Double
Kara Rochelle
Copyright Kara Rochelle 2012
Published at Smashwords
I don't know exactly how I came to be where I am, or how I will ever escape. All I know are the things that led up to this. It all started with an argument between my best friend Christina and me.
"There you are! What the hell's your problem?"
"I'm sorry?" I murmured.
"Don't play dumb. You totally dissed me at the mall Friday! What was all that about?"
I couldn't reply. I was too shocked, not just because Chris was like a sister to me and I would never snub her, but because she said she'd seen me at the mall.
"Well?" she demanded, crossing her arms.
"Chris… I was at home Friday."
"No, you weren't! I saw you standing outside the mall in front of Barnes & Noble. I just waved at you, and you gave me the go-to-hell look and walked away!"
"That's impossible! I went straight home after my classes on Friday and did homework all night." I explained. "It couldn't have been me."
"Yeah? Well, she looked exactly like you," Chris snapped. She walked away without another word.
The next night, I had the strangest dream. I dreamt that I was walking through the crowded hallways at my college, when right past me walked a girl that could have been my twin. Our faces, our bodies, our hair, our makeup, and even our labret piercings were identical. We were dressed differently, but she was wearing an outfit that I owned. As we passed each other, she gave me a murderous glare. It was so incredibly hateful and evil that, even though she had my face, I doubted I was even capable of such an expression.
A few days later, it was not just a strange dream I had, but a horrible nightmare. In it, I had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. As I walked through the house, I realized there was something different and menacing about it. Everything was backward, like a mirror image. It was darker. The angles of the walls, ceilings, and floors were irregular and extreme. It felt as if, at any moment, something would jump out of the darkness and grab me.
I made it to the bathroom, switched on the light, and quickly closed the door. I was relieved that everything looked and felt normal in the room. Maybe I was safe. But it was only after analyzing the dream later that I remembered I had not seen my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
When I was finished, I opened the door confidently, convinced the house would be normal again on the other side. But standing right in front of me as I threw open the door was that damnable body double, waiting there for the sole purpose of frightening me the moment I stepped out. She grinned maliciously, and I jerked awake with a scream.
It was impossible to get back to sleep after that, so I decided to log onto my computer and try to find out what this thing was that wore my face. After searching the Internet for words like "body double," "evil twin," and so on, I began to notice something that all the results had in common: the word "doppelganger."
According to legend, a doppelganger is a harbinger of misfortune. It takes the form of a real person and appears either to that person, or to that person's family or friends. If it appears to your loved ones, it means something bad will happen to you, usually an illness. But if it appears to you, it means you will die soon.
I didn't have much belief in the supernatural, but I took a bit of comfort in what I'd found. After all, it had only shown itself to Chris, so the worst thing that would happen to me would be something like catching the flu. As for the dreams, they were probably a result of the shock over what Chris had told me. I laughed a little as I shut down the computer, feeling sort of foolish for getting so freaked out.
But things were about to get much, much worse.
It had been a few days since I'd done the research, and nothing else had happened. No dreams, no nightmares, and I didn't feel the least bit sick.
I had come home after an hour at the gym and taken a long, hot shower. I stepped out onto the bath mat, wrapped a towel around me, and wiped the fog off the mirror.
I screamed. Looking back at me was my own face, but the flesh was melting off, revealing muscle and bone. Its eyeballs tumbled out of their sockets and dangled across the bony cheeks. Its bottom jaw dropped open and its lifeless tongue flopped out.
I collapsed back against the wall and sank to the floor, sobbing. Mom broke the lock on the door to get inside, yelling, "Honey, what happened? Are you hurt? Did you fall?"
I didn't answer. I grabbed the front of her shirt and buried my head in her bosom, letting her rock me back and forth while I cried like a child.
I knew then that everything I'd read about doppelgangers was wrong. It was wrong, or this thing was not a doppelganger as described in folklore. This was no neutral messenger sent to warn me of my fate. This was something inherently evil.
It was at school that I finally came face to face with it. I was washing my hands in the ladies' room, in front of the long row of mirrors and sinks, when it entered. It stepped calmly through the door and stood behind me. The mirror held two identical images of myself. A cold chill gripped my spine.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and forced myself to say, "What do you want from me?"
Its eyes—my eyes—looked silently forward, and it said in a hoarse whisper, "To exist."
Then it walked inside of me, and forced us both into the mirror.
Now I'm trapped in this terrible place. It's just like the real world, but cold, dark, distorted, and backward, like my house had been in my night terror. There are monsters here, and other people who have been replaced, and even people whose bodies are gone and now they are only sentient, silent, humanoid shadows.
We can see out into the real world through the mirrors, but we can't be seen from the other side. Sometimes I see that creature living my life, fitting into my place seamlessly, and being among my family and friends. And the worst part is, they can't tell the difference. Besides that hoarse whisper, it is like me in every way, and it successfully plays its voice off as permanent damage from the throat infections it—I—was plagued by.
As far as I know, there is no way back. We've tried everything, those of us whose lives have been stolen. Breaking the mirrors, creating our own, and trying to find the way our doubles escaped from here themselves. I can only hope that you, the person who finds this message carved in the opposite side of this infernal mirror, will shatter it to pieces and, maybe, set us free.