CHAPTER 32

The blade sliced through tissue and muscle and severed my intestines. I felt an electric shock of pain and then a strange flowing warmth. My doppelg?nger was right in front of me, his breath on my face. He cut through my abdomen with the practiced hand of a butcher. The damage was done in seconds, and then he put his other hand flat on my chest and pushed me away. I stumbled backward. The knife slid out of my body. I clutched at my stomach and felt blood oozing between my fingers. I staggered out of the tunnel into the light, with a wet red stain growing on my shirt. The river slurped along the bank beside me, sounding loud inside my head.

Shock overwhelmed me. With my fingers numb, my own knife clattered uselessly to the sidewalk. I tried to hold the blood in, but I couldn’t. It pulsed out of my body.

Dylan followed me out of the tunnel, wiping the bloody knife on his leather jacket.

“I thought you were different,” he sneered. “When I saw you take out that knife, I really thought you might have the balls to kill him. But no. You had your chance, and you let it slip away.”

I fought down the dizziness in my head and charged at him. He saw me coming. Smoothly, he eased his weight onto his left foot, turned sideways, and lashed out with a jab of his right leg. His foot kicked like a piston into the wound in my stomach, and my brain turned upside down with agony. I stumbled, moaned, then collapsed to my hands and knees. My mouth spat up vomit. Blood dripped from my belly onto the trail, a constellation of cherry-red spatter.

I tried to forget about my panic. My fear. My pain. I needed to function, at least for a while longer. The blood on the ground became a kind of Rorschach test, centering me. I stared at the blood, and then my gaze shifted to the weeds and cracks in the bridge’s retaining wall, and then to the shadows thrown by the light post overhead, and then finally to the long steel blade of my knife. It still lay on the trail where I’d dropped it. The black handle was inches away. My body blocked it from the view of the Dylan standing over me. I could feel him there, like a boxer crowing over the adversary he’d knocked to the ground.

My fingers inched closer to the knife like the legs of a spider. In one jerky motion, I grabbed it and pushed off my knees. I slashed at him with the blade, and my knife landed in flesh, driving four inches deep into his thigh.

He howled with pain and twisted away, ripping the knife handle from my hand. Grimacing, he yanked the knife out of his leg and threw it like a boomerang into the river. I could hear the splash. He lifted his own knife high over his head, and his eyes boiled with fury. I expected him to bury the blade in my neck, cutting through arteries that would erupt in fountains of blood.

Instead, slowly, he brought his arm back down. I was on my knees on the sidewalk, and he limped toward me and slid the sharp edge of the blade under my chin. He pressed hard enough that I could feel the sting. Then he lowered the knife and jabbed it into the fabric of my shirt and tore away one of the sleeves. He backed up and tied the sleeve tightly around his leg. The cloth was crimson in seconds.

With his wound bandaged, he jerked me to my feet. Another shock wave of pain radiated through my body. I had trouble standing. He threw me against the railing at the riverbank and pushed the point of the knife against my rib cage, where my heart was beating wildly. Below me, I could smell the brown sludge of the river.

“Do you want me to end it?” he asked.

“Do whatever you want.”

“Sorry, I won’t make it quick for you. You get to sit here and die slowly, knowing what I’m doing on the other side of the park. Listen carefully. Maybe you’ll be able to hear Karly scream.”

My lip curled into a snarl of rage. I dug my fingernails like claws into his wounded thigh. It felt good to see him suffer, but my victory was short lived. He scored the knife in a bright-red line across my chest and hurled me to the ground. I landed hard on my side as he delivered a vicious kick into my stomach with the toe of his shoe. Fireworks blew up in my head, white hot and blinding. I was barely conscious.

He knelt beside me, and his voice made a sadistic whisper in my ear.

“I’m going to kill all of them, Dylan. Do you want to watch? Sorry, but I don’t think you’ll make it that far. You’ll see it through my eyes, though. We’re connected, you and me. You’ll know what I’m doing. You’ll watch each one of them go. Dylan. Karly. And the little girl, too. I won’t forget her.”

“Don’t.”

It was the only word I could drag from my throat. He just laughed at me.

“It’s too late. You had your chance. Once I’m done, I’ll go back to the Art Institute and start over. I have more worlds to conquer, and you won’t be around to chase me. You failed again, Dylan. I’m stronger than you are. Face it, I always have been.”

He pushed himself to his feet and limped away.

I tried to focus, but my eyes spun in circles and then blinked shut. I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes again, I didn’t see him anymore. Inside the spinning kaleidoscope of my mind, I saw my father instead. I was a boy huddled in the corner of the bedroom, and my mother’s gun was on top of the dresser, and my father was reaching for it, cocking it, aiming it, pulling the trigger.

I should have been able to stop it.

All my life I’d looked back on that moment and wondered why I’d let it happen. I should have been able to stop it!

If only I’d reacted faster. If only I’d seen him going for the gun, if I’d screamed, if I’d warned my mother, if I’d leaped off the floor and run to him, if I’d put myself between him and her. I could have done something. Instead, I sat there and watched my father pick up the gun and shoot my mother in the head. I did nothing.

I let her die.

I let Roscoe die.

I let Karly die.

Losing them was all on me, one failure after another.

Never again. I heard myself shouting somewhere in my head, trying to jolt myself awake. Never again! I wasn’t going to let it happen to anyone else. I’d come here to set myself free, and that was what I had to do.

The blur of my memories faded away. Somehow, I came back to life. I was still in the park. I’d passed out, but I had no idea for how long. The other Dylan was gone. I was alone on the sidewalk in a river of blood, but I was still alive, and that meant I had one more chance. I grabbed the railing on the riverbank and pulled myself up. When I was standing, I tried to swallow down the pain. I pushed a hand against my abdomen to stanch the bleeding, and I staggered up the trail.

Where was he?

I didn’t see him.

The trail crested a hill beside the trees. With each step, I dragged stale air in and out of my chest. Bugs swarmed around me, as if smelling that I was close to collapse. No, it was my blood they wanted. I felt them landing on my fingers, beating their sticky wings, drinking their fill from my wounds. I didn’t have the stamina to swat them away. Let them feed.

Faster, I thought to myself. You have to go faster.

My legs carried me down the dark trail at a pace that was almost a run. I was in a race now, not just between me and my doppelg?nger, but between my mind and my body, to see which one would give up first.

Where was he?

There. I could see him ahead of me now. He limped in and out of the glow of the light posts. He’d slowed; he was losing blood, like me. I dug into my reserves and pushed aside pain, and breath, and blood, and memory, and I stumbled ahead like a marathon runner with the finish line looming at the end of one more long block.

I was nearly there. I had him within reach.

Then, from the middle of the park, I heard something that sent a shudder of terror through my soul.

“Dylan?”

It was a voice from the darkness, calling my name. A voice I knew so well.

Karly.

No, no, no, no, it couldn’t be her, not here, not now. But the Dylan I was chasing heard her, too, and he stopped on the trail. The unmistakable silhouette of my beautiful wife broke from the trees and joined him. She wrapped him up in an embrace and kissed him. It was dark, and she could barely see him, but she showed no fear.

Why should she? He was her husband.

Relief filled her voice. “Dylan, where were you? I was so worried when you didn’t come home. I left Ellie with the neighbors and came out to find you. Sweetheart, I told you not to go through the park.”

I saw him smile. There was nothing but evil in that smile. I heard him say, “I’m sorry, my love.”

Then I saw his hand disappear into his leather jacket for the knife.

He was just like my father, reaching for the gun.