Doppelgänger

Bryan is bulleting down the road in the pitch dark when the man steps out in front of his car.

Only one of his headlights is working, and by the time the figure, crossing from the opposite side, is lit up in its dull beam it is far too late. One moment he registers a face- wide eyes, gaping mouth, hair plastered to a sweat-slick forehead- and then there is the sickening, meaty thud as his mother's '99 Corolla slams directly into the body attached to that face and, still moving, rolls over something- an arm, a leg, Bryan isn't exactly sure- before it finally grinds to a stop under the insistent pressure of his foot on the brake. He shuts the car off, and all the light leaves the world around him. He hears nothing on the deserted, rural road, nothing but the slow ticking of the engine powering down.

Bryan isn't sure whether he wants to throw up, cry, or scream. He looks at the blackness in his rearview mirror, half-expecting to see a shadowy figure rise from the road like in the horror movies he watched as a kid. When nothing happens, he digs in his pocket with shaking hands for his iPhone and turns on the flashlight function, opening the driver's side door and getting out of the car. He feels oddly exposed on the deserted road, the hundred invisible eyes of the wildlife in the forest on either side observing his crime.

Maybe you're hallucinating, Bryan tells himself. After all, he hasn't slept much in the last few days, since he's been home. For a while, the theory seems viable. What's a person doing out here at 3 am on a dirt road in bumfuck nowhere, Vermont? And that face- there was something about it, for the second for two he saw it- but his flashlight beam falls over a motionless shape sprawled a couple yards behind his car and all hope drains away, replaced by heavy dread and a rising sense of anger.

I don't need this, Bryan thinks as he approaches the still form. He is already at the lowest point of his life, stuck back home with his parents again after flunking out of school. He'd been doing so well before, too. Had a sterling career in college football behind him, and was looking forward to a professional one with the NFL after that.

That was before he tore his rotator cuff and had to be on bed rest for weeks. In the end, he wasn't drafted to go pro, and he spiralled from there. His grades had plummeted until he'd dropped out to nurse his wounded ego and clear his head. This late-night drive was only one of many he’d become accustomed to taking to be alone with his thoughts in the aftermath, to clear his head and try to get some perspective on where he wanted to go with his life from here. The answers aren’t coming, but one thing Bryan knows for sure: any type of sports career at all is going to become a hell of a lot harder once news spreads that he's tragically hit and killed a man on a remote road by Evergreen Lake.

I wasn't going fast enough to kill him, Bryan thinks, knowing it's a lie: the speedometer was pushing fifty. There are no posted speed limits on this road, he rebuts, appealing to the jury in his head.

"Hello?" Bryan says, his voice too loud in the night, disrupting the chorus of frogs in the trees. "Are you all right?" He comes to stand over the figure- definitely a man, built tall and broad like himself. Steeling himself, he squats to shine his light in the other’s face.

"Fuck!” Bryan swears out loud, dropping the phone and falling back hard on his ass. What he sees can't be possible. After breathing shakily for a second, he retrieves his phone and trains the light, with both hands, back on the face of his inadvertent victim, a face that is terrifyingly familiar.

It's his own.

.

Holly is sitting at the computer in her upstairs office when she gets the call. For a moment, she can't register the name she's seeing. Bryan...calling her?

Holly went to high school with Bryan and has harbored an intense crush on him ever since.

She knew he was back on the lake: she sees him running the roads in the evening, sweat glistening on his finely muscled torso. He's even waved to her once or twice, and once, heart pounding, she'd jogged out to him to catch up. It was then that she learned he'd been injured, had dropped out of school. He kept looking off down the dusty road while talking to her like he wished he was anywhere else but here. But Holly, for her part, was glad he was home.

She'd given him an open invitation that day: 'come over whenever you like, call me if you need anything, neighbors and all that'- but she hadn't expected he'd actually do so. He had that look on his face that whole time- that uncomfortable, impatient look- that he'd always got around her, even back in school. It never made him uncomfortable enough to not take advantage of her crush for what he termed ‘homework services’, though, she thinks wryly. Bryan was not one for academics; football was the beginning and end of his life, so it was no wonder that after that road was walled off he'd spiralled so hard.

When she’s done balking at her caller ID, Holly swallows the M&M's she still has lodged at the back of her throat and picks up the call.

"Hello?"

"Holly?" Bryan's voice sounds like it's coming from the end of a long tunnel, the reception patchy.

"In the very flesh," Holly jokes, reveling in the pleasure she gets from him saying her name. Downstairs, there's the sound of wood creaking. She frowns, listening, but Bryan's voice floods in again, panicky.

"You told me, uh, that if I ever, uh, needed something...'

"Yes, of course," she says, growing a little impatient. Of course he needs something. No man is calling Homely Holly at 3 a.m. just to Hang Out (she's infatuated but she isn't stupid).

"I...something happened," Bryan says. “It’s kind of like…you're into science fiction and all that weird shit, right?"

"Yeees," she confirms, wondering where the hell this could be going. She wanders into the bathroom next door and stares gloomily into the mirror at her heavy brows, her coarse red hair, her top-heavy, blocky body. Bryan is hesitating on the phone, breathing harsh. Whatever it is he wants to say has him real choked up. "Look," he says, "if I tell you about this, you can't tell anyone."

Holly's sour look transforms into a slow smile. A secret. Wonderful. "I won't," she says immediately.

"Okay," Bryan says, but again he hesitates. 'Why don't you...just come meet me. I’ll turn my location on. It's probably better if I show you."

.

Bryan is standing a few paces from the impossible body on the road when Holly's headlights swamp over him.

"Hidey-ho," she says, climbing out of her Subaru hatchback and surveying the scene in front of her. "Wow, Bry," she says, looking at the body on the road. "If I'd known I'd be burying a body tonight I'd have brought my gloves."

She’s such a freak. He’s never been happier to see her.

"This is serious," he says now. "This guy came out of nowhere. And Holly, that's not the weirdest part. He looks like me."

"Twins, huh?" Holly says. He notices she's applied lipstick. He hopes she doesn't think this is some kind of twisted date.

"He looks exactly like me," Bryan clarifies, freezing when he hears the sound of another vehicle approaching. He holds his breath but the driver turns off before reaching them. "Help me get him out of here, first,” he decides.

Bryan expects to argue, but good, obedient Holly only salutes and says, "I'll go put down the seats."

She backs her car up to the body and they stand and lift on three, levering it into the back. Bryan’s shoulder screams in protest.

"My parents are home," he says to Holly when she’s shut the trunk. "I don't want to chance them waking up."

"Duh," Holly says, unphased by the fact that she just aided a man in moving a dead body, "Let's go to my house."

.

The clock on his dashboard creeps closer to 4 am as Bryan follows Holly’s tail lights, and he begins to feel a new set of nerves wiggling in the pit of him. They have to solve this, and quick, before dawn catches up to them and he's forced to reckon with this weirdness as a part of real life.

When they pull into Holly's driveway, he gets the first close-up look at her house since her grandmother died, passing it down to her. She's doing well for herself, he thinks. I guess web development or engineering or whatever the hell nerd stuff she does pays well. He can't help feeling a little bitter, like it should be him, the star of the homecoming game back in school, who has the nice inherited lake house and thriving remote business.

Holly flips on the overhead lights in her garage and Bryan almost reels at the sudden brightness as he climbs out of his car to join her, his injured shoulder still complaining.

"Oh wow," Holly says, staring into the open trunk. "Bry, he looks exactly like you."

"Yeah, that's what I said." He's a little irked by the excitement in her tone, like this is all the plot of some dumb novel and not something that could fuck up his own life beyond repair.

"You did, didn't you? But I didn't realize he'd be, like, a clone."

Bryan comes to stand beside her and, in the harsh fluorescent lighting, the sight before him is undeniable.

It's not just a lookalike: it is him. The scruff of five o' clock shadow, the mole he's always hated on his neck- everything is the same, even the scar on his left temple from the time he fell through a plate-glass window at eight.

There are some differences, but they’re superficial. The Bryan in the car is wearing a plaid button-down shirt and jeans, whereas real Bryan- alive Bryan- stands in an old college sweatshirt and baggy shorts. The dead Bryan, he can't help but notice, doesn't have the little bit of paunch he's grown, despite his efforts, since coming home. Dead Bryan, apart from being, well, dead, is in peak mid-season condition. Dead Bryan looks like he would've made the team, Bryan thinks before realizing how ridiculous this is. Jealous first of Holly the Hulk, now of his dead doppelgänger. How much further can he possibly fall?

"Maybe we should weigh him down somehow," he hears himself saying, "put him in the lake before it gets light out."

Holly is staring rapt at the dead Bryan in a way that's starting to creep him out. She traces her fingers lightly over the front of his flannel shirt; if she starts to undo the buttons, Bryan thinks he might lose all grasp on sanity. Instead, she turns to him, her ruddy moon face flushed, and says, "What if you have the same fingerprints? The same blood? If you do, there's no proof that anyone but you was injured, that anyone but you was here in the first place."

Bryan reflects on this for a moment. She's right; it's something he would never have thought of. "All the same, though," he says, "we should get rid of it as soon as-"

“If we kept him,” Holly interrupts, "we could study him." Briefly digging in the man's pockets, she misses his horrified look. "No wallet," she says. "Don't you want to know where he came from?"

"I kind of just want him to go away, Holly.”

Holly doesn’t seem to hear him. “Come inside real quick,” she says, “I want to show you something."

Bryan's eyes dart to his own dead body.

"I'll close the trunk," Holly says, shrugging, and this being her house, he feels he has no option but to comply. He's put himself at her mercy, a little, confiding in her like this. At first he thought that was all well and good- he always knew she was kind of pathetically obsessed with him, something he’d often used to his advantage in the past when he needed work done. But he's forgotten this side of the coin, the opportunistic way she tries to squeeze every drop out of every chance encounter.

In other words, he's forgotten exactly how annoying she is.

.

Holly keeps up a steady stream of chatter as she leads him into the house. They cross a large, dark room littered with books- bulging out of shelves and balanced in ungainly piles on the floor beside the squashy couches. There are various scraps of paper taped to the wood-paneled wall, posters of Bigfoot and crop circles and shit like that.

"- parallel universes?"

"Huh?"

Bryan is jerked out of his reverie when he almost runs smack into Holly at the top of the stairs to her office. Her bulk fills the hall ominously.

"I said, have you ever heard of parallel universes?"

Bryan sighs. "Yeah, I mean, I think so. The whole, 'everything, everywhere, all the time' deal, right?"

She nods and continues to stare at him in the half-light. There's something furtive and dark in her look that Bryan doesn't really like.

"What?" he says finally, "You think the other me is from some kind of parallel reality?"

Holly's face lights up and she claps her hands. "Bingo!" she says. She turns and leads him to an office that looks like a tornado has ripped through it. More piles of books, along with papers, pizza boxes, and candy wrappers litter the cramped space. Holly wades through the mess and sits at her desk, shaking awake the screen on her monitor.

"The thing is," she tells him, "there have been other accounts of this happening. Everyone knows the hours between midnight and three are when the walls between worlds are thinnest."

This is news to Bryan. He's caught between the urge to roll his eyes and the sudden spark of interest he feels at the thought.

"So..." he says, "This other me, you think he was just chillin', going for a walk or something, and he just walked right into another dimension?"

"Well, maybe," Holly says. "But maybe it wasn't an accident. Maybe, in that other world, people are more developed than us. Maybe, in that other world, they know about the other dimensions and how to...to open up holes and travel between them."

This is sounding a lot like the science fiction tomes Holly was always carting around in school. Maybe her brain has gone to mush out here in the country with no one to talk to.

"Come on," he says now, "If that was the case, wouldn't we be seeing doppelgängers all over the place?"

"Maybe not," Holly says, undeterred. "Maybe, in that other world, they're not allowed to make contact with us. Maybe it's punishable under threat of death? Maybe the other you didn't come here for funsies. Maybe he was running away."

The image comes unbidden to his mind: the headlights reflecting off the whites of his lookalike's eyes, his brow stamped with sweat, mouth shaking, twitching open. He was afraid. Afraid even before I hit him, Bryan realizes. He turns to Holly but she's busy typing a password into her computer; it makes the indignant sound that signifies a failed attempt and Holly snorts impatiently, trying again.

"I have to use the bathroom," he says, "Be right back."

In the hallway, he wipes his sweaty palms on his shorts and steadies his breathing.

Chill out, Bry, he thinks, Don’t get into her weird conspiracy theories. Just get rid of the body, go home, and go the fuck to bed.

Bryan turns on the bathroom light and drops his pants, going through the motions in his head as he relieves his bladder. It's only when he's washing his hands in the sink that he catches the reflection of the tub in the mirror- and what's inside.

Bryan spins around, backing up, his lower back hitting the edge of the counter painfully. A scream builds up in his throat but his mouth is too dry. Pins and needles spread through his tongue, rendering it a paralyzed animal.

Holly lies in the tub, sightless eyes looking up at the ceiling. Half the shower curtain has been ripped down and is clutched in her lifeless fist. A fine smattering of blood coats the tiled wall above her head.

Bryan's brain whirls, attempting to make sense of it all. But I just...I just saw…

"What if," a voice from the door juts into his thoughts. "In that other world, there's not just another you but another me? What if, in that other world, that other me is a better me? Not prettier, maybe, but more ruthless, less willing to settle for her lot?"

Holly- the imposter Holly, the doppelgänger Holly- crosses the floor to stand in front of him, pinning him between herself and the sink.

"What if," she says, "the other me always gets exactly what she wants in the end?"

Bryan fills a sharp pricking, and looks down in time to see an empty syringe fall to the floor.

"What...did...you-" he manages to grind out. His legs go numb, and he clutches the counter to stay upright, unable to move.

Holly smiles, placing a hand on his chest.

"You're not my original Bryan, not exactly," she says, "But you'll do, my love. You'll do."