Doppelganger (14 page)

“Sorry.”

“Forget it,” Amber said. “I should have done it a long time ago.”

She squeezed my hand and nuzzled closer. We were both quiet for a while, and pretty soon everything that had happened that day finally caught up with me and I felt myself drifting away. Just before I fell asleep, she whispered to me in the dark.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“I don't have one.”

There was a long pause.

“That's not right,” I heard her say. Then I was gone.

 

A sound woke me later in the night, followed by a steady shaking beside me in the bed. My heart leaped into my throat, then I remembered where I was.

Amber was crying. I wanted to comfort her, but something held me back. There was something in the sound of her crying that told me I shouldn't, though I couldn't say what it was. All I could do was stare at the glowing digits of her alarm clock and count the minutes as they crept by. Even after she fell back asleep, I kept counting. Minute after minute, hour after hour, I watched the numbers change until morning.

Amber smuggled me out of the house the next morning with no trouble. She got me up early and led me downstairs and out to her car in the garage. I lay down in the backseat and waited for another hour or so before she came out and drove us to school. From there, the rest of the day slipped by in a hazy sort of way. I felt like I was in some kind of movie or TV show where nobody else was real. Except for Amber. When I saw her at lunch, she gave me a shy sort of smile and we sat at one end of a table, away from everyone else. We didn't say much to each other. It was like, now that I wasn't Chris anymore, we were kind of strangers all of a sudden. But not in a bad way. It's like we really were starting over, and it felt good because it was real, because I wasn't alone anymore.

Amber had a dentist appointment after school, but she dropped me off at home on her way there. Barry was still at work, and Echo hadn't gotten back yet. We made plans to get together tomorrow, and then I said good-bye and went inside. It felt strange to be back in the house. I'd only
been away since last night, but it felt like forever. I walked past the hole Barry had punched in the wall last weekend—the pieces of cracked drywall around the edges of the circle were still pushed in, like a mouth full of broken teeth—and went into the kitchen. To my surprise, it was clean. The dishes had been washed and put away, the table wiped. The scene had been cleared.

Not long after that, Echo got home.

“Did you have fun last night?” I asked. “With your friend, I mean.”

She shrugged. “We watched a video.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she said in a chipper sort of voice, but I could see the memory of last night in her eyes. She was still stuck with it. I guess all of us would be for a while.

We both spent the afternoon in our respective rooms, her reading, me watching TV. Then Barry got home. I watched him through the window as he got out of the car and headed in with a couple of pizza boxes in his arm, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his mouth. I could tell there was something different about him, even in the way he walked. He sort of shuffled toward the door. He seemed smaller somehow, almost stooped, like the pizza boxes were made of concrete or something.

I peeked out into the hall as he passed through, then left my room and went down the hallway, pausing in the kitchen doorway.

Barry had just put the pizza boxes on the counter and was turning toward the fridge when, seeing me, he stopped. I could see the bruises along his throat, slight but plainly visible, not to mention the cut lip and swollen eye.
I wondered how he'd explained them to the people at work, to his boss. He didn't say anything. He just sort of gazed at me with this hollow look tinged with the remnants of fear, and for a second I panicked, wondering if he'd caught a glimpse of those doppelganger eyes. I didn't think so. If he had, he would've been more afraid.

But there was something else in Barry besides fear. He reached into the refrigerator for a beer, then grabbed one of the pizzas and brushed by me into the living room. As I watched him, I tried to figure out what it was, but I couldn't. It was only later, as Echo and I sat at the kitchen table eating pizza and listening to the TV blaring from the other room, that I realized what I'd seen, not just in his eyes but in every part of his body. It was defeat. Total deflation. You'd think it would've made me happy to see him so broken, but for some reason it didn't. It made me feel a little sick, to tell you the truth, because it was me who'd done that to him.

 

For the next week Barry and I pretty much avoided each other. That first weekend I spent most of the time out of the house with Amber. Echo stayed with a friend Saturday and Sunday. When I did see Barry, he was on the couch in the living room, drinking beers and watching TV. He didn't watch football—guess I'd turned him off from it. Sure, we spoke a few times, but we really didn't say anything—nothing real, anyway—and whether we hated each other more than ourselves for what had happened, I really couldn't say.

The rest of the week went pretty much the same way, with Echo and me taking care of one another and Barry
slinking around the house with his tail between his legs. Amber and I spent more and more time together, going for walks after school to the mall or to the lake, or going to the library to study together, wherever we could go that wasn't home for either of us.

All in all, it was a pretty good situation. Good enough that I'd convinced myself that I could go on being Chris forever. Which was exactly when I ran into trouble.

It started with an itch, right along my back down at the base of the spine. It wasn't too bad at first, just a little itch before bed, but it was the beginning. By the time Thursday came along, I'd developed a bit of a rash across my stomach, and in general my skin started to feel dry and kind of flaky. It had been three weeks, and I knew I was starting to lose the form. Just a little bit, but it was enough to scare me.

As I lay in bed that Thursday night, half watching the TV, I wondered how long I had. I'd gone out to the movies again with Amber earlier that night and had spent most of the time squirming in my seat, trying not to scratch. She didn't say anything, and maybe she didn't even notice, but I knew it would only be a matter of time before she did. I'd have to let her know what was going on eventually. I just didn't want to—not now, not when things were going so well. Not when things were getting started.

But that wasn't even the worst part.

Flicking through the channels, I came across the local eleven o'clock news. I didn't really notice at first what was going on—the backdrop of woods behind the newswoman seemed like it could have been anywhere. Then the camera shifted and I noticed a police officer and then another and
then the edge of a familiar white car. I turned up the volume.

“…police are telling us that the hunters who came across the Subaru wagon said it was in the shape you see it now. And Kip, as I'm standing here looking at it, let me tell you, the thing is trashed. Whoever abandoned it here sure wanted to leave a mess for the authorities.”

Goddam hunters
, I thought.
They find everything.

The camera flashed for a moment to the anchor in the studio.

“Sharon, do we know, in fact, that this is Jill Vitelli's car?”

“Yes, Kip. State police confirmed just moments ago that this is the car authorities have been searching for. What's not clear, however, is how long ago the Springfield killer abandoned it here or why it was left in such condition. Certainly one speculation is that the level of rage leading to this sort of destruction could be an important key in understanding what kind of person we're dealing with.”

“What else do you have for us, Sharon?”

“Well, Kip, police say they're going to begin an extensive search of Bakersville and the surrounding area over the next few days in the hope that some clue will emerge that might lead them to Jill Vitelli's killer. The authorities are asking anyone who has any information to call the state police. Back to you, Kip.”

I flicked the TV off and fell back in bed. All of a sudden, I was wide awake as the adrenaline began pumping through me.

I was pretty sure the police wouldn't find the killer—whoever had abandoned the car in Parson Woods was long
gone. But what I wasn't sure about was what else the police might discover in the process of looking.

I'd been nervous already about leaving Chris stuffed in that culvert just waiting for someone to come along and find him, but now I was downright terrified. The idea of dozens of cops combing through the area with dogs and God knows what else made it just about impossible to sleep, and when I did, I dreamed about it, which was even worse.

In my nightmare I was walking up and down the train tracks, and no matter where I went, I could hear Chris calling out. As he did, a crowd gathered, coming out of the woods in bunches.

“Here I am!” he kept shouting as Barry, Sheila, Echo, Coach, and everyone else I knew kept coming closer and closer to the culvert. I tried to distract them, tried to tell them the noise was coming from the nearby woods, but they wouldn't listen to me, and pretty soon the pack had gathered around the culvert just as the sun was setting. They pulled the roll of plastic out, and the next thing I knew, Chris was ripping his way out of it and standing up. His skin was all rotten and discolored, like the zombies in those old movies on TV, and he turned toward me with everyone else behind him.

He didn't say anything to me. He just lifted his arm and pointed a shriveled, bony finger in my direction, looking at me with his sad, swollen eyes, and began walking toward me. It was just like that banquet scene when Banquo's ghost comes after Macbeth in the middle of his dinner party, only in my dream Chris was no ghost. Everyone could see him. In fact, they began following him, drawing
toward me with that same look of recrimination. They kept coming closer and closer, and I knew I had to get away, but I didn't know where to go. I finally stumbled down the far side of the bank and crawled into the culvert from the other side. The culvert was suddenly bigger than in real life. It was pitch-black inside except for a circle of light way in the distance, and as I sat up with my back against the wall, another flicker of light appeared. Chris was sitting right beside me, holding a candle.

“I was wondering when you'd come back,” he said.

I screamed and turned to escape, but when I looked back at the hole in the distance, I could see the faces of everyone peeking in. Before I could do anything, they were plugging up the hole, and all the light, but for Chris's candle behind me, had been extinguished. I heard a little puff, and everything went dark.

I woke up from the dream covered in sweat and rolled over to discover it was half past nine in the morning. I'd overslept.

I took my time getting up and getting ready for school. I figured there was no point in rushing since I was already late. I spent a long time in the shower, feeling the water wash over the body I'd worn now for over three weeks, trying to shake the dream. At least my rash was gone.

The walk to school wasn't much better. These police cruisers kept driving by, going real slow. Every time one of them passed me, I had to fight the urge to start running away. I suddenly thought of
COPS
, a show I used to watch on Friday nights. In fact, that stupid theme song started running through my brain, over and over again: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do…” It's like I kept
expecting a whole pack of cruisers to tear around the corner and surround me, with their sirens blaring and their lights flashing, while an army of cops jumped out with their guns all pointed in my face. I guess that's what happens when you know you're guilty.

One of them did stop. About halfway to school, this cruiser pulled up behind me. I didn't even see it until it was right on top of me and the cop inside let rip one of those siren noises—
boo-bweep!
I practically jumped three feet off the ground.

“Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you,” he said, grinning out the rolled-down window. I just sort of stood there and looked at him with as blank a look as I could muster.
Don't let him see you're scared
, I kept telling myself.

“What're you doing?” he asked.

“Going to school.”

“Little late, isn't it?”

“I guess,” I said. What did he care? I mean, wasn't he supposed to be out looking for the murderer? I almost said that to him, but for once I was smart and kept my mouth shut.

I couldn't figure out if he was done with me or not. I was just about to start walking again, when he called out.

“Seen anything?” he asked, still looking straight ahead through the windshield in front of him.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Anything suspicious? Anything unusual?” he said, turning to look back at me.

“Not really,” I said.

He took off his glasses and leaned out the window a little to squint at me. My heart started pounding.

“I've seen you before, haven't I?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't think so.”

He snapped his fingers. “Chris Parker,” he said. “You're that football player, right? The one who quit.”

“That's me,” I said.

“Why'd you quit?”

I shrugged.

He sort of shook his head. “Keep your eyes open. There's a killer walking around out there,” he said.

“Right,” I said as I watched him drive away.

 

With so many cops around, the kids in school were wound up even more than they usually were on a Friday. Everyone was talking about the investigation, speculating like crazy. As far as I could tell, none of the guys had come forward and admitted to trashing the car. I sure wasn't going to say anything.

I had to do something about Chris. And soon. Sitting in history class while the video droned on, I thought about it some and decided to bury him that night. I hated to wait that long, but I figured it would be easier to do it in the dark, when there wouldn't be so many police around.

The rest of the day dragged by. It was excruciating. I was already feeling twitchy in my deteriorating form as it was, and having to sit in school, watching the seconds tick by, worrying that the search had made its way from Parson Woods to the tracks on the other side of town, was sheer torture.

At lunch I canceled plans with Amber for after school, making up some dumb excuse, and took the bus home. Then I got everything together—shovel, gloves, flashlight,
rope in case I needed it, and waited. I knew it would look suspicious walking along the roads with a shovel over my shoulder, but I had to risk it—no way I was going to try to dig a grave with my hands.

Around six thirty, Echo and I made dinner. I'd started helping her this week with meals. I figured after the casserole fiasco, I owed it to her to help. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and heated up some tomato soup.