by Dean Koontz
He hopes she matches or exceeds his expectations. He hopes there will be no reason to hurt her.
In the master bathroom, he locates a pair of tweezers in the drawer where Paige keeps her makeup, cuticle scissors, nail files, emery boards, and other grooming aids.
At the sink, he holds his hand over the basin. Although he has already stopped bleeding, the flow starts again at each point from which he works loose a piece of glass. He turns on the hot water so the dripping blood will be sluiced down the drain.
Maybe tonight, after sex, he will talk with Paige about his writer’s block. If he has been blocked before, she might remember what steps he took on other occasions to break the creative impasse. Indeed, he is sure she will know the solution.
Pleasantly surprised and with a sense of relief, he realizes that he no longer has to deal with his problems alone. As a married man, he has a devoted partner with whom to share the many troubles of the day.
Raising his head, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the sink, he grins and says, “I have a wife now.”
He notices a spot of blood on his right cheek, another on the side of his nose.
Laughing softly, he says, “You’re such a slob, Marty. You’ve got to clean up your act. You have a wife now. Wives like their husbands to be neat.”
He returns his attention to his hand and, with the tweezers, picks at the last of the prickling glass.
In an increasingly good mood, he laughs again and says, “Gonna have to go out and buy a new computer monitor first thing tomorrow.”
He shakes his head, amazed by his own childish behavior.
“You’re something else, Marty,” he says. “But I guess writers are supposed to be temperamental, huh?”
After easing the final splinter of glass from the web between two fingers, he puts down the tweezers and holds his wounded hand under the hot water.
“Can’t carry on like this anymore. Not anymore. You’ll scare the bejesus out of little Emily and Charlotte.”
He looks in the mirror again, shakes his head, grinning. “You nut,” he says to himself, as if speaking with affection to a friend whose foibles he finds charming. “What a nut.”
Life is good.
7
The leaden sky settled lower under its own weight. According to a radio report, rain would fall by dusk, ensuring rush-hour commuter jam-ups that would make Hell preferable to the San Diego Freeway.
Marty should have gone directly home from Guthridge’s office. He was close to finishing his current novel, and in the final throes of a story, he usually spent as much time as possible at work because distractions were ruinous to the narrative momentum.
Besides, he was uncharacteristically apprehensive about driving. When he thought back, he could account for the time minute by minute since he’d left the doctor and was sure he hadn’t called Paige while in a fugue behind the wheel of the Ford. Of course, a fugue victim had no memory of being afflicted, so even a meticulous reconstruction of the past hour might not reveal the truth. Researching One Dead Bishop, he’d learned of victims who traveled hundreds of miles and interacted with dozens of people while in a disassociative condition yet later could recall nothing they’d done. The danger wasn’t as grave as drunken driving . . . though operating a ton and a half of steel at high speed in an altered state of consciousness wasn’t smart.
Nevertheless, instead of going home, he went to the Mission Viejo Mall. Much of the workday was already shot. And he was too restless to read or watch TV until Paige and the girls got home.
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, so he browsed for books and records, buying a novel by Ed McBain and a CD by Alan Jackson, hoping that such mundane activities would help him forget his troubles. He strolled past the cookie shop twice, coveting the big ones with chocolate chips and pecans but finding the will power to resist their allure.
The world is a better place, he thought, if you’re ignorant of good nutrition.
When he left the mall, sprinkles of cold rain were painting camouflage patterns on the concrete sidewalk. Lightning flashed as he ran for the Ford, caissons of thunder rolled across the embattled sky, and the sprinkles became heavy volleys just as he pulled the door shut and settled behind the steering wheel.
Driving home, Marty took considerable pleasure in the glimmer of rain-silvered streets, the burbling splash of the tires churning through deep puddles—and the sight of swaying palm fronds, which seemed to be combing the gray tresses of the stormy sky and which reminded him of certain Somerset Maugham stories and an old Bogart film. Because rain was an infrequent visitor to drought-stricken California, the benefit and novelty outweighed the inconvenience.
He parked in the garage and entered the house by the connecting door to the kitchen, enjoying the damp heaviness of the air and the scent of ozone that always accompanied the start of a storm.
In the shadowy kitchen, the luminous green display of the electronic clock on the stove read 4:10. Paige and the girls might be home in twenty minutes.
He switched on lamps and sconces as he moved from room to room. The house never felt homier than when it was warm and well lighted while rain drummed on the roof and the gray pall of a storm veiled the world beyond every window. He decided to start the gas-log fire in the family-room fireplace and to lay out all of the fixings for hot chocolate so it could be made immediately after Paige and the girls arrived.
First, he went upstairs to check the fax and answering machines in his office. By now Paul Guthridge’s secretary should have called with a schedule of test appointments at the hospital.
He also had a wild hunch his literary agent had left a message about a sale of rights in one foreign territory or another, or maybe news of an offer for a film option, a reason to celebrate. Curiously, the storm had improved his mood instead of darkening it, probably because inclement weather tended to focus the mind on the pleasures of home, though it was always his nature to find reasons to be upbeat even when common sense suggested pessimism was a more realistic reaction. He was never able to stew in gloom for long; and since Saturday he’d had enough negative thoughts to last a couple of years.
Entering his office, he reached for the wall switch to flick on the overhead light but left it untouched, surprised that the stained-glass lamp and a work lamp were aglow. He always extinguished lights when leaving the house. Before he’d gone to the doctor’s office, however, he’d been inexplicably oppressed by the bizarre feeling of being in the path of an unknown Juggernaut, and evidently he’d not had sufficient presence of mind to switch off the lamps.
Remembering the panic attack at its worst, in the garage, when he’d been nearly incapacitated by terror, Marty felt some of the air bleeding out of his balloon of optimism.
The fax and answering machines were on the back corner of the U-shaped work area. The red message light was blinking on the latter, and a couple of flimsy sheets of thermal paper were in the tray of the former.
Before he reached either machine, Marty saw the shattered video display, glass teeth bristling from the frame. A black maw gaped in the center. A piece of glass crunched under his shoe as he pushed his office chair aside and stared down at the computer in disbelief.
Jagged pieces of the screen littered the keyboard.
A twist of nausea knotted his stomach. Had he done this, too, in a fugue? Picked up some blunt object, hammered the screen to pieces? His life was disintegrating like the ruined monitor.
Then he noticed something else on the keyboard in addition to the glass. In the dim light he thought he was looking at drops of melted chocolate.
Frowning, Marty touched one of the splotches with the tip of his index finger. It was still slightly tacky. Some of it stuck to his skin.
He moved his hand under the work lamp. The sticky substance on his fingertip was dark red, almost maroon. Not chocolate.
He raised his stained finger to his nose, seeking a defining scent. The odor was faint, barely detectable, but he k
new at once what it was, probably had known from the moment he touched it, because on a deep primitive level he was programmed to recognize it. Blood.
Whoever destroyed the monitor had been cut.
Marty’s hands were free of lacerations.
He was utterly still, except for a crawling sensation along his spine, which left the nape of his neck creped with gooseflesh.
Slowly he turned, expecting to find that someone had entered the room behind him. But he was alone.
Rain pummeled the roof and gurgled through a nearby downspout. Lightning flickered, visible through the cracks between the wide slats of the plantation shutters, and peals of thunder reverberated in the window glass.
He listened to the house.
The only sounds were those of the storm. And the rapid thud of his heartbeat.
He stepped to the bank of drawers on the right-hand side of the desk, slid open the second one. This morning he had placed the Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol in there, on top of some papers. He expected it to be missing, but again his expectations were not fulfilled. Even in the soft and beguiling light of the stained-glass lamp, he could see the handgun gleaming darkly.
“I need my life.”
The voice startled Marty, but its effect was nothing compared to the paralytic shock that seized him when he looked up from the gun and saw the identity of the speaker. The man was just inside the hallway door. He was wearing what might have been Marty’s own jeans and flannel shirt, which fit him well because he was a dead-ringer for Marty. In fact, but for the clothes, the intruder might have been a reflection in a mirror.
“I need my life,” the man repeated softly.
Marty had no brother, twin or otherwise. Yet only an identical twin could be so perfectly matched to him in every detail of face, height, weight, and body type.
“Why have you stolen my life?” the intruder asked with what seemed to be genuine curiosity. His voice was level and controlled, as if the question was not entirely insane, as if it was actually possible, at least in his experience, to steal a life.
Realizing that the intruder sounded like him, too, Marty closed his eyes and tried to deny what stood before him. He assumed he was hallucinating and was, himself, speaking for the phantom in a sort of unconscious ventriloquism. Fugues, an unusually intense nightmare, a panic attack, now hallucinations. But when he opened his eyes, the doppelganger was still there, a stubborn illusion.
“Who are you?” the double asked.
Marty could not speak because his heart felt as if it had moved into his throat, each fierce beat almost choking him. And he didn’t dare to speak because to engage in conversation with a hallucination would surely be to lose his final tenuous grasp on sanity and descend entirely into madness.
The phantom refined its question, still speaking in a tone of wonder and fascination but nonetheless menacing for its hushed voice: “What are you?”
With none of the eerie fluidity and ghostly shimmer of either a psychological or supernatural apparition, neither transparent nor radiant, the double took another step into the room. When he moved, shadows and light played over him in the same manner as they would have caressed any three-dimensional object. He seemed as solid as a real man.
Marty noticed the pistol in the intruder’s right hand. Held against his thigh. Muzzle pointed at the floor.
The double advanced one more step, stopping no more than eight feet from the other side of the desk. With a half-smile that was more unnerving than any glower could have been, the gunman said, “How does this happen? What now? Do we somehow become one person, fade into each other, like in some crazy science-fiction movie—”
Terror had sharpened Marty’s senses. As if looking at his doppelganger through a magnifying glass, he could see every contour, line, and pore of its face. In spite of the dim light, the furniture and books in the shadowed areas were as clearly detailed as those items on which the glow of lamps fell. Yet with all his heightened powers of observation, he did not recognize the make of the other’s pistol.
“—or do I just kill you and take your place?” the stranger continued. “And if I kill you—”
It seemed that any hallucination he conjured would be carrying a weapon with which he was familiar.
“—do the memories you’ve stolen from me become mine again when you’re dead? If I kill you—”
After all, if this figure was merely a symbolic threat spewed up by a diseased psyche, then everything—the phantom, his clothes, his armament—had to come from Marty’s experience and imagination.
“—am I made whole? When you’re dead, will I be restored to my family? And will I know how to write again?”
Conversely, if the gun was real, the double was real.
Cocking his head, leaning forward slightly, as if intensely interested in Marty’s response, the intruder said, “I need to write if I’m going to be what I’m meant to be, but the words won’t come.”
The one-sided conversation repeatedly surprised Marty with its twists and turns, which didn’t support the notion that his troubled psyche had fabricated the intruder.
Anger entered the double’s voice for the first time, bitterness rather than hot fury but rapidly growing fiery: “You’ve stolen that too, the words, the talent, and I need it back, need it now so bad I ache. A purpose, meaning. Do you know? You understand? Whatever you are, can you understand? The terrible emptiness, hollowness, God, such a deep, dark hollowness.” He was spitting out the words now, and his eyes were fierce. “I want what’s mine, mine, damn it, my life, mine, I want my life, my destiny, my Paige, she’s mine, my Charlotte, my Emily—”
The width of the desk and eight feet beyond, eleven feet in all: point-blank range.
Marty pulled the 9mm pistol from the desk drawer, grasping it in both hands, thumbing off the safety, squeezing the trigger even as he raised the muzzle. He didn’t care if the target was real or some form of spirit. All he cared about was obliterating it before it killed him.
The first shot tore a chunk out of the far edge of the desk, and wood splinters exploded like a swarm of angry wasps bursting into flight. The second and third rounds hit the other Marty in the chest. They neither passed through him as if he were ectoplasm nor shattered him as if he were a reflection in a mirror, but instead catapulted him backward, off his feet, taking him by surprise before he could raise his own gun, which flew out of his hand and hit the floor with a hard thud. He crashed against a bookcase, clawing at a shelf with one hand, pulling a dozen volumes to the floor, blood spreading across his chest—sweet Jesus, so much blood—eyes wide with shock, no cry escaping him except for one hard low “uh” that was more a sound of surprise than pain.
The bastard should have fallen like a rock down a well, but he stayed on his feet. In the same moment that he slammed into the bookcase, he pushed away from it, staggered-plunged through the open doorway, into the upstairs hall, out of sight.
Stunned more by the fact that he’d actually pulled the trigger on someone than that the “someone” was the mirror image of himself, Marty sagged against the desk, gasping for breath as desperately as if he hadn’t inhaled since the double had first walked into the room. Maybe he hadn’t. Shooting a man for real was a whole hell of a lot different from shooting a character in a novel; it almost seemed as if, in some magical fashion, part of the impact of the bullets on the target redounded on the shooter himself. His chest ached, he was dizzy, and his peripheral vision briefly succumbed to a thick seeping darkness which he pressed back with an act of will.
He didn’t dare pass out. He thought the other Marty must be badly wounded, dying, maybe dead. God, the spreading blood on his chest, scarlet blossoms, sudden roses. But he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the wounds only looked mortal, maybe the brief glimpse he’d had was misleading, and maybe the double was not only still alive but strong enough to get out of the house and away. If the guy escaped and lived, sooner or later he’d be back, just as weird and crazy but even angrier, better prepared. Ma
rty had to finish what he started before his double had a chance to do the same.
He glanced at the phone. Dial 911. Get the police, then go after the wounded man.
But the desk clock was beside the phone, and he saw the time—4:26. Paige and the girls. On their way home from school, later than usual, delayed by piano lessons. Oh, my God. If they came into the house and saw the other Marty, or found him in the garage, they’d think he was their Marty, and they’d run to him, frightened by his wounds, wanting to help, and maybe he would still be strong enough to harm them. Was the pistol that he dropped his only weapon? Can’t make that assumption. Besides, the son of a bitch could get a knife out of the rack in the kitchen, the butcher’s knife, hide it against his side, behind his back, let Emily get close, then jam it through her throat, or deep into Charlotte’s belly.
Every second counted. Forget 911. Waste of time. The cops wouldn’t get there before Paige.
As Marty rounded the desk, his legs were wobbly, but less so as he crossed the room toward the hallway. He saw blood splattered on the wall, oozing down the spines of his own books, staining his name. A creeping tide of darkness lapped at the edges of his vision again. He clenched his teeth and kept going.
When he reached the double’s pistol, he kicked it deeper into the room, farther from the doorway. That simple act gave him a surge of confidence because it seemed like something a cop would have the presence of mind to do—make it harder for the perp to regain his weapon.
Maybe he could handle this, get through it, as strange and scary as it was, the blood and all. Maybe he would be okay.
So nail the guy. Make sure he’s down, all the way down and all the way out.
To write his mystery novels, he’d done a lot of research into police procedures, not merely studying police-academy textbooks and training films but riding with uniformed cops on night patrols and hanging out with plainclothes detectives on and off the job. He knew perfectly well how best to go through a doorway under these circumstances.