The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Darren Speegle

  “But the wolf . . . ”

  “You do it then. Either way, one of us will have to take our chances with the wolf. But hurry.”

  “There’s something about it,” I said, staring at the animal. “It’s not what it seems.”

  Though she’d turned her head at the wolf’s appearance, she only lowered it from its cocked position now as she rose from her seat to stand by me. The wolf had quit growling, its eyes locked on mine as Dianna’s hand found my fist, the one that clutched the knife, and began to uncurl my fingers, one by one.

  The wolf’s power over me was undeniable, indeed wonderful. “Higgins was right,” I said, feeling a specific part of me stir as I spoke. “It’s beautiful. The loveliest creature I’ve ever seen.”

  “Barry, don’t fight me. Let go of the knife.”

  “It’s so . . . evocative,” I said, not knowing how else to express it. “Its coat of hair is not like hair at all, but skin. Soft, sleek skin. Do you see it? Feel it . . . ”

  Her hand, in trying to wrest the knife from my own, slipped and struck the part of me that was burgeoning into its fullness as my senses roamed the mysteries before them.

  “Give me the fucking knife!” she hissed, seizing my hand with both of hers.

  “The curves . . . they’re so perfect. The eyes . . . my God, Dianna, look at them . . . so suggestive . . . seductive . . . ”

  A whine, long and anguished, escaped her as she dropped to her knees, thrusting her chest at the blade, but not connecting. Not well anyway as the warm fluid spread over my knuckles while she kept lurching and twisting my clenched fist. “Please, Barry,” she begged. “Look at me, not the wolf. Don’t you want to touch my body? It hungers for yours, wants you so—”

  She must have had a premonition of the coming event because it was a full second after she cut off her words that the wolf pounced. As it sprang across the brief distance, I observed a last exquisite feature, a masterful after-stroke of the artist that had envisioned the creature in this scene. It was Ritter, that devil, who’d wielded the brush that had opened the wound, but another, surely, who’d kept the lips from closing over the blue meat beneath. Then the wolf was upon Dianna and their struggle like the dance of two cats meeting at the edges of their respective ranges, fangs and claws slinging blood in an ecstasy beyond what the imagination could contrive for its pleasure. Within moments, it was over, the whimpering beast sliding off of her, and she off of it, the knife clattering to the floor, a coda.

  The hole Dianna had managed to inflict upon herself during the struggle was in the abdomen, very near the spot where I had plunged the knife into the man who would become for me, for Felicia, for whoever wanted to play the game, the elephant man. In the end only Kristin had been undeceived, though she’d tried. Tried so very hard. I don’t know whether it was the thought of her or the experience of Dianna’s face as its eyes turned from ice-blue to brown, its agonized expression to an advised one, that caused me to suddenly awaken from my hypnosis, realizing what I had let myself be lured into. But by then it was too late. Dianna was upon me like the wolf, overpowering me with a wild strength that could not have existed in any mortal. She threw me on the bed, tearing my pants away from my erection before ripping off her own hindrances and mounting me, her blood serving as the lubricant as she lunged and lunged against my ambivalent body until I thought both of us would come apart, spilling our mysteries all over the laboratory and unto God himself to judge.

  But if God was watching from the chair reserved for Him, He offered no indication of it as the third twin’s eyes dissolved to a murky taupe and she, the both of them let me in: in upon those reaches where no mortal dared tread; where the only passage was that of the shadow that stretched elephantine across the wastes.

  20

  I woke to a world so brilliant, I thought I was still in the clutches of the elaborate nightmare that seemed to have spanned years of mine and others’ lives; and that this must be the culmination of its chaotic conclusion, a blinding photograph to attach to mankind’s record, the moment in time when human evolution pinnacled not in glory, but in irony, for crimes against the very engine that had driven it.

  When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and bones—in the form of pain. In his lingering soul—in the form of grief. He had lost someone. Someones. Their names and faces and scars slowly coming back to him, deepening the wounds.

  A detachment I had come to be at home with, a shadow more real than the object casting it, accompanied me as I rose and began to walk. If I depended at all, I depended on my internal compass to guide me. The landmarks were there—the bank of trees to my right, the jagged outline of the hollow’s rim farther away to my left—but my mind was reluctant to acknowledge their relevance, because as the nightmare grew more distant, it grew closer. As it faded, it grew sharper. Regardless of whether dream and waking worlds could be separated, events had unfolded within them and the climactic heart of those events existed here, beyond the curve in the tree line. All echoes resonated from that central echo, painting this place quite the opposite of oblivion—a reliquary.

  Before I reached that point I was distracted by something in my periphery, among the trees. I stopped, scanning the woods’ overlapping ranks, but the motion I thought I’d detected eluded me. I was in the process of turning away when a snatch of movement revealed itself again. This time I caught it, like the dance of butterflies it was, the two of them whirling and whirling within a wider circle around a pair of entwined trees. The scent of their hair, as it flowed on the stirred air, came to my nostrils, bringing recognition with it, a pleasing compensation for the fleeting glimpses of their identical faces, my daughters’.

  As I watched them know this joy, I could not be sure whether the vision occurred on the same plane that I observed it from or on some other metaphysical or dream level; nor could I distinguish one daughter from the other from this distance; nor place exactly where the notion that their circle was missing a link came from, or how it applied within the body of dark experiential matter still in the process of reassembling itself. As if sensing my thoughts and presence at the same time, one set of eyes left her partner’s for me, at least to the extent that they could from her spinning activity before she called a halt to the dance, releasing her partner’s hands and facing me directly. The smile that surfaced seemed a thing I had not seen in a long time and yet was as natural to my eyes as breathing was to my lungs.

  But then, as I waited for further action on her part, her face changed, taking on a troubled aspect that had been known to precede words, words that came on a lavishly cold wind. She turned around looking back into the trees. The other followed her gaze, and they stood there like that a moment, watching the forest with anticipation. When the trees revealed nothing, they faced each other again, clasped hands, and resumed their dance, this time spinning out of sight among the firs.

  “Kristin,” I called, taking a few steps into the wooded realm. “Kathy.” I caught a glimpse, farther along, then the woods were still. I wanted to follow but was afraid I might somehow frighten them, or upset something fragile and beautiful. Still, the urge to partake of my daughter’s smile again was strong as I stood there in the snow, and it eventually won out over my concerns. I proceeded at a pace that I hoped wouldn’t alarm them should they catch me sniffing around their tracks. Those tracks were difficult to follow at times as they wound through the trees leaving their erratic designs in the white bed, often crossing over their own paths and creating a mess of the snow.

  After a while I grew disoriented, unsure of my location in relation to the point where I’d entered the woods. The tracks seemed to be lea
ding nowhere except in circuitous circles around their own patterns, and I was beginning to think I’d lost their direction entirely. But then I found a straighter path tangenting off from the scribbles toward an apparent clearing. I pictured the two of them breathlessly breaking from their dance to seek open spaces, perhaps holding hands as they shuffled through the snow. As I looked along the path ahead noticing that the tracks seemed to collect around the woods’ rim, I thought that maybe it was a momentous thing, this abandoning shadow for daylight; maybe everything in fact.

  Reaching the area in question, I stepped over the hesitant prints and emerged from the trees. And there, visible across a distance that another girl, a little girl with secrets to tell, had recently walked, was the reliquary and its preserved artifacts. Like that little girl’s footprints, the two bodies within the open structure were buried. Their shapes told on them, told how they had been left for the instruments they were, undeserving of further regard. Relegated to less than bystander status.

  But was this picture right? I wondered through emotion that intensified with each step. If the rift had been opened wide, should the two of them be lying there while I had been given legs? Should the world have grown so silent, except for its butterflies, only for me? Surely this was not what the design had envisioned. Not this . . . this desolate, somehow metaphorical aftermath. As I reached the shelter and saw the exposed side of the nearest one’s face, which was turned in the direction of her friend in a belated goodbye, these thoughts fell away, of sudden insignificance. Suddenly those legs I had been given were empty of strength, and I fell to my knees and began brushing the snow away from her. I didn’t know what I planned to do when I uncovered her, surely only hold her for a time before going to the other figure, who also meant something to me, to the blood flowing in my veins. Before I reached that point, though, my hand found something. Something sharp. Something, as I freed it from the snow, stained red-black.

  My eyes shifted from its blade to her face, and I saw among her frozen features something I had not noticed before, though I had memorized it, oh yes, as I had memorized that line a stranger had drawn across my daughter’s throat. But this was not the memory of brutality. This was the expression she’d worn when we parted from that first kiss, before the other woman who lay here had appeared like a wraith to spoil our intimacies. Tranquility was the expression’s name, and along with the unburied knife, it told a tale that sang. A tale that if given the chance might render the part of the nightmare that still remained hidden only a figment of the mind. A tale of the strong one, the one who would rather follow her companions into darkness than bow to inevitability or its wicked master.

  Then out of the surrounding hush I heard a voice that, had it been alone, might have been a side effect of the spontaneous, unbidden thought that the knife was my knife and that it had already served its purpose by the time she stumbled out here with the bloody instrument to die among the elements. But the voice was not alone. It was but the first of a merging chorus. And they were children’s voices, and let forth in their native German. And were answered, these rediscovered voices, by a smile that was not delusional, nor even my own.

  “The trees . . . ” she dreamed aloud.

  But it was the original revelator who, in that same lilting wonder, finished the thought.

  “They’re full of screams.”

  I turned upon a surreal scene, a mass exodus of twins and triplets from the woods, my winged ones running ahead of the wave, their faces twisted into something scarcely recognizable. I shouted to them, but my voice was lost in the shrill and discordant chorus of the children. I started to chase them but had no hope of catching the fleet and terror-stricken butterflies they were on the snow. As I watched them disappear into the next patch of forest, the snowy ranks of firs muffling the persistent cries of the young ones, I almost remembered what might cause such a disturbance.

  When I turned back, Dianna and Maya—yes, those were their names—had risen and were silently brushing the snow from their bloodied bodies. Strips of torn fabric clung to Dianna’s otherwise naked legs, emphasizing other splits and rips, the many and varied ones that ravaged her flesh. But it was Maya’s single wound, which she paused once or twice to explore with her fingers, that glared loudest in the bright day. It was the corruptive sum of her companion’s wounds, including the black perforation beneath Dianna’s ribs. For all the magnetic unsightliness of their disfigurements, it was their expressions, suddenly, that commanded my attention as they abandoned their movements, eyes drawn to the woody realm that had disgorged the host. They searched the trees for only a moment before their focus shifted upward, summoned to a point beyond the treetops. As both sets of eyes fixed on the point, the shadow over their owners’ collective features was fluid. What had arrived as unsettlement now bloomed into confusion, consternation. Finally awe, as one fell to her knees and the other clasped her face, fingers forming a latticework through which to peer. As I turned to share in the vision, the rumble finally found my ears. Not thunder. Something else. Something worse than thunder.

  The rugged contour of the hollow’s rim revealed nothing to my eyes as the children’s screams faded in for a moment, then died away again . . . along with the rumble. In the wintry silence, I diverted my eyes from the rocky cliff to look past the women at the partially open door in the wall. The bed was invisible from my angle, but the blood staining the floor was not. Somewhere in the heavens a bird, some leftover of creation, screeched. The sound awakened Dianna, who snapped her head my way with the words, “Don’t look in there!”

  “Dianna—”

  “What happened in there, it’s not to be revisited.”

  It’s done, I thought. We’ve transformed into other than normal living organisms. What meaning could such a statement have?

  I said, “Do you . . . remember what happened in there?”

  “I don’t want to remember.”

  “But you do, don’t you?”

  The rumble again, this time from the right and seeming to roll along the craggy horizon. The alarm rose afresh among the children’s choir as its members were suddenly on the move again, sweeping around behind the shelter, as if being corralled or toyed with by the unseen threat. Dianna, focused on the door, seemed not to have noticed the rumble this time, while Maya murmured an indecipherable mantra where she knelt, washing her face with the snow.

  “What have we done, Barry?” Dianna whispered.

  The rumble now occurred on the far side of the hollow, undulating, teasingly gathering and ungathering momentum. The children appeared again, in the open stretch to the left of the building. Though my daughters weren’t immediately visible this time, I ran after the mass calling their names. Before I’d gotten a dozen yards, I tripped over my legs and fell in the snow. It didn’t occur to me that I should get up until moments had passed. It just seemed better to rest there, prone. When I did finally rise, seeing the last of the children disappear into the woods from which they had originally retreated, the same woods where my daughters had drawn their whirling, now likely ruined designs, I was aware of a change behind me. I turned, knowing in advance I would find only Maya on the porch now. Dianna had entered the room that was not to be revisited.

  The door was wide open when I arrived, such that I could see the better part of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree tableau that had been left us. I scarcely heard the words that came out of Dianna’s mouth where she stood in the middle of the room beside the heap of matted hair that was the dead wolf; her features so mutated with despair as she turned in a slow circle to take in the whole of the bloody fresco, I thought her face would melt off her skull and become part of the hieroglyphics. For myself, the ability to be disturbed seemed strangely limited, and maybe that’s why Dianna’s words, “I think I must have woken at some point; I’ve a vague memory of seeing children in here,” didn’t stick until the echo came seeping in. Clearly someone had been in the room, and with an additional supply of blood, because there was no way what had
been spilt in this room—the image of Dianna and the wolf entwined in a lovers’ knot rose to the surface—could have provided enough paint for the crude sketches and sloppily scrawled writings that turned the walls into murals. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said the artists, assuming more than one hand had done this, had collected Maya’s blood before it had coagulated. How long had Dianna and I spent in here? Not long enough for the pool of blood outside to harden, but long enough for other things . . .

  My eyes found the bed and its no longer neatly made surface. I could see only the outer edges of the bedspread’s stain because of the thrashing bodies obscuring it. Had we really contributed that preliminary scene to the fresco? One beast pretending to be raped by another? That I was the dominant one, the wild brown-eyed one salivating on the back of the other, spoke to me. All of it, the whole room, every hastily sketched face, every elephant stick figure, every serpentine erection, every isolated scribbled word, every rhyme spoke to me. As I read the snatch of verse over the bed, I found myself doing so, in a loose way, to the tune of Ballad of Thunder Road, whose famous line Moonshine, moonshine to quench the devil’s thirst . . . would forever conjure the image of actor and co-songwriter, Robert Mitchum. Somehow his face didn’t make its way in today. What did was a familiar micro-clock music, its separate and isolated meter indifferent to rhythmic congruity.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, comes the third twin

  Transcending time, surpassing kin

  The blood trailed from the letters down the wall like tears, the longest of the rivulets meeting in flow the letter v in the word lavishly scribbled on the wall just above the level of the bed.

  Evolução

  The word appeared not once, not twice, but at least a score of times around the room, in various shapes and sizes, with and without the accent marks, each instance as memory-stirring, in the most primal sense, as the next.