Doppelganger

chapter FOURTEEN

Amber smuggled me out of the house the next morning with no trouble. She got me up early and led me downstairs and out to her car in the garage. I lay down in the backseat and waited for another hour or so before she came out and drove us to school. From there, the rest of the day slipped by in a hazy sort of way. I felt like I was in some kind of movie or TV show where nobody else was real. Except for Amber. When I saw her at lunch, she gave me a shy sort of smile and we sat at one end of a table, away from everyone else. We didn’t say much to each other. It was like, now that I wasn’t Chris anymore, we were kind of strangers all of a sudden. But not in a bad way. It’s like we really were starting over, and it felt good because it was real, because I wasn’t alone anymore.

Amber had a dentist appointment after school, but she dropped me off at home on her way there. Barry was still at work, and Echo hadn’t gotten back yet. We made plans to get together tomorrow, and then I said good-bye and went inside. It felt strange to be back in the house. I’d only been away since last night, but it felt like forever. I walked past the hole Barry had punched in the wall last weekend—the pieces of cracked drywall around the edges of the circle were still pushed in, like a mouth full of broken teeth—and went into the kitchen. To my surprise, it was clean. The dishes had been washed and put away, the table wiped. The scene had been cleared.

Not long after that, Echo got home.

“Did you have fun last night?” I asked. “With your friend, I mean.”

She shrugged. “We watched a video.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she said in a chipper sort of voice, but I could see the memory of last night in her eyes. She was still stuck with it. I guess all of us would be for a while.

We both spent the afternoon in our respective rooms, her reading, me watching TV. Then Barry got home. I watched him through the window as he got out of the car and headed in with a couple of pizza boxes in his arm, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his mouth. I could tell there was something different about him, even in the way he walked. He sort of shuffled toward the door. He seemed smaller somehow, almost stooped, like the pizza boxes were made of concrete or something.

I peeked out into the hall as he passed through, then left my room and went down the hallway, pausing in the kitchen doorway.

Barry had just put the pizza boxes on the counter and was turning toward the fridge when, seeing me, he stopped. I could see the bruises along his throat, slight but plainly visible, not to mention the cut lip and swollen eye. I wondered how he’d explained them to the people at work, to his boss. He didn’t say anything. He just sort of gazed at me with this hollow look tinged with the remnants of fear, and for a second I panicked, wondering if he’d caught a glimpse of those doppelganger eyes. I didn’t think so. If he had, he would’ve been more afraid.

But there was something else in Barry besides fear. He reached into the refrigerator for a beer, then grabbed one of the pizzas and brushed by me into the living room. As I watched him, I tried to figure out what it was, but I couldn’t. It was only later, as Echo and I sat at the kitchen table eating pizza and listening to the TV blaring from the other room, that I realized what I’d seen, not just in his eyes but in every part of his body. It was defeat. Total deflation. You’d think it would’ve made me happy to see him so broken, but for some reason it didn’t. It made me feel a little sick, to tell you the truth, because it was me who’d done that to him.



For the next week Barry and I pretty much avoided each other. That first weekend I spent most of the time out of the house with Amber. Echo stayed with a friend Saturday and Sunday. When I did see Barry, he was on the couch in the living room, drinking beers and watching TV. He didn’t watch football—guess I’d turned him off from it. Sure, we spoke a few times, but we really didn’t say anything—nothing real, anyway—and whether we hated each other more than ourselves for what had happened, I really couldn’t say.

The rest of the week went pretty much the same way, with Echo and me taking care of one another and Barry slinking around the house with his tail between his legs. Amber and I spent more and more time together, going for walks after school to the mall or to the lake, or going to the library to study together, wherever we could go that wasn’t home for either of us.

All in all, it was a pretty good situation. Good enough that I’d convinced myself that I could go on being Chris forever. Which was exactly when I ran into trouble.

It started with an itch, right along my back down at the base of the spine. It wasn’t too bad at first, just a little itch before bed, but it was the beginning. By the time Thursday came along, I’d developed a bit of a rash across my stomach, and in general my skin started to feel dry and kind of flaky. It had been three weeks, and I knew I was starting to lose the form. Just a little bit, but it was enough to scare me.

As I lay in bed that Thursday night, half watching the TV, I wondered how long I had. I’d gone out to the movies again with Amber earlier that night and had spent most of the time squirming in my seat, trying not to scratch. She didn’t say anything, and maybe she didn’t even notice, but I knew it would only be a matter of time before she did. I’d have to let her know what was going on eventually. I just didn’t want to—not now, not when things were going so well. Not when things were getting started.

But that wasn’t even the worst part.

Flicking through the channels, I came across the local eleven o’clock news. I didn’t really notice at first what was going on—the backdrop of woods behind the newswoman seemed like it could have been anywhere. Then the camera shifted and I noticed a police officer and then another and then the edge of a familiar white car. I turned up the volume.

“…police are telling us that the hunters who came across the Subaru wagon said it was in the shape you see it now. And Kip, as I’m standing here looking at it, let me tell you, the thing is trashed. Whoever abandoned it here sure wanted to leave a mess for the authorities.”

Goddam hunters, I thought. They find everything.

The camera flashed for a moment to the anchor in the studio.

“Sharon, do we know, in fact, that this is Jill Vitelli’s car?”

“Yes, Kip. State police confirmed just moments ago that this is the car authorities have been searching for. What’s not clear, however, is how long ago the Springfield killer abandoned it here or why it was left in such condition. Certainly one speculation is that the level of rage leading to this sort of destruction could be an important key in understanding what kind of person we’re dealing with.”

“What else do you have for us, Sharon?”

“Well, Kip, police say they’re going to begin an extensive search of Bakersville and the surrounding area over the next few days in the hope that some clue will emerge that might lead them to Jill Vitelli’s killer. The authorities are asking anyone who has any information to call the state police. Back to you, Kip.”

I flicked the TV off and fell back in bed. All of a sudden, I was wide awake as the adrenaline began pumping through me.

I was pretty sure the police wouldn’t find the killer—whoever had abandoned the car in Parson Woods was long gone. But what I wasn’t sure about was what else the police might discover in the process of looking.

I’d been nervous already about leaving Chris stuffed in that culvert just waiting for someone to come along and find him, but now I was downright terrified. The idea of dozens of cops combing through the area with dogs and God knows what else made it just about impossible to sleep, and when I did, I dreamed about it, which was even worse.

In my nightmare I was walking up and down the train tracks, and no matter where I went, I could hear Chris calling out. As he did, a crowd gathered, coming out of the woods in bunches.

“Here I am!” he kept shouting as Barry, Sheila, Echo, Coach, and everyone else I knew kept coming closer and closer to the culvert. I tried to distract them, tried to tell them the noise was coming from the nearby woods, but they wouldn’t listen to me, and pretty soon the pack had gathered around the culvert just as the sun was setting. They pulled the roll of plastic out, and the next thing I knew, Chris was ripping his way out of it and standing up. His skin was all rotten and discolored, like the zombies in those old movies on TV, and he turned toward me with everyone else behind him.

He didn’t say anything to me. He just lifted his arm and pointed a shriveled, bony finger in my direction, looking at me with his sad, swollen eyes, and began walking toward me. It was just like that banquet scene when Banquo’s ghost comes after Macbeth in the middle of his dinner party, only in my dream Chris was no ghost. Everyone could see him. In fact, they began following him, drawing toward me with that same look of recrimination. They kept coming closer and closer, and I knew I had to get away, but I didn’t know where to go. I finally stumbled down the far side of the bank and crawled into the culvert from the other side. The culvert was suddenly bigger than in real life. It was pitch-black inside except for a circle of light way in the distance, and as I sat up with my back against the wall, another flicker of light appeared. Chris was sitting right beside me, holding a candle.

“I was wondering when you’d come back,” he said.

I screamed and turned to escape, but when I looked back at the hole in the distance, I could see the faces of everyone peeking in. Before I could do anything, they were plugging up the hole, and all the light, but for Chris’s candle behind me, had been extinguished. I heard a little puff, and everything went dark.

I woke up from the dream covered in sweat and rolled over to discover it was half past nine in the morning. I’d overslept.

I took my time getting up and getting ready for school. I figured there was no point in rushing since I was already late. I spent a long time in the shower, feeling the water wash over the body I’d worn now for over three weeks, trying to shake the dream. At least my rash was gone.

The walk to school wasn’t much better. These police cruisers kept driving by, going real slow. Every time one of them passed me, I had to fight the urge to start running away. I suddenly thought of COPS, a show I used to watch on Friday nights. In fact, that stupid theme song started running through my brain, over and over again: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do…” It’s like I kept expecting a whole pack of cruisers to tear around the corner and surround me, with their sirens blaring and their lights flashing, while an army of cops jumped out with their guns all pointed in my face. I guess that’s what happens when you know you’re guilty.

One of them did stop. About halfway to school, this cruiser pulled up behind me. I didn’t even see it until it was right on top of me and the cop inside let rip one of those siren noises—boo-bweep! I practically jumped three feet off the ground.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, grinning out the rolled-down window. I just sort of stood there and looked at him with as blank a look as I could muster. Don’t let him see you’re scared, I kept telling myself.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Going to school.”

“Little late, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” I said. What did he care? I mean, wasn’t he supposed to be out looking for the murderer? I almost said that to him, but for once I was smart and kept my mouth shut.

I couldn’t figure out if he was done with me or not. I was just about to start walking again, when he called out.

“Seen anything?” he asked, still looking straight ahead through the windshield in front of him.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Anything suspicious? Anything unusual?” he said, turning to look back at me.

“Not really,” I said.

He took off his glasses and leaned out the window a little to squint at me. My heart started pounding.



“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

He snapped his fingers. “Chris Parker,” he said. “You’re that football player, right? The one who quit.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“Why’d you quit?”

I shrugged.

He sort of shook his head. “Keep your eyes open. There’s a killer walking around out there,” he said.

“Right,” I said as I watched him drive away.



With so many cops around, the kids in school were wound up even more than they usually were on a Friday. Everyone was talking about the investigation, speculating like crazy. As far as I could tell, none of the guys had come forward and admitted to trashing the car. I sure wasn’t going to say anything.

I had to do something about Chris. And soon. Sitting in history class while the video droned on, I thought about it some and decided to bury him that night. I hated to wait that long, but I figured it would be easier to do it in the dark, when there wouldn’t be so many police around.

The rest of the day dragged by. It was excruciating. I was already feeling twitchy in my deteriorating form as it was, and having to sit in school, watching the seconds tick by, worrying that the search had made its way from Parson Woods to the tracks on the other side of town, was sheer torture.

At lunch I canceled plans with Amber for after school, making up some dumb excuse, and took the bus home. Then I got everything together—shovel, gloves, flashlight, rope in case I needed it, and waited. I knew it would look suspicious walking along the roads with a shovel over my shoulder, but I had to risk it—no way I was going to try to dig a grave with my hands.

Around six thirty, Echo and I made dinner. I’d started helping her this week with meals. I figured after the casserole fiasco, I owed it to her to help. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and heated up some tomato soup.

We talked about school and stuff for a while as we ate. I let Echo do most of the talking. I liked to listen to her funny stories about school. She was a pretty smart kid and knew how to tell a good story, better than I could, anyway. Then, halfway through a story, she suddenly stopped.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I’d been so distracted thinking about the job ahead of me that I hadn’t noticed Barry had never come home. “It’s Friday. He’s probably at Twisty’s,” I said. Twisty’s was his favorite bar.

“Maybe we should call,” she murmured.

“He’ll be home in a while,” I said. “Besides, it’s nicer without him here. Don’t you think?”

She shrugged and nibbled at the corner of her sandwich. I could tell she didn’t like me talking that way.

“I’m going out tonight,” I told her, to change the subject. “I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“Are you going on a date?” she asked, brightening.

“Sort of,” I said. “You going to be okay here? You got a movie or something to watch?”

“I have a book. The new Lemony Snicket came in at the library. I got to sign it out first.”

“What’s Lemony Snicket?”



“He’s a writer. He writes these books. They’re called ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events.’ They’re really funny.”

“‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’ huh?” I could write a book like that, I thought. “Well, good, then,” I said, finishing my sandwich. I got up and did the dishes. By the time I finished, it was quarter past seven. Time to go.

I grabbed my jacket, snuck out to the garage for my things, and went to leave. Just as I was coming out of the garage, though, a pair of headlights turned into the driveway, shining right on me, shovel and all.

Blocking the headlights with my hand, I saw Amber sitting behind the steering wheel watching me. She turned off the lights and got out of the car.

“Hey,” was all I said.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” I said. “Just picking up around the yard.”

“At night? In the dark?”

“Something like that.”

“Chris,” she said. I started when she said the name. She’d stopped calling me that after learning the truth, and it felt strange to hear her say it now. Then I realized she wasn’t calling me that at all.

“You’re going to Chris, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “I’ve got to take care of him,” I said. “I didn’t do the best job before, and now—”

“All the cops looking around,” she said. “That Springfield Killer.”

I nodded again and started to walk by her. As I did, she grabbed my arm and looked up into my eyes.

“You’re not him are you?” she asked.

“Who?”



“You know. The one they’re looking for?”

“The Springfield Killer?” I said. I started laughing. Probably not the nicest thing to do, but a look of relief came across her face. “No,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter. If the police find the body…well, you can imagine.”

She let me go. But as I reached the end of the driveway, she called out.

“Wait!” she said. I stopped and turned as she approached. “I want to come with you.”

“Amber, I don’t think that’s a great idea. It’s bad enough if I get caught, but I don’t want you to be involved. Besides, it could be pretty gross. I mean, it’s been three weeks. You know what I’m saying?”

“I don’t care,” she said, shaking her head. “I want to help.”

I hesitated.

“Please, let me do this,” she said.

I shrugged. “Let’s go.”

I threw the shovel and pack into the back of her car, and we headed off toward the abandoned lot at the edge of town next to the tracks. We didn’t say a word, but as we drove away into the night, I realized I’d never been so happy not to be alone.



“How much farther?” she asked. Even though Amber was right behind me, holding on to my jacket, her voice sounded far away as we walked along the tracks.

“Not much,” I said.

There wasn’t any moon out, not yet at least, but between the stars and the lights from town, I could see well enough. Amber’s human eyes had a tougher time. Still, I didn’t want to use the flashlight. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t want anyone to see us. Not only that, I had no idea how long the batteries would hold out. The last thing I wanted was for the flashlight to die in the middle of digging.

A couple minutes later, the trees on our right fell back. We were coming to the clearing. It looked different in the dark without the campfire. It seemed bigger.

I smelled Chris twenty yards from the culvert, that odor of decay that’s sweet but not sweet. It wasn’t strong, but it was enough to make me pull up.

“Sorry,” I whispered as Amber bumped into me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

She was nervous. I could hear it in her voice. I wanted to tell her it was okay, that I was nervous too, but I held back. I figured it would only make her feel worse if I told her the truth. Besides, it actually made me feel better to pretend not to be afraid. Like pretending made it real.

“We’re close,” I said.

We went a little farther, and then I spotted the culvert. By then we were close enough that Amber could smell him too. I heard her take a sharp breath and groan a little, but she didn’t say anything.

We scrambled down the bank and paused by the edge of the culvert.

“Hold these,” I said, handing her the pack and shovel.

I reached way into the culvert as far as I could. For a second I couldn’t feel the plastic, and I got scared. I had this sudden fear—what if they’d found him? What if they’d taken him away and only the smell had stayed? But then my fingers brushed along the edge of the rolled sheet. It was a weird feeling—both relief and revulsion at the same time.



Planting my feet, I reached in with my other hand, got a good hold, and pulled.

To my surprise, the body slid out pretty easily. In fact, I almost fell over and would have pulled him right on top of me if I hadn’t caught myself at the last second. It seemed as if Chris had lost a little weight.

“Ugh,” Amber gasped as the smell suddenly grew stronger. I could hear her breaths starting to come quick.

“If it weren’t for the cold and the plastic, it would probably be worse,” I offered.

“You think?” she murmured.

“Breathe in through your mouth.”

“I’m trying,” she said.

I leaned over to her, opened the pack, and pulled out the flashlight.

“Wait,” she said, grabbing my arm in the dark.

“Amber, we need to see. I have to find a spot. Somewhere to dig.”

“Don’t shine it on him,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I flicked the light on. It was bright. Painfully bright, even with it pointing straight at the ground, and I felt like every cop in the area suddenly knew we were here. Then my eyes adjusted, and it wasn’t so bad. I left Chris and headed toward the edge of the clearing. Amber was right beside me. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to be left back there alone.

After a little bit of poking around, we found a good spot behind some trees in a little opening where the ground was soft. I planted the spade and turned to go back for Chris, when Amber stopped me.



“Leave him there,” she said. “Dig the hole first.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

And so I did. For the next hour, I dug while Amber stood by holding the flashlight on me, lighting up the dark shower of earth that flew from my shovel with every scoop. It takes a lot longer to dig a grave than you might think, especially when you’re trying to make it deep. And I was going for the six-foot standard. It wasn’t just about keeping the dogs or whatever else away, not anymore. I wanted him to stay buried for good. So I tried to be careful, to do it right. In fact, I spent almost as much time cutting up the sod into squares and setting them aside to put back later as I did digging the hole.

We didn’t say much, though at one point Amber asked if she could help dig for a while, to give me a break. I told her no, that it was my job.

“After all,” I said, “I’m the one who killed him.”

“Maybe so,” she said, gazing down at the hole, “but I’m the one who wanted to.”

We looked at each other for a moment, then I went back to digging.

Not long after that I finished. We went and got Chris, pulled him across the grass and up beside the grave. I was about to roll him in when Amber spoke up.

“I want to see him,” she said.

“You do?” I said, stepping back from the body.

She glanced up at me and nodded.

I took the jackknife I’d swiped off Barry’s workbench from my pocket and opened it up.

“You’re sure?” I said, holding the knife over the plastic. She nodded again, holding the flashlight close to herself so that her breath sent little puffs of steam into the light’s beam.

I cut through the layers of plastic, one at a time, until I made it all the way through, then pulled the layers apart so that everything was open from the shoulders up.

Then I stood back. She slowly moved the light until it was shining on his face. Needless to say, he didn’t look too good. In fact, he almost didn’t even look like Chris, but enough so that there was no mistaking him.

Amber turned the light on my face for a second. I squinted and covered my eyes. When she pulled the flashlight away, I could see she was shaking her head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m still trying to get my head around all this. I think a part of me was holding out, believing that you—or him, I guess—had just gone insane. Some bizarre schizophrenic crack-up, you know? And this story of the doppelganger. This crazy, elaborate fable…”

“It’s no fable,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“No, I’m glad.”

“Why?”

“Because now I don’t have to feel guilty,” she replied.

“For what?”

“For playing along. For letting him be crazy because I liked him better that way.”

We were quiet for a minute, staring down at the body, a decayed echo of my own form.

“We’d better get going,” I said, pulling the plastic back together to cover him as best I could. “We’ve got more work to do.”

I was going to just roll him in, but at the last second, it didn’t feel right. Like it was the wrong thing to do. So I had Amber grab the legs and I took the top, and we dropped him down in as gently as we could.

We started piling dirt on. Even Amber helped, kicking dirt down in, sometimes scooping it with one hand while she held the flashlight with the other. I shoveled like crazy. It’s like we both wanted to get it over with as fast as we could, especially at first when the dirt hit the plastic, making a weird sort of crackling sound. Then it was dirt on dirt and real quiet and not quite so bad. We finished by laying the sod, with its long grass, back in place. It wasn’t perfect, but it looked okay.

We stood back, side by side, me holding the shovel, her shining the flashlight on the slightly mounded ground. Our breath, heavy from the exertion, clouded in the cold. We were both dirty, but it was done.

Amber reached over and took my hand. All of a sudden she started to cry, a little bit at first, but pretty soon she was choking back sobs. It was over pretty quick.

“Sorry,” she said, sniffing.

“Don’t be.”

“It’s just that I grew to hate him so much, especially these last couple months,” she said, wiping her eyes. She kept looking at the ground.

“He used to hit me, you know,” she said. “Not much at first. More toward the end.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d already figured as much, but to hear her say it was still strange. Maybe it was the way she said it, like it was a confession, an admission of sorts, even though she’d been on the receiving end. Maybe she was saying it for him, because he couldn’t.



“I thought at first that it would stop, that it was just a temporary thing, like when you come down with a cold for a few weeks and then it sort of disappears.” She shook her head. “I was so stupid, to let him treat me that way, to just sort of block it out like it was happening to somebody else. In the end it only made me feel worse. I felt like I was nothing.”

She hesitated. “That’s why I hated him so much,” she said at last. “Because he made me hate myself.”

“But it’s over now,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, Chris hated himself too. For the same reason. I know,” I said. “I saw it in his eyes that night, right here in this clearing.”

We lingered for another minute. I didn’t want to leave yet. Not now, not after what she’d said, no matter how true it was. Chris was a messed-up kid, no doubt about it. But there was more. There’s always more.

“I didn’t know Chris when I killed him,” I said. “But I still felt bad. And now after being him, even for just a little while, I feel worse. He didn’t deserve it, Amber.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “But who’s to say why things happen the way they do?”

She leaned her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. I felt so good all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

“We’d better say good-bye,” I said. She nodded.

“Tell me something about him,” I said. “Something good. Let’s say good-bye that way. There must be something.”

“There’s lots of things,” she said. “He was an a*shole most of the time, but every once in a while, he’d let his guard down. There was this side to him, like a little kid.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “He had these sheets,” she said suddenly.

“Race cars,” I said.

She laughed. “I thought they were cute. I even picked on him once about them. He got pretty mad, but he never took them off,” she said. “What about you?”

I thought for a second. “He was good to his sister,” I said. “I think he really loved her.”

I turned to look down at Amber. Her eyes closed all of a sudden, but the tears came out anyway. She wiped them with her sleeve, and we turned away.

We kept the flashlight going until we got up on the tracks. Then we switched it off and walked the rest of the way back in the dark. With every step, I felt new relief. I’d finally buried Chris and didn’t have to worry anymore about either of us being found out. Everything would be okay. That’s what I thought, anyway, as Amber and I headed down the tracks side by side, still holding hands, close under the stars.