“Yes.”
He inhaled, about to say something, paused, seemed to think better of it and exhaled.
Jessica added, “But, I’ve never seen the EB in here do this. That was intense.”
Despite everything, she smiled. She’d been aware from a very young age that she was a lightning rod for EBs, the events in Alaska with her father having altered the DNA of her psyche or something, tuning her into frequencies unknown. It gave her a sense of satisfaction that she could cause an entity to put on such a massive display of power. It was a fighter. She liked fighters.
Eddie leaned forward and pointed. “It’s down there, in the basement.”
The cellar door was tucked into the back end of the kitchen, next to the door that opened into the yard.
“How do you know?”
“I just know. And it’s tired…and mad. Its defenses are down. If we can get close to it, I can get its name for you.”
Jessica rolled her shoulders and stretched her legs. She took a few healthy sips from a bottle of water, handing another bottle to Eddie.
“Then I guess we need to go into the basement,” she said, her mood surprisingly, disturbingly, chipper.
She grabbed a tripod by the legs and held it over one shoulder like a soldier and her rifle. The camera lens pointed at the ground. Gesturing at the living room floor, she added, “Grab one of those audio recorders.”
Jessica had to pull hard on the door to get it open. The old wood was swollen from the humidity and at first, she thought it was being held closed by the EB on the other side. When the edge of the door scuffed against the floor, she realized it was only the work of Mother Nature and old wood.
Eddie turned on the light from the outside wall. Eight wooden steps led down into the unfinished basement. One low-wattage bulb lit the stairs, and another one glowed feebly by the furnace. It smelled damp and musty, with a hint of mineral earthiness.
This is a place where things go to rust and wither away,
she thought.
There was a long, scarred workbench covered in boxes and dented, faded coffee cans. Ancient shovels leaned against it in one corner. Dusty milk crates jammed with old gardening tools, hardware supplies and magazines littered the floor.
“Doesn’t look like Tim and Kristen come down here very much,” Eddie said.
“They don’t. I was only down here for a couple of hours one night but it was my first time here and I got zippo. It feels very different right now.”
“This is where it goes when it’s really tired. It needs a place to regroup, undisturbed.”
Jessica felt a tingling at the base of her spine that danced up to the back of her neck. There was a heaviness to the atmosphere. Breathing felt like being at a higher elevation. The air itself was chilly, bordering on cold. This was the point where a lot of paranormal investigators lost their shit. It was easy to slide into a panic attack when your body was registering something before your mind had a chance to catch up.
Eddie let out a small gasp and she turned. He covered his eyes with a hand and had stopped walking.
“You getting anything?” she asked.
“Close,” he said, starting to pant. “He’s not making things easy.”
“Where is it?”
Eddie pointed to the recessed area beyond the silent furnace, a place where the light did not penetrate. Jessica took the tripod off her shoulder and set it up so the camera could face the back of the basement. She looked through the viewfinder, set it on night vision and did a quick scan.
“Well, that’s one good thing,” she said, her face close to the tiny screen.
“What’s that?”
“There’s nothing back there for me to trip on.”
She took two quick steps into the darkness. Eddie yelled, “Wait,
don’t go back there
!”
There was a loud pop, and the bulb by the stairs exploded, followed by another, bathing them in total blackness. A deep, malevolent growl emanated from the deepest recesses of the basement, gaining strength as it approached them.
Chapter Nineteen
Selena met her best friend, Julie Quintana, outside the elementary school that was down the block from her house. They had become friends when Julie transferred to the school in third grade and had been inseparable ever since.
“Girl, you look like you need a twenty-hour nap,” Julie said, alarmed at the dark circles under her friend’s eyes. She pushed a few stray hairs from Selena’s face with her fingers.
“More like twenty days. Even when I do sleep, I still wake up exhausted. I can’t shut my mind down, you know.”
The street darkened as an immense storm cloud passed overhead. Thunder rumbled ominously but the rain had yet to fall.
“If you want, you can sleep at my house,” Julie offered. A slight wind had come with the cloud and her pin-straight brown hair flew in every direction.
“You’re the best,” Selena said, pulling her into a tight embrace. “How about after we meet with Crissy, we stop at my place to pick up my stuff and get some pizza to bring back to your house? I might as well have some fun before I pass out.”
They walked toward Crissy’s house, which was only several blocks away. The sky lit up as lightning struck in the distance. Selena and Julie counted the seconds until the clap of thunder made them jump.
“It’s only about five miles away. Oh crap, my laptop bag isn’t waterproof,” Selena said.
“And it’s a hunk of metal in a thunderstorm. Come on.”
They ran the rest of the way to Crissy’s and the first droplets of rain misted on them. They huddled under the aluminum awning above the porch. The rain came down in earnest the second they rang the bell, followed by a bright flash.
“One, one-thousand, two, one-thousand, three, one-thousand, four—”
Selena was breathing hard and laughed. “That was close. I really, really hate storms.”
Julie said, “And I can’t afford to get my hair wet. You know how hard I worked on it today? Now it’s gonna get all frizzy.”
The door opened and the laughter died in their throats. Crissy Davies was wearing black jeans, a ripped, black shirt from the last My Chemical Romance tour and heavy, black boots that looked as if they could kick down a brick wall. Crissy was always
Addams Family
pale. She hated the sun and all things to do with the great outdoors. Her eyelids were done up in heavy purple eye shadow and the studs from her snakebite piercings were shaped like little spiders. She was the epitome of goth and was the de facto leader of the goth circle in school.
“Hey, Selena, hey, Julie. Come on in.”
The inside of her house looked like a cover from
Better Homes and Gardens
. Selena tried to think back to the last time she had been in Crissy’s home. It had to have been before her father left. Crissy’s mother had caught him cheating with someone from his office and threw him out of their perfect little home before he even had a chance to explain himself. It was no coincidence that Crissy became a goth not long after that. Before, she had been a regular kid, though a bit on the nerdy side, who thought listening to anything heavier than Gwen Stefani was a step away from devil worship. She loved her dad, but her mother got the better lawyer and forbid visitation. Crissy had been working overtime to annoy her mother ever since, but a steady supply of antidepressants kept her from breaking through her mother’s narcotized defenses.
All that being said, Selena still considered her a friend, though their paths didn’t cross very often anymore. It was just the way of high school. You spent freshman year finding your clique and stayed in their orbit until graduation. For now, she was thankful that Crissy was who she had become because she couldn’t think of anyone else better to help her.
“Your mom home?” Selena asked.
Crissy rolled her eyes. “Queen Davies is out at some book club meeting or something equally asinine. You got your laptop?”
Selena patted the bag that hung by her hip.
“You have something to drink? I’m always mad thirsty before my period,” Julie said.
Crissy shrugged. “Sure. Just grab whatever you want out of the fridge, except the vodka in the freezer. My mother keeps tabs on the level. Like I’d ever drink her booze.”
Julie shot Selena a look that said,
what the heck have we gotten ourselves into?
, got a bottle of water and joined them in Crissy’s room.
Surprisingly, it was bright and uncluttered. There were no posters of anarchy symbols or Rob Zombie and it smelled faintly of potpourri. They all sat on her bed and Crissy said, “Okay, tell me again what happened.”
That was one thing about Crissy. Always eager to get to the point. She never did have time for meaningless pleasantries.
Selena took a deep breath and told her about the thing in her closet that had looked just like her, as well as what had happened to her father and mother. Crissy listened with rapt attention, asking for more details here and there. Julie pulled her knees to her chest and shivered.
When she was done recounting the weirdness in her house, Selena leaned against the headboard and massaged her temples.
“And that’s why I can’t eat and sleep on the floor in my little brother’s room. Sounds crazy and pathetic, right?”
Crissy was lost in thought. Suddenly, she jumped from the bed and went over to her desk. “I know what it is!” she shouted, hammering at the keys on her computer. When she found what she was looking for, she tilted her monitor toward them.
“This is serious shit, Selena,” she said. “What you saw in your closet is called a
doppelganger
.”
“A what-a-ganger?” Julie asked.
“A doppelganger. It’s German for double walker. Check this out. All throughout history, there have been reports of people coming face to face with their own double.”
“You mean, like someone who looks just like them? Kinda like they say everyone has a twin somewhere?” Selena wondered.
“Not really. These doppelgangers aren’t living beings. They’re kind of like a phantom. Most times they appear as solid as a regular person, though there have been many cases where they’re semi-transparent or their basic coloration is just off, dull. This stuff goes all the way back to Egyptian times where they believed the soul had an exact copy of itself called the
ka
. They even made special rooms for the
ka
in Egyptian tombs.”
Julie moved closer to the screen. Crissy was scrolling down to read the text on a website dedicated to doppelgangers.
“OMFG,” Julie said. “So these things are, like, twins to our souls?”
“It’s not that simple,” Crissy said, shaking her head. “There are tons of theories on the nature of doppelgangers. Some say they’re simply astral projections, while others think they’re independent beings, sent from the great beyond to a person’s life for a very specific reason. Since no one’s been able to capture one, all we have to go on is theory and conjecture. Although, some people have been known to have whole conversations with their doppelganger. This site doesn’t list anything that might have been recorded about those conversations. I can’t imagine what a trip that would have been.”
Selena turned toward the window, watching the rain cascade down the glass in winding rivulets. She was too afraid to look at the website.
Crissy continued, “In almost all cases, people feel that the doppelganger came to warn them of an impending disaster. There are a lot of cases where famous people saw a doppelganger. Mark Twain saw and spoke to the double of a woman at a party. The real woman was miles away at the time. Percy Shelley, the poet and husband of Mary Shelley, the chick who wrote
Frankenstein
, supposedly saw his weeks before he drowned. Writers Goethe and Guy de Maupassant had their encounters as did lots of Catholic saints from Saint Ambrose to Padre Pio.”
“Isn’t Padre Pio that Italian priest who had the bleeding hands thing?” Julie asked.
Crissy arched an eyebrow. “It’s called stigmata. How the heck did you know that?”
“My mom’s into saints and stuff like that. She buys all these special candles with saints on them and reads these pamphlets the church gives her. That woman loves to pray.”
Selena paced around the room clutching a tan throw pillow to her chest. “So what does this all mean? Why are we all seeing my doppelganger and what can I do to get rid of it?”
The tension in her voice was only matched by the intensity of the storm.
Crissy mumbled to herself and she worked her way down the web page. Julie came to Selena’s side and rubbed her upper arms.
“Okay, in some cases, they’re what they call a
bi-location
of the self, which is just a fancy way of saying an out-of-body projection. These are the kind seen by other people, like when this woman saw her brother’s, even though he was in another country. His doppelganger looked and sounded exactly like her brother, except he never moved his left arm. He visited her in her living room on three successive nights, just popped in while she was sitting down to read, sat in the chair opposite her to say a few words, then walked out the door, or more like
through
the door. When her actual brother did return a month later, she fainted when she saw that his left arm was missing. He’d had an accident and lost it in a threshing machine. Communication wasn’t the best back when this happened, so he wasn’t able to get word to anyone until he was able to take a ship back home.”