I'm......You

The woman sitting in front of a computer tab with an empty Google Docs page, the cursor constantly blinking away, does not look like an illustrious young author. Thin, dark hair tightly pulled back into a bun, therefore accentuating her sharply planed face, straight nose beaded with frustrated perspiration, and wearing a gray, ragged cardigan over a black dress, she seems more of a post-funeral attendant with an inclination for staring at a screen for two hours straight. 

“Miss Capponi?”

The wonderful, thready smell of rich velvet wine drifts to her nostrils and dries up the back of her throat. Her head swivels on an unbidden string as she glances over her hunched-up shoulder to the slight young man waiting for her by the door, holding a bottle of - yes, that is uncorked wine - and looking at her with patiently accepting almond-shaped eyes. 

“Sorry, Richard,” Miss Capponi says, rubbing her forehead with a weary hand too sharply veined to belong to a twenty-five-year-old. “I’m still stuck.”

“Did that writer’s block kill you yet?” Richard asked with a wry smile only one who has worked for the same author for years could possess. 

“It might.” Clover is still scrubbing herself with sharp nails. “God, this never happens to me. Ever.”

“It’ll pass. They’re never permanent.”

“Says the man who’s already settled at twenty-six.”

“It’ll pass.” Richard looks like he truly believes this. Clover doesn’t. 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Richard, but it’s been like this for two weeks now.” Blank space that hums whenever she reaches into a brain pocket, searching for something to further her horror novel titled “Six Ways to Kill.” She had been blazing along for months before the white mist had descended and left her groping in the dark for nothing to use. 

“I just thought you could use a drink,” says Richard. 

“I appreciate that.” But she doesn’t pour herself a glass until he’s long gone. 

“Mom, I already said that everything’s under control. You don’t need to worry about me.”

A pause, then: “Okay, talk to you soon. Love you.” 

A sharp click as she sets her phone down on the table, then sighs, long and hard. An audible rustle of sheets as she settles into the downy comfort of her bed, and the crisp snap of her turning off the lamp. 

When Clover Capponi opens her eyes, she expects morning sunlight to blind her so suddenly that she will have to flip her sheets onto her face to block the attack. But dim gray light pours through a whispering, fluttering veil instead. 

She looks around. The air crackles with the smell of ozone and something more in a large, gray, blocky room with sharp angles and nothing to decorate the sparse floor or walls. It is like an interrogation room, the kind stranded on an island in the middle of a dark sea. 

She is seated on a black marble chair that chills her down to the bone almost as badly as the dull silver chains wrapped around her wrists and ankles, crossing her chest in an X, and then looping casually around her thighs. Clover trembles, warm flesh spasming against the freezing chair - the word throne would be a better way to describe the piece of awful furniture. 

If this is a dream, then it’s a nightmare.

“Hello?” she asks off-handedly into the deafening silence. The veil rustles against the floor, behind it some seething black hole where none escape, the lace an indeterminate, floral-patterned color. But wait - butterflies embroider the veil, not flowers. Look - it shifts again. Butterflies morph into crawling ouroboros with eyes that seem to flame. Terror stabs her heart, and she quickly looks away. 

From behind the veil, whispers rise in a cackling crescendo. 

“Hello?” Clover tries again, her voice shaking as panic rises. This is a nightmare. 

But it feels so real. 

“Hello.” 

From the veil, which whips against the charged air faster and faster with an unknown wind, emerges parts of a body. Two bare feet that are startling beside the gray floor, a protruding knee, the gentle flutter of a navy brocade skirt, the dangle of paler, manicured fingers, and an escaping lock of long dark hair. 

Clover’s heart freezes with shock, nerves screaming shrilly in horror, even as her doppelganger emerges from the black hole, which seems to die down the second she fully steps away from the veil. 

“You…who are you?” Fear almost takes the question from her dry mouth, and she licks her cracked lips in an attempt to stay calm. She already knows the answer.

Other Clover smiles hollowly. Everything that makes her sentient is the same; wavy, thin hair, a sharply planed face, full lips, straight nose. But her eyes are swallowed whole by obsidian black irises that seem to penetrate Clover down to her soul. It makes her insides curdle. 

“I’m…...you.” 

Clover shakes her head. “I got rid of you. Ten years ago, I-”

“You thought you could forget?” The raw scream billows in the room, as dangerous as any predator, and Other Clover laughs maniacally. “When you were fifteen years old, I came to you and told you that I would never go away. I promised.” She paces closer to the throne of chains and smiles at Clover again, her black eyes empty. “Mine means more than yours.”

“You are a hallucination from my brain tumor!”

“No, Clover,” her doppelganger says almost sadly. “I’m..….you.”

“Stop saying that!”

“But it’s true. You know this.” The chains tingle against Clover’s skin as Other Clover continues to stalk around the throne, talking in a low, melodic voice. Clover looks up at her and sees the grayish-black cracks beginning to form in her immaculate skin with every haunting word. “You told me everything before they tried to burn me out of your brain. How lonely you were. How lonely you will continue to be. What you would have done to be successful and get to where you are now.” 

“I am at a career-high as a famous horror novelist,” Clover says, a bare tremor wracking her body. She curls her fingers into the chains to hold back the rush of alarm. “I got here because I worked for it. Because I ignored you!”

“And you see where that’s gotten you?” murmurs Other Clover. Her face is spiderwebbed now, the skin falling off in ceramic pieces and shattering delicately on the floor. “There are so many things that you’ve done to incriminate yourself. All I need is the right opportunity.”

“You,” Clover shouts in a fracturing voice, “are not real!”

“And I’m you!” her doppelganger shrieks in return. “How many secrets, Miss Capponi? How many terrible things have you done in your name? For the sake of your career? I’ll tell you all of them because I was there! I. Am. You!”

“No,” Clover whispers. 

Other Clover’s teeth bare into a terrifying, beautiful smile even as her hands begin to splinter, fingers shrinking into toothpick digits. “You emotionally abused your sister for years before she decided to commit suicide. Your last two boyfriends left you because you cheated on both of them with the other. You stole the test answers to every AP Physics quiz in junior year of high school-”

“STOP!” All of it is coming undone. The crimes she’s committed, no matter how big or how small. The lies she’s told, no matter how harmless or harmful. 

The secrets she’s kept, no matter how horrifying. 

This is why she can never sleep at night, why she writes for hours and pours bloody words onto pages for the world to read. 

This is her greatest fear.

Other Clover brings her lips to her ear, and Clover recoils, but not before her doppelganger murmurs one last thing in a quiet voice, but in a voice that lashes into Clover’s brain. 

“The night before you had your surgery to remove your brain tumor, I told you to kill your father because he initially refused to pay for college afterward. You gave him his pills, as well as a dose of something more. And he died of a heart attack the next day. You never hesitated. I told you, but you never hesitated.”

When she withdraws, Clover’s voice is frail with numb, swelling terror. “Who….what are you?”

Other Clover just shakes her head. “Oh, honey. Don’t you know? I’m……you.”