Dell stood before him like a mirror, looking surprised. Anthony didn’t know if it hadn’t heard the little bell over the door or if the damned thing just hadn’t rung. He strode purposefully up to the counter as his duplicate turned around from stacking windshield wipers on a shelf.
“Excuse me; I, uh—”
He answered Dell’s fumbled words by rushing in and throwing a punch to the clockwork’s face. He thought he heard something crack as the changeling reeled from the blow. Not feeling a thing, Anthony vaulted the counter.
Anthony had been in plenty of fights in his life with both fists and a sword. Dragons, witches, pirates, and knights had tried to best him; tried to kill him. Goblins, ghosts, naiads, and werewolves had threatened him. Through cunning, skill, and strength, he’d beat them all.
Dell tried to catch its balance.
Anthony didn’t let him.
He pummeled the duplicate over and over, smashing his fists into the other-Anthony’s face. He didn’t speak; his rage spoke for him. With each blow he felt himself become surer that his enemy—his mirror image—was breaking. But blow after blow landed and nothing shattered.
No gears popped loose; no springs un-sprung.
Dell just slumped to the floor, tears running down his face mingling with red blood.
Anthony saw a flash of bone and realized the crack he’d heard earlier had come from his own fist.
He didn’t care.
He kept punching Dell, waiting for that faux face to fracture, revealing the gears inside.
But it never did, but he could hear them: the clockwork whirring and clicking.
Soon he was panting, standing over the slumped wreck of his clone. Dell didn’t move. Eyes closed, blood was smeared over the doppelgänger’s face, shoulders, chest, and head. Anthony, at some point, had started crying. The broken being before him didn’t look much like him anymore. It had blond hair unlike Anthony’s brown mop and sharp features at variance with Anthony’s round face. He wasn’t breathing. As Anthony watched, nothing changed except his perception. Horror dawned on him as he realized his mistake. It was impossible but he couldn‘t deny the evidence of his own eyes. Somehow, it was Wiste’s human shape.
He’d killed Wiste.
The sound of gears grew steadily. Looking for their source, he caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass windows. Anthony’s face was cracked and peeling. It looked dusty and old. Beneath it, fine, ivory cogs clicked among brass and bronze fittings encased in a ceramic-white façade. A piece of his cheek fell away.
Anthony screamed.
The sound came from so deep in his chest that even after he awoke, he was still screaming.
He’d not had a deep, soul-wrenching night terror since he was seven; not since before he first went to NeverEarth. He realized what the dream was telling him.
The changeling had to go.
He didn’t wait for anyone else to wake up. He stopped in the kitchen to leave his mother a note saying he had to borrow her car to run some early errands. Silent as a cat, he slipped out.
He got into the car and began the long drive to Hampshire. All through the commute, he kept thinking about the dream. A part of him thought he was overreacting, but was he really? He couldn’t ignore the danger. What if his parents found out? What some old friends went to Hampshire and ran into Dell? What if the world discovered his trips to NeverEarth?
If NeverEarth became public knowledge—unforgettable in everyone’s minds—it would be final nail in the coffin of his uniqueness. He would be plunged into international attention. It had been hard enough to come out of the closet; how hard would it be to the sole representative of another world?
The changeling had to be stopped.
When he arrived, the sun had risen. He drove past the hardware store, seeing it still dark with a “Closed” sign in the window. He’d wait.
He pulled down the block and parked in one of the diagonal spaces lining the street. He turned off the engine and sat alert, heart racing. Sooner than he expected, he saw his quarry. His blood ran cold. Across the street, through the windows of a small family restaurant, the changeling was sitting with Wiste.
The satyr was in his human guise chatting with the changeling and some other guy; someone Anthony didn’t know. The three of them appeared to be talking over plates of eggs and having a pretty serious conversation. Anthony felt his rage double.
Wiste had probably taken a short-cut through NeverEarth. He’d done it before; few could travel the paths of the other world like Wiste. But what did he think he was doing here? Why would he go behind Anthony’s back like this?
Remembering his dream, he reached down and pinched himself. He felt real. Reaching under his chin for where the clockwork keyhole should be, he found nothing. This wasn’t a dream and he wasn’t the imitator. His paranoid concerns met, he returned to the reality before him. That the changeling had gotten him so worked up that he was questioning his very existence was just more evidence of the threat the creature posed.
He bided his time, waiting in the car.
Clouds rolled in and Anthony started to feel tired. His head drooped a couple times and he realized he’d have to get out and do something, soon, lest he fall asleep.
That was when they left the café.
Anthony was thinking about shadowing them when he saw it. His eyes went wide. They were holding hands.
The changeling and the stranger were holding hands.
Anthony knew that walk; knew that closeness. The changeling had a boyfriend.
Rage boiled over as he erupted from the car, shouting, “All right; that’s it! This ends right-fucking-now!”
It was a mockery. The changeling had no fear in doing what it did; it had gone through no tortuous process of coming out to friends, to family, to co-workers. Not biological, not even alive, and here it was mimicking the hardest part of his life as if it were ordinary and every-day. Anthony flashed back to when Jayden, one of his closest friends from elementary school, freaked out when he caught Anthony kissing Grant Stohler after school. He remembered the taunts and jeers from the high school jocks. He remembered his first boyfriend; his last break-up. He remembered his trip to see his parents last Christmas. Coming out was a huge part of who he was. And here, just strolling down an unenlightened little hick town on the far side of the Chicago suburbs, was someone—something—who thought pulling it off was a piece of cake.
The three looked up, Wiste’s human face looked surprised.
“Tony, wait; please—”
Anthony ignored Wiste and pushed past the stranger who’d been holding hands with his duplicate.
“I’m not going back on the shelf!” Dell cried.
Anthony was on the changeling in a second. He grabbed his duplicate around the neck and felt the creature’s flesh yield under the pressure. He slammed it back, hard, against the diner’s brick wall. The changeling cried out. Hands gripped Anthony’s shoulders, trying to pull him away, but he held on. Fighting with all his strength and experience, he slipped his fingers under the creature’s chin and felt for a tiny, hard patch. Its simulated skin parted before his fingertips and, in seconds, he felt it.
The key.
Gripping its base, he pushed it inwards before turning it, sharply, clockwise. There was a click as the mechanism was turned off. The hands of the other two jerked him back. The key came with him.
In a flash, the changeling stopped moving and turned porcelain white. Hairline cracks ran through it. From the cracks, fissures opened up in a grid and slid aside, folding back and down; collapsing inwards. First the face, chest, and hands imploded followed by its lower legs, forearms, and neck. It shrank and folded in on itself, clicking and clattering like a swarm of beetles. In the blink of an eye its body had collapsed to the size of an old, silver dollar. A locket on a silver chain fell to the ground.
“No!”
The young stranger dashed forward to pick up the fallen jewelry. His cry of anguish surprised Anthony but he still kept his cool a
nd slipped the wind-up key into his pocket. He backed away as Wiste released him.
“Oh, heissis, Tony; what have you done?”
The young man spun to face Anthony, fury dancing in his tear-stained eyes. “What did you do to him? Change him back!” He leaped at Anthony, pushing him off the curb and into the street. He landed several blows as Anthony blocked with his arms. He was lean and wiry, probably a year or two younger than he was, with reddish-blond hair. A faint trace of freckles were still visible on his cheeks.
What stung, though, were his tears. He’d seen those tears before: when looking into a mirror after the first boy he’d ever met rejected him, when Reynold told him he’d met someone else, when he’d been lost in the streets of Madrid on vacation with his parents. They were the tears of a world coming apart.
A low blow almost knocked the wind out of him, and Anthony brought up his knee into his assailant’s groin in response. He pushed the other man away. Stronger and with more experience getting into and out of fights, he got free. Wiste, stood to one side looking … hurt.
Key still in his pocket, Anthony turned and ran back to the car.
“Tony; Tony, wait! Please!”
He didn’t wait. He didn’t wait and he didn’t slow down. He could hear feet pounding the pavement behind him. He jumped into the car with seconds to spare. Angry fists beat against the window as he put the car in gear. He squealed the tires as he headed for the highway.