The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Darren Speegle

  We had a balance of scales: her sisterly instinct and womanly intuition on one side, my foreboding on the other. My half was poisoned by fear, hers by love. Somewhere in the middle, I suddenly knew, lay a hole so black, even our echoes would be torn to pieces.

  “I’ve often wondered how things would have been had she been the one to survive,” Dianna went on as the child resumed her course, a few ounces heavier. “Would she have called me to play with her? Would I have come, riding the wings of her imagination as she did with me? It could have gone that way, you know. We were both late. Painfully, awfully late for my mother, who was in labor for more than two days. We were both severely underdeveloped. Yet I lived and Dalia died. Who decides these things, do you think?”

  Their eyes were only for each other, she and the child, as the latter now stepped under the roof placing her gift on the end of the wooden table, delicately spreading the snow across the surface. Only then did the girl divert her eyes; then, as she began to trace with her small finger in the parchment she had formed. As the characters took shape, my being fragmented into three separate, highly conscious entities while remaining a single, ultra sensitive super-receiver. The mind found itself immersed in the meaning surfacing behind Dianna’s words. The senses realized they were entrenched in a déjà vu so powerful that the instance itself existed in a continuum. And the body discovered what a shadow felt like as it involuntarily followed Dianna’s movements, softly stepping forward and leaning close enough to the unfolding magic to see the individual crystals in the wand wielder’s hair. The first character, a simple vertical line, was revealed as a number only after the second, a plus symbol, was complete. Before the wand finished the third and fourth—another vertical line followed by an equal symbol—the image of the fifth and last character had already impressed itself, by the ice-cold brand of future memory. Indeed, the complete equation along with the child’s next action was an impression no element could ever erase. The action was actually more a continuation of motion than an independent movement as the magician’s finger swept through the last arc to follow the lead of her body as it turned to Dianna. Her eyes arrived before her finger, mirroring the ice blue pools of their object as she touched Dianna lightly, meaningfully on the breast before simply turning and walking away in the direction from which she’d come.

  The silence, as our eyes shifted from her retreating figure back to the message, lasted for as long as it took Maya, looming unnoticed behind us, to formulate the perfect accent to the revelation occurring.

  “‘One plus one equals three’ . . . You are the third, then! We could only hope.”

  19

  “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit next to God?” Maya said, eyes still moist as they reflected the fire’s whispery flames. “For me, that is not a simple question to answer because I have sat next to one who sits next to God. He dispenses his keys, breaks his genetic codes without regard for bystanders, or even those he dispenses his keys to, those whose codes he breaks. It is entirely possible he has cracked the genetic code to God Himself, but does he consider the possibility of offense? No, because there are no possibilities with him. There is only the thing he intends to achieve and the straightest route to that achievement. For him, God is a bystander. He’ll acknowledge Him if He gets in the way. Otherwise . . . ” She shrugged.

  Dianna and I sat on the opposite side of the fire. Outside the shelter, the snow came harder now, blowing at a fluctuating slant in spite of the protection of the hollow’s walls. From various quarters of the compass and at varying degrees of distance, thunder occasionally sounded, its peals at times rolling one upon the other for several seconds before fading behind the gradually escalating howl. While this activity was a first for the series of storm waves that effectively imprisoned us, Dianna and I, like Maya’s single-minded mystery man, had regard for only the one thing, this surreal communion in which circumstances had landed us. Distractions, small or great, be damned.

  “Who is this person and what have you to do with him?” Dianna demanded, the traces of shock and anger lingering, but only faintly, like her friend’s tears. “We’ve heard about the necessity of your deception. We all acknowledge that you believe in that necessity, or you wouldn’t have spent all this time working me—was it the whole two and a halfyears of our so-called friendship? Now give us facts.”

  “It’s not like that, Dianna,” Maya said, almost too softly to hear.

  “Facts,” Dianna repeated sternly.

  A flash of lightning caused Maya to look up before she began with a reflective sigh to tell her tale. “It began on our trip to Honduras, believe it or not. He was there, upstairs, when the boys took me to look at the document. As soon as I saw him sitting there in his elephant outfit, I remembered him from my youth in my aunt’s house. He used to come and play with me, tell me secrets about the future. About a time when I would embark on a special mission, a mission so important that it would change the whole world. Over time the memory had faded—I’d been very young then, maybe four or five—but when I saw him again, saw him sitting there in his rickety throne, it all came back. And with it, the knowledge that the time had come. The time to embark on my special mission. Rather than waste the energy rehashing what had already been told to me in my youth, he simply instructed me to look back, to remember each and every word. It was easy, so easy, I found, in his humbling presence. Not just the words, but the dreams. You’ve asked if I’ve dreamed. Oh God, such dreams. But I would see him again, and further knowledge would be bestowed. Twice, to be exact. Once unexpectedly, in Sri Lanka. Once by appointment, at my aunt’s house in Brazil. You see, my aunt is not Sri Lankan. Just as my parents in Sri Lanka are not my biological parents, nor my sisters there my sisters. Uiara was not fit to be a mother to me. She told me so herself before she had child services find a foster home for me. He was not happy of course, and arranged that the home I was to be put in was one he approved of—”

  A terrific boom of thunder rocked the shelter, causing Dianna and I, already at the haggard end of our senses, to seize the arms of our chairs, and Maya to actually lurch to her feet, bracing herself on the end of the picnic table, where the snow from the child’s message still melted. If lightning had preceded the detonation, we’d been too rapt to notice it, but it flashed now—once, twice, yet a third time, turning our haven into a phantasmagoria of haunted and stricken faces. Amid the electricity, the distinctive sulphurous odor of deceit was strong, triggering memories of casual statements like, I’d be very interested to know what became of the one that survived.

  “Tell us who he is!” Dianna shouted over the howl.

  “I don’t know who he is!” Maya threw back. “What shall I say of him? That he speaks with a woman’s voice? That he cocks his elephant head a certain way as he says arcane but suggestive things like, ‘we are each of us only instruments of another’? Will that build insight into the enigma that he is? I do not know him. How he influences actions. How he bends nature. I only know what he instructs, which I do because I must do. The rift itself demands it. From the moment I laid eyes on him again, I understood I was on a predestined course, a cosmically enlightened mission. Then to discover my true genesis . . . to know that my first breath of life came from out of the pool of my mother’s blood on the floor of a chapel already primed for its role by the wounds inflicted by a priest upon children . . . to realize that from the moment of birth I’d been part of the glorious events that have widened the seam exposed by Weiler’s work . . . I tremble to think of the genius and majesty of it all even as I flail in my profound ignorance. No, Dianna, I cannot know him who is unknowable. What I do know is that now that your unique part is confirmed, Maya’s services, therefore Maya herself, are no longer required. The thing belongs to you and he, Dianna! That is the way he has orchestrated it. That is how the rift desires it. You, a third twin, and he, a third twin. You, from this side of the veil, he, the other. It is beautiful beyond human reason. Soul and species expanding.” She th
rew her head back. “I would die a thousand times over to be you!”

  The wind was screaming now, joined by a magnificent succession of pounding thunder, brilliant lightning flashes whose strobe-like effect brought a keen vibrancy to the children’s’ faces appearing in the periphery, to the knife Maya raised to her exposed throat revealing a feature that could only have occurred here, where the world in which time held no sway had poured over into the living realm. Amid the wrath of the resurrected storm, the thin clean scar shone like mystery itself as she let her eyes fall on me, uttering wondrously strange and familiar words to my ears before bringing the edge of the blade across its own echo.

  It’s to you now, blood of our blood. You, he said, would know where to find the key.

  The scream Dianna loosed as she failed to reach her friend and betrayer in time was so fraught with despair that the storm itself cowered from it, the faces that rode its winds retreating into swirling folds of darkness. As I reached to pull her back from where she hung suspended in the unfinished motion over the pit, the untucked hem of her shirt caught fire, forcing me to nearly tackle her in my effort to beat out the flames. She apparently didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that she was in danger of burning because she fought me in my bear hug, scratching and biting and cursing, as though I was the cause of the blood flowing out of the opened throat of the body that still had not dropped, its eyelids falling ever so gradually over the organs they guarded, which still fixed on the point where I had sat.

  At last both Maya and Dianna, the latter now out of harm’s way, slumped. It was almost a simultaneous motion until the point where the shelter floor stopped Maya’s fall. Dianna’s kept going, in the form of the emotion that poured from her, as freely and tangibly as the life fluid flowed from Maya. As I held her I realized that she had gone completely to gravity and that I supported her entire weight. Working my way around the trembling sack that she was in my arms, I let her gently into her chair. As I fetched the soft sleeping bag liner that Maya had liked to wrap around herself sometimes, and placed it over Dianna’s shoulders, I noticed that the world outside had indeed calmed, the weather having culminated in its latest human event and moved on for the moment, trailing electrical pulses and rumbles of thunder like a god’s fading laughter.

  But something else had caught my eye as I returned from Maya’s bed with the blanket. The pile of snow on the table. The lines and curves of its message had changed as the snow melted in the heat from the fire, rivulets seeming to connect with each other in paths of their own choosing. While the impression of the freshly formed symbols hadn’t fully taken in my mind, I knew, intrinsically, that they constituted a new message. One meant for my eyes. Standing there, looking across the fire on the diminishing pile, I dearly, desperately did not wish to know the content of that message. Everything, the world, moon, the stars, depended on my ignorance. Flee the scene, I told myself. Now is the time. Pick the knife up off the floor and do what you know with every ounce of your being you must do. Do it not only unto thyself but to thy neighbor as well. End it here and now. Leave the design nothing but dead DNA.

  As the storm grumbled, testily, not liking this tangent at all, I thought about Kristin in her vast black gulf, alone and waiting. If I used the knife on Dianna and myself, where did that leave her? Lost forever? Were it all a fiction I was working on, I could imagine the design’s unraveling causing the void to expel her or to leave her behind as it was sucked back through the rift, but while it had the proportions of such, this was no fantasy. It was a highly sophisticated evolving organism to which I and my thoughts were less than microbes. Of course if that analogy was to be used, then microbes must be given their due as agents of often devastating damage.

  As I stepped around the pit, squatted and picked up the knife—my own knife, I noticed with a strange sense of satisfaction—I felt Dianna’s hand clutch my wrist. I hadn’t realized her sobbing had stopped, or that what the storm had actually done was drawn in a great breath and was awaiting my decision before settling upon the nature of its exhalation. As I turned to Dianna, the knife gripped solidly, comfortably in my fist, the silence was literally deafening.

  “The key,” she said, searching my eyes earnestly. “You must produce the key so we can address the thing now, Barry. Before it’s too late.”

  “Address it how, Dianna?”

  But she wasn’t listening suddenly, her eyes having found what mine had wished so dearly, so desperately to unfind. As she stepped past me, the voice of reason or unreason screamed at me to Do it! Do it now! You know how. You’ve done it before.

  Our eyes landed on the message at the same time, but only she spoke it aloud. “One, nine, seven, seven. 1977. It’s a year, Barry. What can it possibly mean?”

  I provided no answer because I wasn’t there anymore. I was back in Portavora at the hotel, in the computer room, Mengele’s face staring dead-eyed at me. Behind me, a man lurked. Who was he? Did it matter? Did anything matter—as I moved the cursor down to the time icon in the corner of the screen—anything but the information contained in the bar that was about to pop up? Did anything matter but today’s date in time? A date I’d looked at but hadn’t seen, later been nagged by but hadn’t resolved, like so much else in this fugue of fugues, this evolução of which I was so inextricably a part.

  Wednesday, April 19, 1977.

  One wonders, I heard the man say as Mengele’s face in the screen warped, dissolved into another face, a Brazilian face, sweat pouring from its brow as the shadowy figure behind it, the one who held the knife to her throat, drove himself against her, inside her, causing her to grunt in pain, or ecstasy, with each stroke. The Brazilian face distorted into another, a more beautiful one to my eyes, though the moans escaping it were no less agonized or ecstatic, the tears filling its winter-blue eyes no less rapturous. As her mouth opened wider and wider in anticipation of the moment in which the human species ceased to be what it had been, the face of her partner in the union came into view behind her. A face that told too many tales as it looked at its older, more creased self in the mirror, watching its owner draw a line across his throat—

  “No!” came Dianna’s voice, its impact arriving concurrently with that of her forearm, which sent the knife flying from my hand, its deed left unfinished.

  “It’s me, Dianna. I’m the one! I was there, in Portavora, in 1977. All along, it’s been me. Kathy, Kristin, Maya, the Cunhedos, all of them are where they are now because I put them there! Oh God, please God, kill me. Kill me, Dianna. Please . . . ”

  “Shut up!” she screamed. “He’s doing this to you! It’s him, not you.”

  “Don’t you understand,” I whispered. “I am him.”

  She shook her head, shook it over and over again.

  “He was always masked, Dianna. Bobby Owens did not get a good look at him. Kristin, in Rio Tago—”

  “No!” she said, taking hold of the thing that had come to her. “The man in Alaska, the man who called your daughter Kathy-chen . . . he was not masked. Kristin would have said so.”

  “I never had a chance to question her about it.”

  “But she would have remembered that to the police.”

  “Stop it, Dianna. If you need proof, then walk over to that door and try to open it. I guarantee you the knob will turn. It’s simply been waiting for everything to be in place.” What the hell was I saying? “No, Dianna! Don’t.”

  But it was already in motion as she whirled, stormed to the door, grasped its handle, twisted it. “See?” she said the moment before it exceeded its pause, yielding. Through the crack that appeared, so did light, as a bright overhead blinked on in the spaces beyond.

  “See!” she laughed as she shoved it open, her hysteria rising like the vapors that must once have escaped the vials and tubes that lay scattered about the base of the wall; gathering like our sweat over the single object of any size occupying the interior; settling into the terrible calm that must come after, while the magic finished spinning. “But yo
u’re not a scientist,” she said without turning from the sight. “You’re not a geneticist. You’re just a bloodline caught in the current.”

  “I don’t know what I am, Dianna. None of us know what, or who, we are.”

  “It can still be stopped,” she said, even as she entered the room; even as she approached the object upon whose neatly made surface lay the moment mankind had been hurling toward.

  “Bring the knife, Barry.”

  Strange that the night, in the midst of it all, should continue to remain so still, but that is what it did as I retrieved the knife and followed her into the room that comprised the whole of the building’s interior. The silence was more awful, and more beautiful really, than all the storms the design could summon. Dianna sat on the bed, hand closing around her white-gold hair, which hung in front of her as I remembered it from the plane. Tossing it over her shoulder, she rested back on her hands, exposing her throat.

  “We’ll have the last laugh,” she said at the ceiling. “If there’s a hell, you won’t be there, Barry. Whatever you think, it could not have been you. If you search your memories, I know you’ll see this. At worst, you were a vessel. ‘We are all only instruments of another’. Isn’t that what Maya said? Isn’t that what the elephant man told her? Come, Barry, do it quickly. Before—”

  A deep guttural noise that we both knew well sounded from the doorway. I had reached the bed and was standing by its foot when I turned to greet the beast. Its eyes on mine were different this time, not copper but brown in the room’s brightness, a rich shade that reminded me of my daughters’ eyes. What is your business here? I wanted to ask it. This is a homo sapien game. But I was afraid it would answer me, which seemed a worse fate, somehow, than bringing the blade across my own throat.

  “Barry . . . ” Dianna said. When I didn’t answer, she repeated my name, with more emphasis. “You’re wasting time,” she said. “Toss me the knife. Maybe only one of us needs to die.”