The Mirror Man, стр. 76

“Stand up!” he shouted, and punctuated the command with his boot in the clone’s shoulder. “Stand up and fight! You used to fight! What the hell happened to you?”

He kicked him again and then a third time until the clone struggled to get his hands underneath him and push himself up to a sitting position. He sat there for a moment, dazed, and then began to scoot away backward. Jeremiah kicked him again in the side and the clone grunted and fell back down in a heap, his face buried in his arms.

“Stop sniveling!” Jeremiah shouted. “Do something! Why the hell do you just lie there and take it? You let the whole goddamn world trample on you—kick the shit out of you—until there’s nothing left! Look at me! Hit me! Fight back!”

The clone kept his face buried and Jeremiah heard muffled sounds as though he were actually sobbing on the floor in front of him.

“Look at me!” Jeremiah commanded again. The clone turned his head slowly and looked up at him, red-faced and wheezing, trying wordlessly to beg for his life, attempting to make sense of what he was seeing. But there was no making sense of this.

“I don’t know who you are,” the clone moaned. “I don’t know who you are.”

Jeremiah knelt down on one knee, the knife now at his side, and looked him hard in the eye.

“You know,” he told him. “You know exactly who I am. You just won’t see it. You’ll never see it because you’re too afraid to really look at anything. You’re too weak. Or maybe you’re just crazy. Am I really here, Jeremiah? Or have you completely lost your mind? Maybe they’ll put you away, just like Uncle Charlie!”

The clone paused and Jeremiah knew he’d struck a chord. Just like him, his double must have been plagued by the constant, menacing threat of some hereditary lunacy.

“Who are you?” the clone asked again, more frantic now, almost defiant. Hearing it satisfied something deep inside Jeremiah.

“That’s the question that will haunt you for the rest of your life,” he said. “That’s what you’ll ask yourself over and over again, every night as you lie there in the dark and try to wrap your feeble little mind around this moment. This moment! Right here! This is the moment that will define you—take over the rest of your life. Is this real? Did it really happen? Until all that’s left is that question!”

The clone just looked up at him, his expression completely blank and vacant, which only served to push Jeremiah on.

“But this isn’t the question that matters. This is meaningless. This is nothing! You need to pay attention to the right things—the questions that actually mean something. Did you read my note?” Jeremiah barked. “About Diana? Did you do what I said? Did you try to protect her? She’s dead because you didn’t pay attention! She’s dead because you’re too arrogant to believe anything that doesn’t fit in your stupid little box of a mind. That actually fucking means something!”

The clone just stared up at him stupefied, his expression tortured. Something in his face made Jeremiah certain he had read the note. Jeremiah snickered and shifted as if to leave, convinced he wouldn’t get through to him, couldn’t make him understand. How could he see if he wouldn’t open his eyes? But before he even stood up, something made him stop. He needed to do something, he decided, leave him with something to think about, something real and unforgettable to make him understand. He needed something to make him believe. Jeremiah shifted his weight again and brought one knee hard down onto the clone’s wrist, pinning his left hand flat against the garage floor. Without pausing, without a flicker of consideration, he raised the knife high above his head, machete-like, and brought the full force of it down onto the clone’s index finger—cutting through skin and flesh and halfway into the bone. The scream was high-pitched and prolonged and the clone’s whole body writhed and then buckled as the color drained from his face. From somewhere inside, Jeremiah could hear Louie barking frantically, scratching at the door. Jeremiah had to hack three more times, using the blade as an ax, before the finger was fully off the hand. Then he picked it up and put the warm, slippery thing into his pocket.

He stood up, breathing heavily after the exertion, and watched the blood pool onto the floor and pick up little swirls of incandescent dust. The clone pulled his mangled hand in tight to his body, curled up and rocked back and forth in a fetal position. Jeremiah could tell, more from his motion than from any sound he emitted, that he was sobbing. He patted his pocket and felt the warmth of the clone’s blood on his own hand.

“I want you to remember,” he said flatly. His voice sounded quiet and cold, terrible, even to his own ears. He repeated the words, softer this time, almost pleading. “I want you to remember.”

He dropped the bloody knife and left it where it fell, right beside the clone. Have fun explaining that, he thought, knowing any fingerprints or DNA would point irrefutably to self-mutilation. He knew the clone wouldn’t report anything to the authorities. What would he say when they asked for a description of the assailant?

He turned around, almost calmly, and walked through the side door of the garage, up the length of the brick walk and around to the back of the house. He kept walking until he reached the woods and found the familiar path that he had walked so many times with Louie. Once he was deep enough in the trees, he took the cell phone from his back pocket and, with shaky hands, dialed the number Brent had made him memorize.

“Change of plans,” he said when Brent answered on the first ring. “Meet me in the woods behind my street. Park at the top, go in behind the first