I would do anything to go back to that day, to take a slightly different route to work, to have lazed around at home instead. Anything.
I had rolled out of bed at 8 AM and hurriedly got myself ready to commute to the office, throwing on a light shirt and some jeans in preparation for what was supposed to be a relaxed warm Friday. Before I’d managed to get a few feet away from my building, I noticed a man staring at me from across the road. I’d seen the man a few times in the weeks before but had always been in too much of a rush to care about the oddity of his appearance. Funnily enough, from that distance, he looked remarkably like I did. He was wearing a similar outfit to me and held a cup of coffee from the place I always stop at in the mornings in his hand. It wasn’t until I walked closer and looked him in the eyes out of mere curiosity that I realised the resemblance was beyond similarity.
It was me. Or at least a seemingly perfect copy of me. I had grown up with scary stories of doppelgängers and the horrifying things that could take place if you happened to come across yours and so my basic instinct was to run. I ran until I could barely breathe and was freaked out enough to avoid my normal subway route and instead hail a cab to the office. Terrified that it’d legitimise the fears I’d hoped were childish and irrational, I didn’t tell a soul and buried myself in as much work as I could find in an effort to forget about what I’d seen.
That was until the ding of an email from my work computer broke the delusion.
From: iknowyousawme
Subject: The first of many
Content:
Why did you look back? Do you know what you have done?
I’ll be in touch.
Regards,
You.
I thought the same to myself. What had I done?
I got home to a neatly presented box sitting outside the door to my apartment. I carefully slit it open and a note was sitting on top of a misshapen gift-wrapped item.
“To me,
You knew nothing good could come from taking a good look at yourself, and now I have to pay my dues.
”A piece a day, until I’ve gone away.
Away, away, away.”
It was harrowingly clear what the sick present waiting for me was. I undid the bow and tore at the heart-printed paper to reveal a bloody hand. Before the absurd horror of it all could register in the form of a pained scream, I realised the hand looked exactly like mine. Of course it would, I knew who it had come from.
Unsure of what to do and knowing this would continue, I called the cops in some desperate hope they wouldn’t see me as crazy. I don’t know why I thought that would work, because I wouldn’t have believed me either. They took my account and explained the process of attempting to locate the person the severed hand belonged to, and presumably out of pity humoured me when I insisted on providing my own fingerprints to cross-examine against. I knew the prints would be one and the same, but I still fell to my knees and silently cried when they called me a few days later with the news. At least up until that point, I had the tiny comfort of convincing myself it was all a sick joke, a prank gone too far. That call stole my last comfort away from me.
It has been three weeks since the first piece arrived. It was followed by both ears before hands and feet began to arrive. Then came arms and legs. The torso was the heaviest. By that point, the packages had become large enough that I had to sign for them. I stopped going to work until after midday and waited. Every morning I waited for a package to arrive, and every morning they came. The torso was worse than all those that came before it and had the first note since the ear that began my ordeal. The note also made it clear that whilst my doppelgänger had sent the initial packages, he was long since killed by someone. Or something.
“Are you ready?
Here comes the head :)”
Like always, it came the next morning. The note was hidden underneath the withered amalgamation of flesh in the blood-stained cardboard box. It had been disfigured beyond almost all recognition, save for the small birthmark below the cheek we both shared.
The note tied together the sick game I had been forced to play.
“I’m all out of pieces, but you can rebuild me.
Stitch me back together until I’m whole again.
Lest you ever again forget the importance of looking away”.