Doppelgänger

by Sean Munger

  I must tell her everything that happened, Anine resolved. The séance—the doctor’s warning—everything. She felt awkward confessing it to Clea here in the house, however, with the doppelgänger watching them and listening to every word. Still staring at the mirror which duplicated her own reflection into a myriad of jagged-edged figures she said, “We must talk. There is much I must tell you. But not here. After what happened in the Central Park it’s obviously not proper for us to go back there. There must be a park, a public space for working class people where we could talk without arousing anger. Do you know of such a place?”

  Clea looked taken aback. “Miss Anine, I don’t think that’d be proper.”

  “Miss Wicks, our choices have become extremely limited, have they not?”

  The maid seemed to recoil a little bit but she was so stoic that her reaction would have been barely noticeable to anyone who didn’t know her well. “There’s a place called Jones’s Wood,” she replied. “It’s on East 68th Street.”

  “Well, that’s where we’ll go.”

  “It’s raining today, Miss Anine.”

  “We’ll go when the rain stops. If not today, tomorrow. Find me something suitable to wear there.” She turned away from the mirror and looked deeply at Clea. It’s important, she tried to say with her eyes.

  The rain did not stop that day, nor did the breakages. At lunchtime Mrs. Hennessey discovered that two expensive china plates had crumbled into dust where they sat stacked on a shelf in the kitchen. A pitcher and bowl in one of the guest bedrooms were also found shattered. When she changed clothes in the afternoon Anine went to put on a brooch that she’d worn many times, given to her by her mother, and discovered that the clasp had been snapped clean through. Miss Wicks reported that she’d found a chair in the library sitting crooked, one of its legs having been broken off. The broken-off piece of the chair’s lower leg was never found. In all of these cases no one was present to see the damage occur. It seemed to happen silently and stealthily, in empty rooms and at odd times—a subtle trail of destruction caused by an invisible spirit who, Anine thought, wanted with this action to irritate and annoy more than terrify.

  She did, however, witness one breakage with her own eyes. It was at dinner, where she found herself again dining alone. Spontaneously, and with no sound other than a very soft hiss, the stem of her wine glass drooped like a wilting flower. A moment later the bowl of the glass seemed to tighten, like a skin of ice contracting, and then it shattered with a soft plink! Droplets of wine showered over the table and rose like a fine rose-colored mist into the air. It was really quite beautiful, but Anine found her appetite had suddenly drained away. She pushed away her plate and stared at the ruin of the glass. The emotion she felt was exasperation more than fear.

  “Is that supposed to scare me?” she said aloud to the spöke.

  Instantly the spirit reacted. Anine felt a swift blow in her solar plexus. Actually it was less of a blow than a sudden awful tightening, like an invisible hand had closed itself around her abdomen. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. The tightening in her stomach became a violent lurch. She bolted out of her chair. A moment later vomit burst out of her mouth as if propelled by a cannon. The dinner she’d just eaten splattered in pinkish chunks over the tablecloth, her plate and the broken remains of the wine glass. The sudden acrid aroma of stomach acid made her woozy.

  Yet in seconds it was over. The clutch in her stomach was gone and she didn’t even feel nauseous; indeed she felt perfectly fine. After the head rush cleared Anine was slightly weak at the knees and she sat back down. The table was now a dreadful mess.

  That will teach you to mock me, she imagined the doppelgänger thinking.

  “I’m still not scared,” she said.

  Actually, she was.

  Over the next two days—during which the cold drizzle that had seized New York still did not abate—the pace of breakings increased, and the spöke’s foray into destructive phenomena took a new turn: it seemed like it was trying to communicate.

  Julian brought it to her attention first. After his work was over for the day and he came home from a brief political meeting, shortly before dinner he called Anine up to his bedroom. “I want you to see something,” he said.

  She came, somewhat reluctantly, to his room. Draped over the end of the bed was one of his formal jackets, black with long tails. He picked it up and laid it over his arm. “Mr. Shoop noticed this when he was putting something back into the closet.”

  The back of the jacket was covered with a strange flurry of small marks. They were hash marks, some long, some short, arranged in no discernible pattern. The marks appeared to have been made with chalk or a wax pencil or something of that nature. Anine’s brow knitted as she looked at them. Gingerly she reached forward to touch one of the marks. The stuff—she had no idea what it was made of—did not come off on her fingers. It had no smell either.

  “Have you noticed anything like this before?” Julian asked her.

  She shook her head. “No. I haven’t.”

  “Mr. Shoop doesn’t think it can be cleaned and neither do I, but we’ll send it to the laundry tomorrow in the hopes they can work a miracle.” Unceremoniously Julian flung the jacket into a nearby chair. “First the goddamn thing starts breaking our plates, and now it ruins a fifty-dollar tailcoat. Maybe it means to get us to leave by running us out of money.”

  “At fifty dollars a tailcoat and eight dollars a Crown Derby plate, the doppelgänger may achieve its goal in about twenty years,” said Anine, starting for the door. Julian merely scoffed and shook his head.

  In the morning Anine herself observed more of the curious hash marks. She found them on the green velvet wallpaper in the second-floor hall, right in the corner. They were made with the same chalky substance. These marks looked slightly different than the ones on Julian’s coat. They were less angular, more curved and squiggly, but still equally meaningless. Because one of the squiggles looked like part of a letter N Anine thought, Is it trying to send us a message? She thought the doppelgänger had told them everything it had to communicate through Dr. Dorr, so perhaps this was simply another attempt to intimidate or unnerve them. There was no way to be sure.

  Later the same day Mrs. Hennessey called Anine into the kitchen. “I found a curious thing, ma’am, on one of the serving trays.” She presented a large silver tray so broad and straight that its bottom could have been a mirror, except for the fact that it was marred with the same squiggly lines. Unlike the disturbances done in the chalky substance, these were scored into the silver with some hard metallic object. Anine could feel the ridges of the marks with her fingers. These squiggles made no more sense than any of the others did, except for one that appeared to be an incomplete letter A.

  “Who could have done this?” said Mrs. Hennessey. “The tray was in the pantry like always. I don’t think I’ve brought it out in a week.”

  “I don’t know,” Anine lied. “If you notice anything else of this nature, Mrs. Hennessey, please report it at once.”

  “You mean aside from plates and sugar bowls breaking themselves all over the place?”

  “I’d like to know about those too.”

  “I’ll be reporting to you a lot then, ma’am. It seems like every time I turn around something else is broken.” Mrs. Hennessey shook her head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this place was haunted.” This was the first indication that the cook had begun to notice the spöke phenomenon.

  Very much as Anine expected, the strange hash marks appearing on various objects proved to be indelible and destructive. Not only was the laundress to whom Bryan Shoop delivered Julian’s tailcoat at a loss as to how to eradicate the marks, she couldn’t even determine what they were made of. The same was true of the markings on the wall on the second floor. Clea tried mightily to sponge them away with everything, including lye soap, but couldn’t make
the slightest impression upon them. The only remedy, Anine realized, was to cut out that section of wallpaper and replace it with a new sheet that had to be matched meticulously. Fortunately the wallpaper she had ordered for the house while on their honeymoon was machine-printed, not hand-painted, and thus she could place an order through the decorator for replacements. Anticipating that more walls would be ruined in the future, however, she ordered several more rolls of surplus wallpaper for all the rooms in the house. Between this, Julian’s suit, the broken crockery, the mirrors, the table and the serving tray, in the few days since the séance the doppelgänger had already cost the household nearly a thousand dollars.

  On Friday, a week after the séance, the deluge of rain finally abated. It was not exactly sunny and the ground was still sodden but Anine seized the chance to get away from the house, and she told Clea to summon a carriage. The maid had chosen as Anine’s costume for the outing to Jones’s Wood a rather plain-looking cream-colored day dress that Anine used to wear on dreary afternoons during the long Swedish winters. Nevertheless she couldn’t resist adding a hat, a new item she had ordered from a catalog the week before, trimmed boldly with bright yellow canary feathers. She must have looked rather odd clambering into the carriage, clutching her hat and followed by her maid dressed simply in black. The sun, playing hide-and-seek with the remnants of the rain clouds, happened to be shining at that moment. Anine was glad just to get out of the gloomy confines of the house.

  Jones’s Wood was a curious place. For one thing there were precious little woods left of it. Most of the site had been given over to a large, gaudy-looking amusement park, which given the season and the weather was not open. The park fronted no fewer than three German-style beer gardens which were open, though sparsely populated in the middle of the day on a Friday. The place obviously catered to working-class New Yorkers, and as she got out of the carriage Anine felt actually relieved at the total absence of promenading socialites and ostentatious buggies that one saw in the Central Park. The sky had clouded over by now but the rain did not resume. Glancing at the beer gardens, feeling adventurous and even cheerful, Anine said, “You know what, Clea? I believe I’ll have a glass of beer.”

  “You sure you want to do that, Miss Anine? If word gets around—”

  “Stuff and nonsense. No one even remotely connected to society would be caught dead here. That’s why I think I like this place.” Anine took out her coin purse and started toward the nearest of the beer establishments. “Come along.”

  Anine sat on a rough wooden bench at a picnic table on the muddy grass beneath several droopy crepe-paper streamers and a hand-lettered sign in German. Her small gloved hand curled around the handle of a colossal glass beer stein. Two elderly men, both with bushy mustaches, looked at her strangely as they smoked cigars at a table not far away but no one else seemed to pay them any attention. “This was a good idea,” said Anine. “We can talk privately here.”

  “It may not be such a good idea if word gets around. It almost always does.”

  “Well, certainly you won’t be telling?” Anine smiled and sipped from her mug. Then she knew the time for levity was past. “There’s much to tell you, Clea. The doctor was at our house Friday night. He made contact with the spirit.”

  Clea nodded. “I been wondering what happened that night.”

  Anine shuddered with the memory. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Nothing.”

  She told the story in great detail. She did not hesitate to repeat the words the spöke had shouted at her. Anine had firmly decided that Clea must know everything, because knowledge was the most powerful weapon against the spirit—assuming anything worked against it at all. She also confessed to Clea for the first time that she thought she’d seen Ola Bergenhjelm’s apparition after his untimely death, though she admitted she wasn’t sure she could trust her senses regarding this or how it might relate to the phenomenon in the house. The only thing she omitted was the ominous undertone of Julian’s question to Dr. Dorr about whether the death of Mrs. Quain would exterminate the doppelgänger. Anine phrased it as: “We discussed whether the spirit was coupled to Mrs. Quain’s life. The doctor didn’t give us a very clear response but I suspect the answer is yes. Doppelgänger are, it appears, literally the ghosts of living people. It seems like everything is pointing in that direction.”

  Clea thought for a moment and then gave a sort of nonchalant little shrug. “You almost don’t need to hear what I think, Miss Anine, ’cause you know it already. The doctor’s right. You’d best be getting out of this house. Mr. Julian’s a fool for wanting to stay.”

  “I know it. Of course the doctor’s right. I’ve been urging Julian to sell the house and move for weeks now. Mrs. Minthorn’s note certainly seemed to make it clear that the family is no longer willing to deal with us, which means their generous offer is off the table. I think we could still get a fair price for the house but Julian won’t consider moving.” She sipped from her beer mug. Trying not to alarm Clea—or herself—Anine said delicately, “It appears that his strategy is simply to wait the spirit out. Meaning, wait until Mrs. Quain—”

  Clea finished the thought for her. “Wait until she dies and then the thing is gone.”

  “That’s what he’s expecting, yes.” She shook her head. “It’s childish, really. It’s like he’s now pretending there is no problem in the house, just hoping it will go away. I don’t think it will go away. Suppose Mrs. Quain lives another ten years? She could, you know. I don’t think she’s that old. Given the disturbances we’ve seen this week I suspect in six months’ time we’ll be reduced to wearing rags and eating food from our fingers because our clothes will be shredded and every dish broken. There won’t be a stick of furniture left in the house that isn’t ruined. That is, unless my husband wishes to devote the entirety of his fortune to replacing everything the doppelgänger destroys. If that’s what he wants we may as well mortgage our lives to the Crown Derby company.”

  Clea shook her head. “You just talking just to talk, Miss Anine. You know what’s got to be done.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Leave Mr. Julian. He’s no good for you. I see the way he treats you. You think I don’t hear through the walls when he’s yelling at you? Everybody hear it. Mrs. Hennessey too. And him and that manservant—Shoop—you know, Miss Anine, what goes on between them?”

  Anine had her suspicions but she’d endeavored mightily to keep them out of her mind. “What goes on?”

  “Things that gentlemen shouldn’t be doing. Unnatural things. He don’t need you, Miss Anine. And you don’t need this, all the nonsense with this—I can’t even say that name.”

  “The doppelgänger.”

  “So leave. Pack up. There ain’t nothing worth all this. Leave him in the house, if he wants it. He’s the one who made this bed. He got to lie in it.”

  She’s absolutely right, Anine thought, but it still feels wrong to give up so easily. She admitted to herself she’d been thinking more and more about Sweden, about what she might say to her parents if she returned. It had even occurred to her that perhaps she didn’t need to divorce Julian. It seemed likely that if their marriage ended she would be doomed to be a spinster forever and strangely that didn’t bother her. If she remained married to Julian but separated from him by an ocean her life would be little different except that both of them would escape the scandal of divorce. Julian might not have any interest in taking another wife, especially if he preferred Bryan Shoop’s company to that of a woman. Remaining married might keep that potential scandal at bay. But how do I even suggest this to him? Would he agree?

  Another question weighed on her mind. “Clea,” she said, “let me ask you something else. It may be difficult for you to answer. If I were to do as you say, leave the house and go back to Sweden, would you come with me? I would be happy to continue to employ you.”

  Miss Wicks didn’t
seem surprised or even particularly moved by the question. “You don’t worry about me, Miss Anine. You don’t need to be hauling me across an ocean. If you leave the house and leave Mr. Julian, you should go back with your own people. I wouldn’t be any help to you.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve come to rely on you a great deal.”

  “You say that ’cause you got no one else to rely on. They got you cornered here, Miss Anine. Mr. Julian, the Fifth Avenue ladies, everybody—even the ghost. You got to break free. You take it from me, I know. You only a slave if you give up trying to be free.”

  Anine took another sip of beer, and then set the mug down on the rough plank table. “I believe I’ve had enough,” she said, suppressing a soft belch. “Thank you for speaking so frankly to me, Clea.”

  “You asked me to speak to you like that. Don’t thank me just for doing my job.”

  Just doing my job. There was a curious sadness to this moment that did not escape Anine’s notice. Is that all it is to her? Does she not really consider me a friend? Anine was eternally grateful of her company and her counsel, but sometimes Clea Wicks was very difficult to read.

  They said nothing more to each other on the ride home. When they did reach the house Clea went silently back to her duties, pressing clothes, dusting and cleaning up the shards of freshly-broken crockery.

  For that weekend and into the next week a sort of delicate balance held throughout the house, thin and fragile like the crust of ice just forming on the top of a water barrel. The dreadful mood of claustrophobia remained, plates and furniture were still found broken and in the deep of the night on Sunday Anine heard again the chilling sound of Mrs. Quain’s laughter coming from somewhere above her bedroom. But there were no quarrels with Julian, no sudden spasms of rage from the spöke, and the strange hash-mark attempts at communication (if that’s what they were) ceased. The situation was not exactly optimal, for Anine could not see herself living for long even at this slightly-reduced level of intensity, but at least it was less dire than it had been at any time before the séance, and it suggested that it was possible—just barely possible—that the Athertons and the doppelgänger might be able to live together.