by Tina Amiri
In his own suite, he adjusted the contents of one of his shelves to accommodate the four-inch monitor and his new VCR—both of which connected to the covert camera in Morgen’s bedroom. Sandy took the four-pin connector and inserted it into the monitor. Then he turned thoughtfully toward his television set on the adjacent wall. He could probably even connect the camera unit to his TV where the entertainment was sure to look that much better. He’d never been such a fan of modern technology.
****
Night had every intention to shred the front page of the newspaper that he’d left in his room, but he really didn’t have a plan for the other couple hundred thousand copies still in circulation.
“Morgen!” commanded a foreboding voice as he tried to sneak upstairs.
He turned around to find Frederick at the base of the stairs, already in possession of his own copy, which he held up for Night.
“Isn’t this interesting?” he said, but without the humor that Doris had injected into her reaction. “It’s not every morning that I get a wake-up call from my campaign manager with this kind of riveting news.”
“It’s just a stupid tabloid,” Night said, borrowing Doris’s words.
“That is true,” Frederick replied. “However…” he smashed his knuckles on the photograph, “that is my Christmas tree in the background, my floor in the living room, my furniture, my doorway, my painting, my daughter’s sweater, and my son’s hair!” His face flushed deeply as he suppressed his words. “And I really don’t know how someone could have rigged this up.”
“I don’t know either,” Night’s voice flared and then cracked, “but it’s not real.”
“I hope like hell that it’s not real! Morgen, you’ve impressed me lately—so much—but I could never excuse this, and right now, I don’t have enough faith to discount it simply on your word. If this is real,” Frederick decreed, “then you don’t belong in this family. If this is real, I’ll take it you’ve chosen to embrace your roots and would, from this point forward, prefer to go by…” he snapped his fingers, coaxing the name from his lips, “Shannien.” He pitched the paper onto a bench in the foyer. “Tell me I’m wrong, Morgen.”
“You are wrong! Why can’t anyone see that nothing is ever how it looks!”
The frustration of being invisible, behind an eternal wall of secrets, ignited a fire behind Night’s eyes that, once again, threatened to incinerate a whole building. He fled the scene and insulated himself inside Morgen’s suite before another impetuous thought could shoot from his tongue. Despite his achievements, and the miles between where he’d come from and this, his discarded past still managed to antagonize him. Absently, he drifted to Morgen’s bedroom window and waited for his brother’s return, which he dreaded as much as he longed for it right now.
Chapter Eighteen
The 101 North left Waldport behind as the car drifted up the coastline. Morgen, sitting upright and alert since their last stop, reached forward and shut off the radio. “That’s the mailbox! This has to be the place. Go back!”
But it wasn’t the place and Morgen began to worry about the information he’d artfully wheedled out of his brother about his isolated home.
“I can see how Gramps got away with what he did. I mean, it’s not hard to make yourself invisible on the Oregon coast. It’s a wonder your girl, Daphne, ever found you at all—and what about delivery people, and this Lila who helped you? Did your private road have a name or was it just a really long driveway? There had to be a landmark, a mailbox, a number…?”
The next time Morgen ordered Steve to slow down, he was sure. Somehow, it even felt familiar to him. Steve parked the car on the side of the dirt road, just short of the clearing that surrounded the house.
Andrew’s Mercedes was on the property and many more of Night’s descriptions came to life through one sweeping glance: the beach, the veranda, the tree-stump… He instructed Steve to join him in about ten minutes, then he made his way to the front door, all the while drawing on his anger to stave off the strange sensation of becoming his brother.
Morgen’s nearly translucent hand pressed on the door handle and a shockwave coursed through him when the door easily fell open. Shivering, he glanced around the bottom floor. The sparingly furnished interior and hardwood floor lent to his chill. The emptiness played with his mind, spawning ideas of Night being the true psychopath, or con artist, having made everything up for kicks or some mercenary gain.
It had to be the place… First it had tried to turn him into Night, and when that failed, it turned him entirely against him for one excruciating minute. Back on task, Morgen concluded that if Daphne had scaled the rocks below Night’s bedroom window, then his room had to be upstairs, facing the bay. As though stepping into an unknown and parallel world, Morgen opened that door with due caution.
The scent of ocean escaped past him like trapped spirits. The bed had been left crisply made up in blue satiny sheets and covers. The dressers and other odd furniture looked stately beneath a thin layer of dust, and Morgen found himself disturbed only by the insincere luxury here. He walked through the room and peered out the window, just as his twin had done countless times.
Through a casual glance, he thought he caught some movement on the sand, below. He looked again and found himself staring into Daphne’s spectral face, but she took one look and faded away in disappointment. Morgen shook his head, not sure whether to attribute this vision to clairvoyance or the needle.
“Night!”
Eclipsed by the window behind him, Morgen returned Andrew’s multifaceted gaze.
“You’re not Night…”
“No,” Morgen thought. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even had his moment. “What do you mean, Daddy.”
The confusion on Andrew’s face lasted only a few seconds, and then it became clear he’d made up his mind.
“I thought I was deranged when I started to hear noises in the house, but then I saw your door half open. What’s happened to you? You’re different. You’ve lost weight. You look terrible.” Andrew rushed forward, gripped Morgen’s arms, and then embraced him with all of his desperation, frustration, and anger. At no response, he backed away. “What’s the matter with you? I want to hear you speak—or are you really a ghost? Speak!”
“Now you want me to speak?”
Andrew’s spine went up like a cat’s. “Yes, tell me… Didn’t you like it out there, Night? Didn’t you find everything you thought you’d missed? Was it not fulfilling?” he hammered. “Did you come here with some illusion about making amends, or did you just stop by to taunt me…now that you’re so worldly?”
Morgen lifted one eyebrow in a vague acknowledgment.
“If so, then you have no idea. I will never forget what you did to me, Night. I will never forget the way you left me and how you destroyed my restaurant, my life—so many lives!”
Even with Andrew shouting, Morgen became distracted by the calm and tragic howl of the wind outside. His companion still hadn’t arrived and already Steve seemed a thousand miles away, or like a memory. Morgen blinked to clear his head.
“Did you rebuild the restaurant?”
Andrew chuckled dryly. “After the scene you made? Maybe once people start to forget and I can stop hearing about how my once-respectable son just up and ran off with his little slut friend. The only good that’s come out of the blasted rumor is that nobody believes that anyone is missing.”
“Or dead… Yeah, that’s pretty lucky for a two-time killer.”
Andrew seemed immobilized by the attitude he perceived as coming from Night, so it caught Morgen by surprise when a tremendous weight landed on his face that rocked his balance. His rage swelled at the thought of Night being stuck here for all the years that he’d lived, not aware of the life he’d been deprived of.
“So what happens now?” Morgen asked, incessantly sniffing back the blood that instantly filled his nose. “Are we going to start again? Build a new restaurant and lie to people? Should I pretend I’m de
af again, and never speak to anyone, and stay all by myself all the time, until one of us finally dies?”
“That would have been ideal,” Andrew granted, “but nothing will ever be that easy again—least of all, for you.”
Where was Steve? Morgen slipped past Andrew, but the distance between them collapsed at the top of the staircase as Andrew pulled him back into a chokehold.
“This perpetual race to the bottom…” Andrew crooned.
Morgen couldn’t breathe. It hadn’t been an easy task for days, but the dam across his airway actually made him black out a few times on the steps.
“You don’t have any idea what you put me through—all the searching, the restaurant, the police, Lila…! I’d like to kick you straight to the bottom, but I’m afraid you’ll shatter.”
On the ground level, Andrew hustled him toward the front door. He sniffed at the faint scent of hair dye that lifted under his nose. “No…I don’t want you dead,” he continued, ignoring the clue. “I’ve spent far too much time preparing for your return. Oh, yes…” he assured in Morgen’s involuntary silence. “I’ll show you.”
Morgen tried to root himself, expecting Steve to barge in and turn the tables around, any second now. He regretted the belatedness of this trip. He could have taken greater command of the place—when he wasn’t dying quite as much.
Andrew adjusted his hold and, suddenly, he couldn’t even turn his head with the fierce grip against his scalp. He threw back an elbow, only to lose both his arms to just one of Andrew’s, but at least the pressure was off his throat. A last stab attempt to free himself failed when he stamped his heel back, but missed Andrew’s foot.
His mind continued to fade in and out. His hands and wrists, and the entire lengths of his arms pulsed with poison blood, and he had difficulty initiating each new breath as Andrew railroaded him into the corridor. Just for a moment, he surrendered to whatever lay ahead as his eyes turned listlessly to see the front door where his recruit should have revealed himself by now.
“Look, Night…” Andrew nodded at another door, directly opposite the main entrance. “It had always been hiding there, behind the paneling.”
“For fuck sake… Steve!”
“Did you bring somebody along…another problem for me to take care of?”
Andrew reinstated his previous chokehold while his other hand flipped back a latch on the old, narrow door.
Morgen squirmed, but his throat kept paying the price.
“I once kept all of your mother’s things down in there,” Andrew disclosed as he pried open the door. “But I finally took them all out—so you can try living in a black hole like the one I’ve been living in for so many months!”
As he resisted being pushed forward, Morgen saw the steep line of stairs that angled sharply into the cellar. He also saw how the wood on the inside of the door appeared to have fossilized, in mere decades, through the cool, damp climate that surfaced from the deep. Finally, he dropped all his weight and broke through the chokehold.
“Christ!” Morgen yelled into the blackness as Andrew punted him forward, but he caught the doorframe with his fingers.
“Night..!”
“Wrong!” Morgen pushed himself off. “Don’t you see it yet, Daddy…?” He had to regain his breath before finishing. “I’m the one you didn’t want.”
Andrew’s blue eyes darted all over Morgen. He instinctively glanced at his hands and noticed the color that had bled onto them through his clammy grip on Morgen’s hair. “I knew it immediately… I knew my Night couldn’t have changed so much, so quickly.” He shook his head in a quick shudder.
“Your Night…? Your Night would shock you ten times over if he were here!”
Andrew’s head swayed. “I don’t believe it. The sick little Morning... So, you managed to be saved.”
“Yeah…you could’ve chosen me. Who knows how I would’ve turned out—I might have been easier to handle. Night, from what I’ve seen, is way too crazy to care what happens to him, so you were damned from the start.”
There were tears in Andrew’s eyes, even as his anger finally detonated. He plucked Morgen forward and thrust him against the adjacent wall. “So, tell me…! Where is Night? Did he come with you, or did you leave him at home, with Brigitte, in California? Oh, yes…I know where you’re from.”
Morgen’s chronically weak lungs threatened to cave in. His mind battled against a head-rush as his eyes struggled to uncross.
“You’re still the same sick runt you were when you were born. Let’s return to the question…” He clutched Morgen by the front of his sweater—a sweater he’d once purchased for Night—and smashed his body against the wall a half dozen times before letting him crumble. “I wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, you useless curse, so buy yourself some time and talk!”
Blood trickled from the already fragile lining of his nose and he braced for the inevitable blow that would immortalize the silence, but then the door opened.
“Sorry, my friend,” Steve began, after assessing the scene. “I never loaded no gun before.”
Andrew balked, looking somewhat amused. “Saturday Night Special? Now you think you’re going to kill me?”
Morgen scrambled his way up the wall and stumbled over next to Steve.
“Just get out,” Andrew shuddered. “I didn’t want you here from the very beginning and you are still uninvited! And take this low-bred defective off my doorstep as well.” He lunged for the gun in Steve’s hand, but Morgen stepped between them.
“Not yet. I want to play a little game, Daddy. You can pretend to be Night.” He coughed blood into his hand, wiped it down his side, and through labored breaths, simply continued. “I’m going to pretend I’m you, okay? It’ll be fun.”
“Get out!” Andrew shrilled. When neither of them budged, he strutted toward a door inside the living room, presumably to find his own source of backup.
Morgen swiped the gun from Steve’s hand, pointed it at Andrew’s knee, and fired it. By the time Morgen completed a blink Andrew was writhing on the floor. The bullet had missed his knee, but it had drilled through his calf before going on to take out the leg of a nearby chair.
Steve clutched his head for a second. “Man…what are you doing? What if they can trace the gun?”
“Don’t worry,” Morgen said, his eyes locked on Andrew. “He won’t make any problems for us. He’s got things to hide, too…much bigger things. Don’t you, asshole?”
Andrew groaned and smacked the floor.
“How’re you doing there?” Morgen gibed. “I’ll hurry this along, for both our sakes, but first I want to know something. Why did you do it? Why did you ruin my brother’s life?”
“I didn’t ruin it,” Andrew scoffed through tortured breaths. “I gave him everything.”
Morgen sighed. “Yeah, and I go to confession every Sunday. Try again!”
“He didn’t understand…”
“Really…? Because I don’t understand either. Do you understand, Steve?”
Although half stunned, Steve rattled his head.
“You treated him like shit—my brother—and while I wish it wasn’t so, still your own blood!” Morgen gripped the gun in two hands and raised it to Andrew’s face.
“No…” Steve beseeched, cringing one second and pulling Morgen’s arm back in the next.
Morgen let his arms fall. “Tell me about my brother’s friend, Daphne. Do you think Night understands why she had to die?”
“She isn’t dead.”
Morgen kicked Andrew in the chest and knocked him flat; then he kicked him again.
Andrew’s breaths became frenzied. “Everything was her own doing… She ruined our lives!”
“So you took hers?” Morgen shoved him with the sole of his borrowed hiking boot, but Andrew barely moved. “How many people have you killed? My real mother, Daphne… Anyone else, lately?”
“I wish I’d killed you, brat. Leave, before—”
“No. I may not be able to keep this up
for nineteen years like you deserve, but I’m not going away that easy. To think it could have been me who you put through all this bullshit.”
Andrew still gasped for air. “You were never even a thought.”
“Well…” Morgen scratched his ear with the gun, “that’s not really fair either. I came with a convenient expiry date—and I could’ve learned the piano. I’m musical…just like Night. In fact, I just landed a music contract. I’m a rock star. Did you know that?”
“Oh, perfect…” Andrew tapped into some reserve of strength and lifted his shoulders. “The authorities will hear about this, Rock Star, and I’m sure you’ll be a popular little fuck where you’re going.”
Morgen smirked. He remembered one of Night’s stories and abandoned Andrew for a moment. “How are you going to call them?” he asked as he gave the telephone cable a fatal yank.
Andrew gawked, for once, speechless.
“They say twins can feel each other’s pain, so excuse me if I’m taking things a little too personal!”
Andrew grimaced, clutching his profusely bleeding leg. “You’re nobody’s twin… I don’t know what you are.”
“I’ll tell you what I am…” Morgen whispered, leaning close into Andrew’s face. “I’m your nightmare.” He trudged back over to Steve. “Now…what sort of gesture was that when you put all those lovely marks on my brother who you believe to be such a better pick?”
Andrew collapsed on his own arms, clearly aware of what was coming. His opposite hand left bloody fingerprints on the hardwood floor with every attempt to maneuver away from Morgen.
“No answer on that one, huh? Let’s try again. What did you use to do it?”
“I’ve had enough of this!” Andrew blasted. “Just finish what you came here to do and then get the hell out!”
Unexpectedly, Steve leaned forward. “Jus’ answer my friend so we can do that.”
“To hell with you both.”