, my companions’ screams filled the room, enraging the three-headed Siamese monstrosity that writhed before us.
***
“Barry,” came the whisper. “Wake up!”
“Dianna?” I said, squinting at her. “Oh thank God. Thank God it was only a dr—”
“Barry!” she said more urgently.
I sat up, following her eyes out into the wind-driven snow. “Shit,” I breathed.
The solitary figure of a young girl, luminous as the snow, stood in the mid-space between our shelter and the tree line, watching us. Against the backdrop of the firs, she was as delicate and pristine, as deceptive and contradictory in this fugue as a swan’s feather.
“What can she want?” Dianna whispered as we parted with our sleeping bags and rose to our feet. “Barry—oh heilige Scheisse.”
As though her purpose had been fulfilled with our roused attention, the girl’s watch was finished. She was now walking toward us, the wind snatching at her hair, the scraps of clothing she wore, turning them to spectral, billowing flames. We were rendered immobile as the child placed one bare foot over the other in the shin-deep snow, leaving shifting impressions of her passage behind her. As she neared the shelter she stopped momentarily and with a grace that rendered her more than poetic, more than beautiful, more than terrible in the harsh night, stooped down to gather up two handfuls of snow. Utilizing the pause, I extricated myself from the vision to glance at Dianna, only to find that she was no longer seeing what I was seeing, her features spread not with fear and suspicion, but wonder and recognition.
“It’s okay,” she said, the shadow of tranquility settling over the wonderment. “It’s Dalia. She’s chosen the form of the girl Dascha and I used to pretend we were playing with when we were this age. Our lovely sister whose dress Dascha once tore when we were chasing each other in the backyard. She only wants to share something. A secret.”
The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 22