Doppelgänger (26 page)

He scrambled to his feet. Anine was flattened against the balustrade on the steps, standing over Clea Wicks's body—Julian had no idea how she had died—and then she screamed again.
“Behind you!”

Julian turned. While he was looking away the doppelgänger had crouched on all fours and sprang like a cat, its joints bending in grotesque ways impossible for any human. It leapt four feet into the air and tackled Julian bodily to the carpet of the entryway. As they grappled Julian felt pieces of wood—shards from the broken grandfather clock case—cracking under his weight and digging into his back.

He clawed. There was a terrible pressure on his throat. The doppelgänger had gotten its hands around his neck and was squeezing the life out of him. Its face was inches away from his own. It was a mask of rage and anger, lips pulled back in a hideous snarl. The most horrible thing was that it
looked
like him. Every ginger hair, every pore on his nose, every freckle was in place. One of the hands that was even now crushing his throat had a little scar on it where Julian had accidentally gouged himself with a rusty wire when he was eight years old. And yet at the same time this thing was alien, vile, not of this world.
Evil
. Spittle frothed from its lips, turning to streamers of drool as it continued to gasp and sneer with the effort of strangling him. Julian's vision clouded. The pain in his neck was excruciating.

It's killing me…got to get…the pool stick…or anything…

“Let him go!” Anine shouted. “Stop it! You don't have to do this!”

“Fitta!”
the creature hissed.
“Var tyst!” (Be quiet!)

Julian's arms were flailing now, grasping for anything within reach that he could use as a weapon. He came up only with a three-inch stick of wood from the grandfather clock case. He plunged it into the doppelgänger's back but the creature didn't even flinch.

He seemed to drift away for several seconds. The pain faded; so did conscious thought. Under other circumstances Julian might have thought he had fallen asleep. When it cleared the pain resumed, now bursting in his head as well as in his neck and throat. His lungs were deflated, twitching in the airless void of his chest. The horrible visage of the doppelgänger dominated his field of vision.

“Stop it!” cried Anine. “You don't have to kill him!”

There was another sound too, a strange metallic sound:
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeak…

Julian faded again. He decided now that he liked the fading. The strength was leaving his body. He couldn't fight the doppelgänger. The fading took the pain away, and the fear. Something within him told himself he shouldn't give up—that this was wrong, that he couldn't let it, couldn't let
her
take his life away too—but the power of the fading was too strong. Nevertheless, it cleared again, and a new burst of strength (his last) radiated to his hands that tried to grasp the doppelgänger's straining arms.

Creeeeeeaaaaaak…SNAP!

The last thing Julian saw was a huge looming shape whirling out of the darkness above him, falling straight down on top of him. He did not even realize it was the chandelier. As it landed on top of him and the doppelgänger one of the metal arms of the fixture sliced deep into Julian's skull, bifurcating his brain into two neat halves. The fading became a sudden sharp darkness, and after that, nothingness.

The roar of the chandelier collapsing sounded to Anine like a crashing train. With her arm she shielded her face from the flying glass and she could hear bits of crystal shrapnel impacting all around her. The impact was so loud that her ears rang in its wake. Gasping, she could smell gas and the faint aroma of smoke. She was afraid the entire house would explode. But it didn't. Indeed, after the tinkling of the broken crystal died down, the house became eerily quiet. She could hear the faint hissing of the gas spewing from the pipes.

She brought down her arm. The impact of the chandelier had made an eerie sunburst of carnage in the center of the entryway. Atomized glass formed rays that radiated from the center of the horror, where the bulk of the fixture itself had come to rest, stretching its twisted arms like a metal octopus. Underneath one of the arms she could see Julian. He was dead. Half of his head was missing and blood and brain matter was splattered outward from where it had struck him. She could see another shape, also vaguely human, twitching underneath another ruined arm of the chandelier. It was pinkish and covered with red speckles. As it moved Anine realized it was the arched naked back of a human being, or something that looked human.

A bare foot emerged from the wreckage, pressed on part of the destroyed fixture, and with a powerful shove moved it aside. The human form crawled out from under it, accompanied by the sound of metal and glass snapping and tinkling. Anine's heart again leaped into her throat as she feared that the doppelgänger was now about to turn on her.

The
spöke
, which still looked like Julian, gradually hauled itself to its feet. It looked down at the destroyed chandelier and the corpse. Seeming somewhat bewildered, it examined itself, stretching out its arms. There were many lacerations on its limbs and back. The small stick of wood that Julian had plunged into its flesh protruded from its lower left back just above the buttocks, but it was not a severe wound. It pulled the stick out and flung it casually aside. Noticing something else, it winced as it reached down and pulled a crystal shard from out of the bushy red hair in its groin. Then it looked at Anine with sea-green eyes—Julian's eyes—and her fear surged.

“Don't kill me,” she begged it. “
Please
don't kill me. You wanted to kill him, not me.”

The expression on the doppelgänger's face was hard to gauge. It looked at her and then glanced up at the darkened entryway. It said one word:
“Gas.”
Then, quite casually, it stepped over the wreckage of the chandelier and walked to the wall where the dimmer switch was. With Julian's fingers it manipulated the switch and turned down the gas. Anine heard the hiss of the flowing gas die off into silence.

“It's not safe here,” said the doppelgänger, with Julian's voice. “All the gas. We'll go to the suite at the Grand Central tonight. Then we can come back in the morning and collect our things.”

Come back in the morning? What does it mean?

The doppelgänger walked away from the switch and toward Anine at the foot of the stairs. It paused in front of her. She quivered, but she was less frightened than she had been a few moments ago. Bending over, the doppelgänger began picking up Julian's clothes off the carpet.

It straightened up and looked her deep in the eyes. “I don't plan on bringing much,” it said. “We must get the first ship tomorrow morning headed anywhere overseas. I'm sure there's one to Liverpool or Le Havre. Then we can send for whatever else we want once we get to Stockholm.”

It took her several seconds even to notice that Julian had spoken to her in Swedish.

Epilogue

Echoes

Sweden, 1928

Julian Atherton died on a Friday in April. His funeral was the following Tuesday at the old Solna church, almost in whose shadow he would be buried in the graveyard of Norra Begravningsplatsen.

Anine could not have asked for a prettier day for the funeral. The buds on the trees had just exploded into tiny light-green leaves and the sun was shining brilliantly. A line of cars traversed the narrow tree-lined road into the cemetery, their headlights blazing. Anine rode in the back of a long black town car with her eldest son Gustav and her youngest Yngve. She sat impassively, her wrinkled age-spotted hands folded in her lap, black veil across her face. Watching the trees pass by on either side of the car strangely reminded her of that first carriage ride through the canyons of Manhattan moments before she saw the 38th Street house for the first time. Odd she should think of that now.

“You doing all right, Mother?” Gustav asked her.

“I'm fine,” she said, and even managed to smile a little. “Beautiful day.”

“Yes, it is. This is the kind of day Dad liked to go walking.”

“He always loved the spring.”

The church was an ancient stone building dating from the twelfth century, a round turret-like tower with a green copper dome. Julian's gleaming black casket was laid out beneath the great stone apse and the gilded wooden altar flanked by candles and draped with flowers. The bereaved filed by one by one, some laying bouquets, others touching the casket. Anine was amazed at how long the procession took. Julian had legions of kin. Gustav, now forty-seven, had six children by his wife of twenty years who herself had four brothers and three sisters. There were also many cousins and second cousins, wives of dignitaries and business partners, and innumerable friends. Most important were the Bergenhjelms. Anine and Julian's daughter Mikaela, now forty, had married Ola Bergenhjelm's great-nephew and bore him many children. A surprising number of the mourners who gathered at the Solna Church that day were introduced nobility, to which the Gyldenhorns had finally come, after another generation, within spitting distance. Solveig Gyldenhorn had died in 1906, but Anine imagined her mother looking down from Heaven approvingly at the vast progeny—all happy and wealthy—into which her family had ultimately metamorphosed.

When Anine herself touched the coffin—everyone else had backed away, leaving her with her last private goodbye to her husband—the thoughts and doubts that had burgeoned uncomfortably and guiltily in the back of her mind since Julian died swam forward again. She decided now she would defeat them with a eulogy of her own.
I have no reason to doubt that you were my wonderful, loving husband with whom I lived in happiness and harmony for nearly fifty years
, she said silently to the form inside the casket.
You fathered my four beautiful children and you were the light of my life for all those years. I want you to know that I really don't care if you were Julian or not. It couldn't be less important now. If you were him—if you were
not
him—I thank you just the same for your loyalty, your tenderness and your love
.

She had no idea whether the spirit that she'd so long thought of as her husband could hear or understand her. Anine was no more religious now than she'd been at age twenty, but she knew there was some form of existence beyond the material world, and that souls—malevolent or divine—passed into other forms. Perhaps Julian Atherton had been dead for nearly half a century, or maybe he died on Friday. She didn't know. Furthermore, she didn't care. The tangible reality of her marriage to Julian surrounded her: her children, their children, all of their families. No one doubted anything. Thus, she decided she would not doubt either.

No member of the American branch of the Atherton family was able to attend the funeral in Solna, but Anine did not ignore them. She had become close—at least in correspondence—with a woman called Constance Cornyn Watts, the daughter of Sarah Atherton Cornyn, Julian's older sister. Connie had married a rich automobile executive and they now lived in a grandiose mansion on Long Island. When Anine wrote Connie about Julian's passing, Mrs. Watts telegraphed almost immediately.
You must come and stay with us on Long Island for a while. Will hold memorial service for Julian here. Letter will follow soon with details
.

Anine was reticent but she knew she couldn't refuse. In June, together with her second-youngest son Per, she set sail for New York aboard the
Olympic
. She hadn't been back to America since the day she and Julian fled. It had changed, she knew, and from what she'd read New York was unrecognizable from what it had been like in the last century.
I bet nothing will look familiar
, she thought.
And I hope it doesn't.
She was making the trip mainly to pay her respects to the American branch of the family. She brought with her a portrait of Julian, painted four years ago, that had hung above the flagstone fireplace of their cottage on Lake Vänern. She intended to present it to Connie Watts as a gift. She also brought a silver box containing Julian's eyeglasses and a lock of his hair. In a leather folio she brought a check drawn on the Bank of Sweden for $250,000. Connie's brother was a lawyer and Anine intended to ask him to establish the money as the seed of a foundation in America in Julian's name for the education of underprivileged children. In his final years, retired from stock-brokering and the ball bearing business, Julian became quite a philanthropist, and she thought it appropriate that his works, or a shadow of them, reach back to the country of his birth.

One evening on the voyage Anine was sitting in the winter garden with Per, enjoying a drink and looking out the window at the ocean passing by. Her son—he was thirty-eight, as yet unmarried, and a film director—asked her, apropos of nothing, “Mother, why
did
you and Dad leave New York all those years ago? It was never very clear to me, or to anyone, really.”

“We didn't live there that long,” Anine shrugged. “Only a few months.”

“But when you first got married you intended to live there permanently, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why did you leave?”

Whenever she was asked this question Anine always successfully deflected it with some nonchalant words.
Oh, I discovered I wasn't cut out for being an American
, or some such rubbish. Her son deserved more than that. “Well, New York was very different then. Among the wealthy of Manhattan there was a very rigid social hierarchy. It was controlled by the ladies, the wives of rich tycoons—the Kirklows, the Rocheforts, the Minthorns. We found it very difficult to become accepted in their circles. I was a foreigner and your father was considered gauche. He committed a major social blunder by marrying me, and the way in which he courted me. I hired a colored maid and insisted upon treating her as an equal, which didn't sit well in that society. The ladies made a point of snubbing me. I had one friend in New York who would receive me. Rachael Norton was her name. She and my maid, Clea Wicks—she was a very good and loyal friend—Rachael and Clea died unexpectedly at almost the same time. It was quite a shock for me. After they were gone I was totally alone. Your father and I decided it wasn't worth fighting society anymore, and we'd be happier in Sweden. So we left.”

Per sipped port from his glass. “But you lived there such a short time. Wouldn't they have accepted you eventually? Why didn't you just stick it out?”

“It just wasn't worth it. You've grown up in great privilege, Per, and with friends and family who've cared for you your whole life. It's hard to imagine being isolated—
totally
isolated. I felt like I was in prison. Some days I never left the house. It was a gloomy house. I couldn't face spending the rest of my life there. Neither could your father.”

This was all she told her son about the house. In truth Anine remembered only hazily and with great difficulty the things that happened there. Tonight, on this voyage aboard the
Olympic
, she thought of them while lying in bed in her stateroom, listening to the thrum of the ship's engines deep below her. She remembered the giggling and the creak of floorboards in the darkness. In her mind's eye she saw the Abyssinian cat jumping on the writing desk, leaving a paw-print of ink behind. She thought of the raspy voice of the
spöke
through the silver trumpet. Anine shuddered to remember these things.

Then, as she recalled them, a curious thought came over her.

Did they really happen?
If they did, how would I know? Simply because I remember them? It's hard to tell a memory from something one imagines. It was so long ago and the events left nothing behind to prove they really took place. Certainly Julian never spoke of them. So perhaps they never happened. What I told Per today was the truth. Maybe it wasn't so much of a half-truth as I thought. Maybe that really is why we left New York. In fact, I'm almost sure it is.

She slept soundly.

Anine and Per spent three weeks in America, and for almost all of that time they stayed at Connie Watts's estate on Long Island. Anine ventured into the city only once. It was to meet with Connie's brother's law firm to sign the papers for the Julian Atherton Foundation. Connie provided her with a limousine and a driver who brought her into the city at mid-morning on a warm day in early July.

Indeed New York looked nothing like she remembered it. The skyscrapers fronting the water formed an impenetrable wall of masonry and windows, holding back the seething tide of automobiles, traffic lights, radio towers and speakeasies that Manhattan had become. The streets were paved in concrete and asphalt; Anine remembered them covered in wooden planking. She remembered horse-drawn carriages. Today, amidst the crush of automobiles she saw only one lonely horse, pulling a milk truck. New York in 1880 might as well have been another planet.

During the meeting at the law firm the limousine and Connie's driver waited patiently at the curb. When she returned the man behind the wheel—a pleasant-looking fellow with salt and pepper hair—said, “Straight back to Mrs. Watts's, ma'am?”

Almost instinctively Anine said, “Yes, please.” But as the car began to move and she realized that she would never again be here—never again have a chance to satisfy her curiosity—she spoke up. “Wait. There's a place I'd like to go first.” The address rolled off her tongue with curious ease. “11 West 38th Street.”

“All right. You're the boss, ma'am.”

It was only a few blocks away but the ride seemed to take forever. The traffic—a gleaming cataract of Model Ts, Model As, Hupmobiles, Oldsmobiles—was almost immobile. After a very long time the driver pulled the limousine up to the curb. She thought it was to escape the traffic. But he sat there silently. He looked in the rearview mirror at Anine.

“You going to get out, ma'am? This is it.”

She looked out the window. The limousine was parked in front of a completely nondescript office building. Maybe it was ten years old but no more than fifteen. It was made of plain tan brick and had concrete cornices. Several of the windows were open, for it was hot. Through one of them, on the second floor, she saw a balding man with glasses sitting at a desk talking on a telephone. He looked like an insurance salesman.

Insurance. They sell insurance here, or some such rubbish.

For half a minute Anine stared at the building, trying to discern even a trace of what the place had looked like forty-eight years before. There was nothing. The building next door did not exist; it was a construction pit sheathed in scaffolding. There was a sandwich shop across the street. She saw a boy selling newspapers. But the past was gone—if in fact it had ever really existed, which in this moment seemed doubtful.

“No, I'm not getting out,” she told the driver. “Mrs. Watts's, please.”