Doppelgänger (18 page)

One of the burning logs in the fireplace broke in half with a flurry of sparks. Anine jumped, startled. She was very much on-edge.

He's right, Julian
, she said to her husband silently
. We have to go. Now, tonight. We'll go to a hotel and decide what to do next. I bet even getting that far away will improve things between us
.

“Doctor,” said Julian, his tone sounding now almost academic, “these doppelgängers, they're actually—”

“
Doppelgänger.
The singular and plural form are the same.”

“Well, whatever, but they are essentially the ghosts of living persons, right? However they get this way, whatever causes it, they're still connected to
living
people, aren't they?”

Dorr looked even more uneasy. “Yes.”

“Everyone says Mrs. Quain is in very poor health. If she were to die, the doppelgänger would be extinguished, would it not?”

Anine felt a pang of dread.
He's not thinking of…?

“Mr. Atherton,” said Dorr, “I don't think I like where this is going.”

“No, I need to understand this. We're dealing with the spirit of someone still alive. If that person dies, their doppelgänger dies with them. That's only logical, right?”

“It is logical. But I must stress to you that we have no way of knowing—”

“Mrs. Quain is an invalid. She must be weak and feeble, shuttered up in that Newport cottage for months. If she passes away, which can't be too far off, our problem is solved without us having to do anything. Would you say that's reasonable to assume, Doctor?”

So that's it? We sit around in this dreadful house waiting for Mrs. Quain to die?
Anine thought this was slightly better than the dark deed she imagined Julian contemplating a moment ago, but not by much. For one thing, it could take years.

Dorr too seemed bothered. He stood up. “You have heard my recommendation,” he said softly. “I'll be going now.”

“Doctor, is what I've said
reasonable
?”

Dorr turned to Anine. “Mrs. Atherton, I hope I've been some help to you. If you will get my coat and hat, please.” Stepping toward the door of the parlor he looked over at Julian. “I'll send you a bill. I know a gentleman of your means is always prompt with his payments. I wish you the best of luck. You can, of course, count on my complete confidence in this matter.”

Just before he stepped out of the Green Parlor, the Abyssinian cat darted in front of his feet, out the door and into the darkened entryway. His eyes met Anine's. A knowing look passed between them. Then he put on his hat and cape, opened the front door onto the rainy night, and as he left Anine realized with fatalistic certainty that she had seen the last of Dr. Andrew Jackson Dorr, psychologist and spiritual medium.

Chapter Fourteen

The Time of Breaking

The séance—or, perhaps more precisely, the knowledge of what the
spöke
was and what it wanted—changed something in the house. Anine slept badly that night, but it was the first night that Julian had slept in her bed in several weeks. He kept the revolver on the bedside table, which she thought ridiculous since it would be useless against the doppelgänger, but she said nothing. There was the sense now that they were beleaguered, that the
spöke
was holding them hostage and they must stand together if they were to have any chance of persevering in the house. She found a kernel of hope in this notion, but she was skeptical it would last. The doppelgänger, above all things, wanted to foster conflict between them.

The doppelgänger reacted in its own way. The morning after the séance began the period that Anine came to refer into her own mind
the time of breaking
. It began at breakfast when the sugar bowl on the table suddenly and spontaneously crumbled into shards. No one was touching it and in fact Mrs. Hennessey was staring right at it when it happened.
Chinkkk!
Suddenly the sugar was a small mound on the table, studded with bits of broken porcelain. “My, how did
that
happen?” said Mrs. Hennessey. Anine was silent. The cook evidently knew nothing of the supernatural disturbances and Anine was not eager to bring a new person into the circle.

Later that morning Miss Wicks came to the Green Parlor. “Miss Anine, I've got something to report,” she said. “I woke up this morning and the mirror in my room was broken. It was nothing I did.”

Anine looked up from her cards, paused a moment and then stood up. “You're certain of it? That it was nothing you did?”

“I'm not in the habit of throwing things at mirrors.”

“Of course you're not. Let's go look at it.”

Clea brought her to the maid's quarters in the garret. Indeed the small mirror over Clea's bureau looked as if a stone had been thrown squarely at it. The ruptures in the glass radiated from a central point of impact, looking eerily like a spider web. Anine touched the edge of one of the shards. “You didn't see it break, Clea?”

“No. I got out of bed this morning and found it like this.”

“You heard no disturbance during the night?”

“No. None.”

I must tell her everything that happened
, Anine resolved.
The séance—the doctor's warning—everything.
She felt awkward confessing it to Clea here in the house, however, with the doppelgänger watching them and listening to every word. Still staring at the mirror which duplicated her own reflection into a myriad of jagged-edged figures she said, “We must talk. There is much I must tell you. But not here. After what happened in the Central Park it's obviously not proper for us to go back there. There must be a park, a public space for working class people where we could talk without arousing anger. Do you know of such a place?”

Clea looked taken aback. “Miss Anine, I don't think that'd be proper.”

“Miss Wicks, our choices have become extremely limited, have they not?”

The maid seemed to recoil a little bit but she was so stoic that her reaction would have been barely noticeable to anyone who didn't know her well. “There's a place called Jones's Wood,” she replied. “It's on East 68th Street.”

“Well, that's where we'll go.”

“It's raining today, Miss Anine.”

“We'll go when the rain stops. If not today, tomorrow. Find me something suitable to wear there.” She turned away from the mirror and looked deeply at Clea.
It's important
, she tried to say with her eyes.

The rain did not stop that day, nor did the breakages. At lunchtime Mrs. Hennessey discovered that two expensive china plates had crumbled into dust where they sat stacked on a shelf in the kitchen. A pitcher and bowl in one of the guest bedrooms were also found shattered. When she changed clothes in the afternoon Anine went to put on a brooch that she'd worn many times, given to her by her mother, and discovered that the clasp had been snapped clean through. Miss Wicks reported that she'd found a chair in the library sitting crooked, one of its legs having been broken off. The broken-off piece of the chair's lower leg was never found. In all of these cases no one was present to see the damage occur. It seemed to happen silently and stealthily, in empty rooms and at odd times—a subtle trail of destruction caused by an invisible spirit who, Anine thought, wanted with this action to irritate and annoy more than terrify.

She did, however, witness one breakage with her own eyes. It was at dinner, where she found herself again dining alone. Spontaneously, and with no sound other than a very soft hiss, the stem of her wine glass drooped like a wilting flower. A moment later the bowl of the glass seemed to tighten, like a skin of ice contracting, and then it shattered with a soft
plink!
Droplets of wine showered over the table and rose like a fine rose-colored mist into the air. It was really quite beautiful, but Anine found her appetite had suddenly drained away. She pushed away her plate and stared at the ruin of the glass. The emotion she felt was exasperation more than fear.

“Is that supposed to scare me?” she said aloud to the
spöke
.

Instantly the spirit reacted. Anine felt a swift blow in her solar plexus. Actually it was less of a blow than a sudden awful tightening, like an invisible hand had closed itself around her abdomen. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. The tightening in her stomach became a violent lurch. She bolted out of her chair. A moment later vomit burst out of her mouth as if propelled by a cannon. The dinner she'd just eaten splattered in pinkish chunks over the tablecloth, her plate and the broken remains of the wine glass. The sudden acrid aroma of stomach acid made her woozy.

Yet in seconds it was over. The clutch in her stomach was gone and she didn't even feel nauseous; indeed she felt perfectly fine. After the head rush cleared Anine was slightly weak at the knees and she sat back down. The table was now a dreadful mess.

That will teach you to mock me
, she imagined the doppelgänger thinking.

“I'm still not scared,” she said.

Actually, she was.

Over the next two days—during which the cold drizzle that had seized New York still did not abate—the pace of breakings increased, and the
spöke
's foray into destructive phenomena took a new turn: it seemed like it was trying to communicate.

Julian brought it to her attention first. After his work was over for the day and he came home from a brief political meeting, shortly before dinner he called Anine up to his bedroom. “I want you to see something,” he said.

She came, somewhat reluctantly, to his room. Draped over the end of the bed was one of his formal jackets, black with long tails. He picked it up and laid it over his arm. “Mr. Shoop noticed this when he was putting something back into the closet.”

The back of the jacket was covered with a strange flurry of small marks. They were hash marks, some long, some short, arranged in no discernible pattern. The marks appeared to have been made with chalk or a wax pencil or something of that nature. Anine's brow knitted as she looked at them. Gingerly she reached forward to touch one of the marks. The stuff—she had no idea what it was made of—did not come off on her fingers. It had no smell either.

“Have you noticed anything like this before?” Julian asked her.

She shook her head. “No. I haven't.”

“Mr. Shoop doesn't think it can be cleaned and neither do I, but we'll send it to the laundry tomorrow in the hopes they can work a miracle.” Unceremoniously Julian flung the jacket into a nearby chair. “First the goddamn thing starts breaking our plates, and now it ruins a fifty-dollar tailcoat. Maybe it means to get us to leave by running us out of money.”

“At fifty dollars a tailcoat and eight dollars a Crown Derby plate, the doppelgänger may achieve its goal in about twenty years,” said Anine, starting for the door. Julian merely scoffed and shook his head.

In the morning Anine herself observed more of the curious hash marks. She found them on the green velvet wallpaper in the second-floor hall, right in the corner. They were made with the same chalky substance. These marks looked slightly different than the ones on Julian's coat. They were less angular, more curved and squiggly, but still equally meaningless. Because one of the squiggles looked like part of a letter
N
Anine thought,
Is it trying to send us a message?
She thought the doppelgänger had told them everything it had to communicate through Dr. Dorr, so perhaps this was simply another attempt to intimidate or unnerve them. There was no way to be sure.

Later the same day Mrs. Hennessey called Anine into the kitchen. “I found a curious thing, ma'am, on one of the serving trays.” She presented a large silver tray so broad and straight that its bottom could have been a mirror, except for the fact that it was marred with the same squiggly lines. Unlike the disturbances done in the chalky substance, these were scored into the silver with some hard metallic object. Anine could feel the ridges of the marks with her fingers. These squiggles made no more sense than any of the others did, except for one that appeared to be an incomplete letter
A
.

“Who could have done this?” said Mrs. Hennessey. “The tray was in the pantry like always. I don't think I've brought it out in a week.”

“I don't know,” Anine lied. “If you notice anything else of this nature, Mrs. Hennessey, please report it at once.”

“You mean aside from plates and sugar bowls breaking themselves all over the place?”

“I'd like to know about those too.”

“I'll be reporting to you a lot then, ma'am. It seems like every time I turn around something else is broken.” Mrs. Hennessey shook her head. “If I didn't know better, I'd say this place was haunted.” This was the first indication that the cook had begun to notice the
spöke
phenomenon.

Very much as Anine expected, the strange hash marks appearing on various objects proved to be indelible and destructive. Not only was the laundress to whom Bryan Shoop delivered Julian's tailcoat at a loss as to how to eradicate the marks, she couldn't even determine what they were made of. The same was true of the markings on the wall on the second floor. Clea tried mightily to sponge them away with everything, including lye soap, but couldn't make the slightest impression upon them. The only remedy, Anine realized, was to cut out that section of wallpaper and replace it with a new sheet that had to be matched meticulously. Fortunately the wallpaper she had ordered for the house while on their honeymoon was machine-printed, not hand-painted, and thus she could place an order through the decorator for replacements. Anticipating that more walls would be ruined in the future, however, she ordered several more rolls of surplus wallpaper for all the rooms in the house. Between this, Julian's suit, the broken crockery, the mirrors, the table and the serving tray, in the few days since the séance the doppelgänger had already cost the household nearly a thousand dollars.

On Friday, a week after the séance, the deluge of rain finally abated. It was not exactly sunny and the ground was still sodden but Anine seized the chance to get away from the house, and she told Clea to summon a carriage. The maid had chosen as Anine's costume for the outing to Jones's Wood a rather plain-looking cream-colored day dress that Anine used to wear on dreary afternoons during the long Swedish winters. Nevertheless she couldn't resist adding a hat, a new item she had ordered from a catalog the week before, trimmed boldly with bright yellow canary feathers. She must have looked rather odd clambering into the carriage, clutching her hat and followed by her maid dressed simply in black. The sun, playing hide-and-seek with the remnants of the rain clouds, happened to be shining at that moment. Anine was glad just to get out of the gloomy confines of the house.

Jones's Wood was a curious place. For one thing there were precious little woods left of it. Most of the site had been given over to a large, gaudy-looking amusement park, which given the season and the weather was not open. The park fronted no fewer than three German-style beer gardens which were open, though sparsely populated in the middle of the day on a Friday. The place obviously catered to working-class New Yorkers, and as she got out of the carriage Anine felt actually relieved at the total absence of promenading socialites and ostentatious buggies that one saw in the Central Park. The sky had clouded over by now but the rain did not resume. Glancing at the beer gardens, feeling adventurous and even cheerful, Anine said, “You know what, Clea? I believe I'll have a glass of beer.”

“You sure you want to do that, Miss Anine? If word gets around—”

“Stuff and nonsense. No one even remotely connected to society would be caught dead here. That's why I think I like this place.” Anine took out her coin purse and started toward the nearest of the beer establishments. “Come along.”

Anine sat on a rough wooden bench at a picnic table on the muddy grass beneath several droopy crepe-paper streamers and a hand-lettered sign in German. Her small gloved hand curled around the handle of a colossal glass beer stein. Two elderly men, both with bushy mustaches, looked at her strangely as they smoked cigars at a table not far away but no one else seemed to pay them any attention. “This was a good idea,” said Anine. “We can talk privately here.”

“It may not be such a good idea if word gets around. It almost always does.”

“Well, certainly
you
won't be telling?” Anine smiled and sipped from her mug. Then she knew the time for levity was past. “There's much to tell you, Clea. The doctor was at our house Friday night. He made contact with the spirit.”