Chapter 11 - The Duplicate
The voice from the hallway was an absolute, flawless acoustic clone of my own. Every inflection, every subtle breath, every hesitation I had used earlier that night was replicated with terrifying precision.
“Mark? Open up. It's freezing out here,” the voice repeated, tapping twice more against the solid wood of the bedroom door with a sharp, knuckle-like rap.
Sarah grabbed my arm so hard her fingernails dug deep into my skin, her eyes wide with unadulterated panic. "Don't answer it. Don't say a single word, Mark. That is not you."
I couldn't speak even if I wanted to; my throat felt paralyzed, constricted by a cold hand of pure dread. I stared at the door, watching the bottom gap where the darkness of the hallway met our frozen floor. Slowly, a thin tendril of absolute blackness—resembling wisps of dark smoke or shifting ink—began to seep underneath the door, slithering across the frost-covered carpet toward our feet.
Buster let out a ferocious bark, lunging forward a few inches before retreating, his golden tail tucked tight as he bared his teeth at the creeping darkness.
"The tape," I choked out, my voice barely a whisper. "Dr. Vance said it uses our shape if we acknowledge it."
I dove toward the reel-to-reel recorder on the floor, my fingers fumbling with the eject button. The magnetic tape popped open, spooling out in a messy loop across the carpet. I grabbed the remaining stack of yellowed paper documents from the steel lockbox, flipping desperately through the handwritten pages to find anything that explained how to reverse the manifestation.
As I turned the pages, a photograph slipped from the back of the stack and fluttered down onto the frozen floorboards.
I picked it up, holding it close to the amber light of the machine. It was a Polaroid photograph taken in this exact master bedroom, dated October 1974. In the picture, Dr. Arlo Vance was standing right where I was kneeling, holding the exact same steel lockbox. But standing directly behind him in the reflection of the bedroom window was a figure with no face—just a smooth, featureless humanoid silhouette wearing a grey t-shirt identical to the one I was wearing right now.
My breath caught in my throat. I looked down at my own grey t-shirt, noticing for the first time that the hem was slightly frayed on the left side—the exact same fray visible on the shirt of the entity in the 1974 photograph.
"Sarah," I whispered, holding up the Polaroid. "Look at the date on this photo. It was taken forty-eight years ago today."
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Before Sarah could look down at the picture, the locked bedroom door slowly dissolved into thin air, leaving behind an open, yawning portal of absolute, starless void.
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