Footsteps of an unearthly softness, lighter than a child's and completely inexplicable, glided toward him from the bottom of the staircase.
•Ned moved half of the way up the stairs and froze where he stood. With the ease of a figure in a dream,a boy identical to himself was emerging through the unopened door.
•Robert looked down in amazed relief at the goggling figure of his overprivileged, sheltered brother and understood that here before him was the means of his survival. He pressed a finger to his lips and pointed down. His brother retreated, and Robert floated noiselessly to the ground floor.
•Ned moved away from the bottom of the stairs. His astonishing double pointed to the end of the hallway. Ned went to the door and attempted to open it. His hand melted through the doorknob and closed upon itself.
He glanced over his shoulder and, past the figure of his enraged double, looked through a transparent wall to see Mr. X striding away from the triangular hump of "Michael Anscombe's" body to invade a room stacked with cardboard boxes. The woman with tangled hair shuffled forward, holdingGoodnight Moon to her chest like a talisman.
•Robert saw the double's fingers pass through the knob of his bedroom door and knew that he was notreal. Thereal Ned Dunstan dreamed on in Edgerton, and what had been sent to Boulder was an illusory replica. For the first time in his peculiar life, Robert found himself capable of setting resentment aside long enough to grasp that although his mother's darling was not physically present, some aspect of Ned Dunstan had been delivered to him, and thatthis figment, thisduplicate, was what he needed to get out of this house.
Robert spun on his heel to observe exactly what his brother had seen a moment before.
•A second after Robert took off down the hall, Ned followed, expecting his double to dash into the living room and melt through the front door. Robert reached the end of the hallway and disappeared. Baffled, Ned moved a few steps forward and saw the woman still plodding across the bedroom. Mr. X plunged on into the newaddition. "Michael Anscombe's" corpse bent over its knees in a widening pool of blood. Frank Sinatra was making clear his intention to kiss those lips that he adored. Ned looked across the living room and, on the other side of the half partition that separated it from the kitchen, saw Robert glaring at him. He raced out of the hallway.
•Robert couldn't believe it. His brother—his brother'sreplica— was gawking like a tourist at the Grand Canyon. Just when Robert had begun to think he would have to throw the toaster at the kid to get his attention, Ned looked into the kitchen and saw him.Come on, Robert urged, and his brother started to move at last. Robert went to the sink, squatted down, pushed aside bottles of cleaning supplies, and opened a secret compartment some previous owner had installed to hide his wife's jewelry. His hand closed around the edges of a metal box.
•Ned couldn't believe what he was seeing. With his back to the opening in the wall, his double was kneeling in front of the sink and rooting around in the washing supplies. In about a second and a half, either the woman or Mr. X, or both of them, would come into the living room.
"Stop messing around," he whispered.
"Shhh," the double whispered back.
Ned moved into an alcove for a washer and dryer next to the back door and watched Robert emerge from the sink cabinet holding a flat metal box. He opened the lid and took out two stacks of bills. He reached into the box again, and his body tensed. His head snapped to the side.
They were going to die. That was it. The double's greed had killed them.
•Robert watched "Alice Anscombe" stumble into view and swing her head toward the kitchen. Her eyes went flat with shock. "Shit on a shingle," she said.
"Alice" dreamily turned her head to the hallway, smiled, and said, "Who the hell are you, Bob Hope?"
•Robert and Ned felt the atmosphere about them intensify and mysteriously seem to brighten. The only other living being in the house had heard "Alice Anscombe's" words.
•A voice in Ned's mind said,Ican't be killed, I'm not here, but he can, and he stepped out of the alcove. The instant he did so, Ned at last understood his baffling double to be precisely that which he had missed and yearned for all his life. He was looking at his brother.
•Robert jumped to his feet, thrusting wads of bills into his pockets. "Alice" waded into the lake of blood, came bemused to a halt, and looked down. Robert thought he saw the corners of her mouth lift when she took in her husband's body, but the smile, if it was a smile, faded. The book fell from her hands, and blood splashed over the tops of her feet. "Alice" turned her head to the empty hallway.
• Frank Sinatra sang:
Fight...
fight. . .
fight it with aaall of your might...
and Ned felt himself begin to fade out of existence with the abruptness of a raindrop on a hot sidewalk. He held out his hands and through their hazy, lightly tinted fabric saw the tiles of the kitchen floor.
•The madwoman in the living room shouted, "Why are you doing this? Don't you understand I'm already in hell?"
A dry male voice said, "Don't worry, Mrs. Anscombe. You will be taken care of soon enough."
•Robert and Ned stared into their identical faces and seemed to glide toward each other without any sort of conscious movement. Ned's being trembled with the awareness that his brother's survival, and in some sense his own, depended upon an extraordinary act of surrender.
•They heard the woman shout,Shit, I really am in hell, only the son of a bitch isn't RED, it's BLUE!
•Gliding toward Robert, Ned experienced a new sort of terror, which was focused on the awareness that he was on the threshold of a change that he could neither control nor foresee. The terrorbecame exquisite when he realized that part of his being was already stretching out its arms in yearning.
•A rational, self-protective portion of Robert also welcomed the coming mystery, for it recognized a chance of survival. The part of Robert that was chaotic and irrational resisted in a terror greater than Ned's. He felt despair and revulsion at having been swindled into a destructive bargain.
•Irresistibly, Robert and Ned sailed toward each other, met, and melted together, each with his own fears, doubts, and resentments, and for a moment their psyches tangled and rebelled, one aghast at the other's depth of rage and violence, the other repelled by what seemed the unbearable narrowness and smallness of his confinement, therefore burning tomutiny, tolay waste—
•No sooner than registered, this ambivalence dissolved into a resolution and harmony, a wholeness shot through with the perception of an even greater, more roomy wholeness, equal to the possession of a kind of magnificence, withheld from them only by the fact of Ned's actualabsence. Such depth of personal surrender accompanied this sense of possibility that both instantly drew back, but in one mind and body they soared together through the kitchen wall with what their Ned-half experienced from his inextricable other self as an acknowledgment of a compounding sweetness and satisfaction equal to his own.