The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  I threw her on the bed, ripping her clothes from their various half-shed states, the tee shirt that had caught up around her bra, which I’d pushed up over the mounds they supported, the shorts hanging open in wings, exposing the silky fabric of her low-cut panties. She moaned as though already on the cusp of release as she tried to help me free her body of its trappings, while at the same time struggling frantically with my own. We never reached liberation from our material binds as she accepted me with the hungry ease we’d known early in the marriage, before physical desire had bowed to the daily demands of rearing twins. I clutched the flesh behind her thigh so tightly as I pushed her leg back against her body that the marks would remain for days, hints of things forbidden, dreamed, visible just under the hem of her shorts. Likewise, she spared my back, my buttocks no mercy as she took what she could of me before it was too late.

  The gasping, sweat-soaked, animal nature of it was in direct contrast to the lovemaking we had perfected to our tastes in those first years, the long stretches of foreplay rooted in giving, in pleasuring the other first and deriving ours from theirs. And yet selfish would be the wrong word to describe the current encounter as the tide toward supreme dependence swelled and swelled on our grunts and cries. In accord with the opposite style of lovemaking, the taking was the giving, and vice versa, so that maybe it was an outpouring after all, an outpouring of thanks for providing the outlet for all the fear and pain and horror and dejection and isolation and abandonment, if only for those few precious moments that preceded the subsidence of the surf. I hardly recognized the gulf left behind as the afterglow, stranger than remembered but no less real, dimmed into sleep, where one could pretend for a while that the emptiness had never existed.

  TWO

  HALF-MAST

  6

  I actually felt calm during the long flight down into South America. For the first time in a while, Kristin’s condition wasn’t constantly at the forefront of my thoughts. Her ‘coming out’, triggered by a vicious nightmare, had been sustained by the decision on the part of her mother and me to refrain at all costs from mentioning anything to do with that nightmare or the whole nightmare in general in our daughter’s presence. Kristin had quietly given herself to participating in this covenant as well, which had made for strangely tranquil skies around the Ocason home for the days that had passed since then. Such that when I asked Felicia if she thought I should still go to Brazil, she said, more adamantly than the words describe: “God yes, Barry. Just don’t bring anything unhealthy back with you.”

  On the one hand she didn’t want to know. In spite of that night’s revelations, if such they were, she was beginning to see a horizon where the madness was overtaken by the sunrise. But also like me, she didn’t fully trust this come around of Kristin’s. Its potential, yes, but there was also the potential for reversion, as evidenced by small things like Kristin’s slight overplaying of interest in a given activity or conversation. A sort of front put forward for either her own psychological benefit or for our practical one. At times her manner suggested she was protecting a secret, which, precisely because that’s what she was doing, was cause itself for careful watch. In any event, Kristin’s case was no different from Kathy’s, in that it demanded—no, required—answers, and Felicia understood as well as I did that a purging could not fully take place while there were unaddressed evoluçãos out there.

  What I would find when I reached Portavora, I could not imagine. The situation had grown far more complex with Kristin’s nightmare-sparked assertions. The image of a catheter, of some X-Files device entering her body was one neither her mother nor I could dismiss. After that night, that long, long night that seemed to never reach dawn, we didn’t talk about it, even in private. Nor did I tell her about my visit with Owens, about his description of Kristin’s state when he returned to the room. But that catheter image was there between us, just like the word babies. Something was going on, something against nature, and if it was too horrible a truth to share, then I would find a way to mitigate it. Nothing was too horrible to rebuild from. I believed that. I hoped that. I dared not dwell there long when my thoughts strayed.

  A sharp elderly lady, American of Brazilian descent, sat next to me on the leg to São Paulo. She didn’t speak much, but when she did, she asked questions. Heartfelt questions I’m sure, but questions about a thing that had become over the past few weeks more uncertain than I’d realized—the future. Do you hope to marry again? Where do you plan to retire? Will your daughter attend college? What sort of man do you see her marrying? The calmness that had accompanied me for so many hours slowly eroded beneath this woman’s forward-looking vision, becoming not the opposite of calm, not agitation, but rather dejection. Dejection so deep, it bordered on deadness. Deadness to possibility. To the sunrise. To meaning. Up until the last, when she was beginning to get sleepy. Then she said words that erased everything before, in keeping with the essence of the message itself.

  “I’m sure I’m not the first to say it,” she said, eyes closed, a smile touching at her mouth, “but when I look back on my life, all I see are the good things, the happy things. It’s as if there never were any negative currents. The whole ride, to this trouble-free, blissful state of mind. It will be like that for you, too, Barry. You’ll see.”

  I held on to her words all the way to my destination.

  ***

  When I stepped off the bus in Portavora, I was still brushing away the threads of the dreams that had kept me company for most of the trip. The last sequence had been one of those disjointed, highly surreal affairs where one dream metamorphosed into another and the central themes got tangled. Kathy and I had been hiking up Mt. Juneau in the summer, chatting about this and that, when a black bear had crossed the trail in front of us, much to my daughter’s delight and alarm. This picture set off some other association and I was suddenly at the state park out along the road to nowhere, again in Kathy’s company, again in pleasant chat. We were walking along the river, salmon flopping in the water or lying dead and dying, half-eaten, along the banks. A bear was poking around, too full to do more than turn the fish over, sniffing at them mournfully. The OB and Dr. Whittler appeared, not seeming to notice us as Mallory picked up one of the half-eaten fish and they started a conversation.

  “This salmon cannot spawn,” she said. “It has no lower half.”

  “Do you need a lower half to spawn?” Dr. Whittler asked.

  “Let’s check,” she said, and took a bite out of the fish’s head. “Hmm, I can’t seem to tell from its taste. Maybe the bear knows . . . ”

  More images had followed, growing progressively stranger until what had begun as a gentle enough detour among sleep’s layers eventually had me shifting continuously on my hard seat, finding the boy and his mother across the way watching me every time a bump in the road, of which there many, caused my eyes to pop open. Then the bus driver was announcing our arrival in Portavora, and everything came apart.

  I’d wanted to inspect the town as we approached, but I suppose it was better to have gotten some sleep after the long flight than to have arrived completely lagging. With the exception of a few cumulative hours in the air, my body hadn’t settled into its rest rhythms until the Rio-Portavora portion of the journey, which unfortunately happened to be the stretch least conducive to that purpose. I was coming around, though, and maybe it was a blessing in disguise, hitting terra firma with my head not too far into what lay before me.

  It was late morning—this by design so I would have most of the day before me—the sky blue and clear, the air warm. Portavora was situated in an inlet whose shoreline was hilly and rocky, with deep green vegetation surrounding its protruding bluffs. The bus station, if it could be called that, was located on a main road running above the beach and its tourist activity. The generous view showed the resort to stretch no further than the small bay would allow, confirming what my research had suggested, that Portavora was one of the area’s quieter destinations. The main town lay bet
ween the shore and the station, its residences spreading out in clusters among the hills. My hotel was down there somewhere, but as I carried only a backpack and had washed up at the airport in Rio, I surrendered to physically locating the shop. The business was on the western outskirts of town, and attached to a house, according to the website’s information. I’d printed out a map, but went inside the station in hopes of getting more details. Not surprisingly, its single window was unmanned. Beside it, though, hung a map of the town, which I compared to my printout before setting out on foot. The costume shop looked to be no more than a mile and a half away, and somehow the idea of taking a taxi to the front door didn’t appeal. I’d considered renting a car at the airport in Rio, but had decided it was more trouble than it was worth.

  My first turn was a short distance down the main road, winding away from the center of town around a hill studded with dwellings. After the next turn, the residences became more scattered, eventually vanishing altogether, leaving me and the road snaking at a steady descent. I saw the house from above through a clearing in the trees before the road hair-pinned back in front of it. As I took it in, a nearly overpowering sense of déjà vu swept over me, advancing the preexisting feeling that things moved according to design. As the sensation trailed slowly along my limbs, leaving a sticky residue to mark its exit path through my extremities, my mind fell in.

  The first thought I had was that the setting was better suited to a vacation home than a native residence. Compared to the standard, the house and its grounds were equally impressive, if a bit worn. The former was a two-story concrete block affair with a red-tile roof and a wide porch to which a brick footpath led. Its modestly-sized grounds were dotted with lemon and orange trees and were encircled by an eight-foot-high wall whose gate served a driveway leading to a carport. The square-ish building that was the costume shop was not actually built on to the house itself, but extended from the outside of the surrounding wall, with a breezeway running between it and the residence. It was accessed by a separate, graveled drive that opened onto a parking area that might’ve held three vehicles on a good day.

  Despite its covetable features, despite it being bathed in sunshine, there was something gloomy about the place. I knew immediately the costume shop was the source, but it took me a moment to process what caused the mood. When it hit me, it hit me with meaning. The windows’ shutters, black, were at half-mast. Though I’d no additional evidence to support such a conclusion, I knew the place was in mourning.

  The veil that haunted the home and its attached business fell like a whisper over me, the beholder, as I stood there for at least another minute before resuming my descent. As I started walking again, I looked through the mesh of black lace upon a world I suddenly felt a stranger in. A world in which lives ran their courses without the interest or involvement, or even the knowledge of others. A pool of strangers, each existing within their own self-realized quantum sphere. I stopped shy of assuming guilt for causing a pebble to fall where it otherwise mightn’t have, but it was doubtlessly true that I had altered multiple lives by an action against a single man. And as surely as my house had known his touch, the house I now approached had known mine.

  As I rounded the bend and the house came partially into view again, a car appeared around the next turn in the road. Its right blinker came on as the driver slowed to turn into the gravel driveway, but he or she paused a moment before doing so. Though their body language, behind the windshield’s glare, was unclear at this distance, I sensed I was the distraction. What was I doing here? Hadn’t I done enough already? Then they pulled into the drive, disappearing behind the wall. I increased my pace, anxious to talk to someone, even a customer, though I did not think the shop was open.

  I strode by the house, leaving the road as I neared the end of the wall, turned the corner, and there she was, standing beside her car looking at me. No one but her, a middle-aged lady, still shapely in her patterned summer skirt, her dark brown hair pulled up in an I-can’t-be-bothered knot, exposing a fine Brazilian neck. She didn’t speak as I approached and neither did I. My mind moved among random thoughts. They must have found out only recently, as I had spoken with the authorities a few days ago and the body still remained unidentified. She seemed too old to be his wife, yet too young to be his mother; was she a sister?

  “Bom dia, ma’am,” I said when there was no space left to do otherwise. It was all I had come with. All I had for her.

  She didn’t waste time on niceties, though there was no malice, nor any other sort of emotion in her voice as she said, in accented though unwanting English, “You’re him, aren’t you?”

  I couldn’t come out with the simple word as I gazed back at her. The natural question formed, but she was there before me.

  “How do I know? You’ve been here before, sir. Oh, not you specifically. But what you are. What you’ve done. You’ve been here before, a time or two, when the masks were involved. I don’t know what his fascination with the masks is. Something metaphorical, I’m sure. But ours is not to know him, is it? We are just samples. Even I, his own sister, just a sample. But come, sir. I’ll let you look at the thing, then you should go. I’ve tailoring to do. I’m just returning from purchasing some fabric as a matter of fact. We’ll be opening back up soon. Funny, I never thought I would enjoy this business. As I get older, though, I grow to appreciate more.”

  Again, the words were not there. So much to say, and yet, what to say?

  “Come,” she urged. “In a few minutes you’ll have what you’ve come for.”

  I followed her along the wall to the rear of her small estate, where we picked up a footpath leading through the woods. I’d neither fear of, nor distrust in the woman, though there was perhaps a trace of awe. At the grace with which she handled me. The luxurious nonchalance with which she uttered things like: You’ve been here before, a time or two, when the masks were involved. The supreme confidence with which she withheld the larger secrets, perhaps such momentous truths as the existential answers themselves.

  Who are we?

  But leaves in the current.

  Where are we going?

  Where evolução takes us.

  What will we find when we get there?

  Do we really want to know?

  But I had only a simple question for her now, before she let me look at the thing. “Ma’am, if I may ask you something?”

  “Please.”

  Would it be that simple? Could I just ask her point blank what the fuck was going on and get a direct answer?

  Somehow this question seemed more important at this particular moment. “When you look back on your life, do you see only the good things? The happy things?”

  She stopped, turning slowly to face me. The shadow on her face was like the shutters on her windows, expressing so much more. She spoke quietly. “Do you want to see it or not? It’s your redemption we are concerned with here, not mine.”

  “My redemption . . . ” The entire spell shattered with those words from her lips. “My redemption?”

  “Shh,” she said, placing a finger on my lips. The pain in her face dissolving. “There is no escaping damnation either way. You support him, you feel the earth trembling beneath your feet. You fight him, the heavens rock with thunder. If there is one thing in which we can take comfort, it is the knowledge that it is not him we serve.”

  —Serve me as your sister serves me—

  “He is only the instrument to its accomplishment.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Come, it’s just up here. Maybe it will shed light, maybe not. In any case, it’s all I have.”

  A bom dia from me to her. This thing from her to me. As we resumed our march and the déjà vu that had never fully released me kicked in again, I suddenly did not want to know. A fiery death would be better than bringing it back with me. I knew this right now with every inch of my being. Whatever the thing was, whatever its nature, it could not be mitigated. It must only be fled from, as far a
s earthly roads could take a man and his beloved daughter, farther than Alaska, farther than the last outpost, all the way to—

  “We’re here.” The words came—again—to my ears.

  We’d come out of the trees and were in a clearing between two rugged bluffs. Scattered intermittently across the impossibly familiar grassy area were flat-surfaced stones, not as might have fallen from the flanking walls, but carefully chosen, carefully placed ones. While of various sizes, each was small enough to lift, with effort, into a wheelbarrow, as evidenced by just that mode of conveyance parked off to the side with additional rocks in its bed.

  “Come,” she said, walking among the markers.

  That is how I thought of them, as markers of some kind, though I wasn’t getting around their purpose strictly by reason. On some deeper, psychic level, I may have registered both function and meaning before I started noticing the dates etched in the stones, but even then I was limited by the strictures of physics, the ingrained understanding of nature and its mechanics. That I walked through a cemetery was becoming clear to me. Who was the cemetery for? What sort of answer, what sort of revelation was this? I sought the secret of only one nameless dead man, not a dozen of them.