Mr. Murder (16 page)

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 knew 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. Marty 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.

All of that wisdom flashed through his mind, as it might have passed through the mind of one of his hard-nosed police characters—yet he behaved like any panicked civilian, stumbling heedlessly into the upstairs hall, holding the pistol in only his right hand, arms loose, breathing explosively, making more of a target than a threat of himself, because when you came right down to it, he
wasn’t
a cop, only an asshole who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the fantasy, you couldn’t
live
the fantasy, you couldn’t act like a cop in a pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he’d been damned lucky the
other
Marty hadn’t been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was deserted.

Couldn’t think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls. If you survive, there’ll be time to seek an explanation for that astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.

Listen. Movement?

Maybe.

No. Nothing.

Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.

Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully to staunch his bleeding wounds.

Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the salt out of his eye.

When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started moving—perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk—he had walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.