Doppelgänger

  The house of madness!

  Transplanted from her native Sweden to the drawing rooms and gas-lit parlors of Gilded Age New York, Anine Atherton will want for nothing in the lavish row house her rich new husband bought for her. But Anine’s house doesn’t seem to like people. The caretaker hangs himself in the entryway. The maid drops dead her first day on the job. Anine herself is becoming anxious and terrified, and not just because of the ghostly laughter she hears in the middle of the night. Her gentle, charming husband is slowly turning into a domineering brute. And whatever shadowy entity lives in her house, it can read Anine’s mind and use her darkest secrets against her. The last woman to live in the house went insane. Will Anine be next in line?

  Doppelgänger

  Sean Munger

  Dedication

  To all of my friends in Scandinavia, through the years. Takk!

  Chapter One

  Doubles

  Sweden, 1878

  On a brilliant afternoon in late spring, as the sun glinted gold off the cold waters of Lake Vänern, a dead man walked calmly and purposefully into the summer cottage of the Gyldenhorn family in the lakeside resort village of Vänersborg. He wore a new suit of dark brushed wool, a blue necktie and a pale yellow silk waistcoat. His blond hair hung in gentle curls framing his thin face. Ola Bergenhjelm had visited the house many times before, as well as the Gyldenhorn family’s main house in Stockholm.

  For nearly two years now he’d been betrothed to their youngest daughter Anine, now eighteen. A footman answered the door at the summer cottage and Ola asked permission to see his fiancé. He was shown into the front parlor, austerely decorated in watered silk and modest Queen Anne furniture. Anine stood by the fireplace and greeted him with a warm smile.

  “Good afternoon, Ola,” she said pleasantly. “It’s been a while.”

  “Good afternoon, Anine,” he replied. “Yes, it has been.”

  Anine was unaware that anything was out of the ordinary. She’d been expecting this meeting. Ola’s mother had written her, telling her to expect her son to call on the twenty-second of May. Anine had not seen her fiancé in nearly five months. He’d spent the winter at Lund University in Scania, finishing his endless studies on naturalism and the scientific classification of animals. In that time he had managed only two letters to her, most of which were filled—as was his conversation—with discussions of walking fish and the theories of Darwin. Please, let there be something different on his mind today, Anine thought as she walked around the side of the sofa and motioned to the silver tray on the table in front of it. “Tea?”

  She was surprised when Ola replied, “No. I’m afraid I can’t stay. You see, something has happened.”

  She had already bent down toward the teapot on the tray. Looking up at Ola, she noticed for the first time that there was something different about him. Something about his eyes looked unusual; they looked curiously blank, but it was not a difference she could have explained in terms intelligible to anyone else.

  Something has happened? What does that mean?

  “You can’t stay?” she said. “I don’t understand. Why can’t you stay?”

  Ola moved several steps forward. There was a deeply serious look on his face, and it was this more than anything else that suddenly caused Anine’s pulse to quicken and a flutter of nervous butterflies to take flight in her gut. Something’s wrong, she thought. Seriously wrong. Her hands began shaking.

  “I love you, Anine,” said Ola. “I never really told you that before, but I do. I’m not good at expressing feelings. I never have been. I hope that this…well, that it shows you what you meant to me, even if I never said it.”

  Anine noticed that she could see the individual hardwood planks and the baseboard through Ola’s feet and ankles. His lower body was becoming semi-transparent.

  A wave of powerful feeling flooded through her. It was part adrenaline, part terror and part guilt, and it clouded her vision and began to drain away the strength in her knees. “What’s happening?” she said, in a gasping half-whisper.

  The transparency had moved rapidly up Ola’s legs and into his torso. Even his head was becoming hazy. The only part of him that seemed solid were his hands, eerily attached to arms that had almost completely dissolved. Yet the gold watch chain on his waistcoat still gleamed brightly in the sunlight coming through the parlor windows.

  “Goodbye, Anine.” Ola’s expression now utterly blank. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. You will find another. Be happy in your life.”

  “Ola!” she cried.

  The watch chain was the last part of him that was visible. But a moment later it too was gone, and Anine found herself standing in an empty room.

  At the moment her head filled with a strange hazy-white cloud her knees gave out. She crashed to the floor, landing in a pile of muslin skirts and lace that broke her fall, but the edge of her skirt had caught the silver tea tray and dumped its shattering contents onto the floor. Gasping for breath—it felt suddenly like her corset was crushing the life out of her—she managed to scream, but the sound was drowned out by the sudden commotion coming from outside. It was the shrieking of the stable boy, running like lightning from the direction of the path leading up to the house.

  “Mr. Gyldenhorn! Ingmar! Anybody! Come quick! There’s been an accident!”

  For the past eight minutes Ola Bergenhjelm had been lying dead on the gravel road bounding Lake Vänern, just out of sight from the house. For reasons unknown the horse pulling the phaeton he’d been driving had bolted suddenly, lurching violently to the side and shattering one of the carriage wheels. As Ola was flung from the phaeton a jagged piece of the wooden axle flew up and impaled him through the throat. He died almost instantly, but the blood continued to drain from his body in a crimson rivulet through the underbrush to the edge of the water. The coroner remarked it was the most bizarre accident he had ever seen. Ola was twenty-three.

  He was buried in the Bergenhjelm family plot in the Norra Begravningsplatsen graveyard, in the shadow of the old Solna Church. Anine was unable to attend the funeral. She remained in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the summer cottage, too stunned and horrified by what she had seen even to leave her room.

  New York City

  “You’re sure you’ll be all right, Mother?”

  The woman smiled at her son as she stood in the entryway, hands clasped together and pressed against her black skirt. I must reassure him, she thought. But I really am all right. I just need to be alone for a while. “I’ll be fine,” she replied. “You needn’t worry about me. Go to your wife and your girls. They need you.”

  Percy Quain hesitated for a moment, his mouth a terse line under his bushy mustache. It was still hard for her to imagine her son like this, a man, an adult with a family of his own. The woman flashed back to the first day she had seen him. He had been four years old, a cherubic, joy-filled child, and when he twined his arms around her neck for the first time and she kissed him she felt a fulfillment that had never again been equaled at any other time in her life. The fact that she hadn’t given birth to him hardly mattered. Percy and his joy, his music, the vivacity of his life had given animation to hers, and that was what was important to remember, especially now that Phin was gone.

  “Well, send me a note if you need anything,” he said. “Anything at all. I still wish you’d let me stay here and look after you.”

  “Percy, I don’t need looking after. I’ll be perfectly fine. Come visit in a few days.”

  He nodded. A moment later Percy put on his hat, paused at the doorway, and then opened the door. The woman saw the bustle of West 38th Street through the doorway for only a few moments. Her son s
tepped out into the sunlight, waved at a carriage whose horse was clopping slowly past, and then she closed the door and sealed herself into the silence of the house.

  She remained at the door, her hand on the heavy crystal knob. She looked into the entryway. Right now it seemed as big as the nave of a cathedral. The whole house was arranged around this space, dominated by the huge carpeted staircase that ascended to the railing-lined hallways, lorded over by the colossal crystal chandelier that Phin had ordered from Paris just before the house was finished. The woman remembered the workmen installing it. They were tiny ants at the tops of ladders, wrestling and wrangling giant ropes and squeaky pulleys; but mostly she remembered when the servants had lit the gas jets in it for the first time and it glowed like the crystalline crown of a giant unseen angel, spreading holy light everywhere. The chandelier was dark right now—it was the middle of the day and the velvet drapes on the entryway windows were pulled back—but the woman was smiling at it, seeing in her mind the gaslight glimmering off its innumerable crystal teardrops.

  “There was the day the paintings arrived,” she said aloud to the empty entryway. “Oh, I remember them! Giant crates filled with straw—the J.M.W. Turner we hung in the boudoir, and that lovely mythological scene by Picot that was in the parlor…” She reveled in a pleasant thought. “I must go and see the Picot! Yes, Phin, let us look at the Picot…I missed it so much while we were gone…”

  Soon she was standing in the front parlor, staring at the wall. The painting by Picot was no longer there. It had been removed a year ago, sold like most of the other art treasures with which Phinneas Quain had stocked the house over the course of twenty years. The lion’s share of the furniture was gone now too, sold to pay the monstrous debts that Percy had discovered after his father’s death, but the woman still saw everything. In reality she was staring at nothing more than a darker-colored patch of watered silk wallpaper where the giant painting by Picot had once hung, but she could still see it: the cavorting cherub, the figure of nude Venus reposing on a marble bier, tastefully covered in velvet whose red hue in the painting was almost redder than anything she had ever seen in real life. She saw the furniture too: the Empire-style settee, the rosewood tables, the giant Grecian pots exploding with ferns and papyrus plants. She smiled to remember it all.

  “My house,” she whispered, smiling at the wall. “My beautiful house.”

  She was now thinking of the ball that she and Phinneas had given, back in April 1865, on the occasion of the end of the war. The house had been so alive with laughter and gaiety then—candles and the wicks of gas lamps glowing softly behind frosted glass, an ice sculpture on the dining-room table melting into a silver tray of floating flowers, the musicians playing upbeat waltzes—and the people who had for four long years been afraid to smile were now relieved of their terrible burdens. The woman remembered that she’d bought a new dress for the occasion. It was a lovely gown with a red and black floral design and a broad crinoline skirt, the kind of thing that would have been scandalous to wear during the austere war years, but times were different now; there was peace and the Union was restored. She’d invited everybody who was anybody in New York, and it didn’t matter whether they were Astors, Nortons, Kirklows, Minthorns, Schermerhorns or Hanlyns. They all came, or at least she thought they’d all come.

  After a lavish dinner the guests gathered in the parlor—this very room!—to listen to Percy, only twelve but already a virtuoso, play the harpsichord that Phinneas had imported from Vienna. He played Bach, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It was like the voices of angels. Now that was a party! Those were the things she liked to remember.

  My beautiful house, now empty. Her smile faded and her heart grew heavy. Phin is dead and Percy moved away. And there’s almost nothing left of our beautiful things. She now saw the blank wall. The absence of the painting was jarring and painful. Turning, she left the parlor, the black skirt of her widow’s gown rustling softly against her legs.

  “Happiness,” she said, her voice echoing on the stairs as she climbed them, past the silent crystal monolith of the chandelier. “There is still happiness here. There must be. There must be.”

  A few minutes later she found herself standing in an empty room with a dusty hardwood floor. The gas light fixture on the ceiling was covered in a bag. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows.

  “This was Percy’s room,” she said aloud. She pointed. “There was a harpsichord there. Small at first, but we bought him a bigger one when he outgrew it. He had a trumpet too, a little silver trumpet. It came from Germany. When he was five years old he blew it all the time. We heard the trumpet more often than his voice. Phin and I grew so tired of it.” She laughed. “So you see, Mrs. Winters, this house is just full of memories. I know that you…”

  Who am I talking to?

  The woman looked to her right and to her left. There was no one there. Mrs. Winters, she suddenly remembered, was a doll—a doll she had owned when she was a child. She had often talked to it when she was young, but she hadn’t thought of Mrs. Winters in years.

  Shamed suddenly, although there was no one around to see her, the woman quietly withdrew from the old empty bedroom. In the hallway outside the door the silence of the house seemed to press in upon her like a great weight.

  She was now on the third floor. She looked over the railing down the great staircase and its gleaming mahogany balustrades, and she thought she could hear something coming from downstairs. It seemed to drift to her ears, distantly at first, like spectral music warbling up from the bottom of a haunted well. Heart in her throat, she stood still, clutching the railing until she began to recognize it: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

  “Is someone there?”

  Slowly she descended, first one flight, then another. Her shoes made no sound against the thick wool carpet. The music grew louder. And the house was growing darker somehow. The chandelier was lit now, spreading its angelic light; the red velvet curtains on the entryway windows were drawn as if it was night. Wasn’t it just afternoon?

  At the landing on the second story the woman stopped. The music was coming from the front parlor, the one with the potted papyrus plants and the mythological painting by Picot. There were other sounds coming from the room too—a soft trilling, a cooing that resembled pigeons, but when mixed with a rising chorus of clinking porcelain cups and crystal glasses became the sound of a joyous gathering. The woman’s heart suddenly leaped. Why, it’s a party! And everyone is here, I bet—the Astors and the Nortons and the Kirklows and the Schermerhorns—and Percy is playing his harpsichord…

  She descended the stairs almost to the ground level. The music and the sound of the party filled her like the breath of life. She wanted only to go into that parlor and live again, to make the rounds of her guests, to fawn over paintings and furniture and Percy’s magnificent music, but something stopped her. A figure had emerged from the doorway of the parlor and was standing there staring at her. Motionless, imperious, the figure’s eyes met the woman’s, and both suddenly froze.

  The person standing in the entryway was a woman in her mid-thirties. She wore a magnificent ball gown, red and black, low-cut with a bell-shaped skirt fitted over an enormous crinoline cage. She wore pearl earrings and the fingers of her tiny white hands flashed with rings. She carried a Japanese fan, half-folded, and stared disapprovingly at the woman on the stairs, as if she was an intruder—which in fact she was.

  Except for the wrinkles and crow’s feet that had developed in the intervening years, the faces of the two women—the one in the entryway and the one on the stairs—were identical.

  They looked at each other for several seconds, saying nothing, as if it was rude for each to acknowledge the other’s presence. After the long moment was over the woman in the red and black ball gown spread open her fan with a flick of her wrist, turned and went back into the parlor, into the continuum of gaslight and harpsichord mus
ic and the trill of pleasant conversation, and gave not a thought to what she had just seen.

  Vänersborg

  The knock came gently on the door of Anine’s bedroom one afternoon in late July, two months after Ola Bergenhjelm’s death, and was followed by the soft voice of her mother Solveig. “Anine, Mr. Atherton has come to call on you. He’s downstairs in the parlor. Will you come and see him?”

  No. Not Julian—not so soon. This was the moment Anine dreaded. She had no illusions that Julian Atherton, the curious and handsome young American who’d come to call on her before, wouldn’t have heard of Ola’s death. She wanted to write to him, but knew it was far from proper. She had no idea what her future prospects were, if indeed she had any at all, but it would not do to have them ruined by any scurrilous gossip that might be started in motion by contact between them so soon after her fiancé’s demise. Yet she knew he would appear eventually. She’d secretly wanted it.

  Anine stood up from the chair where she’d been sitting, reading the Bible and staring out the window at the summer light painting the waters of Lake Vänern. “All right,” she replied. “I’ll be down.” She smoothed out her black dress, felt to make sure that her corset was appropriately tight and that her bosom wasn’t bulging vulgarly from its top, and turned toward the door. What am I going to tell him? she asked herself. She answered almost immediately: I’m going to tell him thank you for the sympathy call, but there can be no question of any contact between us. Our relationship has been completely innocent and I don’t want to give anyone a reason to doubt that.

  She still shuddered every time she entered the parlor. She’d been able to face the room only a few times since the day of Ola Bergenhjelm’s death. Since that day she doubted she’d really seen Ola’s apparition there, and she told herself repeatedly she could not have. Certainly she spoke of it to no one. Ingmar, the footman, had answered the door that day and shown Ola into the parlor, but he’d left the employ of the Gyldenhorn family six weeks ago, and no one else had seen Ola in the house except Anine.