Doppelgänger by Sean Munger Page B

why.”
    She’s protecting me . This affected Anine profoundly. Throwing off the covers she said, “You’re a very wise lady, Miss Wicks.”
    Julian returned and they had dinner. Anine, in a maroon silk dress with matching earrings, looked none the worse for wear. He spoke aimlessly of politics over the table, his usual tirade of disparagement against Garfield and the Republicans. He slept in their bedroom that night but made no attempt to touch her. She was grateful of that.
    This time when she heard the woman laughing in the night Anine was prepared. She raised her head off the pillow, staring into the darkness split only with the terrible cymbal-crash of the ticking clock, but she knew she had been awakened by it. Her heart was pounding but her terror was at least constrained by some sense of understanding. It’s not just me , she knew now. Bradbury heard it too. He was insane, but this part of the experience in the house—whatever explained it—must have had some semblance of objective reality.
    When she heard the laughter again she looked over at Julian. He was sleeping on his stomach, dead to the world. It was pointless to awaken him. He wouldn’t believe in the reality of the phenomenon even if he heard it for himself.
    She reached for her dressing gown and shrugged it on in the darkness. Pausing at the door, she pressed her ear to the wood.
    Yes, the spöke was there. She could hear it. Creak…creak… Then the laughter came again. It was so faint as to be barely perceptible, but it was there.
    Anine opened the door. The hallway was very dim. Miss Wicks often left one light in the entryway on, the gas turned very low. It was so faint that the orange glow barely filtered up to the second floor. But at the end of the hallway Anine could see a figure.
    She was astonished at first. Rubbing her eyes, now certain of what she was seeing, the terror suddenly clutched at her. Twenty feet away, at the very end of the hallway near the doors to two of the guest rooms, Anine saw what was unmistakably the bell-shaped figure of the lower half of a woman’s dress. It was red and covered with some dark pattern. A fringe of red lace danced against the floor. The upper body of the woman was shrouded in darkness. As she moved the red-black bell of the dress moved with her, swishing about with the sound of gently rustling fabric. The giggling came again—a soft, polite, airy laugh—and then the shadows swallowed all.
    Instantly Anine wrenched open the bedroom door, darted back inside and closed it behind her. Her breaths were fast and shallow. She could hear the pounding of her pulse in her ears. There was no mistaking it this time. She had seen it. For a split-second, yes; dark, yes; indistinct, yes. But she had seen it.
    She turned. Julian still hadn’t awakened. Gingerly Anine tiptoed back to bed, took off her dressing gown and draped it on the bedpost. She was so terrified of the figure at the end of the hallway that right now even Julian’s presence was comforting. She bundled the covers around her, gathering them up as if they were armor that would deflect the supernatural.
    Well, there’s no use denying it any longer , Anine thought. This house is hemsökt . Haunted.

Chapter Eight
    The Woman
    Anine knew she needed to bring someone else into the circle—if only to preserve her own sanity—but with each day that passed without a note from Rachael she realized her choice of allies was extremely limited. Until she could be seen socially without turning the women of New York even more fiercely against her, Anine knew she could count on no hope from outside the walls of her house. Yet she steadfastly refused to be isolated. The terrifying gibberish in Bradbury’s diary had set off an alarm inside of her. That could happen to me . It was imperative to make sure it did not.
    Two mornings after she’d seen the specter in the hallway Anine waited until