Duality

by Nasser Rabadi

  Except for them. The cult that worshipped her. There were people day after day that prayed to her and to her statues. And the men in the cult loved her so much that they burned her to death. If one of them couldn’t have Talia, none of them could.

  But that was all fine. Talia had descendants. She snuck into the homes of men who descended from her homeland and seduced them in their sleep as a succubus would. The men would see Talia in their dreams, and when the baby was born and Talia returned to the men to give them their children, they saw her and they knew.

  And those children had children, and those children also had children, and so on. But the bloodline was unholy. It was corrupt. Abnormal. They were all freaks of nature. Every single one of them was cursed with sickness and insanity—all the way down to Athena Hendrasen and eventually Valerie Hart.

  The curse followed Talia’s bloodline to every part of the world. Their lives were filled with tragedy, such as the man who founded Carpenter. Only half of his sorrows had come from the witch on the day of the burning.

  The cult did not end when Talia died. It did not fade into obscurity as one would think—and as she’d thought as the fires raced her screams through the night of her own burning. It followed her twin-like descendants throughout the years.

  And tonight, they worshipped Valerie Hart.

  Shawn Porter was weak and staggered a few feet away from Rose, whose head was still stuck in the light. Even from across the dark road, he saw her looking into the hollow of the tree into an unusual pit of brightness. Dried blood clung to his face, and he was still wiping it away from his stinging eyes. His neck was tense and ringing with pain. He was sure he would collapse and die within five minutes.

  “Rose,” Shawn said, moving forward. “Get out of this.”

  But she didn’t respond. Shawn limped closer. His foot burned—there was a broken bone or two in there somewhere, but he pushed through it for Rose.

  “Rosie, come on, we’re getting out of here,” he said.

  He put his hand on her arm and tugged. He wasn’t expecting her to hit him away. She tried to push herself deeper into the light, but it appeared that was as far as she could go. He put both hands on her and pulled. It was hard to move his arms.

  Shawn let out a scream of pain; just bending his elbows stung. His temples pounded. A cloud of heat ran threw him. But none of that outweighed his panic and worry for Rose. He knew how hard it was to let go of the light; he himself had looked through it once before.

  One more pull, then she was free. The light disappeared with faint laughter. Shawn’s arms wrapped around her and she hugged him back. They kissed, and unusually strong wind shook the whole forest. The sound of rattling leaves filled the darkness.

  “What did you see?” Shawn asked after a minute of silence.

  “Oh, Shawn…”

  “Yes?”

  “Ohmigod.”

  “Rose? Rose? What’s—”

  “I don’t want to remember.”

  “Rosie, tell me.”

  Rose cried. “I saw too much I can’t explain, but I saw Valerie in it, I saw… I saw… oh, you won’t believe me.”

  “I can’t believe you if you don’t tell me,” Shawn said.

  “Valerie’s the killer.”

  Shawn said, “But Valerie has been dead for—”

  “That was Emily Oakes,” Rose said. “Valerie switched clothes with her, and nobody suspected anything because her—my wallet was in her pocket, so they thought Emily was me. She’s been alive all his time.”

  “Then where is she now?”

  Footsteps circled around Rose and Shawn from far away—the unsettling sound of leaves underfoot. Shawn rubbed his eyes again—a little thread of blood still trickled into them. Rose rubbed her neck. Everything hurt.

  “Can we still make it to Raven Hill?” she asked.

  He replied, “We can try.”

  They walked together, holding hands. Darkness wrapped so tightly around the forest that they could no longer see the street. Trees and darkness pressed in on them from every direction. It seemed as endless as the universe.

  The footsteps circling them were now closer. Shawn let go of Rose and fell to the dirt. Ants crawled over his shoes and up his legs. He felt his head ready to explode—in fact, he was sure it would. His whole body would just combust.

  “I’m so thirsty, Rosie,” he said.

  “Get up.” Rose grabbed Shawn and tried to yank him to his feet. He was too big for her to carry. “You can’t get water if you lie here.”

  “There’s no light,” he said.

  “The light’s gone, the light’s gone, there’s no reason to worry about it anymore,” Rose said.

  Shawn coughed. “Not that one. Not from under your bed—the other light. At the end of the tunnel. Rosie, there’s a tunnel, but it’s darkness.”

  “What tunnel, Shawn?”

  “Don’t you get it? I’m dying here.”

  “No! No you can’t die on me!”

  “I love you so much,” Shawn said.

  “Get up! Don’t look at the tunnel! Get up and let’s go! Shawn! Don’t leave me!”

  “I will see you soon,” Shawn said.

  “Soon? What?”

  He was gone. He was on his way to the abyss, where an endless fire would consume his soul while worms ripped through his flesh. That would be his destiny. His eternity. For a second, Rose saw a shadow come over Shawn in the dark. It was brief—just barely there, then gone. It was Death, and Death was smiling.

  Rose shivered and looked around, and wondered about the burning fire in the street. Shouldn’t she still see it? It wasn’t too far from here. She shifted through the trees. Suddenly she realized the footsteps had stopped. Somebody had to be watching her.

  And they were. Eyes hidden inside black hoodies watched Rose from every direction. They studied her. Then, each one of them lit a small candle, and Rose saw dim light afar off. Her head throbbed again.

  Evil figures lurking in the darkness moved in unison one step closer to Rose. She screamed, fell to her knees, and the screams continued. She cursed the Carpenter sky that had followed her into the outskirts of Raven Hill, then pounded her fists against the icy ground. She couldn’t find the energy to move.

  Footsteps closed in on her and the lights of the candles burned brighter. She was too terrified to move. She fought against the paralyzing fear, begging her neck to move up so she could see who was approaching. She begged her legs to move away from them, but her body didn’t want to respond.

  Rose screamed again.

  And when the burning red eyes were all within ten feet of her, she put her hands on either side of her face and forced her head up to see who was there. She shrieked at the sight of the burning red eyes in the cruel night—so abominable, yet familiar.

  Rose screamed. “Just kill me! I’ve lost everything! I don’t want to live!”

  The hooded figures all began to chant in a lost language. Rose was disgusted with their words, even if she couldn’t understand them. She felt as if her whole body was about to fall apart. Scream after scream left her mouth, and the chants grew louder.

  Rose screamed until her sore throat couldn’t take it and would scream no more, then her screams turned into a cry. A pathetic cry. She sat in a pile of her tears and boogers and blood. It was pure misery.

  “Kill me.”

  “That could be done,” a grim, gross voice said.

  Rose turned. It was Valerie.

  Valerie had a knife in her hand and the world’s biggest smile on her face. She was in a tight, black Audrey Hepburn dress that seemed to mold to the shape of her body. As Rose studied her, light in every direction reflected off of the knife, and Rose could now see how pitiful she looked.

  “I hate you,” Rose said. “You’re not Valerie!”

  “I am. You can accept it or don’t. I don’t care, you cock-sucking slut.”

  “Valerie died a long time ago, and part of me died with her,” Rose said.

&
nbsp; Valerie lowered herself to Rose, raised the knife—as she so often had—in both hands above her head, then pushed it down with all her force. Rose rolled out of the way; suddenly she didn’t want to die anymore. She remembered something she had heard before about suicidal people who jump from bridges and change their mind on the way down. That’s at least what the survivors said, anyway. And Rose was now sure it was true of everybody faced with death.

  The chanting cult of Talia moved closer around them; their flames grew impossibly bigger and brighter.

  Valerie yelled, “I’ll shove this knife so far up your cunt, it’ll come out your head.”

  Rose wobbled as she got to her feet, knowing she was in no condition to run. Valerie Hart had the upper hand in every single way.

  Rose spat at Valerie, then pushed past two hooded cult members and ran.

  The chase was on. Valerie trailed her with the knife raised. As Rose dodged a branch, the fire from the road came back into view; she could see better now. And when Rose glanced behind her shoulder, Valerie was merely four feet away.

  Rose let out another scream from deep within herself, then sprinted again and turned to the right, then took another right and hoped to lose Valerie by going back the way they had come—but Valerie was too smart for that. She kept up with Rose. In a split second, Rose tripped over Shawn’s lifeless body as Valerie tackled her.

  Rose cried. The light of the fire illuminated Valerie’s gorgeous face—and Rose missed her. Rose missed how things used to be. And she had less than a second to remind herself that this person was no longer Valerie—an ancient sickness had taken over her mind and body. And while Rose was distracted, she hadn’t noticed the knife had slipped from Val’s hand. Val reached for it, and Rose panicked.

  I have to do something!

  She grabbed Valerie’s outstretched arm as Valerie’s fingers wrapped around the knife’s handle, then bit hard into Valerie’s throat with all the power left in her body and pulled out a lump of warm flesh. Valerie’s eyes went wide and she dropped the knife, then gripped her throat. Rose crawled out from under her and looked at the sky.

  What a way to go, Rose thought, looking up to that godawful black sky.

  She shut her eyes tight, then opened them moments later as she heard people approaching. Above her were the dangerous red eyes that had haunted her. The cult members circled around Rose and chanted—softly at first, and slowly getting louder.

  Two of them picked her up.

  “Thank you,” Rose Hawthorn said.

  She was their new thing to worship—their new incarnation of Talia.

  Author’s Notes

  This is my favorite story of mine, and I almost didn’t write it. It was one of my first ideas, back in 2015. I read an article about Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak—two women whose identities were mixed up after a bus accident—and the idea for Duality popped into my head suddenly.

  I tried to write it as a comic book once and did five issues of it, but it was too big for me and I couldn’t do it justice. I gave up on it. Then I rewrote those five issues into four issues, and it still felt too big for me. I wasn’t sure which way to take it, it was gonna be tough doing the switcheroo, and finding a good enough reason to do it, and I almost wanted it to be like the comic book Hack/Slash about a girl who hunts slashers, but it just didn’t come together correctly. There was no way I could turn it into Hack/Slash, and I gave up another time.

  But then, one day, when I was deciding which novel to write next, the story for Duality popped back into my mind, with the opening line “The terror all began…” and I couldn’t knock it for weeks. So I finally sat down to write it as a novel and decided I’d turn it into a horror/comedy since the whole premise of lookalikes switching places is comical. Originally I intended for it to be serious, but the comedic route fit much better.

  And it worked. But once I translated those four scripts into a novel I was nervous, because that was only the first four or five chapters of this book, and I had no idea what was next. I don’t plot these things out, and the rest just happened. And I loved every page of it. I had the time of my life writing this book.

  But even as I wrote it, there came a point about halfway through when I thought that I was doomed to fail and that this project was still much too big for me. I was at work one day—a bank, my first job after college—and one of my first customers that day was a Vietnam veteran.

  I told him, “Thank you for your service, sir.”

  And he told me a story about the war, and how his identity was mixed up and they called his mother back in America to tell her that her son was dead, but he was really alive. And I just couldn’t believe how eerie it was that my book Duality was on my mind, and how I felt I probably could never do it justice. But for some reason when he told me that, I just took it as a sign to man up and finish the freaking novel. I went home that day inspired and typed away. In another couple weeks draft one was finished.

  Thank you all for reading. I couldn’t do it without you.