Doppelganger (3 page)

“But I'm not ready,” I said. “I haven't had any preparation. I don't even know where he lives.” But I knew she was right. It would be a waste.

I placed my hand on his chest. A moment later it was done. The pain wasn't bad this time—I hardly felt anything. Drawing back, I marveled at the skin—firm, pink, the joints supple. It felt good to take on someone my own age.

I removed his clothing and dressed as quickly as I could in the cold. Pulling his wallet from the pocket of his jeans, I opened it and looked inside at his driver's license. His face—now mine—stared back at me with a smile. It looked so different from the cold visage next to me. I covered the picture with my thumb and focused on the information. There it was—his name, date of birth, height, weight, eye color, sex, and, most importantly, his address—all the details of his life squeezed onto a two-by-three-inch piece of plastic. There wasn't much else in the
wallet—a few dollars, a fake ID, some random cards.

And then I found her, tucked into a back fold. I pulled the picture out and held it up to the light. She was a little scuffed, but I could still make out the ringlets of red hair and the eyes that sparkled even in the worn photo. I had seen plenty of beautiful women on TV, but never anyone so beautiful in quite this way. I flipped the picture over and saw—written in smudged round letters—“Amber.”

I stuck the picture back in the fold, slipped the wallet in my jacket pocket, and stood up.

I knew I had to get rid of the body. Mother always told me it was one of the most important parts. I didn't have the time or tools to bury him right now, so I'd have to stash him somewhere where nobody would find him. This is why it helps to prepare ahead of time, but once again I'd messed up. Of course, it's easier to hide someone when no one else knows they're supposed to be looking for him. Still, I didn't want to just dump Chris in the woods—who knew what might get after him. Suddenly I got an idea.

I jogged over to the tracks and walked along the bank, and pretty soon I found what I was looking for. The culvert—a corrugated drainpipe running under the tracks—was less than three feet in diameter. It wasn't ideal, but it would do.

I went back to my pack and pulled out a rolled-up sheet of plastic that I'd found last week in an empty boxcar. I had been using it as a groundsheet to keep the moisture out as I slept. It had worked pretty well, but I wouldn't need it anymore.

The hardest part was getting him to the culvert. His license said 175 pounds, but he felt a lot heavier than that. I carried him over my shoulder at first, but then it got to
be too much, so I just put him down and dragged him the rest of the way over grass already soaked with dew. It seemed to take forever, and I kept waiting for Josh and Steve to show up, wondering where their buddy was. Finally I got him over there, laid him out, and wrapped him up. After I finished, I just looked down at him for a minute. I couldn't really see him through the plastic, but I knew the expression on his face hadn't changed.

“Sorry things turned out this way,” I said, standing over him beneath the cold stars. I felt like I should say something, like I should try and reassure him.

“I'll try not to screw it up too bad.”

I was worn out after hauling him all that way, but I managed to get him stuffed in there pretty well. I put him in headfirst and pushed and pushed until he was out of sight.

Then I said good-bye one last time, climbed up onto the tracks, and headed for town.

Steve and Josh were waiting about a half mile away where the tracks passed an empty lot. I took a few deep breaths and walked up to them.

“Hey, guys,” I said. They jumped at the sound of my voice. They'd been talking and hadn't seen me.

“Christ, you scared the crap out of me,” Steve said.

“Good thing you showed up,” Josh added. “We were just about to leave your sorry ass.”

“How's the old man?” Steve asked.

“He's gone,” I muttered.

“Got rid of him, huh?” Josh said.

“Well…,” I said.

“I don't want to know,” Josh said, holding up his hands and laughing nervously.

“Let's get out of here,” Steve said. We left the tracks and headed down to Steve's car, a beat-up Ford Escort parked in the corner of the lot. I sat in the backseat as we drove off, not saying much of anything. Not that it would have mattered—with the music thudding from the zillion speakers Steve had in his car, they probably wouldn't have been able to hear me anyway. A little while later, they pulled over in front of a house partway down a crowded street. The lights were out in all the houses. A street lamp cast the only glow around. Josh clicked off the stereo, and the car suddenly went silent and still.

“Here you go, pal,” Steve said, glancing up to look at me in his rearview mirror. “Try not to look too hung over tomorrow. We've got a big practice.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “big practice.”

I got out of the car. As I was heading across the lawn toward the house, Steve rolled down the window and called out, “Need a ride in the morning?”

That's right. School.

“No thanks,” I said. At this point I didn't see myself making it to school. Not tomorrow, anyway.

“All right. Later.”

I watched them speed off, then turned and looked things over. A bike was lying on the scraggly lawn in front of me, the grass growing up between the spokes of its wheels. The house was a single-story ranch. Even in the semidarkness, I could tell it looked sort of run down.

Chris Parker
, I said to myself,
welcome to your life
.

The front door was locked, so I went around to the back porch off the kitchen and tried the sliding glass door. It opened, and I poked my head in. A light over the sink glowed weakly, but it was enough to see by. The house was quiet. Everyone seemed to be asleep, but I didn't want to stick around the kitchen long enough to find out. I had to find Chris's room and just pray no one else shared it.

I stepped in and slid the door shut behind me as quietly as I could. The first thing that struck me was the smell. It was the smell of a human home—a heavy mix of foods, soaps and cleaners, cigarette smoke, and body odor. And there was something else.

A sudden jingling noise startled me. I froze with my back against the door, and a second later the source of that strange odor appeared as a dark shape glided into the kitchen. The next thing I knew, I was face-to-face with a black dog. A big black dog. Seeing me, it pranced forward, wagging its tail in welcome, then stopped three feet away, its entire body stiffening. Dogs—they're just like doppel
gangers. They can tell who's human and who's not. They can smell it.

The last time I was this close to a dog was when I'd had that little puppy my mother brought home. I still remember her taking its limp form from my hands and pitching it into the woods. I'd looked for the body the next morning, but it was gone.

I bent down on one knee and reached out to pet the dog, wondering if it was Chris's or if it belonged to the whole family.

“Hey, boy. How ya doin'?” I said. I didn't know if it was actually a boy or not, but that's what people always say on TV.

The dog cocked its head at the sound of Chris's voice. Then its hackles raised. The poor thing was so confused, it didn't know whether to attack or jump up and start licking me. After a few seconds, it just gave up and slunk away, giving me one last skeptical glance before disappearing.

I went from the kitchen into a hallway. The living room opened out to my right, while the hall continued to my left with doorways on both sides. The little bit of light from the kitchen revealed a set of photos on the wall, and I paused to meet my new family. I found Chris in one of the pictures—looking a few years younger, dressed in a baseball uniform, smiling, with a bat over his shoulder. Beside it was a family portrait. Just what I was hoping for. There was Chris, flanked by a man and a woman on one side and a girl who appeared a good deal younger than him on the other. They all resembled each other—two parents, two kids, one big happy family. At least, that's what it looked like.

I headed down the hall and passed the open door of a bathroom with a closed door directly across from it. Beyond them, at the end of the hall, were two more doorways. I went to the end of the hall and tried the door on my left, opening it a hair and putting my eye up to the crack. I could make out a double bed with two people sleeping in it. One of them stirred. I shut the door as quickly as I could.

I heard the bed creak on the other side of the door, followed by footsteps. Without thinking, I opened the door behind me, ducked inside, and pulled it closed. I spotted an empty bed and jumped in, throwing the sheets over me and praying nobody would come in.

It wasn't so much that I was afraid of getting in trouble. I just didn't want to talk to anybody right then. I was still pretty rattled from everything that had happened and wanted some time to settle down and ease into my new life. Get a lay of the land.

For a whole minute, I waited in bed, facing the wall as my heart pounded in my ears. Suddenly a toilet flushed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A moment later the door opened and a slit of hallway light flashed upon the wall before me. I froze, resisting the urge to turn and see who was watching me, focusing instead on the shadow my head cast against the wall. Finally the door closed.

I waited until I couldn't feel my pulse throb anymore before slipping out of bed and switching on the desk lamp. Chris's room was pretty spare, almost as bad as mine had been at the cabin. At least I'd had an excuse—I was pretty much a shut-in. Chris might as well have been. I looked around at the mostly bare walls, trying to get a sense of
things, and guessed there wasn't too much to this kid. It didn't appear that he had many hobbies or special skills I was going to have to deal with. That's one of my recurring nightmares, by the way—I take on a form only to discover that the person is, like, a master bagpipe player or something ridiculous like that. As far as Chris was concerned, there was sports—football, basically—and that seemed to be it. All to the good, I thought—it was going to make my life simple.

There were a couple things on the wall—an AC/DC poster, another of some sports star—but not much else. No real toys that I could see, aside from a football on top of the bureau next to a piggy bank. There was a stereo with maybe a dozen or so CDs in beat-up jewel cases. And then there was the TV—a nice one, bigger than the one I used to have. I went over and flipped it on, turning down the volume until I could barely hear it. It was incredible—the image so sharp, the colors like real life. And the channels. My old set had had an antenna that picked up four, sometimes five, channels with varying degrees of success, depending on the weather, my patience for fiddling around with it, or the mood it was in. This TV had channel after clear channel. And there were channels just for news, sports, food, all kinds of different things.

I plopped myself down on the floor and settled in for a good hour or two of TV time. I had a bit of catching up to do, and it helped take my mind off all the night's ugliness. After a while, though, I started getting sleepy, so I grabbed the remote, got up, and went back over to the bed. I was about to get in when I noticed the sheets.

Race cars. Chris had race car sheets. It struck me as a little funny at first, and then sad as the memory of what had
happened around the fire came back to me. I tried to imagine that same drinking, swearing, screaming boy coming home and curling up in his race car sheets to go to sleep.

But not tonight. Not any night, not anymore. Instead it was me who was curling up with the race cars. Chris was out there in a musty old culvert, by now as cold as the plastic he was wrapped in, not even able to see the sky. And I was the one who had put him there.

I picked up the remote and flipped around until I came to a rerun of
Gilligan's Island
. It seems like there's always
Gilligan's Island
playing on some station. Even growing up with only four decent channels, I was able to see it pretty regularly. As a little kid, I didn't like the show. I felt scared for the castaways—lost, confined to an island with not much to live on. But to them everything was a big joke. It irritated me that I had to worry for them. Oh sure, they wanted to go home, but when every episode ended with them yukking it up, how serious could they be? As I got older, I lightened up. I figured maybe they were on to something. Maybe sometimes, to survive, you just have to make the best of what you've got.

 

“Chris, it's time to get up.”

I opened my eyes to see Chris's mother standing over me in a pink bathrobe. She didn't look as good in real life—her eyes drooped with dark circles, her brown hair was going in all different directions, and her skin seemed pale and gray. Almost like a doppelganger's.

She walked over and turned off the television set.

“What were you doing watching TV?” she asked. She seemed pretty annoyed.

“I got up in the night,” I said. “I was having trouble sleeping.”

“Well, you got over it pretty well. It took me three tries to wake you.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, you better get up. Your father's already in the shower, so you'll have to wait. You're going to be late. Again. And this time I'm not going to write a note for you.”

“I can't go to school,” I said. I almost added “Mom.” I wasn't sure what to call her—Mom, Mother, Ma?

“What's the matter this time?” she said, frowning.

“I don't feel good,” I said. “I'm sick. My stomach really hurts.” It wasn't true, but I knew as soon as I opened my eyes this morning that there was no way I could leave the house today. I needed more time.

She came over and felt my forehead.

“You don't have a fever.” She grabbed my chin. “You got in late last night. Were you drinking?”

“No!” I exclaimed. It wasn't a lie—not really, anyway. “I just have a stomachache. Please let me stay home today?”

“Fine.” She sighed and turned away. “I don't care, anyway. I've got to be at work in an hour.” She paused in the doorway. “But you're telling your father. Not me.”

“Okay,” I said.

She frowned again. “You must be sick after all,” she said, and disappeared.

I lay back in bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to decide how that had gone. She didn't seem to suspect anything, other than some questionable activity on the real Chris's part. Fair enough.

“What the hell are you still doing in bed?” barked a voice so loud I nearly jumped out of my skin—literally. I looked over. This time it was the man from the picture standing over me, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. Like Chris's mother, he didn't look so hot compared with the picture. He'd just gotten out of the shower, so his black hair was all messed up, and there was a trickle of blood running down his neck from where he'd cut himself shaving. Whereas Mrs. Parker had just seemed annoyed, Mr. Parker seemed mad as hell.

“I don't feel good,” I croaked, trying to sound as sick as possible.

“Big deal,” he said. “I feel like crap every morning, but I still get up and go to work.”

“I can't go to school today. I really can't.”

“But you felt good enough to go out last night and get drunk. And don't bullshit me, either. I know when you got in.”

Now I knew where Chris had gotten his scintillating personality.

I figured there was no point arguing, so I just shut up and waited for him to decide what to do. As he stood there glaring, a girl dressed in school clothes appeared behind him in the doorway, looking in at me with quiet eyes. It was the sister.

“What's the matter with him?” she asked. Her voice was subdued, almost a monotone. There was something about her that creeped me out. I don't know what it was. I just wanted her to go away.

“Little baby says he's sick,” Chris's father said.

“I'm sick, too,” the sister replied.

“No you're not, Echo,” he said, whirling around. “Now get your ass back in that kitchen and finish your breakfast before the bus comes.”

Echo jumped and disappeared down the hall. Chris's father turned back and eyed me one last time.

“You'd better not leave the house today. I'll know it if you do, believe me. In fact, don't even get out of your goddam bed until I get home.”

I shrank back and looked away.

I could feel him staring at me for a moment, like he was waiting for me to challenge him. When I didn't say anything, he turned and left, slamming the door behind him.

I sat up in bed shaking, trying to understand what had happened. I mean, this guy was even worse than Chris. My mother may have been cold, but even on her worst day, she had never gotten in my face. Then again, I'd never had a father before.
Maybe they're all like that
, I thought.

I waited in my room, listening to the Parkers as they dressed, ate breakfast, bickered, and hollered. Then one by one they left. Dad was the last to go. He stuck his head in one last time before heading out the door.

“And no TV,” he snapped.

“Yeah, right,” I said after the door shut.

From my bedroom window, I watched as Chris's father backed the car out into the street. Then he was gone. I had the place to myself.

I spent the rest of the day poking around, trying to learn as much as I could about my new home. Trying to forget how I'd gotten there to begin with. It wasn't easy, on either end.

I opened all of Chris's drawers, hoping to stumble
across a journal or diary, something to help me get a better sense of who this kid was. I came up empty. Searching his closet yielded nothing but a collection of porno mags hidden under a stack of sweaters. I admit I spent a bit of time poring over those.

There was nothing else of interest until I looked underneath Chris's mattress. There she was again. This time, instead of being scratched and jammed between the folds of a wallet, she was tucked inside a birthday card, smiling out of a glossy photo with trees and hills in the background. Amber was even more beautiful in the daylight.

I glanced at the card. There was that same handwriting from the back of the wallet photo—a loopy stream of letters. I read the note, dated last April. It was six months old.

It was nice. I put the picture up on the windowsill and slipped the card back under the mattress. Then I took it back out and read the card again, trying to imagine what her voice sounded like.

I went through the rest of the house. It may not have
been as big as most of the other places on the street, but it was bigger than the cabin I grew up in, and it took a while to go through all the rooms, especially since I had to be careful to put everything back exactly as I found it.

Echo's bedroom was across from the bathroom. Unlike Chris's bare room, it was full of all kinds of strange stuff. Dolls, toy ponies, snow globes, costumes—I went over everything, touching each object, picking things up, then putting them back. A few of the toys were familiar—I'd seen commercials for them on Saturday mornings in between the cartoons, but it was different seeing them in real life. Scattered across the floor or lying still upon the shelves, they seemed smaller, almost dead somehow.