The Gorgeous Naked Man in my Storm Shelter (Erotic Suspense) (9 page)

S
elfish,
selfish, selfish
.

I swallow the
lump in my throat. I stare steadfastly at the road, stepping a
little on the gas pedal to do penance for my sins. The car rumbles
into a lane leading to a woods area. Trees fringe us, accompanied
by birdsong and a tapestry of interlocking branches, filtering
patches of light. After ten minutes or so, the trees thin and lead
out to grassland. A placid green lake lies in the middle of it all,
spanning several miles across.

Green, not
red.
The sky above is a light
blue, not crimson.

Beside me, Don takes
a deep breath.

“Neverlake,” he
says.

“You recognize
it?”

“Yes . . . and
again, not quite. It’s Neverlake, and yet not the Neverlake of my
vision.”

All I can think of
is the red. Don’s strange visions and dreams have always been
crimson.

“Because of the
different colors?” I venture, rolling the car to a stop.

“Not only that.”

I kill the
engine, and we both get out. We walk to the lakeside. The wind
whisks my hair behind me, bringing with it the smell of fresh
water. There’s a pensive look in Don’s eyes.

“
I can’t quite
describe it,” he says, waving his hands around, “but
it’s like visiting somewhere that you
know really well and you can describe the look and feel of it to
someone else, because you’ve lived here and it’s imprinted in your
head. Then returning to the same place twenty years later and
remembering everything the way it was, only it’s not the way it
used to be because there are differences. Am I making sense to
you?”

I must admit what
he’s saying is a little garbled. But I think I do understand. A
little.

“So you’ve been here
twenty years ago?” I say.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s different
then?”

He throws his
arms up helplessly. With the wind buffeting his dark hair into
rippling tendrils, he’s carelessly marvelous to look at.

“
I don’t know.
Everything. This blade of grass, for instance.” He bends over to
pluck it. “It’s different.
Wrong
.”

“
Wrong?” I’m
starting to get worried about
his seeming lack of articulation.

He shakes his head,
frowning, as he gazes upon the errant blade of grass.

“The water . . .
it’s all wrong too.”

“
Why is it
wrong?” I touch his arm, hoping he will calm down. My own heart has
begun to race rather painfully as though the ‘wrongness’ of the
place is seeping in, affecting me as well.

Then I feel
it. A presence behind us.
I
swing round, seeing a little girl with pigtails come out from the
trees. She wears a plain cotton dress with smudges. Her feet are
bare.

She pads towards us,
her eyes never leaving Don’s face.

“Hello,” she
says.

“Hello,” I reply
cautiously.

She points a
dirt-streaked finger at Don. “You’re John.”

He’s
thunderstruck.

“I am?”

I’m equally as
shocked.

“Yes,” the little
girl says. She has clear blue eyes and a sprinkling of freckles on
her cheeks. “How did you get down here?”

“
W
e drove,” Don says. I
can tell that he’s majorly startled.

“
Did
you
jump out of the picture?”
the girl says. She couldn’t have been more than five.

“Uh, no.”

“
I’ll go
hom
e and look. If you’re not
in the picture, then you’re here.”

She happily
turns tail on us and scampers away.

“Wait!” Don calls
after her.

My pulse
quickens as we both run after her. I’m aware of how rapidly Don can
gait, of course, but he doesn’t
utilize his supersonic speed this time. He’s possibly afraid
of scaring away the little girl and losing me in the dust. We catch
sight of her as she vanishes through the trees and into the open
front door of a little house.

We stop short
as we approach the
two-story
house.

It’
s a little ramshackle,
made out of wood slats that are frankly rotten at some places. The
wooden beams of the doors and shutters are vertical, and the whole
house is painted in a dirty white. Or maybe it was a clean white
once, and it has gotten dirty over the years, I don’t know. A
little driveway leads to its rickety porch, connected to a lane
that vanishes beyond the trees.

I exchange glances
with Don.

“Is this familiar to
you?” I say. My stomach is fluttering. This is the truth, I tell
myself sternly, and there’s no way you can deny him the truth.

He wears a puzzled
frown on his perfect features. “No.”

We hear the
pad of footsteps.
I tense as a
shadow emerges from the depths of the house. An older woman frames
the doorway.

She takes one look
at Don.

And screams.

9

The old woman can’t
seem to stop screaming. Don takes a step towards her, but she backs
away.

“
No, no,
i
t can’t be.”

“
Madam.” I
hold up my hand to appease her even though I’m frightened as anyone
has a right to be under the circumstances. “Please . . . what’s
wrong? We don’t understand.”

The old woman
points a finger at Don. Her voice quavers. “John . . . you have
come back. Please, someone tell me I’m dreaming.”

“I don’t
understand,” Don says. I can tell that he’s as nervous as I am. “Do
you know me and am I . . . John?”

But the old woman
looks as though she has seen a ghost. A bubble of spittle forms at
her lips as she keeps backing away and shaking her head.

The little girl pops
out from somewhere and tugs at her skirt. “Grandmama, I checked.
John’s still up there.”

T
he old woman – her
rheumy eyes rolling in her skull – says in a whisper, “But John is
dead. He has been dead for twenty years.”

A
strange sensation – like a goose
walking over my grave – grabs me by the marrow. At that moment, I
achieve a glimmer of
almost
understanding. And
then it goes away as quickly as it has appeared.

“Then I’m not John,”
Don declares. “But I would like very much to hear what you have to
say about him. Please, madam, I am not his ghost. As you can see, I
am very much alive.”

For a split
second, I am
almost
unsure. I glance
at Don – at his splendid side profile. The perfectly shaped nose,
the high cheekbones, the strong jaw. I recall the feel of his solid
arms around me, the hypnotic pulse of his hard cock inside me. I
have to repress a blush when I think of it.

No, that is
not the work of a
ghost
.

Not a ghost, but
certainly a doppelganger. And I believe this is just the tip of an
iceberg we are about to discover.

Between us, we
manage to convince the woman that – appearances aside – we are very
sincere in wanting to find out more about John. Standing outside, I
tell her in bits and pieces about Don’s amnesia.

Finally, she relents
and lets us into the house.

“
I almost had
a heart attack,” she says, rubbing her scrawny chest as she leads
us through a shabby lounge which also serves as a dining room. The
interior is spartan but clean. The curtains have been bleached to a
faded shade of blue and the furniture bears the marks of
age.

The old
woman’s name is Martha Simmons. She
beckons us into a bedroom. Above the lintel of the
doorway hangs the portrait of a handsome soldier. His features are
shockingly similar to Don’s.

“
He died in
Iraq,” Martha explains.
“Stepped on a homemade bomb in one of those Baghdad buildings
and was blown into smithereens.”

I imagine Don’s
doppelganger doing just that and I quail inwardly.

Don looks
around.

“What is it?” I
murmur.

He replies in
a low voice, “I don’t recognize this place. None of it stirs any
memories. If anything, I felt more of a vibe at the
lakeside.”

“
You owe it to
yourself to investigate this place anyway. It’s too uncanny, you
being the spitting image of John
Simmons.”

He agrees. “Who
happened to die twenty years ago.”

An
uneasy
doubt needles me but
the connection refuses to be made. There’s something here, of
course, despite Don not recognizing anything. But it’s nothing as
simple as it suggests.

Martha Simmons and
the little girl cannot take their eyes off Don.

“Do you have any
family albums or photos of John Simmons?” I ask.

Martha nods.

As she goes to
another bedroom to retrieve her albums, I say to Don,
“
I’m not liking this one bit.
You have a vision of Neverlake, Kansas. But in reality, it isn’t as
you saw it. The NPB is a covert government organization which
investigates paranormal phenomena. And you turn out to be the
double of a man who has been dead for twenty years.”

“So you are saying
I’m a ghost?”

“Not a ghost . . .
but . . . ” I shake my head. I catch my reflection in the mirror. I
look every bit as bewildered as I feel.

Martha comes
back, carrying with her a faded photo album.
“Why don’t you come down to the living room and have
a look at these photos?”

We go
downstairs and make ourselves comfortable on the old sofa. As
Martha makes us some coffee, Don pores over the photos.
There are pictures of John Simmons as
a child, doing the usual childhood things people snap photos of.
He’s a very beautiful kid, and I can well see what Don himself must
have been as a boy. Birthdays roll one after the other, with the
candles on the cake getting progressively more numerous. There’s
one of John with an arm sling, grinning at the camera.

“
He was twelve
at the time,” Martha says, tears misting her eyes.
“Fell off a cherry tree. Broke his
arm in three places.”

Don glances
down at his own right arm. A
memory seems to stir within.

“What is it?” I
persist.

He shakes his head
as if to dispel the thought. “It’s nothing.”

A man with a
mustache appears frequently in John’s childhood photos. In several,
he’s teaching John to ride a bike.

“
That’s my
hu
sband, Stuart. He died when
John was nineteen.”

“Does John have any
brothers or sisters?” I ask.

“
Just
one.
A sister, Mary. She works
in Delaware.” Martha turns the page and points out to a photo of a
girl in pigtails who bears a startling resemblance to the little
girl who led us here. “Susan’s her daughter and I’m taking care of
her.”

The pages of
the album continue to turn, chronicling a boy’s life. John grows
up
into an incredibly handsome
man. John joins the army. Gets his stripes. He’s startlingly
handsome in his uniform.

“
John was so
proud . . . so proud.” Martha wipes a tear off her eye. “He wanted
to fight for his country so badly even though I knew no good would
come out of it. And I was right.”

She turns a
page
and jabs at a photo of
John with his arms around a pretty curly-haired girl.

“
That’s
Melanie. They were engaged to be
married before John went off to Iraq.”

Gazing upon
Melanie’s photo,
a premonition
begins to unfold within me. I don’t know. This is a man who died
twenty years ago that we are talking about. Melanie’s smiling
photograph stares back at me, showing white teeth. Her hair is
raven-black and shoulder length, and she has dimples in her cheeks.
While not plump, she’s pleasingly proportioned in her face and
arms.

Call it a
sixth sense or what you will, but I just
know
I
will meet Melanie. And the circumstances will be bizarre and
unhappy.

The album comes to
an end.

“
He died when
he was twenty-seven years old. This was the last letter I got from
him.”

Martha
takes out a folded piece of paper and
smoothens it out. John’s longhand script is almost illegible. Don
stares at it for a long while.

“May I have a pen
and paper?” he says.

I produce a
ball pen and notepad from my purse. Don writes ‘My name is
Anonymous’.

Dread
drops
like a lead ball in my
chest when he finishes the sentence.

He compares
the two scripts.
They are
almost similar.

Martha claps her
hand to her mouth. I feel like doing the same.

“What does that
mean?” Don implores me out of anxious, frightened eyes.

I have no
answer because there comes the screeching of car tires and
the squeal of brake pads being
applied viciously. We all look up. Outside the window, four black
cars and one black van, similar to the one we stole, crowd upon the
little driveway. The doors open and several men in suits get
out.