The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  “Dianna and I hit it off immediately. We spent the rest of that day and part of the next together. When she learned about my excursion, she remarked that she wished her party was going deeper into the reserve so she could experience more of the biodiversity the Rio Plátano is known for but is lacking a comprehensive record of. I asked her if she could get away for three or four days. The excursion was to last ten, but some attachments to our group were coming back sooner. She checked with her team leader, who to our good fortune—or bad, depending on how you look at it—recognized it as a valuable opportunity and gave his okay with the condition that she record everything she observed. I say ‘bad’ because two days in, Dianna developed a fever and some nasty skin blotches, and it was decided she should get back to town before her condition worsened. I returned with her, and thank God, because she was in pretty bad shape by the time we arrived back in Viegro. The fever turned out to be some sort of vector-borne illness that the locals were familiar with but the rest of us, including her team doctor, had never run across. She was laid up in bed for two days taking treatment, mostly boiled roots and herbs prescribed by the locals.”

  Maya paused to sip her beer. Grimacing, she said. “Warm. I should grab some water.” She started to wave in the direction of the bartender, who was polishing glasses at his station on the far side of the lobby’s lounge area, but Dianna told her she’d get it and to continue on with her story.

  “Grab me one too if you would,” I said.

  As she headed to the bar, Maya picked up where she had left off. “On the afternoon of the second day, while Dianna was sleeping, I went back to visit the twins. They’d told me something while we were conversing in Spanish that had intrigued me. They said their great-grandfather, who had come over to Argentina from Germany near the end of the war and eventually married a Honduran woman, had worked with twins and triplets in Germany. They hadn’t elaborated. In fact they’d changed the subject—I think because of an old lady, presumably a relative, who was in the room the whole time and seemed to disapprove. Well, the old lady wasn’t there when I went back. It was just the boys and me, and not only did they have a story to tell, they produced written documentation to back it up. Not the original document that their great-grandfather, whose name was Heidloff, had penned, but an English-language translation done during the same time period, for some unknown reason. Heidloff’s motivations had gone the way of the original document. Anyway, this record . . . Are you ready, Barry? This record described the work that went on at a remote research facility in the Bavarian Alps.”

  Yes, I thought as the statement settled on me. Future memory concurred. The fact had only needed to be articulated. That didn’t stop the whispers from crawling up my back. While she’d spoken Maya had leaned forward in her seat, elbows on her thighs, supporting her gesticulating hands. She sat back, returning my gaze for a reflective moment before spotting Dianna, who glided across the buffed floor toward us, waters in hand. As Dianna handed her the glass, Maya commented, “Christ, I wish I had a cigarette all of a sudden. Can you imagine that? After two years?”

  “I wish I had a joint,” I said humorlessly. “After ten years.”

  As Dianna delivered my water, my fingers touched hers. Our eyes met for a moment in a communication, an intimacy, whose sole purpose might have been to acknowledge its own existence. Darkness, it said. We are together in darkness. Then she was returning to her seat, asking where we were in the account.

  “Remote research facility,” I said, wondering how I managed it without a tremor in my voice. “One that just happens to be located in the Bavarian Alps.”

  “Present tense?” Maya said. “Are we that in tune with our path?”

  “We’re that in tune with our dreams,” I said, remembering the way the wolf had struggled with the baby in its jaws against the snowy backdrop of trees, wire, and walls.

  “Yes, I’ve dreamed of the place too,” Dianna said. “I didn’t say so while you were telling your story, Barry, but the faces you and your daughter have seen . . . I’ve seen them.”

  “And you?” I asked Maya. “You’ve said very little of your own path.”

  She shrugged. “Apparently I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Triplet meets triplet in a Honduran shack where a document emerges describing a remote Nazi facility used for experiments on multiples. I think not.”

  “Wait till you hear the rest,” Dianna said. “Tell him,” she urged her friend.

  Taking a swallow of her water, Maya proceeded. “The facility was known as Installation Wolf to the elite few among Hitler’s inner circle privy to its existence. According to the document, it was built for the sole purpose of scientific study, and with utmost secrecy in mind. A single narrow and well-hidden road wove its way in through the mountains, and movement to and from the site was kept to a minimum. The compound was completely self-sufficient, generators providing the power and a spring well supplying water. More often than not supplies, and whenever possible, the subjects themselves, were dropped in by air. An officer by the name of Braun ran the routine operations of the site, while one of the Reich’s chief geneticists, a Dr. Weiler, ultimately the final word on all aspects of the operation, oversaw the lab.

  “Here’s where it gets all too compelling. The main area of research involved the telepathic and empathic link between twins. Of particular interest to Herr Doctor was the concept of the ‘Third Twin’, which referred to a case of multiple conception in which the mother’s physiology compensated for what it perceived as a deficiency, in the division of one egg into identical twins, by conceiving a third ‘whole’ child. A third twin differed from an identical triplet in that it was conceived after the fact, and did not split from one of the halves of its siblings’ divided egg, but rather derived from a new one manufactured by the body based on the imprint of the fertilized first egg. Weiler believed that this imprint contained not just the original genetic information, but also the very design of the soul, and that the process he called ‘maternal remote cloning’ had the potential to result in a connection between the Third Twin and its siblings strong enough to bridge the gulf between life and afterlife.”

  She paused for a moment to gauge the effect of her words, but I was so absorbed in their meaning, I hadn’t the ability to react in any sort of physical way.

  “However,” she continued, “in each of the rare documented instances of the underdeveloped ‘late triplet’—science in general had not come to the same conclusions Dr. Weiler had, writing off the abnormally long gestation periods as just that—the child had not survived. The doctor’s primary objective was to see one survive, and no ethical or moral consideration would stand in the way. As with his contemporary, Josef Mengele, the lives of his subjects were expendable, sacrifices to the end goal. The document did not go into specifics on the experiments that went on, but there was the strong suggestion they were on a high order of unpleasant. Actually, Barry, as you were describing what happened to you daughters, I could only think of this ‘Third Twin’ lab. God, I cannot begin to imagine what sort of monster we are we dealing with.”

  It had been there for a second, there in my grasp, all of it, the whole design. But the direct address, the personalizing the material she delivered by using my name, by mentioning my daughters, had jarred me out of the fugue. Unwilling to let the glimmer go that easily, I interrupted Dianna with my hand when she started to speak, reaching across my mindscape in hopes of catching the wind that carried the revelation spinning across the tundra, but it was gone.

  “You okay?” Dianna asked when I’d lowered my hand.

  “Chasing phantoms,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “I was going to say there has to be more to it. The idea that duress breeds Third Twins makes no sense. No, the violence serves another purpose. It may be that the purpose is simply to feed his perverse appetites or to satisfy some aesthetic urge. But I don’t think so. That the methods provide twisted sport, I don’t doubt, but there’s something behind t
he doing itself. I’m sure of it. In any case the violence and the genetics are two different animals.”

  So much answered, yet so much more raised. Where to begin to address all the questions? Wherever that starting point, we’d sleep on the matter first. The bartender was already on his way, bill in hand, when Dianna found it timely to mention that he’d informed her at the bar he’d be closing up soon.

  Something told me as I saw Dianna and Maya off in their taxi before walking back to my room that tomorrow’s train ride wasn’t going to be the scenic introduction to the Bavarian Alps one might have anticipated. Unless one considered the strained aspects of one’s fellow captives as scenery. As I lay in bed, having decided to wait until the morning to check in with Felicia lest the potential turns of the conversation deprive me of more sleep, I needn’t have concerned myself. While the digital alarm clock’s minutes cycled with mechanical disregard, I couldn’t shake the image of Dianna, Maya, and me sharing a compartment in an Edvard Munch painting, horrors untold waiting at the terminus.

  13

  In the darkness of my hotel room, I found myself again in the alternate sentient state, my dream-sense lucid enough this time that I was conscious of the soft tick-tocking in the background, and the foreignness of it, from the very beginning. We were walking to the chapel, side by side, my third daughter and I. This time, instead of breaking off on the animal trail, we remained on the main path, which shone with purpose in the columns of sunlight filtering in through the canopy. The building was just becoming visible ahead when she touched my hand with hers.

  “Father?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “What is my name?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. Something with a ‘K’, I should think. How about Kimberly? Do you like that? We can call you Kim for short.”

  “Yes. I like that. I like Kimberly. But Kathy calls me something different.”

  It struck me within the dream it was strange that we should be talking like this, like we were old friends. Until then I’d not wondered—about that, about the clothes she was wearing, about the fact that she was in the fourteen-year-old body of the girl she would have grown to be. It all seemed normal, natural.

  “What does Kathy call you, Kim?”

  “She calls me Lost One. She says I don’t know whether I want to be on the side of progression or regression. Human beings, she says, are always regressing. Becoming what they were in the past. It’s cyclical, she says. We are always learning more, but we behave like we behaved during the last cycle, so that even when we seem to be progressing out of each cycle, we are really just regressing toward the beginning of a new cycle. She says this time it will be different. Different for those who will embrace what is to come.”

  We were almost to the chapel now. We approached it from the side, and I couldn’t see the door. I wondered if it stood ajar.

  “Does Kathy say she will embrace what is to come?”

  “Yes. But . . . ” She seized my hand suddenly, making me face her. “But I won’t! What they want, it’s unnatural. They say that what we keep regressing to is a sense of identity.”

  “You mean progressing to—”

  “No, re-gressing. They say that just as we seem to be on the right path, we suddenly discover who we think we are. The end of World War II was the end of the last cycle. When the war was over, people remembered who they thought they were. That’s not okay with them. They want a world of people with no identity. That’s not what I want. I never got to have one.”

  She resumed walking, continuing to hold my hand. The chapel was close enough now that I could hear the noises coming from within. Noises of distress, fear. The trail let us into the clearing, and we walked around to the front of the chapel. The door was partially open. The noises had ceased.

  We stood looking at it. I said, “Kim, how do you know so much when you never lived among people?”

  “The dead are not slaves to time as the living are. For us, past, present, and future stream by in the same instant. But they are many streams, overlapping each other. One is much more vivid than the others. And it is awful.”

  “Can it be stopped?”

  “I don’t think so. In the end everyone will become other than what they thought they were. He alone will know what he is. It is his evolution, not ours. He will be like God.”

  The noises again. Whimpers. Restrained squeals. And perhaps coming from only one person, now that I was close enough to taste the imminence of it.

  Still, the dream demanded that the thing be witnessed. As I stepped forward, Kim pulled me back, saying, “I am not sure who I think I am. Not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if Kathy is me, and I am Kathy. Only one of us can be the Third, and that one can only be Kimberly. But what if I am Kathy, luring you, testing you, playing games with you. Or what if it isn’t Kathy who has sided with him. What if it’s me, and I am doing his bidding right now. I am confused sometimes. He has told me so himself. None of us, he says, can know who we really are. Not now that things are in motion.”

  “Did he kill Kathy to make her his slave?”

  “Maybe that’s just what he wants us all to believe.”

  “Us?”

  “Our family. Our blood. The blood knows, he says. The blood reacts. You must not go in the chapel. It’s too terrible.”

  “Then why have you brought me here?”

  “Have I? Has she? No, you initiated the dream. The door is in your mind.”

  “Then it obviously is something that needs to be known. To help me prepare for what lies ahead.”

  “There is no preparation for what lies ahead. The rift has been opened.”

  I removed her hand, stepped forward again, and pushed the door open, the tick-tocking escalating though its source continued to seem external.

  The two of them, sisters, were on the floor, naked. Bruna lay on her back, head to me, belly swollen between her spread legs. Raquel—yes, that was the name the cab driver had used—was on one knee beside her, facing my direction, such that I could see the unique physical trait that easily distinguished her from her identical sister. There was no one else present, only the two triplets, one pregnant, one not. The one who was not was a hermaphrodite, the female organ flaring beneath the erect penis. The tip of the hunting knife she held touched the sensitive area just below the hood on the bottom side of the male organ, as if to keep it at fullest staff while she/he watched with intensity as her/his sister squirmed, whimpered, perspired before her/him.

  As I stepped into the doorway, Raquel’s eyes shifted to me. She relinquished contact with the nerve cluster, letting her organ stand on its own engorgement as she flipped the knife so that she held its blade in her hand, and extended the instrument to me.

  “Will you do it?” she smiled, eyes shining black as onyx as her words set off the first charge of emotion the dream had thus far inspired. “Will you set it all in motion?”

  I stared at her in awe.

  “No,” she said. “That wouldn’t be right, would it?” With those words, she flipped the knife again, grasped the top of her penis with her free hand, and in one efficient stroke sliced the member off at the base. Bringing it up to her face, she coupled its bloody end with her nose and cried like an elephant before casting the strange trunk aside, then turning the knife on the belly before her.

  As red filled my vision, and the tick-tocking my ears, I jerked awake. And none too soon as they had arrived with the drink cart and the German beers and the hint of knowing in their Aryan eyes. I turned to my right, but my fellow passengers were not there. There was only a white void, and someone somewhere intoning, None of us can know who we really are.

  Then the alarm was screaming, and the dreadful day had come.

  ***

  Felicia answered on the first ring, but the ring kept going through my nerves, more a siren.

  “Is Kristin okay?” I said without a hello.

  “‘Okay’ being a r
elative term?”

  “You answered the phone so quickly . . . ”

  “I’m just on edge. I must have been waiting on your call. It’s lonely here. I miss Kristin. I miss . . . ” She let it trail away.

  For a moment her foot was in my lap again, its skin soft in my hands. It felt inappropriate somehow, a violation, revisiting an encounter that could never have happened under ordinary circumstances, but hadn’t she been about to say what I thought she had?