Case File 13 #3 (14 page)

The three boys stepped outside, where the sun was starting to set. Nick checked his watch. It was almost five.

“Let's go to my house,” Angelo said. “And start from the beginning.”

“Okay,” Angelo said, sitting down at a desk covered with notes and books. “Let's get started.”

“What is all this stuff?” Nick asked.

“Research,” Angelo said, as if the answer was obvious.

“Yeah-h-h-h, I can see that.” Nick waved his hand at books ranging from climatology to European dance, plus pages of handwritten notes that seemed to be mostly mathematical equations. “But there's nothing here about homunculi.”

Angelo scooped the pages into a neat pile. “I told you. There's almost no information available on homunculi.”

Nick plopped onto the bed. “So what are we supposed to be looking at from a new angle?”

“I'd like to look at a bag of Doritos from an angle just above my mouth,” Carter said. “You have anything to eat around here?”

Angelo pointed to a Tupperware container. Carter opened it to find pieces of cut celery and cherry tomatoes. “Gross.” He sniffed. “I'd rather starve.”

“Now isn't the time to be thinking about food,” Nick snapped.

Carter grunted. “I think better when my stomach isn't growling.”

“Mr. Blackham got me thinking with his talk of causality,” Angelo said, ignoring Carter's disgusted expression. “Let's go back to the beginning. What events preceded us finding the homunculus in the first place?”

“He swiped my food,” Carter said with a wistful expression. “A homunculus after my own heart.”

“Okay, good.” Angelo wrote
1-Food
on a piece of paper. “Somehow he managed to get into a locked car. Which means he has the ability either to pick locks or squeeze through small spaces.”

“The car window was open only half an inch or so,” Nick said. “That would be an awfully tight squeeze.”

Angelo nodded and added that to the notes. “What happened after that?”

“Well,” Nick said, “Carter woke us up. We heard noises. You guys were a bunch of chickens. So I went outside.”

“Chicken.” Carter rubbed his stomach and groaned.

“After that”—Nick closed his eyes, trying to picture the scene outside the tent—“I was freaked out because I thought Bigfoot was about to . . .” He remembered something that hadn't occurred to him until this very moment and jumped off the bed. “Angelo, pull up the pictures you took at the campsite.”

Angelo powered on his iPad and scrolled through his photos until Nick said, “Stop.” It
was the picture of the huge footprint they'd found outside the tent.

Angelo slapped his head. “I forgot all about this.”

“Carter Junior didn't make that,” Carter said. “Twenty homunculi together couldn't leave a footprint that big. And there were more of those prints farther into the woods.”

Nick studied the footprint. “If Carter Junior didn't leave that footprint, what did?”

“Maybe the homunculus and the Bigfoot hung out,” Carter said. “I could totally see Carter Junior going all, ‘Dude, wash your toes sometime! Those big feet of yours reek like rotten cabbage.'”

“Hey, what about the movie we made the next morning,” Nick said. “The one where we were following the cookies. Did you ever go back and study it?”

Angelo smacked himself again. “I'm the worst scientist ever.” He opened his bag and began rummaging through it.

“Speaking of cookies,” Carter said, “I'm going to poke around your kitchen and see if you have any human food.”

“Here we go.” Angelo pulled out the digital camera and connected it to his computer. When he clicked play, a shaky video showed a close-up of Carter—his face so pale that each of his freckles stood out like one of those connect-the-dots games.

There wasn't actually much to see. Angelo talking about the origins of the term
Bigfoot
, Carter searching for cookies, lots of crazy angles on trees. “So much for my career as a cameraman,” Nick said.

“Don't touch it,” Angelo's on-screen voice said. He stepped in front of the camera, looking down at the three straight lines. He turned to look back at Nick. “This can't be accidental. Are you recording this?”

Although Nick couldn't see himself because the camera had been strapped to his head, he remembered nodding and moving around for a better look. Sure enough, the camera bobbed up and down, turned for a moment, and then zoomed in on the three lines.

“Hang on.” Angelo paused the movie, then slowly began to move it forward.

“What is it?” Nick asked. “Did you see something?”

Angelo stopped the video on the huge redwood they'd found Carter Junior hiding behind. “The same three lines are on the tree.”

“Sure,” Nick said. Three lines on the left, three on the right, and three on top. “It has to mean three of something. Three homunculi? Three Bigfoot?”

Angelo reversed the video. “Right after you nodded, just before you straightened out the camera, I thought . . .” He froze the film. As Nick had been moving around to get a clear shot, he'd tilted his head. On the screen, everything was sideways; the trees
looked like they'd all been blown over in a huge storm. He started to turn his head to see more clearly, but Angelo stopped him.

“Wait. Look at it from this angle. What do you see?” Angelo asked. He was clearly excited about something. But Nick couldn't tell what.

“The same thing we saw then,” Nick said. “A bunch of trees. Carter's dirty shoe. And three lines of cookies.”

“Three lines,” Angelo agreed. “But not the vertical lines, three horizontal lines. When you look at it from this direction, the three parallel lines go from left to right instead of up and down.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out his math book. He quickly flipped it open to a page and pointed to a symbol just like the one the cookies were arranged in. Nick read the definition written below the symbol.

“Equivalent. Identical to.” He looked at Angelo, excitement racing through his body. “What does it mean?”

“Identical to,” Angelo muttered to himself. “German. Equivalent. People not acting like themselves.” He glanced toward the mirror above his desk and his eyes opened wide. “That's it!” he shouted so loudly that Nick took a step back.

Angelo ran to his closet and began hastily rummaging through books. A moment later he found what he was looking for. He slammed a thick book on the table, checked the table of contents, and opened to a section halfway through.

Nick leaned over to take a look. It was a picture of a man staring at an exact duplicate of himself—like the reflection Angelo had seen of himself, only without the mirror. Beneath the picture was the definition.

Nick licked his lips and looked at Angelo. “You think?”

Angelo nodded. “The man we saw jogging down the street this morning wasn't Old Man Dashner. It was someone or some
thing
that looked just like him. Ms. Schoepf wasn't Ms. Schoepf. It was her doppelgänger.”

Nick had a horrible realization. “The guy who told my mom and me that we were going out to eat wasn't my dad, it was his doppelgänger. That means there's something in my house right now, pretending to be my dad!”

Carter walked into the room munching on a bag of tortilla chips. “Did I miss anything?”

Nick started for the door. But Angelo grabbed him.

“I have to go make sure my parents are okay,” Nick said, pulling out of his friend's grasp.

“How will you even know if they're your real parents or not?” Angelo asked. Nick paused. “For all you know, you could be talking to a doppelgänger without even being aware of it.”

Carter stopped with a chip halfway to his mouth. “What's a doppelrainer?”

“Doppelgänger,” Angelo said. He picked up the book. “Doppelgängers are mythical creatures capable of looking and sounding just like their doubles. Although the German word meaning ‘double goer' is fairly recent, history is filled with stories of physical or spiritual duplicates. Ancient Egyptian mythology called it a
ka
. In Norse, it's a
vardøger
. In Finnish folklore, an
Etiäinen
is a spirit double.”

“What do these doppelgängers do?” Nick asked. “What do they want with my dad, and Mr. Dashner, and Ms. Schoepf?”

Angelo checked the book. “Not all the stories agree. But according to many accounts, a doppelgänger's appearance can mean bad luck, danger, or even death.”

Nick felt like someone had some slammed a lead weight on his chest. He could barely breathe. “My dad's going to die?”

“Come on,” Carter said, grabbing a handful of chips. “You're trying to make us believe there are a bunch of what? Evil twins, running around the neighborhood getting ready to kill everyone? Let me guess, they're all riding purple unicorns and blowing party horns.”

Angelo glared. “I didn't say they were going to kill anyone. I said their presence has been known to occur shortly before something bad happens—which, at times, has been death.” He flipped the page. “According to several reliable sources, shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected he looked into a mirror and saw two reflections of himself. One was normal. But the other looked pale and deathlike. His wife thought it was a warning that he would be reelected to a second term but wouldn't live to see the end of it. And that's exactly what happened.”

Nick grabbed the book. “Let me see that.” He scanned the text. There were dozens of stories of people who saw doubles right before something terrible happened. A guy saw a duplicate of his pregnant wife in France shortly before she lost her baby in England. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the husband of the woman who wrote
Frankenstein
, met his own doppelgänger. The doppelgänger pointed to the Mediterranean Sea, and a few days later, Shelley drowned there. It was scary stuff.

But in at least a few cases, the doubles didn't seem to do any more than cause mischief. “Listen to this,” Nick said. “In France there was this thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher named Emilie Sagée. She was writing on the chalkboard when her students saw her exact double appear standing beside her. The two looked exactly the same, except the doppelgänger wasn't holding any chalk.

“Another time a bunch of girls were in class. When their teacher left the room Sagée's double appeared again—sitting in the teacher's chair. A couple of the girls tried to touch her, but their hands got pushed away by some kind of force.”

“How do they know it was a doppelgänger?” Carter scoffed around a mouthful of chips. “Maybe the teachers were just pulling a trick on them.”

“Pretty tough to do when the girls could look right out the window and see the real Emilie Sagée planting flowers in the garden. According to this, lots of people reported feeling sick or weak either just before their double appeared or right after he left.” He stared at Angelo. “My dad said he wasn't feeling good right after his doppelgänger told us we were going out to dinner. And didn't you say you were feeling tired right about the time Angie and her friends said you were telling them to meet you at your house?”

Angelo dropped into his chair. “I have a doppelgänger. That was who talked to the girls pretending to be me. They must suck some kind of energy from you.”

Nick nodded. “Like psychic vampires.”

“You guys really buy that mumbo jumbo?” Carter asked. “It's total garbage. But you won't listen to me. I'm sick and tired of you two thinking you're so much smarter than I am. All Carter can do is eat and crack jokes. Well, you know what? I'm the only person in this room with a bit of common sense. You can believe whatever you want, but I'm out of here.” He threw the bag of chips on the floor and stomped from the room.

“What was that about?” Angelo asked.

“No clue,” Nick said. “Maybe we better go after him.”

Before they could, Carter came back into the room. “Man,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “I was looking for food when all of a sudden I got major stomach cramps. Totally thought I was gonna hurl. But then it went away and I just felt kind of tired.” He glanced down at the bag on the floor. “Who brought the chips?”