Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  A sudden swoon of terror darkened her vision, made her dizzy on her feet: she imagined they were bringing her inside to show her Gemma’s body, still and cold and lifeless, her lips dark as a bruise.

  Years ago, she and Geoff had refused to accept the death of their only child. They had transgressed the natural order: they had taken their child back, after death had already claimed her.

  She couldn’t shake the idea that death had come, now, to settle the score.

  When the door opened and instead she saw Pete Rogers, bloodless and exhausted-looking and definitely alive, she almost cried out. He was sitting at a table wedged between the metal shelving, which had been cleared of everything but a few cardboard boxes—or maybe that was all the evidence of crime in this part of Lancaster County.‎ He was gripping a Styrofoam cup of what smelled like hot chocolate, and he had a blanket draped around his shoulders. The room was cold and extremely bleak, with a cement floor and exposed wire-encased lightbulbs.

  “It’s the only room that locks besides the drunk tank,” Agrawal said, as if he knew what Kristina was thinking. “I wanted to be sure he had privacy.”

  “Pete.” Kristina’s relief lasted only a second—fear grew almost immediately again inside her, a hard, cold metal thing that stuck in her throat. The night before, she’d gone instinctively for the Klonopin in her purse, only to find that suddenly her throat wouldn’t work to swallow. She literally could not get the pill down.

  She hadn’t been this sober in years. She hadn’t been this afraid, either.

  “Pete.” She went to him and knelt, taking his hands, which were cold, noting the bruised color of his eyelids and the capillaries broken across his cheeks and forehead. “Pete.”

  He showed no sign of having heard her.

  “He’s in shock,” Geoff said, as though it weren’t obvious.

  “One of the troopers picked him up right on the shoulder of the turnpike a quarter of an hour ago, near the intersection of Route 72,” Agrawal said. “My guy nearly plowed him.”

  “He needs a hospital,” Kristina said. She had a memory of seeing Pete, April, and Gemma laughing together at her birthday party, playing bocce barefoot on the lawn. Pete’s pants were rolled to the knees and Gemma had several paper cocktail umbrellas tucked behind her ear. She was laughing. Could that really have been only four days ago?

  “We’ve got a team from Lancaster General on their way now,” Agrawal said. “I wanted to bring you in first. In case . . .” Kristina didn’t miss the look Captain Agrawal gave her husband.

  “Gemma’s still out there.” Pete’s voice was so raw it hurt just to hear. It was as if he was speaking through a mouth full of thorns. He started to stand up, lost his balance, and sat down again. “I lost her. We have to find her.”

  “Shhh.” She put a hand on his forehead, which was clammy with sweat. She smoothed back his hair. She had met his mother once—a cheerful, round-faced woman who’d arrived with paint still smudged on one cheek. She was a kindergarten teacher, she’d explained, and Kristina had immediately envied her warm, chaotic friendliness. “It’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”

  He was grabbing the table as though he still worried he might fall down, even though he was sitting. “It was Calliope,” he said, his voice cracking over every syllable. “She must have had the whole thing planned from the start. Gemma tried to warn me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t believe her.” He was shaking. Kristina reached out and put a hand on his back, trying to rub some warmth into him. “There was so much blood. . . .”

  Immediately, it was as if the cold had flowed into her body as well. “What—what do you mean?” Memories swept suddenly through her head, brightly awful, like dead leaves: Gemma’s veins threaded with tubes and needles, like some kind of alien plant; Gemma’s mouth leaking blood the first time she’d lost a tooth; the thick Y-shaped scar across her chest, so similar to the incision that morticians made after death.

  “There were three of them,” Pete said. “One of them was just a kid.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kristina’s voice sounded loud in the little room. “What’s he talking about?”

  “He means those homicides off Hemlock,” Agrawal said quietly, avoiding Kristina’s eyes. She knew that something terrible had happened to one of the Amish families in the area, but she had deliberately tried not to listen. She had enough tragedy of her own. She couldn’t handle anyone else’s. “He was on the scene.” But Kristina had the feeling that there was more, that there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “I told Gemma to run,” Pete said. He wouldn’t look at her. He was staring at his fists, balled now in his lap. “They were coming after her. There was no other choice.”

  The cold made Kristina’s fingers and lungs tingle. “Who was coming after her?”

  Pete shook his head. It was as if he’d forgotten anyone else was in the room. “They thought she was Calliope,” he said. “That was the whole point. That was what Calliope wanted.”

  Kristina imagined herself freezing, like a pane of glass webbed with frost, filling with tiny cracks. “Who’s Calliope?”

  Pete met her eyes, finally. “Calliope’s one of Gemma’s replicas,” he said.

  “One of . . . ?” Kristina tried to take a step backward and knocked one of the shelving units behind her. There was nowhere to go, no space at all. She couldn’t breathe.

  “All right, that’s enough.” Geoff came forward and tried to put a hand on Kristina’s shoulder, but she jerked away. “The kid is in shock, Kristina. He needs to go the hospital, like you said.”

  “Numbers six through ten,” Pete said, as if he hadn’t heard. Now that he was looking at Kristina, she wished that he would look away. “Five in all. But Calliope wanted to be human.”

  “He’s confused.” Geoff’s voice seemed to reach her from a distance, as if she really were hearing him through a thick layer of ice. The air had frozen in her lungs. She couldn’t speak. She had the sense that she and Pete were alone at the bottom of a lake, that everyone else, the whole world, was held at bay by thousands of tons of water.

  “That’s why Calliope did it,” Pete said, in a whisper. “She wanted to switch places.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 22 of Lyra’s story.

  TWENTY-THREE

  GEMMA BLINKED INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AGAIN, tossed up by a hand of pain. Something screamed. Or rather, she screamed and it screamed, and it was impossible to tell who started first. Leathery wings swept her face and the tangle of her hair, and her voice reached registers she didn’t even know she could hit: a high-C, horror-movie scream that echoed back to her as the bat winged up toward the moon, probably just as scared as she was, knocking against the sides of the well in its effort to get out.

  It was silhouetted briefly, a black blur against the sky knotty with clouds and a moon just easing out of the darkness, and then it was gone, and with her terror ebbing, the pain came grinding back instead, and the memory of what had happened: the long, limping escape through the woods, the sudden realization that she was lost. The house in the glen—now, in memory, so obviously abandoned, maybe for a century—and the soft splinter of wood breaking apart beneath her.

  The well.

  She was at the bottom of a well, alone, in the middle of the woods.

  She was shivering. The well smelled, strangely, like the inside of a dirty produce drawer, like the chill of old vegetal rot. The mud was puddled with old water and debris, with a tangle of tree branches and miscellaneous trash. She was lying in the rot of the old well, and when she shifted, she heard the crunch of small animal bones beneath her. High above her, a portion of the well cover was still intact. It blotted out a sweep of sky and reminded her of a half-closed eyelid.

  “Hello?” she whispered. Of course no one answered. She cleared her throat and said, louder, “Hello?” Her voice rolled off the stones and then dropped.

  Panic came up from her stomach, shar
p-clawed and frantic, like some kind of rodent. She could barely sit up. Her back hurt; everything hurt. Nothing seemed broken, at least.

  “Hello!” she tried again. “Help me!” There must be someone out there, someone who would hear. The well tunneled her voice into echoes, so even when her voice began to crack she was momentarily surrounded by the cascading responses of her own words, help me. “Help me! Hello! Help!”

  She shouted, over and over, into the thin night air, but her voice, still raw from overuse, gave out quickly. It dropped into hoarse croaks and then into whispers. Finally, she couldn’t even do that, and when she opened her mouth, nothing came out but a soft whistling, like a leak from a faulty kettle.

  Still no help arrived. No one came. No one answered.

  There was no one around to answer, no one for miles and miles. Only the bats, blind and hungry, clicking their way through the dark.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 23 of Lyra’s story.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN THE CURDLED LIGHT OF a new dawn, while a hundred police officers from all over the state began to gather in the parking lot outside the Bruinsville police station to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and blink the sleep out of their eyes, while four bloodhounds lashed to the wrist of their handler sniffed experimentally at shoes and car tires and the crusted remnants of someone’s dropped bacon, egg, and cheese, Gemma woke up to the pressure of a light rain that had started hours earlier and to a voice calling softly to her.

  She blinked. Rain blurred her vision, and she swiped it from her eyes, disappointed when she realized that the voice, and her name, must have been part of a dream. There was no one above her, no one looking down on her at all: just the sky, a small and narrow mouth, graying above her. Staring up at the knit of clouds, she thought of the surface of a distant mirror.

  A shadow moved: she saw her own reflection peering down at her as she peered up at it.

  She blinked again through the long tunnel of rain.

  Calliope.

  “Hello, Gemma,” Calliope said. Then Gemma knew that hers was the voice she had heard calling softly to her in her sleep.

  It took Gemma a long time to sit up. An eternity to claw, inch by inch, to her feet. “Calliope.” Her mouth was dry. She opened it to the rain. “Please. Help me.”

  Calliope’s face was a small, shifting pattern of shadows. “Don’t be afraid,” she said in a sweet voice, like the subtle pressure of a razor on Gemma’s skin. “Be a brave girl, now.”

  Calliope disappeared again. When Gemma opened her mouth, when she screamed, she felt as if more fear flooded in, instead of being expelled.

  “Please.”

  Calliope reappeared almost immediately, and Gemma felt a small flicker of hope. Calliope had murdered all those people. Calliope was sick. She was evil. But she was still someone. She was a chance. Gemma couldn’t stand to be alone. She couldn’t bear it.

  “Please, Calliope.” She licked her lips. “I—I want to help you. If you get me out of here, you can come and live with me. We can be like—like sisters.”

  “Sisters?” Calliope repeated the word in a puzzled tone of voice.

  “Like friends,” Gemma said desperately, realizing Calliope likely didn’t know what sisters were. “Like best friends, who share everything.”

  For a long time, Calliope looked at her. She seemed to be considering it. Gemma allowed herself to hope.

  Then Calliope said, “I’m tired of sharing.”

  This time, when she vanished from the lip of the well, Gemma heard almost immediately the scrape of something heavy on the ground. And then a portion of the sky above turned black. Gemma thought, confusedly, of an eclipse.

  “Good-bye, Gemma.” Calliope was invisible, hidden somewhere behind the curtain of black that began to inch slowly across the opening of the well.

  A door, or some kind of table: Calliope must have found it in one of the old cabins.

  She was using it to cover the well.

  She was using it to seal Gemma inside.

  Terror turned Gemma inside out. “No!” She pounded the walls with her fists, as inch by inch the daylight narrowed to a finger, to a line, to a single point above her. “No! Please! No!”

  The covering slid into place. Now she could see nothing but a faint gray web of sky, where gaps in the planks revealed razor-thin slices of daylight. Calliope’s voice, when she spoke, was so faint Gemma couldn’t be sure, afterward, that she hadn’t imagined it.

  “Good-bye.”

  Gemma screamed for hours. She screamed, again and again, calling for Calliope, calling for someone to help. But no one answered—only the rain, scissoring through the rot of old plywood, a quiet shushing.

  She slept again. She woke up crying, from a dream of rescuers, of friendly voices drawing closer. Wishful thinking, like people who saw mirages of floating water in the desert.

  But then, once again, she heard them.

  She sat up as quietly as she could, as if by making too much noise she would frighten off the distant voices. And for a second, she thought she had: she couldn’t hear them anymore, and she strained so hard to listen that she felt the effort traveling all the way through her jaw.

  Then they came again, nearer this time. She could make out only a few phrases, which carried through the woods and, like water going off a cliff, tumbled down into the well: “clear,” “no sign,” “radio.” Cops. So someone had been sent to find her. In all likelihood, that meant Pete had escaped and found help.

  She was saved.

  “Down here,” she yelled, and was horrified when instead what came out was a fragmented whisper, like the rough sound of dry leaves skittering in the wind. She could barely hear it over the drumming of her heart. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Help me. Please. I’m down here!”

  A whisper. A croak. A fish opening and closing its mouth soundlessly beneath the water.

  She’d screamed for hours.

  She’d screamed herself hoarse.

  Already, the cops were drifting away—their words lost shape and edge, and their voices became tones, low notes of regret and disappointment. She grabbed a piece of wood from the splintered pile next to her and tried to beat it against the stone, but it crumbled moistly in her hand.

  Help me.

  Please.

  Please.

  She crawled, digging a hand into the loam of rot at the bottom of the well, until she found a rock. Loosing it from the mud, she drove it hard against the side of the well, again and again, rhythmically, and the sound traveled as a shock from her wrist to her elbow and up to her teeth.

  But it was too late.

  She was alone again.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 24 of Lyra’s story.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SHE WATCHED THE RAIN BEAD along the fine prism of a spider’s web. The spider, black-bodied with furred white-and-black legs, had been at it for hours, leaping and soaring beneath the splintered remains of two shattered boards, trying to restore what had been lost when Gemma had fallen. It was amazing how pretty the web looked in the rain, in the trickle of light that reached her down here.

  She lay there, cheek pressed to the mud, breathing in the smell of rotted wood and leaf rot, surprised that she wasn’t afraid, wasn’t in pain, wasn’t feeling much of anything. She was content simply to watch the spider. She wondered how many times over the spider had seen its own web destroyed, and how many times it had simply begun to reweave. Ten? Twenty? One hundred?

  She wondered if Pete was okay, and if he’d made it back to civilization, whatever that meant. She wondered if he’d managed to convince anyone of the truth, or whether he’d been shunted off into some psychiatric hospital.

  She had no idea what time it was, only that it had been hours since the voices had gone, and so far they hadn’t come back.

  In Chapel Hill, her classmates would be drinking bad coffee in the cafeteri
a, finishing last-minute homework assignments, sweating through pop quizzes, ducking outside to smoke weed behind the music building.

  She had to get up. Her stomach hurt. She had to use the bathroom. There was a bad smell permeating the air; she realized that it was coming from the filthy cloth still tightly wrapped around her hand.

  She had to get out of the well. Not tomorrow. Not when—or if—someone found her. Now. Today.

  She kicked through the rubble at the bottom of the well. Wood splinters. A soda can—that got her interest, that was good, it meant there were other people who came this way, hikers or picnickers, and she couldn’t be that far from help. She found a textbook, too, from someone’s history class—the pages warped, the type blurry and mostly indecipherable. That almost, almost made Gemma smile. She and April had hurled their biology textbooks onto the train tracks once, just to watch them get mowed over, even though both of their parents docked them allowance for the cost of a replacement.

  There was no ladder. No booster rocket. No flare gun, or charged cell phone. Big surprise.

  The well walls were moss-slicked but studded with rocks that made decent handholds. She wished now more than ever she’d been allowed to participate in gym—her mom had always insisted she be excused, claiming a weak heartbeat, concerned that Gemma might flatline in the middle of a game of dodgeball—and that she’d learned rock climbing during the aerial unit last fall. She couldn’t climb one-handed, anyway, but when she tried to use her left hand, thinking that with four good fingers, she’d be okay, the pain was so bad she nearly peed herself and stumbled backward, gasping.

  So. She couldn’t climb.

  She thought of piling all the rotted wood together, stacking it carefully in a cross-hatch pattern, hoping that by some miracle of geometry she would be able to climb the pile like a footstool and reach the top of the well. But the wood was soft and rotten and there wasn’t much of it to begin with: it boosted her barely a foot. Her voice was still shot, still coming out in a bare croak, like the throaty wail of a dying frog.