Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  Night hadn’t fallen yet, but the room around me was dark. The heavy curtains were closed. In the dense shadows, I could barely distinguish a kitchen chair that had been pulled into the corner of the bedroom. Someone was sitting in it. A dark shape watched me. I could hear his breathing and the rustle of his clothes as he moved. He knew I was awake now. With the scrape of a match, I saw a tiny flame illuminating the skin of his hands. Then the sting of cigarette smoke made its way to me.

  “Hello, Dylan,” my doppelgänger said.

  He pushed himself off the chair and came and stood over the bed. I stared into a black mirror, his face identical to mine. He had the collar of my father’s leather jacket pulled up, framing his neck like the wings of a crow. Under it, he wore a collarless olive-colored shirt, untucked and misbuttoned. He had wild, messy dark hair, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The bones of his face jutted out in angles that looked sharp enough to make you bleed. He was the same as me in every physical way, but we were two different people. His mouth had no expression, whereas Karly had always told me she could read my mood by my lips. Given the things he’d done, I expected to see cruelty shining in his blue eyes, but his fixed gaze offered no evidence of his sadism. The bubbling cauldron inside him had to be at the bottom of a deep well.

  “You didn’t have to kill Tai,” I said.

  He didn’t answer right away. He examined me with the same intensity I’d given him. With two fingers, he freed the cigarette from his mouth, tilted his chin, and exhaled gray smoke. Then he said with a shrug, “I do what I want.”

  The other Dylan retrieved the wooden chair. He put it next to the bed and sat down, folding his legs with the black heel of his dress shoe balanced on his other knee. He took the cigarette and offered me a drag with a flick of his eyebrows. I shook my head.

  “I’m glad to finally see you up close,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Most of the Dylan Morans out there are dull little people. Frigid, depressed, beaten down. Look at this one, letting his wife dress him up like a Ken doll. It’s hard for me to respect someone like that. But you fought back. You came after me. It makes me think you’re more like me than the others.”

  “I’m nothing like you.”

  He gave me a quick, cynical laugh. “Oh, come on. You want to kill me, don’t you? That’s why you’re here. That was your plan. If I let you, you’d wrap your hands around my throat and choke the life out of me. Admit it. We’re not so different.”

  “I’m trying to stop you from killing anyone else. That’s the difference.”

  “Yeah, you’re a hero, and I’m the devil. You have no innocent blood on your hands.” He leaned close, engulfing me in the smoke of his cigarette, and whispered in my ear. “But then why is Roscoe dead in your world? Why is Karly dead? You killed them, not me.”

  I flailed against the bonds but couldn’t free myself. I stared at him with murder in my eyes. He was right. I would have strangled him then and there if I could.

  He grinned, as if he’d made his point. Then he got up from the chair and went to the closet and began taking out men’s clothes, which he draped across the bed piece by piece like a fashion show. “Relax. I’m just baiting you. I don’t apologize for who I am. Unlike most of our other twins, I accept it. So should you.”

  “I can’t imagine becoming someone like you. Doing the things you’ve done.”

  He shrugged, as if we were talking about the ethnic foods we liked and didn’t like. As he reviewed the clothes he’d taken from the closet, he held up a Hawaiian shirt from the bed and rolled his eyes. Then he sat down in the chair again.

  “Really? You’ve spent your whole life afraid of turning into your father. Why is it so strange to meet a Dylan Moran who did?”

  His one cigarette was done, so he took the time to light another. Every motion he made was unhurried. When he’d savored a few puffs, he leaned close to me, with curiosity in his voice.

  “Let me ask you something. If you could go back to that day, what would you do? You know what I’m talking about. Dad took the gun and fired. Mom was dead. You’re sitting in the corner. What would you do differently?”

  “I was a kid,” I said, trying to make myself believe it this time. “There’s nothing I could have done.”

  “Not true. I did something.”

  Oddly, I found that I had to know. “What did you do?”

  “I killed him. I charged him, knocked him over, took the gun, and blew his head off. I got revenge for our mother.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not? Because you were a coward, and I wasn’t? Because you wish you’d done the same thing as me?”

  “I don’t wish that.”

  “No? Then why do you keep getting into fights with men who abuse their partners? It’s because when the chips were down, you didn’t stand up for our mother. You did nothing, and it eats you alive.”

  I felt myself breathing hard. I wanted to scream a denial, but he wasn’t wrong. Yes, I’d dreamed about doing what this other Dylan had done. This mirror of myself, this serial killer, knew me better than I knew myself. A little smirk of triumph crossed his face as I looked away.

  “See?” he announced, easing back in the chair and sucking on his cigarette. “I’m the ultimate Dylan Moran. I do what all of you wish you could do, and I get away with everything. Killing my father? They let me off. I was just a traumatized kid. In high school, I kept beating kids up, but they didn’t do a thing to me. Oh, that poor boy, he had such a tough upbringing. They’d send me to detention, or send me to a counselor, and then I’d do it again. Sound familiar?”

  I frowned. Yes, it did.

  “So I just kept raising the stakes. I wanted to see how far I could go. But I already knew where I was headed. I knew the line I wanted to cross. It’s how I’m wired. Somewhere inside you, you’ve got the same code, whether you like it or not.” He shot me a look that said he was familiar with all my secrets. “Who was the first girl you slept with? Diana Geary, right?”

  There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “We met on a train,” I said, because it was obvious the same thing had happened to him. “I was seventeen. She was older, twenty-two. We started talking and went back to her place, and then she got me drunk on tequila, and we ended up in bed. She was feeling bad because her boyfriend had dumped her, and I was the consolation prize.”

  “I met Diana Geary on a train, too,” the other Dylan replied. “Same as you. We had sex.”

  He stopped. He waited for me to ask, and I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Then what?”

  “Then after we were done, I suffocated her with a pillow and cut off her head.”

  “Oh, shit.” I struggled against the ropes that held me again, but I couldn’t move.

  “And do you know what happened after I killed her? Not a damn thing. No one found out. No one knew it was me. Once I figured that out, once I knew I could do anything, I tried different methods, different victims. The violence itself wasn’t really the high. The thrill was knowing I could get away with it. By the time I turned twenty-six, I’d killed fourteen people. The police had no idea.”

  “You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

  He shrugged off my loathing, as if moral and immoral were just mirror images of each other.

  “I could have kept going like that for a long time, but everything changed on my twenty-sixth birthday. Do you remember what you did that day?”

  Actually, I did. It was a memorable thing to do on my birthday. “I saw a shrink.”

  “That’s right. Court-ordered therapy for anger management. After a bar fight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who did you see?”

  “Her name was Vanessa Kirby.”

  Dylan nodded. “Yeah, I was supposed to see Dr. Kirby, too, but she was sick that day and didn’t show up. So I saw someone else. There was a shrink with an office on the same floor, and
I figured, what the hell? All I needed to do was check off a box on my court papers. Guess who I saw?”

  My brow furrowed. “Who?”

  “Eve Brier.”

  I swore under my breath.

  “Yeah, isn’t it funny how things work out? Eve was smart. She really got me. She told me that I felt guilty about killing my father and getting away with it. She said I felt an intense need to be punished, so I kept putting myself in situations that proved I was a bad person. Of course, I hadn’t told her about any of the other people I’d killed, but I guess that would have just proved her point.”

  Dylan got up from the chair again. He grabbed a skinny-fit dress shirt in deep purple, with a checkered design. He held it up on the hanger. “What do you think of this shirt? Can I pull it off?”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Is it stylish? Maybe with a button vest? There’s not a lot to choose from here.”

  “You want fashion tips? Are you kidding me?”

  He shrugged and took off the leather jacket and unbuttoned his olive shirt. When he slipped it off, I noticed a pattern of scars all across his bare chest, like cuts made with a razor blade. It was obvious they’d been self-inflicted. I understood why Eve thought that this Dylan felt a desire for punishment. He’d been taking out his self-hatred on his body for years.

  “Anyway, that was when she told me about the Many Worlds thing,” he went on. “Did you think it was bullshit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But Eve wanted to try it on someone, and I thought, what the hell? She said experiencing other worlds would help me deal with the bad choices I’d made. So I let her inject me with her little cocktail. That was a ride, huh? There I was in the Art Institute, surrounded by all of these other versions of myself. Except I was the only one who knew what it meant. The others were oblivious. Knowing what was going on made it even worse. The more of them I saw, the more I felt like I was cracking up. Is that what it was like for you?”

  I didn’t want to answer, but I did. “Yes, that’s exactly how it was.”

  He nodded, as if it made him happy to hear that. Then, without saying anything more, he turned around and went into the bathroom. With his back to me, he found a razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet, and he began shaving his face with slow, measured strokes. He was doing that with Tai’s body still in the tub, where he’d drowned her. We could see each other in the mirror, and he smiled a little as I kept struggling to free my hands and feet. But I couldn’t.

  Eventually, he finished, washed his face, and came back, drying his now-smooth skin with a towel. He sat down and continued his story. “I didn’t try to go anywhere that first time. I just got the lay of the land, you know? Then I said the word—you know the word—and boom, there I was back with Eve. She asked if the treatment helped me, and I told her it did. That was true, but not in the way she was thinking. I was already starting to wonder if I could really go into one of these worlds. So I said I wanted more sessions. The next time, I followed one of the other Dylans out the door. I had no idea what to expect, but holy shit. I was totally lost. When I woke up, it was days later. I was on the can in a men’s room in Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. It made no sense, right? Except when I got out into the mall, I spotted my double, and I followed him. I never let him see me, but I got to know his whole life. I stayed there for a week or so, and finally I said the safe word to get the hell out of there. Same thing, there I was, back in Eve’s office, and like half an hour had passed on her end. I told her I wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to go back. Only this time I knew what to do.”

  “Kill,” I murmured.

  “Oh, yeah. I followed another Dylan into his life, and I watched him. Studied him. Figured out his routines. Then I did an experiment. I went into his job at the hotel while he was at a meeting somewhere else. Nobody knew. Nobody suspected a thing. I mean, why would they? So then I slept with his wife. She thought it was the best sex they’d ever had. I loved that. And then on a night when I knew he was home alone, I picked up a girl at a bar and went to her place.”

  I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming.

  “And then I cut out her heart.”

  I swore, over and over and over.

  “The next day, I watched from the park as the police arrested this other Dylan Moran. They had him on camera at the bar. He’d given his name to the bartender. They had his fingerprints in her apartment. They took him away, screaming that he was innocent. I’d never had a high like that. The thrill of killing wasn’t even close to the thrill of watching Dylan Moran suffer for my crimes. Of all things, it turned out that Eve was right about me. I really did want the punishment. I wanted everybody to know that Dylan Moran was an evil, terrible person who should be put away forever. But the best thing was, I could do it over and over and never stop. There was always another world, another Dylan to destroy.”

  “The perfect crime,” I said.

  “The perfect crime,” he agreed. “You’re right.”

  He put on the checked purple shirt he’d found earlier, and then he went back to the closet and grabbed a gray vest. He changed pants, too, switching from jeans to black slacks with tapered legs. He slipped his feet into loafers. He took one of the cologne bottles from the nightstand, opened it, and winced as he inhaled. Even so, he dabbed a little on his face. I could smell the musk. He sat down again and checked his watch and obviously concluded that he had time for one more cigarette. He was loosening up, enjoying himself now as he blew smoke up into the blades of the ceiling fan.

  “Then there was you,” he went on. “I’ve done this so often now that I try to make the crimes fit the punishment. And with you, well, once I got to know you, I knew what to do. I started killing women who looked exactly like your wife. Sooner or later, Detective Bushing would show up, all the evidence in hand, your pretty wife shocked to realize she was married to a killer. But after Karly died in the river, I decided to make things more interesting. I decided to let you see me. I’d never done that before. I wanted to watch you disintegrate as you lost your mind. It added a nice little twist. But you surprised me. You figured it out. And then you used Eve to come after me. Knowing you were on my trail forced me to improvise. I had to move fast. I also couldn’t have two other Dylans in this world, so I took care of one by the river. Now it’s just you and me.”

  “So what happens next?” I asked. “Do you kill me, too?”

  “It’s not about the killing. Remember? It’s about the punishment.”

  He left the bedroom, and I could hear him opening a drawer in the kitchen. When he came back, he held two serrated knives in his hand. He slipped one into his pocket and then put the other on the bed just out of the reach of my fingers.

  “It may take you a while, but you should be able to figure out how to get hold of the knife and free yourself,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you can come after me, and we’ll see who wins.”

  “Or maybe I’ll just wait here and take my chances,” I replied. “The police are going to have a hard time charging me with Tai’s murder if they find me tied to the bed. They’ll know I didn’t do it.”

  “You won’t wait here,” my doppelgänger replied with a strange degree of confidence.

  “No?”

  “No.” He calmly smoothed the sleeves of his purple shirt. “You have a date with Karly tonight. Remember?”

  Suddenly, I understood.

  Suddenly, the horror of what he was doing became clear. The dress clothes. The smooth shave. The musk cologne. My body wrenched against the bonds that held me, making the entire bed frame rattle on the floor. “Stay away from her! Don’t go near her! Don’t do this!”

  He took the knife from his pocket and dangled the blade in front of my eyes.

  “You couldn’t save Karly in your own world,” Dylan told me. “So this should be very interesting. Do you think you can save her in this one?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Ka
rly.

  I was going to lose her again. This predator with my face was going to meet her and kill her.

  I had to stop him, but I had almost no time. Night was falling fast, which meant the time of our rendezvous wasn’t far away. Meanwhile, I was alone and trapped in the apartment. Alone with Tai’s body haunting me from the bathroom. Another woman I’d failed to rescue.

  I shouted for Edgar, but he could barely hear the television even when it was turned up to full volume. I called for help at the top of my lungs, hoping to hear the thud of movement on the wooden floor over my head, but I heard nothing. Edgar was asleep in front of his game shows.

  I needed to do this myself.

  Dylan had left the kitchen knife just outside my grasp near the headboard. I jerked my body straight up, trying to jiggle the knife toward me. It moved a tiny bit toward my outstretched fingers, but it also slid dangerously close to the edge of the mattress. Where the knife was now, I could just touch the bottom of the handle with the tip of my middle finger. Another fraction of an inch, and I would be able to slide it into my hand.

  Again I thrust my body fiercely upward. All four posts of the bed clanged up and down on the floor. The vibration bounced the knife closer, but the blade rotated, and the black handle crept over the side of the bed. I saw it falling in slow motion, and I was able to pinch the point of the sharp metal between two of my fingers, but it cut me, and I lost my grip. The knife dropped to the floor.

  Now I had no way to escape.

  For several more minutes, I struggled uselessly. However, I noticed that as the bed shook, a lamp on my nightstand kept moving. The lamp had a heavy base and a delicately fluted glass column rising to a conical shade. Glass could break. Glass could cut. I jolted the bed again, and the lamp wobbled. If it fell, there was no way to predict the direction it would go, but I had to take the chance. I hurled myself up and down one more time, watching the marble base of the lamp nudge over the side of the nightstand. Another shudder, and the thing would topple.