Dead Ringers (35 page)

“And I thought your friend Danton was an arrogant prick,” she said.

The thing that wasn't Aaron flinched. “What are you—”

“You were all so full of yourselves, weren't you?” she said. “Cornell Berrige was the most accomplished magician of the nineteenth century and even he couldn't safely summon real evil into the world, but you amateurs thought you'd dabbled enough that calling yourselves the Society of the Lesser Key would lend you a sophistication and a level of skill none of you really had.”

As she spoke, Tess kept backing toward the psychomanteum, knowing with every step that the other doubles might be inside, living within the mirrored panes of its interior. At any moment they might step out, might reach for her—the one called Marketa would try to leech more of her soul away, trap her inside the mirrors.

“Your tongue is going to get you killed, woman,” Not-Aaron said as he began to approach her. In the soft shadows of the room he seemed to have three faces, one Aaron Blaustein, one she imagined he'd had in life, and the third his true face. Withered and dead, half his lower jaw rotted away.

Tess shuddered. She'd allowed fear and adrenaline to push away the knowledge of what these things really were and what it might mean to be drained completely, reduced to nothing but a husk of humanity, a forgotten shadow.

“I never liked Aaron Blaustein,” she said. “But he had a wife and kids who loved him and now he's dead because you and your friends were so full of ambition that you were willing to sell your souls, but too cowardly to pay the price when it came.”

“Hush, now, and die,” the dead man said. His upper lip curled in disdain as he strode toward her, snatching a knife from a table that had been prepared for the morning's breakfast seating.

“You want to be careful telling a woman to watch her tongue,” Tess said. “It never goes well.”

She bolted for the emergency exit, smashed the safety bar on the door and it swung wide, blasted by the autumn wind. She turned back to look at the occultist, at the only thing left of Aaron. He picked up his pace, perhaps thinking she meant to run.

Lili was first through the door, this little Indian woman wearing leather gloves and carrying the poker from Tess's fireplace. Aaron's double slowed a moment, then gripped the knife tighter and lunged toward them.

Nick stepped through the door, aluminum bat held down by his side.

The dead thing hesitated.

Lili smashed him across the skull with the fireplace poker, gashing his skin. Blood spattered as he staggered into a table and then fell over a chair, his knife skittering across the carpet.

“Stay down,” Nick said, pointing at him with the bat, even as Audrey came through the door with the duffel bag.

“Do it,” Tess said, nodding at Lili.

Audrey pulled a pair of golf clubs from the bag and dropped it onto the floor. She handed one to Tess, glancing around.

“No alarm?” Audrey asked.

“Maybe silent,” Nick said. “Clock's ticking either way.”

Tess gripped the golf club in both hands and followed Lili up to the psychomanteum. “Careful for the glass.”

“Stop!” the dead thing said, its false face wavering. Not-Aaron scrambled to his feet, touching his bleeding head. “You don't understand.”

Nick swung the baseball bat, breaking the dead thing's right arm. It cried out in pain.

“Thing is,” Nick said, “we do.”

Tess stepped into the psychomanteum, where Lili shoved aside the table the hotel managers had put there. She cocked her arms back, ready to swing the golf club at dozens of reflections of her own face.

Audrey began to scream. A wail tore from her throat, followed by desperate words.

“How … oh, God, how can you not feel that?” she cried as she fell to her knees.

As if the words had opened some window of perception in her, Tess did feel it. She doubled over, a pressure on her skull unlike anything she'd ever felt. Sweat beaded on her skin and she wanted to run, to get to fresh air, to water, to anything that might help clean the filth from her flesh. The ghosts of the Lesser Key had flesh and bone, they were solid, and somehow Tess and the others had persuaded themselves to look past what else they were. Dead things, yes, but black magicians.

Evil.

Three feet ahead of her, Lili leaned against the mirrored interior of the apparition box, tears streaming down her face as she used her free hand to swipe at imaginary things in her hair.

How foolish they had been to let themselves be brave. Tess wanted to tear her own skin off. Instead, she swung the golf club as hard as she could. Two mirrored panes shattered inside the octagonal booth, shards flying. One cut her face but she ignored the sting and swung again, smashing a third pane.

The thing that was not Aaron screamed and rushed toward the box. Nick struck him again with the baseball bat, shouting for them to keep going. Audrey struggled to her feet and staggered toward the psychomanteum, blood streaming from both of her nostrils from some kind of psychic overload.

Tess grimaced, lifting the golf club again. “Nice try,” she managed to say, tears slipping down her face from pure revulsion and fear. “But mothers don't run.”

Hundreds of Tess faces looked back at her from the mirrored walls. Hundreds of reflections of her, along with hundreds of Lilis.

“No,” Lili rasped.

Tess glanced over at her.
Beyond
her. One of her reflections grew larger, looming. It wore the same clothes as Lili did and its hair looked the same, but it did not move when Lili moved. It had adapted to her reflection, but it lived, and its eyes gleamed with fury.

“No!” Lili cried, and swung the fireplace poker at the glass.

Too late.

The thing that called itself Devani Kanda lunged from within the mirrors, emerging as if thrust from darkness into light. The double wrapped her hands around Lili's throat, momentum hurling them both out of the psychomanteum.

Lili's double strangled her, screaming in hatred all the while.

The dead thing wearing Aaron Blaustein's face only laughed.

 

TWELVE

Frank sat in the backseat of the Toyota with his back against the door, as far from the revenant corpse of Simon Danton as he could get without fleeing the car. He wished he had thought to ask Lili to crack the windows because it was getting warm and close back there, despite the chilly night. Frank told himself they wouldn't be long. The plan had been for Tess to sneak in, open the emergency door to the outside and let the others in, smash all hell out of the mirrors inside the psychomanteum and then run out the same door before they could be detained and arrested.

Simple.

Batshit crazy, but simple.

He held his gun in both hands, rested on his thigh. For the first few minutes he had kept it aimed at Danton's skull but his arms were getting tired, and if he waited until they were too weary to hold the gun up, Danton might easily get the jump on him. This way the gun still pointed in the dead man's general direction and he could still get a shot off if Danton made a move.

Or even if he didn't.

Ghost or not, dead thing or living abomination, Simon Danton had masqueraded as him, chained him in his own basement, made him shit and piss in a bucket, mocked and laughed at him. Frank wanted very much to shoot him in the face. The strange part of that, however, was that he wasn't motivated by any of the things that Danton had done to him directly, or by horror at the hideous nature of what this inhuman thing was. He wanted to take aim and pull the trigger again and again for only one reason—because Danton had been better at being Frank Lindbergh than Frank himself had ever been.

“I'm going to miss it,” Danton surprised him by saying.

Frank kept his arms rigid, ready to fire. “Miss what?”

The dead thing smiled. Frank wasn't sure what the rest of them saw when they looked at Danton, but to him the thing looked like what it was. A haunt. A withered human scarecrow, dried and desiccated. Dead except for the little points of ugly yellow light in the pits of its eyes.

“Miss being you,” it said, as if it could read his mind. And maybe it could, after all the bits of him it had leeched away.

“You were never me,” Frank said. “You were wearing a costume. Hiding and praying Berrige wouldn't come and make you pay for the evil you'd done.”

“Is it so hard to imagine that we wanted a second chance at life?” the dead thing said, its voice the sound of autumn leaves crunching underfoot. “We weren't hiding, we were living.”

Frank sniffed, almost a laugh, and saw Danton go rigid.

The dead thing swiveled its head to glare at him with those sickly, gleaming eyes. “What are you—”

“If you weren't hiding, you could have used your own faces.”

The dead man glared at him, withered lips parted as if he might speak in his dusty, leathery voice, but he had nothing to say. The point had been made.

Something slapped the window just behind Danton and they both jumped. Frank lifted the gun, afraid the man who'd stolen his face—this man who'd once persuaded a group of others to dabble in black magic—would attack him. In a split second, he realized the sound was not Danton's doing. He'd seen that the dead man was startled but it took his conscious mind a moment to catch up with his instincts, for logic to catch up with fear.

Outside the car, a scrap of filthy black cloth billowed against the glass and Frank's heart beat wildly in his chest.

He knew, then. Even before Danton turned to look out the window, already more faded and diminished than an hour before. Even before the glass shattered and long arms reached into the backseat, spindly fingers like spider's legs closing around the dried flesh of Danton's throat and puncturing it like it was made of papier-mâché.

Even before he saw the grinning, thin-lipped mouth and its rows of black shark's teeth, or the filthy blindfold that covered the raggedy man's eyes.

Danton screamed as the blind man dragged him from the car, half-vanished dead flesh ripping like parchment paper on the jagged shards remaining in the window frame. The raggedy man stuffed the fading remains of the ghost inside his coat, where the darkness roiled and breathed. Frank saw another screaming face in the shadows inside that coat, a damned soul trapped in a shifting indigo Hell, and beneath the screaming and the sounds of the city there came another voice, speaking a guttural, ancient language so laden with malice that Frank Lindbergh could do nothing but turn away, pressed against the opposite car door, weeping and waiting for the demon inside the raggedy man's coat to drag him into darkness.

When he glanced up, the raggedy man had gone and Simon Danton was no more.

“Oh,” Frank whispered to himself. “Oh, no.”

Then his hands were scrabbling for the door latch and the lock and he popped open the back door, stumbling into the street. A car horn blared and he turned into the bright headlights of a taxi, which swerved to avoid running him down. The driver shouted profanity out the window, but Frank barely heard. Numb, he turned to look at the side of the Nepenthe Hotel. Dead leaves skittered along the sidewalk and the road, fallen from the handful of trees that lined either side of the street.

He shut the car door softly, calmly. Pushed it to make sure it had clicked into place. For a moment he hung his head, heart thundering and face flushed, wondering if he could live with himself if he ran away now. Maybe if he hadn't already given up on himself so many times in this life that he'd grown sick of it. Maybe if the dead thing Simon Danton—whose screams still echoed in his mind—hadn't reduced him to a human husk before he'd reclaimed his name and his face. Maybe if he hadn't kissed Tess Devlin that night at the party, or if he couldn't remember how soft her lips had been and how kind her eyes on that night.

“Oh, shit,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

Frank lifted his head, stared at the hotel, and then started to run.

Toward it.

 

THIRTEEN

In the darkness of the cellar of the Otis Harrison House, Steven found that he could still see. It made no sense, really. When he had come downstairs he had been carrying a flashlight, but now the flashlight was no longer in his hands. He vaguely recalled a cracking sound, though he admitted to himself that it might have been his skull when he had tripped over uneven stones in the floor and fallen.

Don't be stupid,
he thought, flexing his fingers on the grip of his service weapon. His palm was dry against the surface of the gun.
If you'd cracked your skull, you wouldn't be standing here.

Of course he wasn't standing, was he?

No. He was sitting, cradling the gun, letting its weight lie gently in his grasp like the hand of a lover.

The crack had been the flashlight. Almost certainly it had. Though he thought he smelled blood and it might have been his. He had to acknowledge the possibility. After all, he was a police officer, which meant he had to be an objective observer of the evidence. The flashlight, though … it was gone, and he remembered the cracking sound and now the cellar cloaked him in darkness.

But he could still see.

His friend whispered to him in words he had never heard before, but just as he could still see in the dark, he understood that rasping language and the things being said to him by that voice drifting up from the pit in the middle of the cellar.

Steven blinked his eyes, so different now. Vision so clear, so detailed there in the darkness. He sat just at the edge of the pit, dangerously close, and felt the cold draft that whispered past him as if the pit itself were breathing.

He cradled his gun and he nodded slowly, understanding the words and the dark, matching his breaths to the breathing of the pit.

 

FOURTEEN

Belly contentedly full of mac and cheese, Kyrie sat on the sofa at Nick's apartment with a cup of tea balanced on one leg. Maddie had been restless through the first half of
Finding Dory,
but at last she had rested herself against Kyrie, laid her head down on Kyrie's lap and promptly fell asleep. After the intruder the other night and whatever bizarreness had taken place today—hinted at in the girl's intriguing babble of an explanation—the poor thing was totally wrung out. Maddie would think it a betrayal if Kyrie watched without her. They would finish in the morning.