Let me start by just telling you about myself.
My face is unique, not ugly or deformed, just different. People will say I look like my mother, but she has much softer features. My father looks like a stereotypical Italian man, and I have his nose, but that’s about it. Both of them admittedly look young for their age, so I naturally look about 20 in my late 20’s. My brother, on the other hand, looks like he was pulled from a modeling catalogue. So I’m not ugly at all, just… weird.
When people ask for their celebrity doppelganger, they usually get straight answers. The closest I’ve gotten to that is Lady Gaga during the 2010’s, when she was in her craziest phases. My father will happily compare me to Anya Taylor-Joy, Jennifer Lawrence, and even Emma Stone. None of which look like me, or even like each other, frankly.
I have gray-green eyes on an extremely pale face, with olive undertones from the Italian side of the family. My hair color changes depending on how I’m feeling that month. Currently, I’ve been trying to save my hair from bleach damage, so it’s naturally ashen-brown with some hints of old red and black dye from the past year. There are some stray grays; the perks of being almost 30 I guess. My body is unremarkable. I’m about 140 pounds, average chest size, with violin hips.
All of that to say, I don’t stand out in a crowd, but I am just inconsequentially unique.
So why, on the train on my way to work, did I find myself literally staring at myself in the face?
Not like a billboard, or advertisement or anything crazy like that. Just a girl, who was identical to me in almost every way. Sure, she maybe had about 30 pounds on me, but she made up for it with an outfit I would never feel confident enough to be in. Soft pinks, frilly skirt, lacey blouse. She caught me staring at her on the train, and had the nerve to look at me like I was the crazy one.
I went to work as usual, writing it off as just a freak coincidence. She didn’t seem weirded out that we looked alike, just that I was staring at her. So maybe I had imagined the similarities? But I knew what I looked like, didn’t I? She was like staring at an old picture from three years ago, when I had been heavier. I tried to ignore it, getting work done at a much slower pace than usual. No one noticed, at least, and at the end of the day the uneasiness had mostly subsided.
Until I got back on the train.
Now there were four of me. Two of them talked to each other like nothing was amiss. They were all different body types, one of them was even at least six inches taller than I was. But we all had the exact same face. Voices didn’t match, thank God. My voice is naturally rather deep, but still feminine. These girls all seemed to have varying pitches and tambours that didn’t fit mine.
I sat down in one of the seats, resolved to staring at the floor. The other girls hadn’t even taken notice of me, much less noticed each other. And if they did, they weren’t seeing what I was seeing.
A man sat next to me, and immediately started talking to me.
“They’re all going to the facility. I’m guessing you are too?”
I looked at him like he was the crazy one now. He was maybe just a couple years younger than me, looking like he had stepped off the set of Maze Runner or something. He just had that kind of vibe. Not unattractive, but rugged and overly bold.
“They’re not going to let you in, you know.”
Excuse me? What did that even mean? I had just finished a full day of work, it was past dinnertime, and I wanted nothing more than to just go home to watch Netflix and lounge in my sweatpants.
“They do this tour every year. And no one ever gets past the doors.”
I had to admit, I was curious. But my longing for the comfort of a braless existence was stronger.
“I just want to get home.”
Every one in the train car turned to look at me. Three more of my own face were glaring daggers at me, along with the ones from before. All conversation had stopped, like what I had said was against some unspoken rule.
“Just stick with me.” The man whispered in my ear, “I’ll make sure we get out of this okay.”
I didn’t have a choice but to trust him. The train whipped past my usual stop without even slowing down. My eyes found their usual spot on the floor. I didn’t want to get my phone out, or do anything else that would make my doppelgangers look at me again. It was a quiet, unsettling ride. I didn’t even know how much time had passed. The only thing that changed was that at one point, the man tried to reach for my hand, and I pulled it away.
“The train now approaching platform #######, terminates here. This train is the service from ######. This train will terminate here.” Loud screeches, inhuman screeches where the locations should have been. The others made no inclination of fear, where as I couldn’t help but shriek and cover my ears.
“Come on.” The man, whose name I still didn’t know, grabbed my hand and pulled me off the train as quickly as possible. The station was filled with various versions of me. Anywhere from 50 to 100 of the same face, on different bodies, different clothes, different voices. The man rushed me up the stairs, as if we were on a time crunch I didn’t know about. Or any of the other girls knew about.
It looked like a high school. The stereotypical glass doors, the flat roof, the uneven structure of it all. It didn’t look like a museum, or insane asylum, or anything. Just a boring school building. But there were twenty people out front, including an older woman with a clipboard.
“You’re late.” She said, looking between me and the man. She was likely in her sixties, blonde-gray hair frizzled all over, with dark brown eyes hidden behind 1980’s styled spectacles. “Come on then.”
Most of the people there were… normal. Meaning that there was a family of five, with two small children and a teenager, a handful of couples, and a group of friends that were probably no older than 16. Only one girl looked like me. And she was alone, but happily talking to whoever spoke to her first.
I didn’t talk to her. But I found out from overhearing her conversations that her name was Amy. My name is not Amy, for reference. She seemed to have a perfectly normal life, a well-paying job, a boyfriend, and friends who had for some reason bailed on her tonight. For a while, I even forgot she looked like me. She just seemed so average, like any other girl I would meet on a night out.
The tour was fairly standard, except that we were only allowed outside of the building. The older woman was clearly the tour guide, and waxed lyrically about the wonders of the inside of the building. ‘The grand dining room once housed 300 of the world’s finest philosophers!’ as we passed by what looked to me like an abandoned cafeteria. The others were eating it up, taking pictures of the outside of a boring building. It was just so strange.
We finally finished our tour, and ended up outside of the front of the building once again.
Only now, did the man nudge me.
“Go on, open it.”
The woman was finishing up her speech about the ‘facility’s’ owner, and was just distracted enough for me to try and pull open the double doors. I had expected some kind of resistance, a lock, anything. But they came open easily; the hinges didn’t even seem rusted.
A chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ as I entered both sets of double doors without issue. I held open the inner door, while the man held open the front door. Every single person in our little group was let in, until the tour guide tried to chase after us. The man shut the door in her face, and we watched as she tried to pull on what was now a locked door. The group seemed to scatter almost immediately, taking pictures of dark broken down hallways.
The place was so much creepier from the inside. It was now pitch-black outside, and the only light and noise came from the buzz of fried fluorescent lighting. The entirety of our group had disappeared, including Amy. It was just me and the man now.
“My name is Jacob.”
Well, now you tell me.
Everyone else had taken the hallway to the left, but we stood still in front of the doors for a while. To me, it was like there was one singular light over us, and I didn’t want to leave it to travel down any dark hallway. Jacob seemed to be waiting for my cue, but eventually we walked forward, away from the doors, into the darkness.
It didn’t take long before we saw a light again, coming up from a room just ahead. There was a sort of shifting noise, like something was moving. I paused, and then I saw the shadow. It was… wrong. Almost human, but not exactly. The best description that I can give is that the shadow looked like Calibos from the original Clash of the Titans movie, and even then that wouldn’t be doing it justice. No tail or horns or anything, just an incorrect human form.
We held our breath just outside of the lit room for a second, before the figure seemed to notice us. Jacob grabbed onto my arm, getting ready to run, when the figure finally stepped out.
It was just some guy.
He was probably in his 40’s or 50’s, bald, thick glasses, overweight. He looked like the kind of awkward man who lived with his mom and took care of her, complete with the soft and kind demeanor. I almost felt bad for him. He must have been living here to avoid being homeless. He did seem to light up when he saw us, which made me smile.
“I haven’t had guests in so long, come in.”
Jacob pulled on me, as if to tell me that we needed to leave, but I just ignored him. The older man waved us inside, and I followed, with Jacob begrudgingly behind me. He looked more uncomfortable the closer we got to the room, and once we were inside I understood why.
It was a hoarder’s room. There was trash piling up to the ceiling, and a smell to match. The main source of light came from inside a bathroom that looked like it hadn’t been used in years, flickering and cool. The only other light came from a vintage television screen that bathed the place in cold, blue static. The man brought us to a folding poker table with chairs to match, where rust covered the majority of the metal. It was covered in grease, congealed to the point where it was almost jello, with dishes piled high enough to touch my chin as I sat down. They were covered in everything from dried food, to mold, to maggots. I could see the flies buzzing and nesting between the ringlets of what must have been a kind of sauce once.
But that didn’t startle me nearly as much as what I felt when I sat down. I hadn’t thought to look down; I was too focused on the table. But something squished against my pants, and I felt the cold seep onto my skin. It was urine. I could smell the ammonia, even against the mold and maggots and rancid food.
I tried to stand up and panicked when I realized I couldn’t.
Jacob was more afraid than I was, especially once the man put down what must have been salads in front of us. He shook his head desperately at me, as if telling me not to eat the food. I wasn’t planning to. The lettuce had wilted beyond recognition, the cheese stunk in a way it shouldn’t have, and it was sopping in moldy dressing. I wanted to puke, but I couldn’t. Because he was still watching us.
He looked at me expectantly, like I was supposed to eat whatever garbage this was. He all but ignored Jacob, keeping his eyes on me as he started wandering around the kitchen, almost pacing. Waiting.
I realized that every time he moved, the sounds of his steps were heavier than they should have been. It was that same shifting noise from earlier, with big thuds every time his foot came into contact with the floor. My mind didn’t want to comprehend it. It seemed like with every new strange thing that happened that day, my brain was working over time to make sense of it.
First the dozens of women who looked like me, a building that supposedly only I could open, now a man who looked like a man but didn’t walk like one. Girls who looked like me could be explained by anything. Maybe I was more average looking than I thought. The ‘facility’ seemed simple too, maybe no one had tried to open it after the tour. It did seem like a rude thing to do after all. And the man? A drifter, someone down on his luck.
But the shadow, the footsteps, the fact that I wasn’t able to move from this spot? It could just be paranoia, and that’s what my brain kept telling me.
That’s why I ended up taking a bite.
It tasted like… well, it tasted like my favorite salad. Like this man knew me so well that he could whip up my favorite salad just the way I liked it. The lettuce had the perfect crunch of iceberg and the smoothness of spinach, the goat cheese was flavorful, there were even dried cranberries and walnuts in just the right amounts. It took a few more bites before I even remembered that I was sitting in cold piss.
“I have to use the bathroom, is that okay?”
My voice was soft; I wasn’t afraid anymore, not really. Jacob was looking down at his food, defeated, but I ignored him. The man gave me a small nod and I stood up without any resistance. Upon standing up, it was like a switch flipped in my head, and I remembered where I was. The flickering light in the bathroom made me not even flip the light switch as I went to just try to clean myself up. I was retching, trying to avoid making any kind of noise, trying not to look at the horrific state of the bathroom in question. I was tempted to just throw my pants into a crumpled heap on the floor, but obviously, I didn’t.
As I finished up what was left of the damp, one-ply toilet paper, I stood up to wash my hands. I didn’t even know if the sink would work, keeping my eyes low to avoid the shattered mirror. I didn’t like looking at my face on the best of days, and today I had already seen so much of it. The water from the tap oozed brown, and I glared at it, hoping it was rusted pipes. And then I made another mistake.
Out of habit, I sighed and looked up at the mirror.
Except, the mirror wasn’t broken. And now the light inside the bathroom was warm, and lit up the peach colored walls perfectly. There were children’s toys littering the floor, and I could hear voices just outside the door.
And one of them was mine.
She walked into the bathroom without any regard for the me that was looking directly into the mirror. She was definitely me this time. Same body type, voice, I even recognized the sweatpants that I had been wanting to change into all day. Her hair was high in a messy bun that I always wore. She picked up a couple of toys, then stepped in front of the mirror.
Or, stepped into me.
The other voice I had heard walked into the bathroom and immediately put his arms around me. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life. With dark hair, dark eyes that pierced through your very soul, he kissed my neck and I felt loved, truly loved.
“It hasn’t been the same without you.”
He said, to the me in the mirror. I turned to look at him, and there was the older man, with such dejected eyes as he pulled his arms from around my waist.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you to come back. All of them, almost like you, but never quite right.”
My brain wasn’t fighting me anymore. There was no logical explanation for what was going on here. All I knew, was that this was my home, and I had to take care of it again. It had really gone to hell without me.
It definitely needed a woman’s touch.