Doppelgänger

by Sean Munger

  Julian shook his head. “I don’t follow you, Doctor.”

  “Disembodied spirits do not move, Mr. Atherton. An apparition—a ‘ghost,’ in the colloquial term—of a man who died in Wyoming Territory would not decide to suddenly appear hundreds of miles across the country in the bedroom of a man who happened by chance to witness his murder. I served in the war—medical corps—and I saw many men killed, some in battle, a few from other causes. Although I can remember their faces clearly, not a single one of these men has ever transported themselves from the battlefields of Atlanta or Chickamauga to haunt me, however disturbing I might have found the experience of witnessing their deaths. Nor am I aware of any similar case.”

  “So is there another explanation?”

  Dorr looked like he’d been waiting for this question and relishing the prospect of answering it. “Potentially,” he said.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “The spirit in your house may not be a ghost. It could be a doppelgänger.”

  “A what?” said Julian.

  “A doppelgänger. It’s a German word meaning ‘double walker’. Essentially, it is the ghost of a living person.”

  Anine knew this word, or at least a variation of it; dubbelgångare in Swedish. It meant double, but she’d never heard it used in the context of ghosts.

  “How is that possible?” Julian asked.

  “Doppelgänger are quite rare, but they are documented. The poet Percy Bysse Shelley claimed to have seen a ghost of himself in Italy in 1822 shortly before he died. Goethe, in his autobiography, also speaks of seeing a doppelgänger of himself riding toward him on a horse. Doppelgänger can travel—they aren’t rooted to one specific place—but in your case it may be strongly associated with your house.”

  With a flood of uneasy recognition Anine thought of the vision she saw of Ola Bergenhjelm on the day of his death. Julian didn’t know about that and there was no way she could mention it here, but again she saw Ola’s feet dissolving in her mind’s eye. She had to remind herself that was not what Dorr was talking about. That was the ghost of a dead person, for Ola was already dead, although no one knew it at the time. But something about the description of the doppelgänger seemed eerily to evoke that experience.

  Julian sounded amazed. “So you think it’s Mrs. Quain’s living ghost—her doppelgänger—who is in our house?”

  “I think it’s possible, yes.”

  “But that wouldn’t explain the presence of the man from the West either.”

  Dorr puffed on his pipe. “It might. Doppelgänger are different than the ghosts of the dead, and they have different abilities. As I said before, they can travel. There is also some evidence—limited, anecdotal evidence—that they can change their form. This is not accepted by very many students of the supernatural. Few in my milieu even credit the doppelgänger phenomenon as real in the first place, so it’s understandable that their capabilities are not fully understood. But I have heard of one such case.”

  “What was the case?”

  Dorr paused before continuing. “It is said to have happened during the Napoleonic Wars. A colleague of mine found the incident described in some old correspondence he uncovered in Paris several years ago, letters written by an old Frenchman, a veteran of both military and government service, to his younger wife. In 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia—as is well-known—the Russians retreated before him, burning or carrying off almost anything of value. The French found Moscow a virtual ghost town, filled with empty buildings that had been stripped of furniture, wall hangings, gold and silver plate, food, firewood, anything. This French officer was some minor adjutant to Napoleon. He and another officer appropriated the home of a Russian count, not far from the Kremlin, as their headquarters. It was a very grand apartment but was as empty and barren as anything else in Moscow. However, the Frenchman and his companion began to notice certain disturbances. They heard voices speaking in Russian but there was no one there. Strange spectral marks appeared on the walls. Eventually these marks began to form words in Russian, insulting and taunting the French and predicting that they would be defeated. Yet the house was heavily guarded and there was no opportunity for anyone to gain entry.

  “After a few days the officer and his companion began to see an entity in the house. It was an elderly man, well-dressed, wearing a brocaded vest and a powdered wig. The apparition roared and shouted at the Frenchmen in Russian. Driving their swords through him, they encountered only air—the ghost vanished and then reappeared somewhere else, taunting them again. Purportedly the ghost predicted that the French would lose Moscow to fire. That very night Moscow began burning. Ironically it was because of the ghost’s warning that the French officers managed to save the count’s house, one of the few that survived the great conflagration.

  “When the fire failed to drive the officers out the spirit in the house grew intensely angry. It began destroying things, tearing up floorboards and ripping chunks of plaster from the walls, moaning insensibly as if in terrible agony. Then at last another apparition appeared. It was the French officer’s wife, his first wife, who had died in childbirth a few years earlier. She didn’t want to bear his child, having already had three previous children born dead, but the officer insisted and she carried the child to term. When she died giving birth to yet another dead son the officer was wracked with guilt that he thought would remain with him until the end of his life. Seeing the vision of his dead wife here—hundreds of miles away in the count’s apartments in Moscow, years after her death—horrified him. He confessed in his letters that he put a pistol to his head and it was only the intercession of his colleague that convinced him not to take his own life. Not long after that Napoleon began the retreat from Moscow and the French officers abandoned the count’s apartments. The officer claimed he heard the spirit of the Russian count laughing boisterously in victory as they departed.

  “A long time later—many years after the war was over—the French officer, who joined the foreign service of the July Monarchy, visited Moscow again on a diplomatic mission. While there he passed the building containing the count’s apartments, which was still standing. He said something compelled him to go inside. He found that the count’s family was moving and selling off the furnishings. The count himself had just died. The Frenchman saw two workmen carrying out of the house a large portrait of the Russian count which had hung in one of the parlors. It was the same man the Frenchman had seen in 1812, though obviously many years older. In shock the Frenchman realized that the Russian count whose house he’d appropriated had still been alive—and that it was the ghost of this living person, the count’s doppelgänger, that haunted his house during the French occupation—a sort of spectral sentinel who watched over the place during the family’s absence. That was the ghost he’d seen, and the doppelgänger, deliberately seeking to drive the Frenchman to commit suicide, assumed the form of his dead wife to shame him into doing it. The Frenchman confessed all of this in a series of letters only on his own deathbed, having been so horrified by the experience that he dared not speak it to anyone during his lifetime.”

  Dorr left this heavy story hanging in the air as he returned to the chair behind his desk. He tapped out the pipe into a bowl and began re-filling it, saying nothing, as if waiting for Julian or Anine to comment.

  Could it possibly be true? Anine thought. Could that be the spirit of Mrs. Quain tormenting us in punishment for living in her house? She had to admit to herself that it made a kind of intuitive sense, but Dorr’s story about the French officer was still so fantastic that she had a hard time getting her head around it, much less applying its dubious lessons to their own situation.

  “You believe this story?” Julian finally said.

  “I’m not sure,” Dorr replied. “It’s not the kind of thing that lends itself to easy verification, like a science experiment in a laboratory. It could be true. Or it could be utter rubbish. I mention
it to you because it serves as a possible precedent for what might be occurring in your house. The ghost theory, after all, requires two deaths in the house that we do not know have occurred—Mrs. Quain and the child seen by Bradbury—and offers no explanation for the man from the West, or the cat for that matter, unless there’s some sordid history of the house that is totally unknown to anyone. The doppelgänger theory, though speculative, could account for everything you’ve seen, presuming that doppelgänger are capable of changing form.”

  “How do we test this theory?” said Anine. “There must be a way to verify it.”

  Dorr smoked. “For openers I would need to visit the house for myself and see if I can make contact with the spirit. It’s possible we may be able to learn something useful. As a threshold matter I would be very curious to know whether Mrs. Quain is still alive. Nothing less than seeing and speaking with her face-to-face would be sufficient to establish that.”

  “That’s unlikely,” said Anine. “Our relations with her family are—” she searched for a delicate way to put it “—strained.”

  If this bit of information mattered to Dorr he gave no indication of it. He put the end of the pipe in his mouth. Glancing at Julian he said, “Do as you will, Mr. Atherton. Perhaps you need some time to think it over. I’ll be here in Ossining through the end of October.” With a puff of bluish smoke rising from his pipe he motioned to the office door and Anine understood that the interview was over.

  They had taken a boat, a day steamer, up the Hudson to Ossining, and as it chugged resolutely back toward New York City in the late afternoon Julian stood at the railing on the stern of the ship, staring into the water. Anine accompanied him for a turn on the deck, carrying her parasol although it was still gloomy overcast. They said nothing. She’d turned the problem over and over in her mind and still could not quite accept the doctor’s hypothesis, but she dared to hope that it might push her husband toward recognizing what needed to be done, if it could still be done.

  She joined Julian at the rail. The waters churning beneath the boat were grayish-black. They matched her mood.

  “What do you think?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he shrugged. “The whole thing is so—strange.”

  “Yes, it is.” A cold breeze ruffled a ringlet of Anine’s blonde hair against her cheek, causing her to shudder. “Whether it’s true or not, this affair of the doppelgänger—or even if by some fluke we’ve both imagined what we believe we’ve seen—I think it’s clear that we can never be happy in that house, and are never meant to be.”

  Julian did not look at her but his gaze became glassy and cold. “I will not sell the house back to the Minthorns. That decision has been made, and it’s final.”

  “Then sell it to someone else. Let’s move, Julian. We haven’t had a moment’s peace, either with the house or with each other, since we’ve been there. Let’s start over. We’ll give our marriage another chance. Things will be different. I know they will.”

  Anine was going out on a limb by saying this because in her own mind she wasn’t convinced it was true; yet it seemed a moral imperative to at least exhaust all reasonable opportunities to salvage their relationship before giving up completely on their marriage. I do still love him, she admitted to herself, or at least I love the charming, awkward boy he was back in Sweden while he was courting me. There was something else lurking behind this thought too: the supposition that, if Dorr was right about the doppelgänger, it might ultimately be responsible for Julian’s transformation into the monster he’d become since they came to New York. If they left the house, would the kind, charming, awkward Julian return? Would his rages, his intransigence, his rapes be in the past? She dared to hope, but it was nothing more than a hope.

  Perhaps predictably, he spurned it. “There’s one thing that would give our marriage a chance,” he said coldly, “and that’s a baby. But you don’t want to do that, and frankly I no longer want to give you one. You’ve utterly killed my manhood. You disgust me now.”

  She was exasperated. “If the only pleasure left for you in our marriage is to say things that hurt me, then go right ahead. I assure you they won’t trouble me any longer.” She put up her parasol, turned and walked down the promenade deck away from him, not even bothering to look back. Right now she felt totally capable of pushing him right over the railing into the Hudson River.

  Or jumping into the water myself, she thought, and swimming all the way back to Sweden.

  As if in answer to their new understanding of what was happening in the house, the spöke served up, the very next day, a new torment for Anine: claustrophobia.

  She felt it first in the breakfast room. The room was large, the windows broad and tall, and it was a sunny day outside; yet as she ate her bread and cheese she felt like the walls were closing in. Julian had already left for his office. Her own routine—go to the Green Parlor, read a book or play solitaire or find some way to pass the time—seemed like a straitjacket strangling the life out of her, and yet she had the most dreadful feeling that if she did not do that, if she chose to go out or sit in a different room or do anything else, something terrible and catastrophic would happen to her.

  So she went to the Green Parlor. I must tell Clea about the doppelgänger, she thought, dealing out the cards on her small table. She noticed her hands were quivering. A pit of dread sat uncomfortably at the bottom of her stomach. A few cards into the game it turned into prickly panic creeping up the back of her neck.

  Then she saw something move at the foot of the fireplace, just a quick flash of motion. She looked up and for a split-second saw the Abyssinian cat, which jumped up onto one of the wing chairs, peering out at her. In the next instant it receded, the cat vanished and the feeling of claustrophobia suddenly trebled. Anine felt like her corset was suddenly crushing her. Gasping for breath she threw down the cards, stood up and staggered toward the wall for the bell cord to summon Miss Wicks.

  “Stop it!” she hissed to the cat, now disappeared. She was speaking Swedish. “Why are you doing this to me? What have I ever done to you?”

  The pocket doors slid open. Clea stood in the doorway, looking as calm and stoic as ever. “You want something, Miss Anine?”

  With her words the feeling of claustrophobia instantly evaporated but the pit of dread in Anine’s stomach did not. She straightened up, hand still on her stomach, and looked over at the maid.

  I have to get out of here, she resolved. Right now.

  “I need to get some air,” she said. “Let’s go to the Central Park. Get your coat and gloves and summon a carriage.”

  Clea looked surprised. “You want…me to come with you?”

  “Yes, right away. I must get out of this house.”

  “Let me must change my dress.”

  “Do it, then. Quickly.”

  Anine grabbed a dolman and a pair of gloves and waited for Clea in the entryway. Above her she heard Bryan Shoop whistling as he worked in Julian’s bedroom, shining his shoes. Through her disgust for the young man, which had been growing steadily since what she referred to in her mind as the frigid incident, she felt something else: a sense of frustration, that an expectation had been confounded. But the frustration was not hers. She wondered if it was the spöke’s. Her decision to go out and to take Miss Wicks with her had spoiled some plan that the house had for her. This was the strong intangible sense Anine felt.

  If true it was an interesting revelation: the doppelgänger was not all-powerful. It could be frustrated, hampered. If that was true perhaps it could be defeated, or driven out of the house entirely.

  For nearly two hours Anine and Clea rode together in a hired carriage through the tree-lined paths of the Central Park. As it was sunny and the weather mild, many other rich Manhattanites had the same idea; it was likely to be one of the last mild-weather days of the year and they had come out in even greater force than
usual. There was a virtual traffic jam of surreys and phaetons and the place looked more like a racetrack than the quiet refuge from the bustling city that it was intended to be.

  As they rode Anine told Clea everything about the strange meeting with Dr. Dorr. The maid absorbed it without skepticism and, characteristically, almost without comment. When Anine was finished Clea said softly, “Doppelgänger. That’s a word I never heard before.”

  “It’s German. In Swedish we have a similar word for it, dubbelgångare.”

  “What do you know about this Mrs. Quain? She a bad woman?”

  That’s an odd question. “What do you mean by that, Clea?”

  “It sounds to me, Miss Anine, that the spirit in the house is angry. The things you describe are bad things. Dark things. Is that who she is? Did Mrs. Quain do bad things when she lived in the house? She beat her kids? Was she angry? Did she hate?” Clea glanced out the side window of the carriage, which was moving very slowly. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  I’d never thought of that before. “I don’t know,” Anine shrugged. “Everything I’ve heard about her suggests she was a fine person.”

  “You’ve got to talk to her, Miss Anine. If this doctor’s right and the ghost is hers, maybe she can stop it.”

  “I don’t think that’s very likely. Given the lengths we had to go to just to see Mrs. Minthorn I can’t imagine them letting us near Mrs. Quain.”

  “You don’t need to talk to the Mrs. Quain in Newport,” said Miss Wicks. “You need to talk to the one in the house.”

  Suddenly it clicked. Yes—of course! Why did I not think of that? Perhaps the doppelgänger could be reasoned with. In any event it seemed obligatory to try, before something more drastic—whatever that might be—was attempted.

  The carriage rattled to a halt. Ahead of them Anine could see several other carriages, their horses pawing and scratching at the ground. Sticking her head out the window she said to the driver, “What’s wrong? Why have we stopped?”