She hesitated a moment. She said then, “You would be embarrassed, Mr Carter. Mary would not eat anything – she never eats before strangers – but she would pretend she was. She always imitates every move I make.”
That was what I’d guessed; I suppose I felt proud of being right, and I still wanted to be kind. I said heartily, “Well, let her. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Come along.”
And she gave in. She let me take her. Dinner dates didn’t often come her way, poor kid; not with a sister like hers.
The hour was early for dinner, and we found a little table in a corner of a quiet restaurant. Nobody seemed to notice Mary, although she kept just lifting her spoon up and down, up and down from the bowl of soup I had brought to her; I told the waiter the second lady had no appetite. After the meat was brought and Anne began to eat it Mary used her spoon like a fork. But presently I forgot her; Anne and I were busy talking, and Anne was enjoying everything like a child. Her eyes were big and shining, as if she’d never been in a restaurant at night before.
We were beginning dessert when I looked around and noticed that Mary wasn’t there. She’d gone as suddenly and silently as, earlier, there in the apartment, she had come.
I expected Anne to be disturbed, wildly upset even, but she wasn’t. She only said, quietly, “She must have gone home.”
“You can trust her to get there all right?” I asked.
“Yes. She will be back sooner or later.” For a moment the gayety went out of her face. “You can always trust Mary to come back.”
It was her look-out, not mine; I said nothing more. I took her to the theatre, and she enjoyed that as she had enjoyed the restaurant. Like a little girl, having a great treat. She seemed to have forgotten all about the work she was supposed to do that night. Her eyes sparkled like diamonds, and when I took her home I kissed her at the door, and her mouth was fresh and sweet. So sweet that I forgot to wonder if Mary was waiting for her, behind the door; the wonder that, as we walked down the hall, had been crawling up and down my back like a cold worm.
During the next few days I kept telling myself that it was silly, superstitious, to have that cold, creepy feeling about Mary. To be afraid of an idiot girl. Except for bad luck – that accident that had made both girls motherless and knocked her silly – she’d have been as warm and sweet and exciting as Anne was. But the way she moved – you never saw her coming or going, you only knew suddenly that she was in a room or that she wasn’t – got on my nerves. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help that any more than I could keep away from Anne. I finished my story, and dictated another and another. And always Mary was in and out, like Anne’s reflection got loose from a mirror; and whenever she came some of the life seemed to go out of Anne – most of the energy and sparkle. I kept noticing that; I didn’t like it.
Then one day I asked Anne to marry me. I remember how quietly she sat there, with her hands folded on her knees and the tears dropping down on them, brightly, soundlessly, her big eyes wide and wistful like the eyes of a child staring into a candy store, and knowing that it can never have any.
“I am sorry, Frank. I would like very much to marry you. But I can’t; I can’t leave Mary. And you could never stand it – having her there always, year after year. Everywhere. For there would never be any place, Frank, where I was, where she would not come. She could not be kept out.”
And then I saw Mary, sitting across the room. She hadn’t been in the apartment when I came (I was sure of that, I had learned to look behind doors), but she was there now. And for once she wasn’t imitating Anne. No tears were falling from her eyes; they were watching us, but watching me more than Anne, and there was an intent look in them; an eager, avid look. Like a hungry cat’s.
I saw her reflection in the mirror above Anne’s little mantel. It came to me, with a start, that it was the first time I had noticed that.
I said roughly, “You’ve got your own life to live. Why don’t you send Mary away – to some good place where they’d look after her better, probably, than you can? I can afford it. She’d soon forget you.”
“No – no! I can’t!” Anne cried out as if in pain. Or terror. “It’s impossible, Frank! You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I do know,” I said stubbornly. “Sometimes you’ve got to be a little hard on one person, honey, to be kind to more than one. We’ve got our rights too, you and I.”
She laughed then, a queer little laugh. She said, “I have no rights, Frank. I am not – like other people. I oughtn’t ever to have gone out with you. I didn’t want to hurt you; I was just hungry; hungry to – to be like other girls. To live. Sometimes I get so hungry that I understand how Mary herself must feel. Outside – farther outside even than I am.”
“What do you mean?” I had a queer sense of something alien, cold. Of inexplicable, black cold.
She said, “It doesn’t matter. Please go now, Frank. For good.”
I didn’t; I argued. But she would only say over and over, “Please go now, Frank – it’s no use. Please go.” We both lost control of ourselves; I shouted and she cried. And all the time that still figure in the chair across the room just sat there, quietly watching us. She didn’t look stupid or scared or sympathetic; she looked strong and sinister; sure of herself. Almost amused.
Once I saw Anne dart a glance at her; a strange, sidewise glance, and then – I knew!
It wasn’t love or pity that bound Anne to Mary. There was fear in Anne’s eyes – stark fear.
I caught my girl in my arms; I tried to pull her to the door. I said, “Come outside with me, honey. Somewhere where we can talk alone.” I meant to send doctors back to take Mary – trained men who could handle her if she got violent. I suppose I thought she might; I don’t really know what I thought.
But Anne pulled away from me. She was suddenly calm. “It’s not so simple as that, Frank. Places don’t matter. No walls, no locks, no distances, could ever keep Mary away from me. She is me.”
I said hotly, “That’s crazy!” But again I felt that queer inner chill.
She smiled and shook her head. “If you won’t believe me go to Charleston and ask my father. He’ll explain; I can’t. If I even tried to I’d sound as mad as you think Mary is.”
And in the end I went to Charleston. Went telling myself that Anne was hysterical and that it was no wonder, after years of life with a lunatic, quite possibly a dangerous lunatic. Went knowing that I was, somehow, unreasonably afraid.
I didn’t expect to like Anne’s father. I had no use for a man who’d so shirk his own responsibilities, shift all the burden to his daughter. Mary might have given her stepmother the creeps, been unbearable around the house – I could understand that; but he should have put her away years ago. Never have let her fasten herself around Anne’s neck.
But I found him a gentle, ineffectual-seeming little man with a soft voice and a sensitive face. When I walked into the sleepy-looking little stationery store he ran, he greeted me with a smile that was very like Anne’s.
I said, “May I have a talk with you, Mr MacNair? I’ve just come from New York. I met your daughters there – Anne and her twin sister.”
His face turned white at that. The smile went away. He said, after a minute, “Yes, of course, Mr – Mr – I didn’t catch the name. How is Anne? How are – they?”
I had lunch with him. I told him everything – how I wanted Anne, why she wouldn’t marry me.
“It’s not right, Mr MacNair,” I ended. “Anne has a right to her own life – to a chance to get something out of it, poor kid. You must be Mary’s legal guardian; you ought to be able to do something about it.”
He looked miserable. He said unhappily, “My boy, for fourteen years – ever since Anne was eight – I have been wanting to do something about it. I have tried – for many years I tried. But nobody on earth has any control over Mary. You see – Anne is my only daughter.”
I stared. I didn’t say anything. For a minute I wondered if the whole
MacNair family was mad. Or if I was.
He went on, “It began when Anne was eight years old, you see. When her mother was killed. She and the child were in the car together, on a country road, when it crashed. People came in time to pull the little girl out, but my wife was – burned. Anne must have heard her screaming. And for hours afterward she kept crying, ‘I tried to pull her out, Daddy – I tried, but I couldn’t! I couldn’t!’
“I didn’t take any notice of that, then; I set it down to shock. Anne wasn’t much hurt, but she was cruelly shaken – beside herself. And she couldn’t really have tried to help her mother; she’d been found pinned beneath the wreckage, helpless to move. Later, much later, I talked with one of the men who’d been first on the scene, and he said that he’d been surprised when they found my little girl where she was, pinned – he’d thought, as he first came up, that he saw a child silhouetted against the flames. Been badly scared, he said, for fear she’d be burned before he could reach her. He had thought she was – trying to pull at something.”
He paused a moment, his mouth tightening.
“I don’t like to think of that, sir,” – with a pitiful kind of dignity – “of my wife. Afterwards, for a long time, Anne wasn’t well. She was nervous and cried easily, and the housekeeper I engaged didn’t get along with her. She said the child disobeyed her and played in the yard when she was supposed to be in the house – things like that. Anne always denied it; whenever there was any mischief done she’d say, ‘It was Mary.’ I thought Mary was one of those imaginary playmates children make up. Then one day we found Anne safely inside the house when the housekeeper had sworn she was out of it and there’d been no chance for her to slip back in; I concluded the woman was being completely unreasonable – picking on the child. That was why I married Charlotte Trumbull sooner than I would have otherwise; I thought Anne needed a mother – more intelligent care. But Charlotte didn’t get along with Anne either. She maintained that the child wouldn’t stay in her bed at night – kept creeping around the house like a little ghost.
“One night I saw her myself, after midnight, on the stairs. I called to her and she didn’t answer. I followed her and took her by the shoulder – and it was like catching hold of a piece of muslin. My fingers went through the whole shoulder as if it were a nightgown – closed on each other. Through something that was too thin, too – wet – for flesh. It was like thrusting your hand, wrist-deep, into a cloud.
“And then I heard a voice from the top of the stairs – Anne’s voice: ‘Did you call me, Daddy?’ She’d come out of her room and was standing there, wide-eyed and puzzled, fresh from sleep – and I looked down again at the thing I had under my hand. It was still there – Anne’s face, Anne’s curls, Anne’s night-things, perfect as a reflection in a mirror – and then it quivered, as your reflection in a pool quivers when you disturb the water, and was gone.
“But Anne had seen. She smiled. She actually beamed. She said, ‘You’ve found Mary, Daddy. You see now – Mary’s real; I don’t tell stories.’ And I ran back up the stairs and grabbed her and carried her back into her room as if all the devils out of Hell were after us. I locked the door and knew, even as I locked it, that no lock could keep that –thing out; that uncanny fleshless thing that was my daughter’s twin.”
He stopped and mopped his brow. “That was the beginning. Charlotte wouldn’t believe it at first, but presently she had to; we saw the two of them together – often. The situation grew worse as Anne grew older; we couldn’t send her to school or camp, of course; there was – too much confusion. She had to give up all young friends of her own age. We tried doctors; the thing seemed to come oftener if Anne were ill or tired, but tonics, exercise, all such things, failed. Sometimes the shape would stay away for days, weeks even, but always it came back. As a rule it did nothing in particular, only wandered about aimlessly or imitated Anne’s motions, but it was – unnerving. And there were a few times—” He stopped again, then said slowly, reluctantly, as if the words were being forced out of him:
“There is no malice in my daughter, Mr Carter, but it is only fair to tell you that there is, sometimes, in that spectre. One night when Anne was eighteen, Charlotte, my wife, fell downstairs. She is permanently crippled – lame. And she has always sworn that Mary pushed her. Her fear of them – of even Anne – made all our lives intolerable after that. So when my daughter wanted to go to New York I did not oppose her so much as I should have liked to – the family doctor said, too, that she might be stronger, happier, in new surroundings; that the thing might not come back there. For he knows, Carter – after all these years he too knows. If you do not believe me, ask him.”
I did believe him. I even felt sorry for him. It would have taken a stronger man than he to save Anne – I wasn’t so sure, any longer, that I could do it myself.
He asked me a few questions. How Anne was – how strong she seemed – and, in a way, how Mary was. Had I ever touched her? Ever seen her reflection in a mirror?
He seemed depressed when I had seen her reflection.
“That is a bad sign; a very bad sign. When Anne was ten or twelve you could not see Mary’s reflection in a mirror. But as time passed she seemed to grow stronger – more substantial. It was not until the day before Charlotte’s accident on the stairs that we ever saw her reflection in a mirror. But of course that accident may really have been one – Charlotte may simply have slipped; for years she had been very nervous.”
He didn’t believe that, I knew. He believed that his daughter was possessed of – or haunted by – a devil in her own likeness. But I did not. All the way back to New York, on the swift plane that carried me away from the sleepy old Southern city, I tried to figure out exactly what I did believe.
The ancient Egyptians believed in what they called the ka, a “Double”, a body within a body; they mummified their dead and built elaborate tombs, believing that the ka might come and go like a live man from that house of death. They thought that sometimes it might leave the body of a living man and make journeys that he could not. Modern occultists meant much the same thing, apparently, when they talked of astral bodies. Well, suppose that that long-ago night when she heard her burning mother’s cries, Anne’s Double had come loose from her physical body? Had tried to help but failed, because it lacked strength, solidity? And had never rightly been able to get back inside again – to make safe anchor within her? A lot of what we had all felt about the creepiness of “Mary” could be set down to imagination, superstition – she was only a kind of floating doll after all, without real consciousness of her own.
Even if she had tried, a time or two, to do harm, what of it? We all have evil impulses, desires we never acknowledge to our normal, waking consciousness. Sex does play a part between parents and children; little girls are often jealous of their fathers’ attention to even their own mothers. Anne might subconsciously have wished her stepmother dead; Mary might have tried to do something about it, there on the stairs. But she hadn’t actually killed the woman. And Anne could never have been very happy since her mother’s death; if she were well and happy her whole being might integrate, coalesce, again; Mary might vanish.
Anyhow, I loved her. I couldn’t leave her; leave her alone, shut up for life with that weird, more than half-bodiless thing. Any more than I could have deserted a child, or a comrade in battle.
I went straight from the airport to her apartment. I found the door half-open, and Anne in the midst of packing, standing in the middle of a confusion of clothes and suitcases. Alone; blessedly alone.
She burst into tears at sight of me. “Oh, Frank, Frank, I should have left sooner! But I never really thought you’d come back; how could I? How—”
And I swept her into my arms. I knew, then, that she hadn’t the strength to fight me any longer.
I won’t try to tell about the weeks that followed. You can’t describe love. We were happy; completely happy; and Mary never came at all. We almost forgot her; it seemed silly to go on with the plan
s I’d made; to buy a ranch in the West where we could be alone together and there’d seldom be anyone to notice Mary if she did appear.
But the ranch would be a good place for me to write. I thought, too, that there might be less chance of Anne’s getting nervous there. Brooding over the idea of Mary’s coming back, and so perhaps, by sheer force of fear, invoking her.
In the fall of ’49 we found exactly what we wanted: an old adobe ranch house in the mountains of southern Arizona. Its deep recessed porch looked out over the most marvellous view that I’ve ever seen; a wilderness of jagged peaks and steep, massive slopes, their golden-brownness dotted with green saguaros. Slopes that curved for a little way and then dropped, sheer, into a valley that looked like a knife-cut slashed in the bowels of the earth.
Anne was all right until after Christmas. It was on New Year’s Eve that she caught the cold.
She was feverish for a day or two. I slept on the livingroom couch so as not to disturb her. Something was wrong with our telephone – it went bad very suddenly, with that contrariness that inanimate objects sometimes seem to have – but old Mr Barker, from the nearest ranch, offered to go for a doctor. He’d been a good neighbour; glad, I think, being old and alone, of somebody to talk to, and of a chance to eat Anne’s cooking. I thought his offer a godsend, but it made Anne positively hysterical. She did not want a doctor.
She kept saying over and over, “He’d see her! The doctor would see her! She’s standing over there in the corner, Frank. Smiling. She’s planning something. Oh, don’t let her come any nearer – don’t, Frank, don’t!”
Neither old Barker nor I saw anything. But I didn’t let him go for the doctor; perhaps I should have.
Toward evening of the second day Anne had a more lucid interval. She said: “Frank, do you remember? Was my apartment door open that day you came back from Charleston?” And when I said yes, she drew in her breath sharply: “I was afraid of that. It shouldn’t have been open – I always kept it shut and it had a spring lock.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books) Page 35