Doppelganger

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Chapter One

I met Amber two days after I throttled her boyfriend, Chris Parker. A week later we were in love. Or rather, I was in love with her. It took a while on her part. After all, she thought I was him.

Let me explain -- I am a doppelganger.

Not many people have heard of us before. We're a pretty secretive race. So secretive, in fact, that I don't even know that much about us myself. Most of what I know about my kind I learned from my mother, and she wasn't all that informative. I can't even tell people my name. I don't have one. Not one I was born with, anyway. My mother always said names are worthless to a doppelganger. So the whole time I was growing up, she was she, and I was me, and that's as far as it ever got.

The problem is that doppelgangers are loners. We don't keep in touch. We don't call each other or send postcards. We would never e-mail. There's no annual doppelganger convention or home base or family reunion. When you're a doppelganger, you're on your own.

Maybe there just isn't much to know about us. We're pretty simple, actually -- primitive, one might say -- which is how we've managed to survive for so long.

But there are a few things to know. The most important is that we're shape-shifters. We can change the way we look, the sound of our voice; we can even change our sex, though we usually prefer not to. We're like chameleons, but taken to a higher level.

And it's a good thing we are shape-shifters, because in our natural state we're ugly as sin. Really hideous, to the point where we can barely stand to look at ourselves, let alone others of our kind. A doppelganger mother will even turn from her own child in disgust. I'm sure it's hard to imagine such a thing -- after all, a human mother will love even her ugliest child -- but with us it's true. It must be an evolutionary thing or something. If so, it works pretty well -- a doppelganger can rarely be found in its natural form. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw my mother in her own skin. Who knows, maybe I've just blocked the other times out of my head. Between the mottled, almost transparent flesh, the bulging eyes, and a face with no nose or mouth other than a few slimy slits, you've got the makings of a real freak. Actually, all those drawings of aliens recreated from people's so-called abductions -- those things with the egg heads and spindly arms -- they're not aliens, they're doppelgangers. And those people who think they were abducted didn't go anywhere -- they were just lucky enough to have survived. That's my theory, anyway.

Which brings me to another important doppelganger fact: We're killers. Of people, that is. We prey on your race -- stalking you, watching your moves, the places you go, learning the patterns of your life. Then, when we think we've got it down, we find a nice quiet little corner to strangle you in and take over. At least that's how it's supposed to work. Sometimes things get a little messy.

But if we're really good, no one can tell it's not you. We look like you, sound like you, even act like you. We take your life and live it in your place. And then, when we get bored or someone seems to be getting too close to the truth, we move on. Though, to be honest, we can only hold a form so long before we start to lose it. It takes a lot of strength to hang on to somebody's life. After a while it even starts to hurt.

Of course, the letting go can be just as bad. Trust me, I know.

Does this sound awful? Are we evil creatures? Monsters? I've been asking myself the question since I was old enough to wonder, and I still haven't figured it out. My mother would say no. In her view, our people have nothing to do with the concepts of good or evil. "Foolish human conventions," she once called them. In her mind, we do what we do because that's who we are.

"Are we bad?" I remember asking one afternoon as I watched her break the neck of a rooster for our supper. I was eight, I think, and had recently learned the truth about doppelganger ways. "Are we bad for killing?"

She looked at me in disgust. "You've been watching too much TV," she said, tossing me the limp bird to pluck. "That's a foolish question. The kind a human would ask."

"Well, are we?" I pressed.

"Is the tiger evil when it kills the zebra? Is the shark malicious for biting the swimmer? Does the bee sting out of wickedness?" she said.

I took her meaning. She felt it was our nature to kill -- nothing more, nothing less. And it's true, it's not like we doppelgangers want to take over the world or enslave the human race or anything like that. Far from it -- we prefer to live quietly, below the radar. Still, it troubled me. Not because I didn't believe her, but because I did. Because I believed a doppelganger was supposed to obey its nature. That's what bothered me. For even back then, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to live by killing. Not like her.

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Excerpted from Doppelganger by David Stahler
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