The Identical Boy (10 page)

All
y
stormed into her kitchen and launched her bag against the far wall, before stomping over to the table and throwing herself down on a chair with a strangled cry of frustration.

‘So,’ said Ally’s Mum. ‘All right and well with you, then?’

Ally rolled her eyes so hard they were in danger of dislocating. ‘Don’t give up the day job, ma.’

‘I thought you were on babysitting duty tonight? You didn’t forget, did you, because that boy’s Mum will be on the phone to me and she is a royal pain in the behind.’

‘I didn’t forget!’ said Ally, more sharply than she intended.

‘All right, moody one, blimey.’ Ally’s Mum paused to let her continue.

Ally did not continue.

‘And…?’

‘And … and nothing.’ Ally fidgeted. What was she going to say? That suddenly Sam had a creepy twin brother who never existed before? She knew how 100% insane this all sounded, but it had happened. It was the truth.

‘Out with it, then.’

‘There’s nothing to “out”! I just quit, alright? I couldn’t stand that perv of a dad anymore. Or the Mum! Have you smelled that bog water she sprays herself with? It’s a freaking health and safety hazard!’

Her Mum sighed. ‘What did you do, young lady?’

‘Oh, it’s always
my
fault, isn’t it?’

‘You’re mouth does have a history of getting you fired. Remember that paper round?’

‘I was ten!’

‘And you called Mr. Baker, that lovely old man from the corner shop, a—and I quote: “fascist, evil, fart-breathed pig-person”.’

‘Well, ten-year-old me had a way with words; what can I say?’

‘So, why did that dreadful woman fire you tonight?’

Ally screamed in frustration. The kitchen floor squeaked as Ally turned sharply on her heels and headed for the stairs.

Two
days later, Ally was walking and smoking. She looked up and realised she’d wandered near Mark the bully’s house. Mark the ex-bully. Mark the most likely very dead bully. Stood opposite, staring at the place, was Sam. She looked around to see if his creepy twin was in sight, but the street was empty. Flicking her almost dead cigarette into the road, Ally squared her shoulders and went over.

‘Oi, Sammy boy, care to share?’

Sam turned to her, startled, like she’d just snapped him out of a deep sleep.

‘What?’

‘Wakey-wakey, little man. What’s going on over at your house? Who’s the little creepy mirror image?’

Sam looked at his shoes and scuffed at an empty crisp bag. ‘That’s my friend. My best friend.’

‘Your best friend who looks exactly, and I do mean
exactly
, like you. Your best friend who, I got the distinct impression, your parents think of as their own child. Your best friend who they seem to think I know all about. That one?’

Sam said nothing. Ally grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him towards her. ‘Oi, answer me! This is some weird malarkey you’ve got going on, and I want to know what the beef is.’

‘I don’t know why they think he’s always been there. They weren’t even supposed to know. But … but then I came back home from school one day and he was sat with them in the kitchen. Just talking. I thought I was busted. That I was in trouble.’

‘But you weren’t.’

Sam shook his head. ‘They just acted like everything was normal.’

‘Well, who is he? Where did he come from?’

‘He’s just my friend. My best friend ever. That’s all and everything I know.’

Ally raised an unbelieving eyebrow and leaned back against the wall, fishing in her pocket for a fresh smoke. ‘Cost me my babysitting gig, you know.’

‘You won’t be coming back? I can ask Mum?’

Ally struck a match. ‘No thanks. They’d have to pay me a lot more to go back to your house, place got a little over-creepy suddenly.’

Sam looked sad, turning away to stare at Mark’s house again.

‘Why are you always here?’ asked Ally.

‘I’m not!’ said Sam. ‘Not always. Hardly ever!’

‘It’s the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen you here. You and bully boy weren’t friends. Never were, never was, so what’s with the ghoulish house watch?’

Sam looked as though he was going to say something, then quickly zipped up his coat and turned to leave. Ally pulled him back by his coat hood.

‘Woah, woah, there boy, hold your horses—’

‘Let me go!’ Sam struggled, pulling at his coat; Ally yanked it down hard so he fell to the ground. He looked up at her, eyes wounded.

‘Sorry. I’m … look, Sam, come on, I’m your friend aren’t I?’

Sam looked up at her from the ground. It looked as though he was about to burst into tears.

‘Sammy boy…?’

‘I don’t…. He’s just my best friend. My best friend. My best, best friend.’

Ally looked over to Mark’s house, then back to Sam as something cold bloomed in her stomach.  ‘Do you know something? About Mark? It’s okay, we can go to my Mum. She’ll help; we can just—’

‘I don’t know anything, okay!’

Sam jumped to his feet and ran as fast as his skinny legs would carry him.

‘Sam! Sam, I’m sorry, come back!’

He didn’t slow or look back at her. Ally watched him leave, feeling worried and confused. What was going on? She was still none the wiser about the sudden hey-presto appearance of Sam’s twin, who he claimed was his best friend, but his parents seemed to think was their own flesh and blood, or something. And how was Mark mixed up in it all? Had Sam seen something, or maybe heard something? Was there a connection?

Jesus, it felt like her brain was full of overactive frogs, jumping this way and that and butting heads.

She took a draw on her cigarette and looked at Mark’s house. Something was going on. She knew it. Something bad.

Something really and completely bad.

Th
e
next day, Ally decided to do a little investigating. If Sam wasn’t going to let her in on the secret, then Ally guessed it would be up to her to get to the bottom of it all.

She dressed all in black, shades in place, and crouched behind a hedge a little way down the street from Sam’s house. She watched as his awful Mum and Dad left for their jobs in the morning. Watched as Sam left, on his way to school.

For a while, she was content to wait and watch the house, earphones clamped to her ears to relieve the hours of boredom. Her eyes scanned from window to window. Upstairs, downstairs. Looking for the merest hint of the home’s newest and strangest inhabitant.

After three hours without even a twitch of an upstairs curtain, or the opening of the downstairs blinds, Ally decided to get a closer look. She made her way to the back alleyway, then scrabbled over the back garden fence, only slightly grazing a couple of knuckles in the process.

Swearing under her breath as she sucked the smear of blood from her hand, she crept towards the kitchen window. Peeking through the netting, she discovered the kitchen was empty. Which wasn’t really that amazing a discovery.

Spying the drainpipe, she spat on both palms and rubbed them together. ‘Here we go…’

Slowly but surely, Ally managed to shimmy up the drainpipe. Putting her life (or at least her ankles’ current unbroken nature) on the line, she stretched away from the drainpipe to steal a look through one of the upstairs windows.

Nothing.

Almost slipping twice, Ally made her way back to the ground. She kicked an old plant pot containing a long-dead bit of vegetation over, then climbed back over the back wall.

So far on her first day as a super spy, Ally had learned precisely zilch about the weirdness around Sam. Well, this wouldn’t do. No more pussyfooting around. Time to take the bull by the horns.

Ally marched round to the front door and rang the bell, long and hard, so it blared annoyingly sharply inside. She waited for twenty seconds, then repeated the bell prodding, this time followed by repeated bashing of the metal doorknocker as a noisy chaser.

Still nothing.

Ally fished a hand into her pocket and retrieved her ring of keys. One of the keys opened the front door to Sam’s house. She’d been entrusted with the key as a precaution whilst Sam’s babysitter of choice. She might have walked out on that post (or been fired, depending on whom you asked) but she still had possession of the key.

Now, either Sam’s double was in there ignoring the front door, in which case she could corner him alone and force some answers out of the skinny twerp, or she’d find herself in an empty house. In which case she’d rifle through the place, looking for clues. She wouldn’t have to hurry; it was still hours before anyone would return.

An illicit thrill zipping through her, Ally grinned and slid the key into the lock. She twisted the key and pushed the door open.

‘Hello, hello? You in here, creepy boy who looks a freaky lot like my little buddy?’

Ally closed the door behind her and pocketed her keys. The inside of the house felt very still and silent, as though movement and noise was neither expected nor wanted at this point in its day.

‘Hey, hey, hey! It’s just me, your sassy neighbourhood babysitter! Well, former babysitter.’ Ally’s words seemed to echo off the walls. ‘Come out, come out if you’re lurking! I promise I won’t do too many dreadful things to your skinny little body!’

Nothing. No reply, no sound of anyone moving to meet her or to hide.

Ally sighed, a little disappointed. She’d really hoped the weirdo would be in; that way she could get to the bottom of all this in double-quick time. Now, chances were she’d find little to help her.

She made her way into the living room. Everything looked the same: the couch with its sagging and crushed cushions, the giant TV, the God-awful smell of that woman’s toilet water of a perfume.

Ally coughed. ‘Yuck…’ Even the ghost of it clawed at her eyes and throat.

She turned to leave the room, then stopped as something caught her eye. It was a picture in a frame, perched on the mantelpiece. There was Sam, and there were his parents behind him. And then, stood next to Sam, was a second boy. An identical boy.

‘What the what….’ Ally picked the picture up and stared at it. This was too weird. She’d seen this picture countless times. It was Sam and his parents on holiday in Devon. Stood on the beach together. The other boy had never been in it before, and now? Now, there he was. Like he’d always been there.

Ally shivered and put the picture back on the mantle.

The staircase creaked under her feet as she took each step. It was weird how loud and unsettling any normal sound seemed when you were alone in the very quiet and your heart was beating a little too fast.

Sam’s room was at the end of the corridor, the door closed. Ally suddenly felt as though she should turn around and leave the house. Forget about all this. Whatever it was, it was way too weird—weirder than that even. Maybe it was best left alone.

There was a noise from Sam’s room.

Ally held her breath.

A bedspring creaking? As though someone on the bed had shifted their position?

‘Hey, freaky boy, you in there?’

Silence. Ally began to move towards the door.

‘You know if you’re trying to scare me … well … you’re doing an okay job, I’ve gotta admit. So congratulations. But I know something you don’t. I know you’ve got arms like pipe cleaners, and if you carry on playing daft I’ll have to snap them in bits, alright?’

There was no further noise, and no reply.

‘Right, you asked for it.’ Ally gripped the handle and threw the door open, leaping through, fists aloft. ‘Hi-
ya
!’

Ally looked around the little room, holding her kung-fu stance. It was empty.

Lowering her fists, she got on her knees and looked under the bed, then in the wardrobe, and finally the trunk at the bottom of the bed. No little Sam mirror-image lurking.

‘Ally, girl, your mind is playing mean tricks on you,’ she said.

Ally shook her head, green hair swinging, and decided that the search was a bust; she wasn’t going to discover anything. She’d just have to wait until the little weirdo went outside with Sam and corner the pair of them. A little old fashioned bullying would get the truth out of the little squirt.

She stepped out of Sam’s room and into the corridor. As she moved towards the stairs, something she saw made her stop. There was a new door. She was quite sure it hadn’t been there before. The upstairs of Sam’s house had three rooms: Sam’s room, his parents’ room, and the bathroom. One, two, three. So why was there now a fourth door between the bathroom and Sam’s parents’ room?

The door didn’t look like the others. It wasn’t painted, just bare wood, an ornate brass handle at the centre.

‘Okay, Ally, how about you don’t let your curiosity get the better of you for once and we high tail it out of here…? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Damn.’

Ally approached the new door, tentatively reaching a hand towards the brass handle. She half-expected sparks of electricity to arc out of the handle towards her fingers as they met. The handle was cold to the touch. Colder than Ally thought it should be. She twisted the handle, which moved silently and with ease, and pushed the door open.

It was dark inside, and Ally couldn’t make out a single thing. Not a colour or shape.

‘Hello?’ She reached a hand inside and felt around for a light switch. ‘Aha,’ she said as she found one and flicked it on. ‘Oh.’

Ally stood, dumbfounded, gazing around the new rooms’ interior. There were four walls, a ceiling, and a forest.

The room had a forest. ‘Well… blimey…’ was about as much as Ally could manage.

She stepped inside the forest room, fallen twigs crackling beneath her battered boots. She certainly wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about this, let alone her Mum; her Mum would for sure think Ally was on drugs if Ally told her about the magically-appearing room with a forest inside.

Half mesmerised, half weirded out, Ally walked further into the strange new room. It was big, bigger than a building this size could house. Ally could just about make out the back wall in the distance, through the crush of leaves and tree trunks. Way, way up was the ceiling, though it didn’t stop the trees. They thrust straight through it. Somehow Ally knew that, if she was to go outside, she wouldn’t see any treetops breaking through the roof and into the sky above.

‘This is crazy,’ said Ally, as she walked deeper into the room, turning round and round in awe at it all, waiting for the trick to be revealed, for the magician behind it to step out and show her how it was done.

In the centre of the room was the largest tree of all. It was as wide as four of the other trees with branches as thick as two people hugging. Ally felt compelled to reach out and touch the bark; it was warm and soft.

‘Weird….’ A rustling in the thick canopy of leaves above caught Ally’s attention. She bent her head right back, squinting, but she couldn’t see anything moving.

She jumped as something hit the ground behind her.  Something had fallen out of the tree. Turning, she saw a lumpy, grey-green ball, about the size of a football, sat on the ground. Actually, it wasn’t as round as a ball, it was more egg-shaped. It looked damp, oozing, decaying—like something that you might find in a damp basement when you lifted a long abandoned thing from one corner and looked underneath.

But that wasn’t all. As Ally shuffled still further forward and squinted, tilting her head slightly, she realised something else that made her gasp and raise a hand to cover her mouth.

It had Sam’s face.

Not an exact copy, it wasn’t perfect, it was sort of half-formed. Stretched. Twisted. But she could clearly see Sam in it.

Ally stepped towards the grey-green ball, already wondering why she was doing something that was so clearly a really, really dumb idea. She crouched a few feet away from it, peering closer.

It opened its eyes.

‘Gah!’ Ally fell back, kicking at the dirt as she pushed herself away from the thing. A thud, then another, and another. All around her more and more of the wet, leathery eggs with twisted, incomplete approximations of Sam’s face fell from the giant tree and to the ground.

One by one, they began to move. They turned to look at her, opening their crooked mouths wide and scream, scream, screaming.

Ally stood, and Ally ran. Ran for the door that led from this impossible nightmare room and back to non-terrifying normality. She looked back only once, to see the nightmare balls of teeth begin to drag themselves towards her with stunted limbs, mouths wide, screeching at such a pitch that it made Ally feel like she might be sick.

She leapt through the open door into the corridor and slammed the door closed behind her, cutting dead the noise from within. Now the only sound was her ragged breathing and the thumping rush of her own blood in her ears.

Ally blinked and the door was gone, replaced by wall. Ally didn’t stop to ponder this; she turned and ran down the stairs, along the corridor, and out the front door.

As Ally raced down the street and away from Sam’s house, she had the very certain feeling that if she were to turn back and look, she would see the identical boy framed in one of the windows, watching her leave.

Ally did not turn back and look.