06 – Seeing Double

In a game of spot the difference, Erika figured the best solution involved blurring her eyes—going cross-eyed like she was looking at a Magic Eye illusion—at which point the differences would jump out. In a picture of a room, the potted plant overlaid on top of a stack of books became obvious when they were laid on top of each other.

Not that she was an expert. Erika doubted she had done a spot the difference puzzle since elementary school.

Now, eyes flicking back and forth between two cells within The Castle’s asylum, Erika was starting to wish she had a little more practice.

Anna sat in a cell, clearly unhappy with her face set in a heavy scowl. She sat on a wooden chair with one leg crossed over the other in a more masculine style. Her biker jacket was off, tossed over the back of the chair, showing off muscular arms and tattoos, along with thin seams marring her skin. Fingers drumming against the armrest, she scratched at the side of her head where a thin scar ran up into her hair.

Erika turned her head to the other cell, in which Anna sat, clearly unhappy with her face set in a heavy scowl. One leg crossed over the other with her biker jacket off, she tapped her fingers against the armrest while scratching at the scar on the side of her head.

“This is fucked.”

“This is fucked.”

Both spoke at once, voices coming through an intercom. Neither could see nor hear one another, but Erika could hear both.

“I can’t believe you fucking stabbed me,” one Anna said. “Did you even know what was in that needle? What if you hit my jugular?”

“I can’t believe there’s another one of me,” the other Anna said. “Isn’t it obvious I’m the real one?”

Erika massaged her temples with both hands, rubbing in slow, wide circles. Flicking her gaze to the side, she raised her eyebrows.

The Stalker sat next to her, eyes shimmering, flicking her line of sight back and forth between the two mirrored windows looking into the cells. Whatever weird spatial anomalies the asylum had did not apply to this room, keeping her from breaking down with a headache, but Erika would have expected her to instantly point a finger at the correct one.

“If you ask my power,” The Stalker said, voice slow, “they’re both the real one.”

“They can’t both be real,” Erika snapped.

“You think I don’t know that?” The Stalker turned away, glaring with her eyes still shimmering. “But I don’t see a difference.”

Daniel leaned forward, pressing down on the intercom button for the Anna that Erika syringed. “Anna,” he said, speaking the name clearly and carefully, pausing a moment before carrying on. “You and Rick were at my fifteenth birthday party. What did you bring me as a gift?”

Anna didn’t answer right away. Her expression shifted from open-mouthed surprise to slumped disappointment before settling on her lips firmly pressed together. “I was going to thrash Erika over stabbing me, but even you can’t tell, huh? Fuck…”

“Sorry, really I am,” Erika said, pressing the button. “But I reserve the right to rescind my apology if you’re the fake.”

Anna snorted, shaking her head. “Fifteen, huh?” she said, looking up toward the ceiling, deep in thought. “You’re eighteen this year, right? So that would have been… Oh, right. Leslie was wanting you to take the family business a bit more seriously, so we brought you a genuine cursed music box which Rick and I confirmed would draw spirits toward it… then it proceeded to do nothing. Pretty sure that was because Leslie had recently strung up those little hanging dolls to ward off ghosts, but we weren’t thinking about that at the time. Ended up breaking it trying to get it working.”

Daniel looked to Erika, nodding his head, before switching over to the other Anna’s intercom. “Anna,” he said, trying to maintain the same tone. “You and Rick were at my fifteenth birthday party. What did you bring me as a gift?”

Anna didn’t answer right away, brow furrowing in confusion before she shifted to annoyance. “When I volunteered to undergo a few tests, I didn’t think it would take over an hour. Even you can’t tell? Fuck…”

“Sorry,” Erika said, pressing the button. “I reserve the right to rescind my apology if you’re the fake.”

Anna snorted, shaking her head before casting her gaze up at the ceiling. “Let’s see, that would be about three years ago? Ah. That was the music box, right? Leslie wanted you to believe in ghosts, so we hatched a plan to bring one to you in neat, undeniable evidence. We broke it trying to get it working, which I think was because of those dolls Leslie made to ward off ghosts a few weeks before.”

Erika threw her hands up in frustration, standing to pace around the small interrogation room. Flipping out her phone, she scrolled down her list of supernatural contacts, trying to figure out who among them could help in a situation like this. Normally, her go-to would have been The Stalker.

The Stalker stared between the two Annas, eyes wide and unblinking as she tried to discern some minute difference that would clue them in.

“There’s got to be somebody who can tell truth from lies,” Erika said, flicking the list up and down. “Can The Warrior make some truth circle?”

“They both told the truth,” Daniel said, looking just as frustrated. “Both know things that, logically, one of them shouldn’t.”

“Yes, but one of them lied about remembering.”

“Maybe… but also maybe not.” Daniel hummed, rubbing at a thin scruff under his chin. “What if this is like The Thing?”

Erika glanced back at her contact list. “I don’t think I know a The Thing.”

“No, The Thing.”

“What thing?”

Daniel slapped his face, dragging his hand down in exasperation. “There is a theory that the infected people don’t even know they’re infected until the alien jumps out of their body.”

“Stupid fucking theory,” The Stalker said, almost absently, as she maintained her stare. “They sabotage the blood test and plant evidence. A human wouldn’t do that.”

“What are you people talking about?”

“My point is…” Daniel looked back to the two cells, frowning at them. “What if both Annas genuinely think they’re the real one?”

Erika pressed her lips together, staring back and forth between the increasingly impatient identical twins. Neither had done anything out of character thus far. The one Erika stabbed still felt more suspicious, just because it seemed like a bad idea to try to fight The Castle inside the asylum, but at the same time, Anna had just been attacked and likely felt fighting her way out was her only option.

The other Anna hadn’t really had an opportunity to make such mistakes, but she hadn’t been thrown into a stressful situation like that either.

The door slid open with a gravelly grind. The Doctor lumbered in, nose pressed up against a long, continuous ream of paper with thin perforated strips of holes on the sides. Erika hurried over to him, hoping he had something sensible to say.

“Blood test returned identical,” he said in a low, slow voice, making Erika sigh. “I recognize my handiwork in both. The Mind reports no significant anomalies in their surface thoughts; their thoughts make sense for the differences in their similar situations.”

“He can’t dive deeper?”

“Not outside members of The Castle.”

Erika clicked her tongue in annoyance. “That whole oh, we know everyone at this mind table is who they say they are was just a lie, huh?”

“An assumption,” The Doctor corrected. “We hadn’t acquired a subject to fully test at the time.”

“So give them a temporary membership card,” The Stalker grunted, not even taking her eyes off the puzzle to acknowledge the newcomer.

“Temporary isn’t an option,” The Doctor said, giving her a hard look behind his pinch-nose glasses. “What is an option is a more invasive examination, but The Director has elected to contact The Fixer based on The Maid’s report that they have some knowledge or awareness of these beings.”

Erika let out a long, slow breath. Although she had quizzed The Fixer over the other portal, nothing they said gave her the impression that they would be able to identify a clone. Then again, she wouldn’t be surprised to find that they were hiding more information from her. At this point, Erika was fairly confident that The Fixer could not help themselves; it was just their inhuman nature to be as unhelpful as possible.

“If breaking a chain weakens The Mummy’s prison, and I did not break a chain, how did one of those things get here?” Erika asked, trying to see this from some other angle. “Could this be an entirely unrelated incident?”

“Per The Maid’s report,” The Doctor said, “the exploratory group fled an active portal, trusting ‘The Guardian’ to destroy it. One of the creatures was nearby at the time. Aside from that, I am curious as to why the creatures cannot enter our world when a cultist opens the portal.”

Erika frowned at that, considering. The maggots had been sealed inside their ziggurat until she broke the chain. However, the birds had not been similarly contained, at least not in any way Erika had seen. She didn’t know much about this new realm, but it sounded like the copy-cats were running loose in some snowfield.

Daniel nudged Erika, raising his eyebrows in a patronizing sort of disbelief. “You really think there are two separate cloning incidents going on at the same time? That’s too much of a coincidence.”

Erika snorted. “Haven’t you been paying attention? There are at least two, maybe more.” She waved a hand at The Doctor. “They admitted The Mind is a clone of The Director, and The Prescient was worried about other clones escaping when we kidnapped him.”

“Huh…” Daniel, along with Erika, slowly looked over to The Doctor.

He didn’t react, not even an errant twitch of his large mouth. “While my handiwork is present in both subjects, neither is one of ours.”

His phrasing made Erika’s temple twitch. “Do you have clones of Anna in your basement?”

“Not in the basement, no.”

“Do you have clones of Anna anywhere?” Erika stressed.

“No,” he answered, not hesitating, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. “If you’ll excuse me.” Shoving the ream of paper under his arm, The Doctor turned and lumbered right back out of the room.

A long beat of silence passed. Erika and Daniel stared at the door, and The Stalker stared at the Annas.

“Wait,” Daniel said, blinking heavily. “Does he have clones of Anna?”

“Stalker~” Erika cooed, sliding up to her girlfriend. “Think you can get The Warrior to make a truth detector? It would be the best one-month anniversary present.”

The Stalker finally broke her staring contest with the one-way mirrored glass and turned her shimmering eyes to Erika. “You’re going to make me think you’ve been replaced.”

Erika gave her a light swat on the back of the head, sliding off The Stalker and into her seat as she did so. Elbows on the table, frustration on her face, she glared through the windows. “What do you think they’d do if we put them in the same room as each other?”

“They’d fight.”

“They’d fuck.”

Daniel and The Stalker both looked at each other like the other was an idiot.

“Never mind,” Erika muttered, perking up as the door ground open once again.

A blur zipped into the room, crashing into Erika. For the briefest of moments, Erika thought The Gadget had his arms wrapped around her in a hug. “I feel like it’s been so long since I saw you!”

“Carter?” Erika’s mind screeched to a halt, then whirred up; her first thought was that this was an impostor, another mimic come to taunt her. She couldn’t quite bring herself to break out of the hug. “What—”

Just before she could run a hand through his hair, he zipped away, now stopped in front of The Stalker. He stared, hands stiff at his side, as The Stalker stared back.

The Stalker’s teeth started to grind, and her fingers twitched like she wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. Erika watched, ready to intervene. She doubted she would have to do something; The Stalker had been good about following most of Erika’s rules.

“Got a problem, kid?” The Stalker finally snapped.

“Thank you for taking care of Erika.”

The frustration at being stared at vanished from The Stalker’s features, replaced with confusion and… a little embarrassment. It was hard to tell, exactly, as Erika wasn’t used to seeing that expression on her face.

“Uh… sure,” The Stalker said, glancing aside. She shot Erika a look, getting a shrug in return.

“You too,” Carter added to Daniel, making Daniel’s ears tinge red, before he finally turned to the one-way glass. He looked back and forth between the two Annas, grinning wildly. “Beth is going to be sooo envious.”

“Why are you here?” Erika asked, suspicion still worming its way around the back of her mind.

“My fault,” Leah said, stepping through the open door, accompanied by The Butler. “Given the situation, I didn’t want to leave him alone.”

A quip about how it was okay for her to drag Carter to dangerous places died on Erika’s tongue as she realized the false equivalence between taking him to a known ally and the stomach of a dead god. Instead, she simply nodded, deciding to not start a fight for once.

Leah gave her a half-smile before handing control over to The Fixer. They turned to the mirrored glass with a frown.

Erika watched them work, their eyes swapping back and forth just like The Stalker except without the shine. “Do you have some way of differentiating them?” Erika asked, following their gaze back and forth. “They look the same even to The Stalker’s power, The Doctor gave them a medical exam, we even quizzed them a bit. No dice.”

“Shortly after I began, I was in Denmark, a little known village that I don’t believe still exists. It was beset by changelings—children stolen in the night and replaced by identical copies. Paranoia gripped the townsfolk, most people couldn’t tell if their own child was still theirs, and any minor inconsistency with their perceived character wound up with them banished to the forest.”

The Fixer paused, walking closer to the Anna that Erika stabbed, almost touching the glass. “Long story short, the local priest believed he was saving the children by securing them away where the cruel realities of the world could never touch them.” Glancing back over their shoulder, they offered Erika a sad smile on Leah’s face. “Given what we know about The Mummy now, I wonder if they were slowly absorbed—assimilated—into its being.”

“Great story,” The Stalker grunted. “Didn’t answer the question though.”

“Truthfully, I’ve never seen one without the original having been spirited away,” The Fixer said, returning to the glass. “I know how they work, however… assuming they’re the same creatures. They start out somewhat ephemeral, more of an idea than a person, but as they latch on to one specific individual, they start to solidify, becoming functionally identical to their target. They read minds of everyone around them, figuring out how they’re expected to act; none of your questions could have been answered wrong.”

Erika frowned, narrowing her eyes at the Anna she had stabbed with the syringe. The Mind pointed out that Anna answered with something that Erika also knew. Was that suspicious? Erika couldn’t decide; as she pointed out, saying some random thing that literally only Anna knew meant that Erika couldn’t verify it.

“So… how does knowing this help us?”

“Simple,” The Fixer said, tapping the side of their head. “Don’t have a mind that can be read.” They pressed down on the intercom button for both Annas, leaning toward the microphone. “Anna, this is The Fixer speaking. We first met on Halloween night after Erika saved me from the ██████ of Maggots. You performed a little surgery on me, fixing me up enough that I wasn’t going to drop dead. Do you recall what you were wearing that night?”

Erika blinked, then blinked again. There were… so many things wrong with this plan that Erika didn’t even know where to begin. If the impostor could read minds, then it could read Erika’s mind and realize that The Fixer had not met Anna on Halloween, but a few weeks before, and while they had been saved from the realm of the ██████ of Maggots, The Fixer had been chained up beneath the ziggurat, not anywhere near the maggots themselves.

Besides all that, the real Anna was sitting next door. Couldn’t the fake just read her memories and know everything the real Anna was supposed to know?

“But—” Erika started, only to get cut off by a single index finger from The Fixer. They didn’t even look away from the glass, staring at the two Annas.

“So…”

“So…”

Both Annas spoke at almost the exact same instant.

““First of all,”” they said in unison, ““that’s a creepy question.””

“Everything about this is creepy,” Daniel muttered under his breath.

“Second, we didn’t meet on Halloween,” Anna said—the one who Erika had not stabbed.

The other Anna, however, made a face. “Second, you didn’t get injured on Halloween that I know of.”

The Fixer snapped their fingers. “Got ‘em.”

Erika blinked, staring back and forth. Neither said anything wrong to Erika’s ears, both said a true statement, even if it wasn’t the same statement.

Neither Anna reacted to The Fixer’s accusation, the one Erika hadn’t stabbed simply carried on, describing sewing some wounds shut as Erika remembered. Erika didn’t recall all the exact injuries that Leah’s body had, apart from the hook in her eye, but Anna recounted several stitches to various parts of the body.

The other kept on talking nonsense. “I dressed up as Catwoman, 1960s version, to match Rick’s Romero Joker.”

“Piper King had a little Halloween party later that evening,” The Fixer said, grinning. “You weren’t there, but Leah and I were.”

“Really?” Erika asked, looking to Daniel to confirm.

She got a shrug. “They went out later that night; I didn’t go. I didn’t know your parents went.”

“What did they go as?”

“Mom was Batman. Dad went as Alfred, but he didn’t shave his beard, so it was more like he just put on a suit and glasses.”

“Huh.” Erika looked back to the Annas. One still tallied off a series of sutures, the one Erika stabbed wasn’t talking at all. “Huh. But… couldn’t the fake read the real one’s mind?”

“I confirmed with The Butler and The Mind on the way in, but with everything you know about the asylum, do you believe these two rooms are anywhere near each other?”

“I did until you asked,” Erika muttered.

“There is a link between this room and that room, and a link between this room and that room,” The Fixer said, gesturing from the table to the two rooms. They then swept their hand back and forth. “No link between them. Or so The Butler said; truthfully, I’ve got no idea how this place works myself.”

Erika pressed her lips firmly together, glaring back and forth. Both Annas were silent now, neither looking suddenly worried that the jig was up. She felt… cheated somehow. Like it would have been impossible for her to figure this out on her own. If she could do everything on her own, she wouldn’t need allies, but it still felt… gross.

“So there you have it. That is the real Anna. I’m eighty-five percent sure.”

Daniel’s expression, as contemplative as Erika’s, broke. He snapped his head to The Fixer. “That’s not even that sure!”

“We can try a few more tricks, but I will have to do it on my own. Sorry, telling you and having you present will contaminate the whole affair.”

“We’re going to be fucking sure. Zero percent chance of the real Anna being…” Erika trailed off. She hadn’t even thought about what they were going to do with the fake yet. Probably leave it with The Castle and hope it didn’t escape like The Monk had.

Erika’s eyes flicked back and forth, trying to weed out one little tell, just a single twitch on one of their faces that they were afraid of being found out. All she saw was a tired exasperation, ready for the day to be over.

Exasperation, and a heavy bruise on one of the Annas’ necks.

“Oh god. If it really is her…” Erika trailed off, heart sinking. “I’m going to have to apologize for stabbing her with a syringe.”