The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 11

  I lingered in her backyard now, safely out of sight but not necessarily out of harm’s way as my eyes kept returning to the one alternate path I knew led in the right direction, which unfortunately happened to also be that of the graveyard. The idea depressed me immensely, but this was Brazil, and the forest essentially a jungle, with underbrush to rival the ensnarling thicket of my dreams. It seemed to me a balance of evils. By tiptoeing through the grim pass in the bluffs, I risked necromancing the dead somehow. By attempting the understory, I turned the dreams into portents of my journey here. Yes, the man with the stout-minded postulations was still that fragile. If evolução was a personal evolution, then mine was one of schizophrenia. I had become twin revolving personae over the past several weeks, one existing in a fathomable world, one in its mirror opposite. If I hadn’t fully flowered into my evolved form yet, I was flirting with fruition.

  In the end it had to be the graveyard passage. Neither of my egos could come up with a presentable excuse. I tried to make dogged will my companion, but it was really just necessity, that and pride, that led me along as I met the trail briskly, not looking back for fear of not looking forward again. Motor action proved no mitigator as the specter of the dread rendezvous with my victim grew with each deliberate step I took. I felt like a man going into battle, terrified but resigned to the inexorability of it. But these were only the first layers of emotions. Beneath them lay the feeling that the trail led gradually into another dimension, one I was already feeling the effects of and would soon be entirely immersed in. And when I say feeling, I mean that specifically in the way of sensation, the sort inspired by external stimuli filtered through my senses.

  The vegetation around me hummed with vibrancy. The air had a character to it, a certain palpability exposed by my motion within it that reminded me of being high on marijuana. The trail in front of me seemed to lean before me, to help me along gravitationally. I realized it was likely all a product of my anxiety, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt, quite honestly, like those forces I’d tried to give some solidity to had finally complied, but only here, in this forest realm in Brazil, these spaces surrounding Uiara Cunhedo’s symbolic graveyard. As if the psychic energy that had gone into the illusion had made it other than illusion, and the metaphor one that could be smelled and tasted. In such conditions, I thought, an elephant man could rise from his otherwise figurative grave and meet a visitor.

  But when the trees opened up and I slowed my pace to confront the clearing before me, my sense of things changed slightly, became more refined. Looking at the stones, the wheelbarrow, I felt so utterly out of my element, so disoriented, that it literally dizzied me. And yet it suddenly wasn’t my surroundings that acted upon me. As I stepped lightly past the first stone, skirting the yard along the right-hand bluff, it was I that acted upon them. I was a ghost here. A ghost moving among material things. I haunted the area that moments before had haunted me. Only it hadn’t really been haunting me. My impressions had, and they were the impressions of a soul awakened from life into an otherworld previously conceived of. There was comfort in that, in knowing the specters you’d imagined were contrived. But there was something horrible there, too, in the loneliness that came from having no effect upon the environment in which you found yourself; and worse, in the realization that such places existed independently of your perceptions, that they were in fact not related to you at all, not in substance, not in form, not in theory. It was never your reality that was the dream. It was you. And your dreamer right there in the ground beneath your feet, pretending to be dead.

  Now maybe a third of the way across the yard, I felt a knot slipping, and knew if I didn’t get a handle on it, I’d never make it to the other side. The day had warmed considerably, as I’d begun abstractly to appreciate while walking among the foliage. In the clearing the beating sun was blisteringly hot to skin that didn’t belong on this plane, the bluff beside me like the wall of a furnace, emitting its own heat. Sweat beaded, and ran into my eyes. My flesh crawled with it, and maybe it had all along, I didn’t know. If I said I was cold, too, I wouldn’t be embellishing. A fever of medieval scale had come over me as I was apparently being acted upon, after all, for my trespass. And still the knot slipped. I was unable to get a grip with my slick hands, unable to find the key behind its unlocking with my stinging eyes. Better, I thought, to just let it go. Throw back my ghostly head and loose all the extraneous matter that gave me more gravity than a haunt should have. I could not fulfill my role here by taking slow, burdensome steps. If I could not simply pass through, as it is the wont of some ghosts to do, then I must rain terror upon my twelve-faceted victim, summon him from hiding and spit poisonous ectoplasm into his elephantine eyes. Yes, I could feel the toxins bubbling in me under the scorching sun, the knot slipping free at last . . .

  Then I saw her. She was standing just beyond the last stone, the one Cunhedo had referred to as mine. She was beckoning me with the familiarly elegant hand of a thirteen-year-old who had wandered away from her sister while collecting leaves. She was wearing the same outfit, too, with the beady black butterfly embroidered over her heart, the black, open-laced high-topped basketball shoes, their circular emblems colored in with a red permanent marker. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head, red streaks spilling out of the pineapply fountain. I’d always thought of this get-up as the Avril Lavigne punk detour from the standard goth attire, but when I’d referred to it as such, she’d rolled her eyes and lamented, Could you be more out of touch, Dad. But this wasn’t that same person, I realized as she now held her hand extended, an invitation away from this unhealthy place. She had borrowed the clothes. The mannerisms as well as the aspect of the person inside them were different from Kathy’s. Where Kathy’s had been a slightly more sassy look, to Kristin’s lazily exotic one, this was a sweeter face, one highlighted in innocence, as though unworn by the everyday demands of the world. She was a creature like me, I thought, though a purer stranger in this realm. And when I placed my hand in hers, we would be joined in the assurance of ourselves as real beings.

  I had been unwittingly moving away from the rocky wall toward her and now realized I was passing the stone that marked my involvement in the most recent of the elephant man’s exits. As I glanced from the girl who was not Kathy to look at it, I saw that it was stained with red droplets. I paused, knowing what the substance was but compelled to touch it anyway, because it didn’t look like it was in the appropriate state. As I bent down, I could just detect in my periphery the vigorous back and forth head motion of the girl who was not Kathy. Like in Kristin’s airport dream, when she was telling me not to go to Bavaria. The compulsion was stronger than my belief in the necessity of her warning, and I continued with my motion, touching one of the droplets in spite of her concern, finding its texture too tacky in the hot sun. It occurred to me as I lifted my finger to look at the tarry substance that maybe the girl who was not Kathy was like me in more ways than I’d realized, that maybe this was her blood and she called not for assurances, but help, though she was loath to admit to it.

  I crossed to her in three strides, the distress seeming to melt from her face as I took her hand. It felt real in mine, cool to my hot skin, but solid, tangible, as I twirled her in a slow-motion dance move, scanning her for injury. Finding none, I stood before her, now taking both her hands in mine.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  She shook her head, releasing one of my hands and gesturing to her mouth as if to indicate that oral communication was not possible. She held up her forefinger—wait, it seemed to say—then she scanned her immediate vicinity and apparently finding what she was looking for, led me to a patch of naked ground, where she knelt, picked up a stick and began to inscribe a message in the dirt. It was then, as I watched the letters form, that it hit me. This was no extension of the fugue I had been in, but a real event. Indeed all the impressions associated with that fugue had slipped away while I wasn’t looking. The world had returned to some semblance of its f
ormer self, and along with it, my perception of its scents, sounds, and images. Then why was she still here, this girl who was my daughters’ identical. This third twin—

  It struck me like one of those glimpses from childhood. Those passing epiphanies of absolute understanding of the nature of it all, and the reason behind it. The glimmer was there for a lingering second, then gone. Unlike those epiphanies from childhood, this instance left more than a residue of something missed, of something that should have been snatched to the soul while still available. It left knowledge. Not full knowledge, not harmony with the nature of the reason behind it all, but knowledge nonetheless.

  The elephant man had indeed been looking for something, and that something involved a much narrower demographic than mere twins and triplets, or even identical multiples. What he targeted, what the design required, were specific bloodlines. The plan wasn’t at all in line with a Nazi vision of a master race. It sought to isolate, to find or to breed specific individuals, or a single specific individual. An individual or individuals who embodied or would help fulfill its evolução. Every throat that had been cut had been cut to this purpose. The Cunhedo ‘brother’ had very possibly not been a brother at all except inside Uiara Cunhedo’s head, or more likely, in some elicit agreement between them. He could have been some other relation or associate, linked to their father or a fellow scientist from the Nazi days. God knew what webs were in place. But all of it, the slaying of the sisters, of my own daughter, the impregnation of Kristin, it was all to the end of isolating the genetic fit for the design.

  The waving hand of the girl who was not Kathy pulled me back into the moment. Christ, was she really here?

  Again the glimpse, the glimmer. Again, gone as soon as it materialized. I looked at her words, in hopes that they provided the key, but they served just the opposite purpose, which was to temper, to detract, to make it all seem fanciful.

  I will lead you to the sea.

  That was it? That was why she was here?

  But she wasn’t finished yet, her finger returning to the dirt now that she had my attention again. This time I watched every letter form until the statement stood complete.

  No matter what happens, you mustn’t go to Germany.

  “But who are you? Are you Kathy? Do we change when we die . . . ?”

  She was writing again, and running out of room. The last words—I am Kathy—were scrawled on the grass, as unmistakable as they were useless by themselves, because the whole said something else entirely.

  If believing that will make you listen to me, then yes, I am Kathy.

  I paused before responding, listening. “Do you hear a tick-tocking?” I said.

  She tilted her head, regarding me oddly.

  “Never mind. Why mustn’t I go to Germany? Can you tell me that?”

  She shook her head, lips pursed in determined resolve. Though I wanted more, and pressed her for more, I knew where she stood. Knowledge was temptation. Temptation to go against her advice. And she would not be the provider.

  ***

  When we had walked perhaps an eighth of a mile along a continuing trail through the forest, she unexpectedly veered from it into the thicker foliage, causing me to take her arm, which now felt not only cool, but somehow less firm. Without turning, she shook her head, a habit I was becoming used to, and pushed on, soon picking up what appeared to be an animal path. This path led at an angle to the other trail, which I could still discern by the open swath it drew through the brush. It was as I was absently tracing its course—dimly thinking it was time to wake up now; what could be gleaned had been gleaned—that I saw through the briefest of windows the chapel.

  On impulse, and without even considering consulting my guide, I set off across the jungle in the relevant direction. I was almost halfway there before I looked back to see if she had followed. She hadn’t, and she wouldn’t. She was gone. I wanted to go back for her, but the greater compulsion lay with the chapel. Besides, I knew she would not be found. She had returned to the place she had come from, perhaps the sadder for having left to begin with. Missing her, I turned back to the business at hand, parting the vines that stood between me and the building with the machete of need, basic, irresistible human need to behold, to experience, to know.

  With such gravitational power at its disposal, the chapel, now becoming more apparent through the vegetation, might have been responsible for everything I had just been through. Pain had been delivered and received within its walls. Ghastly violence had been done. Perversities. Lives defiled, profaned, ruined, stolen. Was it too difficult to imagine in the radius of such a pit borders had come down, other spheres had been breached? An overlapping triangularity of life, afterlife, and dream achieved? And maybe, I thought as the trees thinned out in front of me, giving over to the open area occupied by the church, maybe there really was a purpose to the pain, the madness, the death. No wholesome purpose, assuredly, but some meaningful, utilitarian purpose. When I’d thought about it earlier, about all the throats that had been opened, I’d been responding to a glimmer. This was no glimmer. This was straightforward, undramatic, reason-based discovery. What if the randomness and chaos were not so random and chaotic? What if the envisioned evolução depended on such horrors to see itself fulfilled?

  They were thoughts that led me to the very door of the building, which hung slightly ajar on its hinges. Before entering, however, I stood back taking in first the setting—small amphitheater off to the right, accessed by a grown-over dirt road that probably branched off Pinheiro in its seaward descent—then absorbing the building itself, appreciating it for its symbolism. It was not unlike the small out-of-the-way chapels you find in Europe, a stuccoed structure enclosing a nave and an apse, and having an arched entrance, sharply angled roof, and a steeple. The purpose of these buildings was not for congregational worship, they were much too small, but rather to provide a peaceful moment of prayer or reflection for the individual. They were often shrines as well, devotions to holy figures, sometimes austere and functional, sometimes tended with fresh flowers and other ornamentation. This one, being abandoned and therefore bare of any adornments, had a lonely air about it. Though the sense of its function as a consecrated place, one of sanctity and dedication, remained intact, there was also the sense of contrast and contradiction. This was not solely based in the recipient’s knowledge of the deeds done inside its walls, but also in the nurtured Western instinct responsible for seemingly primordial conjurations like serpents in dreams. Inherent in any Catholic symbol was an element of the satanic, purely due to the latter’s place in the theology or mythology upon which the religion was built. It was in this arena where I found an appreciation for this abandoned chapel, and wondered if both the triplets’ slayer and the pedophilic priest hadn’t done the same. But this brought up a question as to evil itself, and whether it had been part of the framework . . . Christ, what are you waiting for, Ocason? The Second Coming? Open the fucking door.

  I didn’t want to. Now that I stood before the gateway to the past and its desecrations, I did not want to open that door. I’d been stalling, hiding behind my thoughts, feebly resisting the inevitability of the coming action. As eager as I’d been to get here, I was now even more eager to have it over with, the foreboding, the foreknowledge having assumed its tangible form as I let my senses process the event of the chapel. Because it wasn’t just a building, this construction of human hands. It didn’t just exist in time and space. It happened, in the way a slaughterhouse happened. It performed, it accomplished, in the way a hunting knife, as it opened throats, performed and accomplished. And as surely as tragedy, violation, horror themselves were open-ended occurrences, so was this church. The past was the present here, the place subject to only as much time—as I stepped forward and threw the door wide—as it took the eyes to focus upon the nature of the event. Even then, the imprint had already been on the irises, needing only the details filled in.

  It wasn’t theatrical. She did not hang from the ceiling
or squirm on the floor. She just lay there, in an unceremonious heap, in a pool of blood from which footprints led back toward the door, turning back upon themselves before reaching it as the murderer decided that perhaps he didn’t want to drag her life stuff out into the day after all, and wiped them instead on the mat of her back.

  One wonders, I heard him saying as I closed the door, searching my pockets for a phone that was not there. The tick-tocking I thought I’d heard earlier was suddenly all too audible. One wonders who needs the windows into madness.

  ***

  I’d thought the decision made as I sat on the edge of the bed staring at my cell phone, which I’d been without all day, either forgetfully or intentionally, who knew. I’d successfully navigated the beach back to civilization. It had been rugged for a while, but I’d been so preoccupied with my thoughts, I’d barely been aware of the difficulty of negotiating the rocky outcroppings until they had given over to the band of sand that rimmed the cove. The final decision had come somewhere along that curving stretch, before I hit the congestion of browned and reddened bodies.

  As I looked at the number of missed calls—from my house, from Felicia’s cell, from some other, unknown location—spilling all to Investigator Pinto was the farthest thing from my mind. Why hadn’t she sent a text? Why—

  The phone rang in my hand.

  A pitch-black foreboding descended as I raised it to my ear.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, dying in advance.

  “She’s killed them, Barry! With a coat hanger. All three of them. The blood, oh Jesus, the blood . . . it was horrible. You have to come home. She’s in the hospital, restrained like a wild animal. Oh God, they are never ever going to let her out again, not after what she’s done, what she’s become...”