As he picked a book off the shelf behind the chair, a knock came at the kitchen door. He hesitated for a moment and the knock came again. Laying down the book, he started for the kitchen, but before he got there, the door opened, and a man came into the kitchen. Lambert stopped and stared at the indistinct blur of the man who’d come into the house. Only a little light came from the lamp in the living room, and he could not be sure.
«Phil?» he asked, uncertain, afraid that he was wrong.
The man stepped forward a pace or two. «Yes, Ed,» he said. «You did not recognize me. After all the years, you don’t recognize me.»
«It was so dark,» said Lambert, «that I could not be sure.»
He strode forward with his hand held out, and Phil’s hand was there to grasp it. But when their hands met in the handshake, there was nothing there. Lambert’s hand closed upon itself.
He stood stricken, unable to move, tried to speak and couldn’t, the words bubbling and dying and refusing to come out.
«Easy, Ed,» said Phil. «Take it easy now. That’s the way it’s always been. Think back. That has to be the way it’s always been. I am a shadow only. A shadow of yourself.»
But that could not be right, Lambert told himself. The man who stood there in the kitchen was a solid man, a man of flesh and bone, not a thing of shadow.
«A ghost,» he managed to say. «You can’t be a ghost.»
«Not a ghost,» said Phil. «An extension of yourself. Surely you had known.»
«No,» said Lambert. «I did not know. You are my brother, Phil.»
«Let’s go into the living room,» said Phil. «Let’s sit down and talk. Let’s be reasonable about this. I rather dreaded coming, for I knew you had this thing about a brother. You know as well as I do you never had a brother. You are an only child.»
«But when you were here before …»
«Ed, I’ve not been here before. If you are only honest with yourself, you’ll know I’ve never been. I couldn’t come back, you see, for then you would have known. And up until now, maybe not even now, there was no need for you to know. Maybe I made a mistake in coming back at all.»
«But you talk,» protested Lambert, «in such a manner as to refute what you are telling me. You speak of yourself as an actual person.»
«And I am, of course,» said Phil. «You made me such a person. You had to make me a separate person or you couldn’t have believed in me. I’ve been to all the places you have known I’ve been, done all the things that you know I’ve done. Not in detail, maybe, but you know the broad outlines of it. Not at first, but later on, within a short space of time, I became a separate person. I was, in many ways, quite independent of you. Now let’s go in and sit down and be comfortable. Let us have this out. Let me make you understand, although in all honesty, you should understand, yourself.»
Lambert turned and stumbled back into the living room and let himself down, fumblingly, into the chair beside the lamp. Phil remained standing, and Lambert, staring at him, saw that Phil was his second self, a man similar to himself, almost identical to himself—the same white hair, the same bushy eyebrows, the same crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the same planes to his face.
He fought for calmness and objectivity. «A cup of coffee, Phil?» he asked. «The pot’s still on the stove, still warm.»
Phil laughed. «I cannot drink,» he said, «or eat. Or a lot of other things. I don’t even need to breathe. It’s been a trial sometimes, although there have been advantages. They have a name out in the stars for me. A legend. Most people don’t believe in me. There are too many legends out there. Some people do believe in me. There are people who’ll believe in anything at all.»
«Phil,» said Lambert, «that day in the barn. When you told me you were leaving, I did stand in the door and watch you walk away.»
«Of course you did,» said Phil. «You watched me walk away, but you knew then what it was you watched. It was only later that you made me into a brother—a twin brother, was it not?»
«There was a man here from the university,» said Lambert. «A professor of psychology. He was curious. He had some sort of study going. He’d hunted up the records. He said I never had a brother. I told him he was wrong.»
«You believed what you said,» Phil told him. «You knew you had a brother. It was a defensive mechanism. You couldn’t live with yourself if you had thought otherwise. You couldn’t admit the kind of thing you are.»
«Phil, tell me. What kind of thing am I?»
«A breakthrough,» said Phil. «An evolutionary breakthrough. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I am sure I’m right. There was no compulsion on my part to hide and obscure the facts, for I was the end result. I hadn’t done a thing; you were the one who did it. I had no guilt about it. And I suppose you must have. Otherwise, why all this smokescreen about dear brother Phil?»
«An evolutionary breakthrough, you say. Something like an amphibian becoming a dinosaur?»
«Not that drastic,» said Phil. «Surely you have heard of people who had several personalities, changing back and forth without warning from one personality to another. But always in the same body. You read the literature on identical twins—one personality in two different bodies. There are stories about people who could mentally travel to distant places, able to report, quite accurately, what they had seen.»
«But this is different, Phil.»
«You still call me Phil.»
«Dammit, you are Phil.»
«Well, then, if you insist. And I am glad you do insist. I’d like to go on being Phil. Different, you say. Of course, it’s different. A natural evolutionary progression beyond the other abilities I mentioned. The ability to split your personality and send it out on its own, to make another person that is a shadow of yourself. Not mind alone, something more than mind. Not quite another person, but almost another person. It is an ability that made you different, that set you off from the rest of the human race. You couldn’t face that. No one could. You couldn’t admit, not even to yourself, that you were a freak.»
«You’ve thought a lot about this.»
«Certainly I have. Someone had to. You couldn’t, so it was up to me.»
«But I don’t remember any of this ability. I still can see you walking off. I have never felt a freak.»
«Certainly not. You built yourself a cover so fast and so secure you even fooled yourself. A man’s ability for self-deception is beyond belief.»
Something was scratching at the kitchen door, as a dog might scratch to be let in.
«That’s the Follower,» said Phil. «Go and let him in.»
«But a Follower …»
«That’s all right,» said Phil. «I’ll take care of him. The bastard has been following me for years.»
«If it is all right …»
«Sure, it is all right. There’s something that he wants, but we can’t give it to him.»
Lambert went across the kitchen and opened the door. The Follower came in. Never looking at Lambert, he brushed past him into the living room and skidded to a halt in front of Phil.
«Finally,» shouted the Follower, «I have run you to your den. Now you cannot elude me. The indignities that you have heaped upon me—the learning of your atrocious language so I could converse with you, the always keeping close behind you, but never catching up, the hilarity of my acquaintances who viewed my obsession with you as an utter madness. But always you fled before me, afraid of me when there was no need of fear. Talk with you, that is all I wanted.»
«I was not afraid of you,» said Phil. «Why should I have been? You couldn’t lay a mitt upon me.»