Dead Ringers (23 page)

“Oh, my God,” Audrey said as she stood and reached for Lili. “Thank you.”

But when she took Lili's hand, the other woman's skin felt ice cold. Lili looked up at her as though waking abruptly from a dream and reached up to touch her own throat, where the blind man had gripped her.

“What just happened?” she asked.

For a moment all the color had drained from her face, so pale that it almost seemed that the moonlight passed through her skin. Then Nick and Tess were there, talking to both of them, and Audrey had to turn her attention to them.

“Tell me I didn't just see that,” Nick said. “That's gotta be some kind of illusion, right? That guy didn't just fucking vanish.”

The women ignored his efforts to make it all less surreal. Less impossible. Tess took Lili in her arms and Audrey felt relieved. The cold she had felt when the blind man had touched her seeped deeper, aching in her bones, and she had enough terrors of her own without trying to comfort Lili.

Audrey glanced up and saw Frank walking toward them. He attempted to collect himself, but fear still radiated from him.

“Can we go inside?” he asked Tess. “I don't think we should be out here.”

They all looked up into the night sky, at the place above the house where the shred of black fabric had disappeared into the dark. Audrey started to move first, and then they were all walking toward Tess's apartment in a tight cluster. Frank fell into step beside Audrey and he no longer seemed so afraid. She understood. The cold had taken deep root inside her, but she felt safer with the others around her.

Safety in numbers,
she thought as they reached Tess's front door. Frank seemed to intuit her feelings. He smiled thinly and put a hand on her shoulder in solidarity as they waited for Tess to unlock the door.

At his touch, Audrey shuddered. She turned to study him, searching his eyes, startled by an aura of malice that seemed to surround him. He drew back his hand and gave her a darkly curious look, but then Tess opened the door and they were all filing inside, and there were other things to discuss. If Frank bore her some animosity, Audrey would deal with it later or not at all. After all, what was he to her? Just a man she'd met once on a job. Compared to the malign entity that had come for them tonight, Frank's hidden feelings mattered not at all.

Tess closed the door behind them and Audrey exhaled, feeling safer.

But she kept glancing at dark corners and the shadows beneath chairs and tables, wondering if a locked door could do anything to keep them safe.

 

SEVEN

Tess felt numb. She asked Lili to make sure everyone had something hot to drink, but it was Nick who filled the teapot. While Lili fetched mugs, Tess checked on Maddie, whom she had left watching a movie, nestled in her own bed. She pushed open her bedroom door and saw Maddie propped on a pile of her mother's pillows, entranced by
The Princess Bride
. Though the little girl had no interest in most films of a similar age, Maddie had latched on to the story of Buttercup and Westley and their friends.

“Hey, punkin,” Tess said, hating the quaver in her voice. She exhaled, steadying herself. “You okay?”

“I'd be more okay if I had cookies!” Maddie said brightly.

Tess smiled, some of her tension and fear burning off in the light of her daughter's presence. “Coming right up. Okay if I send Daddy in with them?”

Maddie rolled her eyes as if to say
of course
it was okay.

Back in the kitchen, she sent Nick down the hall with a cookie delivery and checked to make sure that everyone had what they needed. The teapot hissed as it heated the water inside, and Tess was grateful to see that Lili already had put a tea bag in a mug for her and left it in front of her usual seat at the table.

“Audrey. Frank,” she said as she slid into her chair. “Thank you both for coming.”

Frank nodded, still pale. If he felt at all awkward about having made out with her at a party when she was still married to Nick, he didn't show it. Instead, he glanced at the window over the kitchen sink. “You want to tell me what we saw just now, out there?”

“We're not sure,” Tess replied.

“But it's related to the Otis Harrison House somehow,” Lili added.

“It was a revenant,” Audrey said, slowly rotating her coffee cup in a circle on the table. “A dead person, but with a spirit still inside. Maybe the spirit of the dead man himself or maybe someone else's.”

Frank stared at her. “Isn't your job to say things like that don't exist?”

“I have several jobs, Mr. Lindbergh. One of them is to evaluate situations in which someone has claimed the presence of something supernatural. Most of the time, those claims turn out to be either superstition or fraud or wishful thinking, because some people
want
to find ghosts in their houses. But I've never said things like that don't exist. I know that they do.”

She'd been firm in her reply, even harsh, but now she faltered. Dropped her gaze.

“Never seen a revenant before. I've read about manifestations like that, but wasn't sure they were really possible.”

“Audrey,” Tess said, “there's something you should know.”

Nick had come back in and now they were all staring at her.

“The blindfolded man,” Tess said. “We've seen him before. Lili calls him the raggedy—”

“The raggedy man. I know.” Audrey shook her head. “Lili told me yesterday. Thing is, I've seen him before as well. Sunday morning, early. I was out for a run and I felt really terrible all of a sudden. Nauseous, like my stomach had just dropped into a pit. I threw up, actually. I saw him then, just for a second. When I looked back, he was gone. I thought … shit, I hoped I'd imagined him. Didn't feel like myself for the rest of the day.”

Nick retrieved the steaming teapot and carried it to the table. “So what does this … dead thing … have to do with the doubles Lili and Tess have been seeing?”

Frank huffed and held up his hands. “Can we just … can you all start over? I just saw something my brain is telling me I could not possibly have seen.”

Audrey sipped her coffee. “You're hiding something.”

As Nick poured her tea, Tess stared at her. “What?”

“Frank's scared. We all are. But there's something he's not telling us. Not all of this is a shock to him,” Audrey said.

All eyes turned toward Frank.

He pointed at Audrey. “You're some kind of occult expert. When Nick called, he told me this all had to do with the mirror thing, the ghost box, whatever it is, and that you were going to be here. I figured there was something bizarre going on—I did a ton of research on that house and the bodies you found there, remember? Cornell Berrige and the Society of the Lesser Key. I wrote half the book already. The manuscript is printed and in the top drawer of my desk.…”

“And?” Tess prompted when his words trailed off.

Frank looked at her, an edge of hostility in his eyes. “And I never thought any of this was true until I saw your raggedy man out there vanish in the middle of the street. So maybe start at the beginning, okay? Get me caught up? Because I've got to reset every thought I've ever had about this sort of thing.”

Tess glanced at Audrey, who still looked at Frank as if she wanted more. But if they were going to figure any of this out, they needed everyone on the same page.

“What about Aaron?” she said, turning to Nick. “He's late.”

“Lucky him,” Lili muttered.

Tess began. She had spoken to Lili earlier in the day and they had exchanged their own stories, Lili telling her about her certainty that her double had visited Steven during the night. Now they shared their experiences with Frank and caught Audrey up on things she had missed.

“There's something else,” Nick said.

Tess narrowed her eyes. “You saw something?”

“Not exactly,” he said, keeping his focus on Frank and Audrey. “This morning I told Tess that my girlfriend and I are likely to be moving to London. The other day, someone who sounded very much like me called my Realtor and fired him.”

“Your double,” Audrey said.

“I don't understand,” Lili said. “Why would they care if you went away? Wouldn't they have been less likely to be discovered if they tried to build lives far away from us? It'd be better if you were gone.”

Frank ran his thumb over the handle of his coffee mug. “Unless they need you.”

They all looked at him.

“If they need us,” Tess said, “why are they trying to kill us?”

“I haven't heard anything that indicates they've tried to kill you,” Audrey said. “At first, they were keeping clear of you entirely. If you hadn't run into Nick's double on the street, we might never have known that these people exist. Now they're showing up in your lives and intruding. Tess, your double wanted to be close to Maddie. Lili's double did the same with her ex.”

“It did something to me,” Lili said.

“And to Tess,” Nick added. “Mentally and physically.”

“I still haven't recovered,” Tess admitted. “It's like a part of me's been…”

She searched for the right word. It was Audrey who supplied it.

“Siphoned,” the medium said.

Tess tapped on the table. “You know what this is. What they are.”

“Suspicions only.”

“What about the raggedy man?” Lili asked. “The others may not be trying to kill us, but he attacked me and Audrey just now, and I'm pretty sure he had murder on his mind. That didn't feel like he just wanted to be buddies.”

They were all silent a few moments. Tess hadn't experienced the raggedy man's touch, but she could see it haunted Audrey and Lili.

“I wonder if he's got eyes under that blindfold,” Audrey said.

Tess saw Frank stiffen, as if he'd understood something in the comment that the rest of them hadn't.

“What difference would that make?” Nick asked.

Audrey sat back in her chair. “As part of the original ritual down in the basement of the Harrison House, our friend Berrige ripped his own eyes out.”

Lili gave a hollow laugh. “You think the raggedy man is Berrige? They found his bones down in that pit in the cellar of the Harrison House.”

Audrey fixed her with a grim stare. “I did mention that revenants are dead.”

“That still wouldn't explain why he's coming after us,” Nick said, looking pale and haunted himself. “They buried his bones. He should thank us, not try to kill us.”

“I can't even believe we're talking about this,” Frank said. “Dead people do not wander around and—”

“You saw him out there just now,” Lili scolded him. “Your eyes don't lie. That was no magician's trick. I agree with Nick, though. Why is he coming for us?”

Tess hugged herself tightly, tea forgotten. She stared at the center of the table, but her thoughts were on Maddie. Whatever happened to the rest of them, herself included, she would not allow any harm to come to her little girl.

“It's possible he's not coming for us at all,” she said. “The way he sniffs the air … outside the gallery where Lili and I first saw him, he very clearly said something like ‘I had the scent.' He thought whatever scent he was tracking had led him to us. But maybe the scent he was following belonged to Lili's double, and her pretending to be Lili confused him.”

Everyone looked to Audrey, then. None of them dared comment on the lunatic impossibilities of Tess's theory without her chiming in first. She had her head down, fingers to her lips as though preventing herself from speaking until she could be sure of her words. When she glanced up at Tess, she nodded.

“There's logic in that. Whatever these doubles are,” Audrey said, “whether they're revenants or living people who've used magic to hide themselves behind your faces—”

“Our,” Nick said.

Audrey frowned. “Sorry?”

Nick shrugged. “
Our
faces. If your raggedy man is Berrige or if he isn't, either way, you saw him before any of us brought you into this thing. If he's hunting our doubles and getting confused by their scents mingling with ours—and his hunt led him to you—that means there's a double of you out there somewhere, too.”

Audrey looked like she might throw up. She sagged in her chair. “Fuuuuuck.”

Tess snapped her fingers impatiently. “C'mon, Audrey. Freak out later. You were talking about the doubles.”

“All I'm saying is, whatever they are, they started out just using your … our faces. Like a reflection,” Audrey said. “But it's more than just faces now. More than an image. They've started leeching something from us. Do they need it to survive, to sustain their appearance—”

“Or is it just to confuse the raggedy man?” Tess interrupted.

Audrey stared thoughtfully at her. “They need us for something, that's for sure. Nick wants to move far away and they don't want that to happen. And if we're some kind of danger to them, my guess is if they didn't need us they would just kill us.”

A knock came at the front door and they all jumped in their chairs. Tess's breath caught in her throat and she turned to stare at Lili.

Nick was the first one to rise. “I'll get it.”

“No,” she said. “It's my place.”

But he followed her to the door. Nick tensed, ready to fight, but when she opened the door it was only Aaron Blaustein, wearing an apologetic look.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said. “What'd I miss?”

Beside her, Nick exhaled.

“Come in, Aaron,” Tess said. “I'll get you a coffee and we can start at the beginning.”

 

EIGHT

The noise of a door opening made Frank shift in his sleep, muttering to himself. Then came the creak of footfalls on the stairs. He frowned, resisting the urge to wake for several seconds, but then consciousness seeped in and he felt the weariness of his bones and the throbbing soreness of his muscles. His shoulders were the worst of all, alight with blazing pain from using the chain of his handcuffs to saw at the rusty bolts holding the support post in place behind him.