The séance—or, perhaps more precisely, the knowledge of what the spöke was and what it wanted—changed something in the house. Anine slept badly that night, but it was the first night that Julian had slept in her bed in several weeks. He kept the revolver on the bedside table, which she thought ridiculous since it would be useless against the doppelgänger, but she said nothing. There was the sense now that they were beleaguered, that the spöke was holding them hostage and they must stand together if they were to have any chance of persevering in the house. She found a kernel of hope in this notion, but she was skeptical it would last. The doppelgänger, above all things, wanted to foster conflict between them.
The doppelgänger reacted in its own way. The morning after the séance began the period that Anine came to refer into her own mind the time of breaking. It began at breakfast when the sugar bowl on the table suddenly and spontaneously crumbled into shards. No one was touching it and in fact Mrs. Hennessey was staring right at it when it happened. Chinkkk! Suddenly the sugar was a small mound on the table, studded with bits of broken porcelain. “My, how did that happen?” said Mrs. Hennessey. Anine was silent. The cook evidently knew nothing of the supernatural disturbances and Anine was not eager to bring a new person into the circle.
Later that morning Miss Wicks came to the Green Parlor. “Miss Anine, I’ve got something to report,” she said. “I woke up this morning and the mirror in my room was broken. It was nothing I did.”
Anine looked up from her cards, paused a moment and then stood up. “You’re certain of it? That it was nothing you did?”
“I’m not in the habit of throwing things at mirrors.”
“Of course you’re not. Let’s go look at it.”
Clea brought her to the maid’s quarters in the garret. Indeed the small mirror over Clea’s bureau looked as if a stone had been thrown squarely at it. The ruptures in the glass radiated from a central point of impact, looking eerily like a spider web. Anine touched the edge of one of the shards. “You didn’t see it break, Clea?”
“No. I got out of bed this morning and found it like this.”
“You heard no disturbance during the night?”
“No. None.”
I must tell her everything that happened, Anine resolved. The séance—the doctor’s warning—everything. She felt awkward confessing it to Clea here in the house, however, with the doppelgänger watching them and listening to every word. Still staring at the mirror which duplicated her own reflection into a myriad of jagged-edged figures she said, “We must talk. There is much I must tell you. But not here. After what happened in the Central Park it’s obviously not proper for us to go back there. There must be a park, a public space for working class people where we could talk without arousing anger. Do you know of such a place?”
Clea looked taken aback. “Miss Anine, I don’t think that’d be proper.”
“Miss Wicks, our choices have become extremely limited, have they not?”
The maid seemed to recoil a little bit but she was so stoic that her reaction would have been barely noticeable to anyone who didn’t know her well. “There’s a place called Jones’s Wood,” she replied. “It’s on East 68th Street.”
“Well, that’s where we’ll go.”
“It’s raining today, Miss Anine.”
“We’ll go when the rain stops. If not today, tomorrow. Find me something suitable to wear there.” She turned away from the mirror and looked deeply at Clea. It’s important, she tried to say with her eyes.
The rain did not stop that day, nor did the breakages. At lunchtime Mrs. Hennessey discovered that two expensive china plates had crumbled into dust where they sat stacked on a shelf in the kitchen. A pitcher and bowl in one of the guest bedrooms were also found shattered. When she changed clothes in the afternoon Anine went to put on a brooch that she’d worn many times, given to her by her mother, and discovered that the clasp had been snapped clean through. Miss Wicks reported that she’d found a chair in the library sitting crooked, one of its legs having been broken off. The broken-off piece of the chair’s lower leg was never found. In all of these cases no one was present to see the damage occur. It seemed to happen silently and stealthily, in empty rooms and at odd times—a subtle trail of destruction caused by an invisible spirit who, Anine thought, wanted with this action to irritate and annoy more than terrify.
She did, however, witness one breakage with her own eyes. It was at dinner, where she found herself again dining alone. Spontaneously, and with no sound other than a very soft hiss, the stem of her wine glass drooped like a wilting flower. A moment later the bowl of the glass seemed to tighten, like a skin of ice contracting, and then it shattered with a soft plink! Droplets of wine showered over the table and rose like a fine rose-colored mist into the air. It was really quite beautiful, but Anine found her appetite had suddenly drained away. She pushed away her plate and stared at the ruin of the glass. The emotion she felt was exasperation more than fear.
“Is that supposed to scare me?” she said aloud to the spöke.
Instantly the spirit reacted. Anine felt a swift blow in her solar plexus. Actually it was less of a blow than a sudden awful tightening, like an invisible hand had closed itself around her abdomen. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. The tightening in her stomach became a violent lurch. She bolted out of her chair. A moment later vomit burst out of her mouth as if propelled by a cannon. The dinner she’d just eaten splattered in pinkish chunks over the tablecloth, her plate and the broken remains of the wine glass. The sudden acrid aroma of stomach acid made her woozy.
Yet in seconds it was over. The clutch in her stomach was gone and she didn’t even feel nauseous; indeed she felt perfectly fine. After the head rush cleared Anine was slightly weak at the knees and she sat back down. The table was now a dreadful mess.
That will teach you to mock me, she imagined the doppelgänger thinking.
“I’m still not scared,” she said.
Actually, she was.
Over the next two days—during which the cold drizzle that had seized New York still did not abate—the pace of breakings increased, and the spöke’s foray into destructive phenomena took a new turn: it seemed like it was trying to communicate.
Julian brought it to her attention first. After his work was over for the day and he came home from a brief political meeting, shortly before dinner he called Anine up to his bedroom. “I want you to see something,” he said.
She came, somewhat reluctantly, to his room. Draped over the end of the bed was one of his formal jackets, black with long tails. He picked it up and laid it over his arm. “Mr. Shoop noticed this when he was putting something back into the closet.”
The back of the jacket was covered with a strange flurry of small marks. They were hash marks, some long, some short, arranged in no discernible pattern. The marks appeared to have been made with chalk or a wax pencil or something of that nature. Anine’s brow knitted as she looked at them. Gingerly she reached forward to touch one of the marks. The stuff—she had no idea what it was made of—did not come off on her fingers. It had no smell either.
“Have you noticed anything like this before?” Julian asked her.
She shook her head. “No. I haven’t.”
“Mr. Shoop doesn’t think it can be cleaned and neither do I, but we’ll send it to the laundry tomorrow in the hopes they can work a miracle.” Unceremoniously Julian flung the jacket into a nearby chair. “First the goddamn thing starts breaking our plates, and now it ruins a fifty-dollar tailcoat. Maybe it means to get us to leave by running us out of money.”
“At fifty dollars a tailcoat and eight dollars a Crown Derby plate, the doppelgänger may achieve its goal in about twenty years,” said Anine, starting for the door. Julian merely scoffed and shook his head.
In the morning Anine herself observed more of the curious hash marks. She found them on the green velvet wallpaper in the second-floor hall, right in the corner. They were made with the same chalky substance. These marks looked slightly different than the ones on Julian’s coat. They were less angular, more curved and squiggly, but still equally meaningless. Because one of the squiggles looked like part of a letter N Anine thought, Is it trying to send us a message? She thought the doppelgänger had told them everything it had to communicate through Dr. Dorr, so perhaps this was simply another attempt to intimidate or unnerve them. There was no way to be sure.
Later the same day Mrs. Hennessey called Anine into the kitchen. “I found a curious thing, ma’am, on one of the serving trays.” She presented a large silver tray so broad and straight that its bottom could have been a mirror, except for the fact that it was marred with the same squiggly lines. Unlike the disturbances done in the chalky substance, these were scored into the silver with some hard metallic object. Anine could feel the ridges of the marks with her fingers. These squiggles made no more sense than any of the others did, except for one that appeared to be an incomplete letter A.
“Who could have done this?” said Mrs. Hennessey. “The tray was in the pantry like always. I don’t think I’ve brought it out in a week.”
“I don’t know,” Anine lied. “If you notice anything else of this nature, Mrs. Hennessey, please report it at once.”
“You mean aside from plates and sugar bowls breaking themselves all over the place?”
“I’d like to know about those too.”
“I’ll be reporting to you a lot then, ma’am. It seems like every time I turn around something else is broken.” Mrs. Hennessey shook her head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this place was haunted.” This was the first indication that the cook had begun to notice the spöke phenomenon.
Very much as Anine expected, the strange hash marks appearing on various objects proved to be indelible and destructive. Not only was the laundress to whom Bryan Shoop delivered Julian’s tailcoat at a loss as to how to eradicate the marks, she couldn’t even determine what they were made of. The same was true of the markings on the wall on the second floor. Clea tried mightily to sponge them away with everything, including lye soap, but couldn’t make the slightest impression upon them. The only remedy, Anine realized, was to cut out that section of wallpaper and replace it with a new sheet that had to be matched meticulously. Fortunately the wallpaper she had ordered for the house while on their honeymoon was machine-printed, not hand-painted, and thus she could place an order through the decorator for replacements. Anticipating that more walls would be ruined in the future, however, she ordered several more rolls of surplus wallpaper for all the rooms in the house. Between this, Julian’s suit, the broken crockery, the mirrors, the table and the serving tray, in the few days since the séance the doppelgänger had already cost the household nearly a thousand dollars.
On Friday, a week after the séance, the deluge of rain finally abated. It was not exactly sunny and the ground was still sodden but Anine seized the chance to get away from the house, and she told Clea to summon a carriage. The maid had chosen as Anine’s costume for the outing to Jones’s Wood a rather plain-looking cream-colored day dress that Anine used to wear on dreary afternoons during the long Swedish winters. Nevertheless she couldn’t resist adding a hat, a new item she had ordered from a catalog the week before, trimmed boldly with bright yellow canary feathers. She must have looked rather odd clambering into the carriage, clutching her hat and followed by her maid dressed simply in black. The sun, playing hide-and-seek with the remnants of the rain clouds, happened to be shining at that moment. Anine was glad just to get out of the gloomy confines of the house.
Jones’s Wood was a curious place. For one thing there were precious little woods left of it. Most of the site had been given over to a large, gaudy-looking amusement park, which given the season and the weather was not open. The park fronted no fewer than three German-style beer gardens which were open, though sparsely populated in the middle of the day on a Friday. The place obviously catered to working-class New Yorkers, and as she got out of the carriage Anine felt actually relieved at the total absence of promenading socialites and ostentatious buggies that one saw in the Central Park. The sky had clouded over by now but the rain did not resume. Glancing at the beer gardens, feeling adventurous and even cheerful, Anine said, “You know what, Clea? I believe I’ll have a glass of beer.”
“You sure you want to do that, Miss Anine? If word gets around—”
“Stuff and nonsense. No one even remotely connected to society would be caught dead here. That’s why I think I like this place.” Anine took out her coin purse and started toward the nearest of the beer establishments. “Come along.”
Anine sat on a rough wooden bench at a picnic table on the muddy grass beneath several droopy crepe-paper streamers and a hand-lettered sign in German. Her small gloved hand curled around the handle of a colossal glass beer stein. Two elderly men, both with bushy mustaches, looked at her strangely as they smoked cigars at a table not far away but no one else seemed to pay them any attention. “This was a good idea,” said Anine. “We can talk privately here.”
“It may not be such a good idea if word gets around. It almost always does.”
“Well, certainly you won’t be telling?” Anine smiled and sipped from her mug. Then she knew the time for levity was past. “There’s much to tell you, Clea. The doctor was at our house Friday night. He made contact with the spirit.”
Clea nodded. “I been wondering what happened that night.”
Anine shuddered with the memory. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Nothing.”
She told the story in great detail. She did not hesitate to repeat the words the spöke had shouted at her. Anine had firmly decided that Clea must know everything, because knowledge was the most powerful weapon against the spirit—assuming anything worked against it at all. She also confessed to Clea for the first time that she thought she’d seen Ola Bergenhjelm’s apparition after his untimely death, though she admitted she wasn’t sure she could trust her senses regarding this or how it might relate to the phenomenon in the house. The only thing she omitted was the ominous undertone of Julian’s question to Dr. Dorr about whether the death of Mrs. Quain would exterminate the doppelgänger. Anine phrased it as: “We discussed whether the spirit was coupled to Mrs. Quain’s life. The doctor didn’t give us a very clear response but I suspect the answer is yes. Doppelgänger are, it appears, literally the ghosts of living people. It seems like everything is pointing in that direction.”
Clea thought for a moment and then gave a sort of nonchalant little shrug. “You almost don’t need to hear what I think, Miss Anine, ’cause you know it already. The doctor’s right. You’d best be getting out of this house. Mr. Julian’s a fool for wanting to stay.”
“I know it. Of course the doctor’s right. I’ve been urging Julian to sell the house and move for weeks now. Mrs. Minthorn’s note certainly seemed to make it clear that the family is no longer willing to deal with us, which means their generous offer is off the table. I think we could still get a fair price for the house but Julian won’t consider moving.” She sipped from her beer mug. Trying not to alarm Clea—or herself—Anine said delicately, “It appears that his strategy is simply to wait the spirit out. Meaning, wait until Mrs. Quain—”
Clea finished the thought for her. “Wait until she dies and then the thing is gone.”
“That’s what he’s expecting, yes.” She shook her head. “It’s childish, really. It’s like he’s now pretending there is no problem in the house, just hoping it will go away. I don’t think it will go away. Suppose Mrs. Quain lives another ten years? She could, you know. I don’t think she’s that old. Given the disturbances we’ve seen this week I suspect in six months’ time we’ll be reduced to wearing rags and eating food from our fingers because our clothes will be shredded and every dish broken. There won’t be a stick of furniture left in the house that isn’t ruined. That is, unless my husband wishes to devote the entirety of his fortune to replacing everything the doppelgänger destroys. If that’s what he wants we may as well mortgage our lives to the Crown Derby company.”
Clea shook her head. “You just talking just to talk, Miss Anine. You know what’s got to be done.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“Leave Mr. Julian. He’s no good for you. I see the way he treats you. You think I don’t hear through the walls when he’s yelling at you? Everybody hear it. Mrs. Hennessey too. And him and that manservant—Shoop—you know, Miss Anine, what goes on between them?”
Anine had her suspicions but she’d endeavored mightily to keep them out of her mind. “What goes on?”
“Things that gentlemen shouldn’t be doing. Unnatural things. He don’t need you, Miss Anine. And you don’t need this, all the nonsense with this—I can’t even say that name.”
“The doppelgänger.”
“So leave. Pack up. There ain’t nothing worth all this. Leave him in the house, if he wants it. He’s the one who made this bed. He got to lie in it.”
She’s absolutely right, Anine thought, but it still feels wrong to give up so easily. She admitted to herself she’d been thinking more and more about Sweden, about what she might say to her parents if she returned. It had even occurred to her that perhaps she didn’t need to divorce Julian. It seemed likely that if their marriage ended she would be doomed to be a spinster forever and strangely that didn’t bother her. If she remained married to Julian but separated from him by an ocean her life would be little different except that both of them would escape the scandal of divorce. Julian might not have any interest in taking another wife, especially if he preferred Bryan Shoop’s company to that of a woman. Remaining married might keep that potential scandal at bay. But how do I even suggest this to him? Would he agree?
Another question weighed on her mind. “Clea,” she said, “let me ask you something else. It may be difficult for you to answer. If I were to do as you say, leave the house and go back to Sweden, would you come with me? I would be happy to continue to employ you.”
Miss Wicks didn’t seem surprised or even particularly moved by the question. “You don’t worry about me, Miss Anine. You don’t need to be hauling me across an ocean. If you leave the house and leave Mr. Julian, you should go back with your own people. I wouldn’t be any help to you.”
“I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve come to rely on you a great deal.”
“You say that ’cause you got no one else to rely on. They got you cornered here, Miss Anine. Mr. Julian, the Fifth Avenue ladies, everybody—even the ghost. You got to break free. You take it from me, I know. You only a slave if you give up trying to be free.”
Anine took another sip of beer, and then set the mug down on the rough plank table. “I believe I’ve had enough,” she said, suppressing a soft belch. “Thank you for speaking so frankly to me, Clea.”
“You asked me to speak to you like that. Don’t thank me just for doing my job.”
Just doing my job. There was a curious sadness to this moment that did not escape Anine’s notice. Is that all it is to her? Does she not really consider me a friend? Anine was eternally grateful of her company and her counsel, but sometimes Clea Wicks was very difficult to read.
They said nothing more to each other on the ride home. When they did reach the house Clea went silently back to her duties, pressing clothes, dusting and cleaning up the shards of freshly-broken crockery.
For that weekend and into the next week a sort of delicate balance held throughout the house, thin and fragile like the crust of ice just forming on the top of a water barrel. The dreadful mood of claustrophobia remained, plates and furniture were still found broken and in the deep of the night on Sunday Anine heard again the chilling sound of Mrs. Quain’s laughter coming from somewhere above her bedroom. But there were no quarrels with Julian, no sudden spasms of rage from the spöke, and the strange hash-mark attempts at communication (if that’s what they were) ceased. The situation was not exactly optimal, for Anine could not see herself living for long even at this slightly-reduced level of intensity, but at least it was less dire than it had been at any time before the séance, and it suggested that it was possible—just barely possible—that the Athertons and the doppelgänger might be able to live together.
The fragile equilibrium ended the following Tuesday, the second of November. It was election day. It began cheerfully enough. Julian, taking the day off from his law practice, stayed home for breakfast which was quite rare. Though thoroughly boring, his one-sided chatter was at least upbeat. “I just hope my father takes the loss well,” he babbled. “He was wounded deeply enough when I told him I was a Democrat, and he’s taken constant umbrage at my activism for the party here in New York. Tonight, hopefully, he’ll come to realize that the past is the past and being a Democrat is no longer synonymous with disunion, treason and Jefferson Davis. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even invite him to dinner as sort of a reconciliation.”
He went off to his political meetings which would last well into the evening. Anine cared very little for politics, and as this Tuesday unfolded she had no idea what was happening in the city or the world outside the Green Parlor. It proved to be an uneventful day. Clea Wicks told her that a saucer had been found broken in the pantry but that was the only disturbance. Anine thought for a moment she felt the presence of the Abyssinian cat in the parlor but could not see it. The feeling went away soon enough.
At shortly after eight o’clock in the evening, just as Anine was leaving the dining room after her customarily somber and solitary dinner, the front door burst open and Julian stumbled inside, in a state of rage and apoplexy unusual even for him.
“Dirty bastards!” he roared at the entryway. “Dirty Republican thieves, they have no shame! How dare they even call themselves Americans? There’ll be an uprising, another civil war! It’s a fucking outrage!”
He marched straight into the Red Parlor, wrenching off his necktie. Anine heard the glassy clatter of him removing the stopper from one of the liquor decanters.
So, the Democrats lost. She’d been hoping for a Democratic victory for the sole reason that the opposite outcome would make Julian disagreeable. She debated with herself whether to go to him. She didn’t wish to annoy him, but with as deeply as the election mattered to him she thought it at least the sporting thing to do to offer him her condolences.
She appeared at the door of the Red Parlor. He was standing in front of the fireplace, drinking—more like gulping—from a crystal tumbler of whiskey.
“Your man lost?” she said.
“Don’t gloat!” Julian blasted at her. “I don’t want to hear your arrogant, sanctimonious nonsense! You’ve been for Garfield since the beginning! You’ve undermined me at every turn!”
“I know absolutely nothing about this Garfield person. I don’t even know what the issues are in American elections—”
“Don’t lie to me!” Julian screamed. “You wanted Garfield to win because I was for Hancock! You oppose me at every turn, just on principle! Don’t even try to deny it! Every single thing I’ve tried to do, you’ve desperately wanted me to fail!”
“Now that’s not true and you know it—”
“Get out of my life, you bitch!” Julian suddenly swung around and hurled the tumbler directly at the portrait of Jefferson hanging above the fireplace. The glass shattered and the liquor made a wet splash cross Jefferson’s face. “You will never understand what it means to be an American!” he shouted. “You and your savage Viking country—where kings and noblemen play with peoples’ lives like chess pieces—how can you possibly understand this country? How can you understand anything except selfishness? The world does not fucking revolve around you! When are you going to get that through your head? Why are you trying to destroy me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? Why do you hate me so much?”
He was virtually hysterical. Far from offering her condolences, Anine realized that all she’d done was to provoke yet another confrontation with him, this one over absolutely nothing. She turned and marched toward the door of the parlor.
“Oww, stop it!” Julian cried. “That’s so fucking irritating!”
What is he on about now? At the door, she turned to look at him. He was pacing between the fireplace and the end of the desk, covering his ears with his hands.
“Stop it!” he shouted. “That sound…I can’t abide that sound!”
The nub of unease in her stomach began to rise into something more. Except for the crackle of the fireplace, the Red Parlor was as silent as a tomb. She turned back toward him. “What is it?” she asked. “What do you hear?”
“Can’t you hear it?” he shrieked. “Are you deaf?”
“Julian, I don’t hear anything.”
He sat down in a wing chair, but immediately sprang up from it. His hands were still clapped over his ears. “The trumpet! It’s the goddamn trumpet…the one that Bradbury heard…” He winced. A strange sound came from his lips which were pulled back in an unnatural leer, baring his clenched teeth. It was a high-pitched squeal, like the screech of a hysterical child in the midst of a crying jag that was leaving him breathless. “Stop it!” he roared. “That sound…dear God, that sound…stop it, please, stop it!”
Anine heard nothing. Strangely, imagining what he was hearing was even more disturbing than hearing it for herself. Julian winced again as if the sound was very high-pitched, piercing and deafening.
“You fucking bitch!” he squealed. At first Anine thought Julian was addressing her, but she soon realized he was shouting at the doppelgänger. “No! No! I will never leave this house! I will never leave this house!”
Julian moved his head rapidly from side to side. He gasped suddenly as if he was in severe pain. His chest heaved as he panted for breath. Then, strangely, he held his breath, ballooning out his cheeks. His face turned bright red almost instantly. Through it all he never took his hands from over his ears; in fact he pressed harder, as if trying to crush his own skull between them.
Unease, which had become fear in a matter of seconds, now became panic. The doppelgänger is attacking. She bolted for the doors of the Red Parlor only to realize that they were closed. She grasped the handles of the pocket doors and tried to pull them open—but they held together as solidly as if banded with iron. They were trapped.
Julian let out the breath he’d been holding. “No, I won’t!” he screamed. “I hate you! I’ll die before I let you have this house! Fitta! FITTA!” Then he took another deep breath and held it.
Anine rattled the pocket doors. “Help!” she shouted, pounding on the doors. “Clea, Mr. Shoop, Mrs. Hennessey, anybody! Help, we’re trapped!”
“FITTA!” Julian blasted. “I won’t listen to you anymore!” He held his breath again. Weak from lack of oxygen, he crumpled to the floor, still clutching his hands to his head against the silent torment of the trumpet.
Anine looked over her shoulder at him. Doubling over, almost in a fetal position, he let out his long-held breath with a gasp. “Not true!” he shouted. “Parmenter killed the Indian! I was trying to stop him! I WAS TRYING TO STOP HIM!”
Abandoning the door, Anine rushed to her husband’s side. She knelt down and touched his shoulder. He recoiled. “POOOOOH!” he let out the breath he’d been holding. Gasping, he screeched, “I’ll kill you! God damn it, I’ll kill you for this, you bitch!” There was no doubt he was in communication with the spöke. He took another breath, so deep his eyes bulged out of his head. She couldn’t even imagine why he kept holding his breath.
“What is it saying?” she said. “What is it telling you?”
Julian, his cheeks ballooned, looked up at her. Sweat was breaking out on his forehead and in fact all over his face. As he writhed over on his side Anine saw a wet dark spot spreading across his groin; he had urinated in his trousers.
There was, finally, another sound besides the crackling of the fire. It was a terrible scraping noise, deep and grinding, like a metal implement digging into stone. Something above her fluttered. Anine looked up at the fireplace above them. The portrait of Thomas Jefferson was quivering, shaking slightly against the wall.
The scraping continued. A chalky white gash, scored deep like the gouges in the silver tray, appeared on the left side of Jefferson’s face. It moved upwards, then curved around, forming a recognizable symbol: R.
Julian let out his breath which he had been holding for more than a minute. He was trying to shout but he was so exhausted his voice was barely a whisper. “You’re trying to break me,” he gasped. “You won’t do it! I’ll kill you first, you hear me?”
Another gouge traced itself into the canvas of the Jefferson painting. To the right of the R, a letter F formed, crooked, haphazard, like the writing of a child. It looked a little like the chalky hash marks, but the spöke seemed to have learned how to form recognizable words.
Why can’t I hear the trumpet?
SCRAPE…SCRAPE…Julian had by now begun to breathe again in great jagged gasps. He too looked up at the Jefferson painting. The letters R F were visible, then, further to the right, a D, and to its left, L. As if writing with an invisible awl, the doppelgänger slowly scored a word into the picture:
GARRFEILD
Garfield. The doppelgänger was taunting Julian. As soon as he recognized the word he burst into a long crying sob. The sudden clutch of terror was over, and Anine realized the spöke had departed; it had said what it came to say.
Julian, sobbing, released his ears. The imprints of his hands could be seen, red and throbbing, on his temples.
“Oh, God,” he wailed, sounding now very much like a child. “Oh Christ, why does this thing hate us so much?” He blubbered, crying into his sleeve.
Anine put her arm around him. For the first time in a very long time, he seemed to welcome her comfort.
“It can’t help it,” she said. “It’s what it is.”
“Did you hear it? That squeaky trumpet—that horrible, awful, squeaky trumpet—”
“I didn’t hear anything. It was speaking to you alone.”
He continued to cry. Only after a while did he look down and realize he was wet. “Oh, Jesus. I pissed myself. I pissed myself like a little baby. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’ll help you get cleaned up.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sobbed, propping his head against Anine’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
She held him for a while. It was very awkward. This was the first moment of real tenderness that had occurred between them in months, and that it had to come now—after what had just happened—seemed vile, an obscenity. She did not feel closer to Julian, though she should have. She felt dirty and used. The foulness of the spöke permeated her like a bone chill.
Anine left the Red Parlor—the doors were now free—and rang a bell cord in the entryway. It was not Clea but Bryan Shoop who responded.
“Did you hear me shouting?” she asked him. “We were pounding on the doors. They were stuck.”
“No,” the teenager shrugged.
“Surely you heard the commotion. Mr. Atherton was shouting at the top of his lungs.”
“I heard nothing.”
She was annoyed, but not at him. He’s probably telling the truth. The spöke wanted no one to interfere with its torment of us. She was mindful of Julian’s dignity. “Mr. Atherton spilled something in the parlor. Bring a towel and get one of his dressing gowns. Bring them to me here, then retire to your room. I’ll take care of him.”
He went away and Anine remained in the dim entryway. The gas in the huge chandelier was turned low, unusually low. She walked over toward the dimmer switch on the wall. Suddenly, with what seemed like the force of a charging elephant, something invisible, strong and brutal shoved her with terrific savagery against the wall.
All the air went out of her lungs instantly. “Unghhh!” She was spread-eagled, her right cheek pressed against the wallpaper. The suddenness of the attack shocked and terrified her. Again it felt like her corset was constricting around her—one of the spöke’s favorite tortures. In fact she could hear the threads and seams actually creaking against the whale-baleen stays just under her breasts. The doppelgänger was literally trying to smother her.
Julian! Clea! Anyone, help! She tried to scream. Her mouth was open but no sound came out, only the last bit of air being squeezed out of her body. It felt as though an enormous hand was pressing on her, rolling her from foot to head, systematically flattening her.
She noticed that her left hand was only a few inches from the gas dimmer switch.
Something else seemed very strange, but through the pounding of her heart—straining terribly with no oxygen to sustain it—and the rush of adrenaline it took her several moments to notice it. She was pressed against the vertical wall of the entryway, but she could have sworn it felt like she was lying prone on the floor, as if the entire room had turned ninety degrees on its side.
Screeeeeeeeeeee! Anine winced as a terrible high-pitched note sliced into her head like a steel cable. It was literally painful to hear, causing an instant sharp agony crackling against the inside of her skull. As the note changed in pitch she realized it was the sound of the silver trumpet—the voice of the doppelgänger.
Then, through the trumpet, it spoke to her. “Don’t think I can’t do anything I want to you!” it said, shrieking so loud that it sounded like the bell of the silver horn was pressed right up against her ear. It was, unmistakably, a woman’s voice, and it spoke Swedish.
But what happened next did not feel like a woman at all. The same invisible hand that had flattened her against the wall now suddenly forced her legs apart under her skirt. She gasped, realizing at once she could breathe, almost as if she’d forgotten how—was that what happened to Julian?—and as she gulped for another breath of air, which felt in this desperate moment like it would be her last, she looked down and saw the bustle of her skirt rising, roughly and sharply. An invisible spear, needle-sharp and icy cold, suddenly arrowed its way between her buttocks, pressing painfully on her anus. There was barely enough air in her lungs for her to emit a feeble scream.
Anine lunged. The force was pressing her so hard against the wall that she felt as though it actually lengthened her body. Her fingers reached the dimmer switch. She twisted it as hard as she could. The gas came up, bright blazing yellow, and instantly the nightmare was over.
“Ma’am?”
Anine let out the breath she realized she’d unconsciously been holding. “POOOOH!” Her vision clouded. She grasped at the bosom of her dress, which was unmarred; she looked over and saw Bryan Shoop standing before her, a towel and one of Julian’s silk dressing-gowns draped over his arm.
Dear God, what just happened? She looked down at herself. Her dress was in perfect order. She was standing up against the wall, but nothing was the matter.
She paused only a moment, then walked forward, snatched the towel and the dressing-gown and headed for the door of the Red Parlor. She suddenly understood the frantic threats her husband had shrieked at the doppelgänger. The spöke’s hatred of them was quickly becoming mutual.
Anine did not sleep at all during the night. When morning came she was literally nodding off to sleep while trying to eat breakfast. Julian returned home from his office at mid-morning, which to Anine’s recollection had never happened before. He met her in the entryway. He too looked haggard and sleepless, his eyes ringed with dark bags. He was carrying a crumpled telegraph form in his hand.
“I came from the telegraph office,” he said. “Aunt Lucretia has agreed to put you up for a couple of weeks at her winter home in St. Augustine. You may pack three trunks. The boat sails tonight at eight. Bring your nigger maid with you because she sure as hell isn’t staying here. I’ll sell the house while you’re gone. When you get back you’ll give me a son. Don’t even open your bitch mouth to complain.”
Then, shuffling like an old man, he walked right past her toward the doors of the Red Parlor, never meeting her gaze. The telegraph sheet dropped lazily from his hand and lay in a ball on the carpet. She did not pick it up.