Odd Double
The scene then shifts to Pam in bed, the day after her marriage to Mark Graison. Pam wakes up to hear the shower running. Assuming it's Mark, she opens the shower door, only to find Bobby Ewing, alive and well.
Dallas, 1986, source Wikipedia
If you want to have fun, make up your own songs
Renato Russo, Martians Invade the Earth, 198X, reissued 1997
Chapter One
Having my gift for about ten years, I grew used to foresee an important day at my first wink in the morning. In fact, this time, the dark realm that lingers at pre-dawn. For the last two months I've being living in a standard room at Motel 6, by the highway, in Palm Desert California.
Eddie Fischer, my handler, a pixie old lady of mere eighty six years, suggested that I should lay low for some time. Eddie is much more that what meets the eye, she is tough as a sequoia and wiser and has lived a full live. Well that is a bad analogy since sequoias are stationary and that is the exactly opposite of Mrs. Fischer. She is linked to a secret society that, by its definition, I don't know much about it, they help people in deep way, like they are angels on earth, they have access to technologic and magic resources that do not fails to amazes me every given situation.
So, my last adventure, that was described in my seventh manuscript (if you choose to ignore that briefer one that my editor told me he called Interlude, last was the sixth), Eddie helped me find a group of Satanists that were planning a mass killing of children for some ritual sacrifice or just because they felt that was a fun entertainment. Well this group had, for my always baffled amazement, as much resources as Eddie's, but their goal was spread darkness and chaos.
Since you are here now, reading this, I can assume that you know some of my previous accounts. Anyway, a quick summary follows.
I am just a fry cook that came from a small Californian town of Pico Mundo, since twelve I was gifted with some paranormal powers. Seeing the lingering dead is my most remarkable feature. Since my teenage years I have being helping ghosts of people that are too much attached to this world to move on to the next level, whatever it may be next.
This gift threw me in succession of errands that grew weirder and weirderer any time. So I went from frying bacon to defeating Satanists and their invisible behemoth in a couple of months.
That is my life.
I succeeded rescuing the kidnapped kids and in result of that, I made some people really mad. The ones that were not eaten by the behemoth, to be clear. That dark group had important people in their assembly, when I was exploring the mansion in search for the kids, I spotted actors and politicians.
After the events Eddie drove me to my friends, Annamaria, Tim and Raphael, which were staying in a cozy cottage by the beach. But later that day she received a phone call and hurried us to out. Allegedly counter agents were going berserk all over the place and no known place was safe enough. Her key suggestion was to split us and each one should go to a random place, avoiding even their safe houses, apparently they had hacked the psychic network and were able to locate people when friends stared to each other.
Psychic network seemed to me a ludicrous ideas and the fact that villains would use that to find me was worst. I am not a rocket scientist, I am fry cook, it took me minutes to link the dots and remember the obvious. My second gift, if you are taking note, is called by me psychic magnetism, when I need to find a person I just need to focus his facer or name, if he is not in a very distant place like Honolulu and I am in California, I would bump into him before saying Honolulu. So there is psychic ways to dabble into and since I am no maharishi either, I cannot confabulate the extent and power of its dominion, what I know is that it exists and people can use it. Maybe just radio waves or quantum entanglement or bogus voodoo. But if I can dabble, my enemies may also.
The treat seemed imminent, Eddie reached the trunk of her limousine and gave each of us one children backpack. At first I thought that belonged to the rescued kids but I was wrong. It contained lots of cash, most US dollars but also Euros and Canadians and some other that had Cyrillic letters on it and featured Cossacks on its desing. My backpack was red and blue and was adorned with a picture of Transformers Robot in Disguise.
Annamaria was not remotely upset. It is the way she behaves. But she followed Eddie's instructions and got a backpack for her, this one was pink, Hello Kitty.
The rushed goodbyes were spoken, Eddie drove Tim and Raphael, Raph being a golden Retriever that followed me from Magic Beach where he had other name and other owner.
I followed the instructions and zigzagged California alone for days, taking different taxi cabs and buses, passing through towns of every size.
She said that randomness was the key. I would be hidden from foes and friends would not be able to locate me. Eventually Eddie would find a way, she always did.
Eventually I found a place to stay and just sleep. Something in my heart indicated that it was the right place. It is not my third gift, but peace was there in my heart.
It this Motel 6, that someday was 6 dollars a day, but not anymore. I shared its premises with the continuous replacement of truck drivers looking for rest and lovers looking for privacy.
My main source of food was next door's taco place, that I have eaten each of every item in the menu including the veggies. No overhanging menace was around, I knew that, but I followed the instructions. I could see that there was a Wendy's across the highway, but I would not dare to cross it. I was laying as low as it gets, without starving to death, but my food was far from balanced or healthy. Tacos everyday was fine.
I only crossed the highway once, walked into a thrift store and got some clothes, by that time I only had the ones wrapping around my body and it had as days' worth of desert sweat. The same shop had a small collection of books, it took about thirty of them. How to write romance books and get published, was among them. Random choices in literature to keep me awake. The clothes I chose were random as well, one was a Hawaiian shirt with coconut buttons, that shirt reminded me of someone named Bobby that I never met, yes, I don't know how that is possible, perhaps the psychic network was glitching.
I could not avoid making acquaintances with passing guests and the motel crew. Lupita was the cash clerk, she was about forty and plumpy, spoke Spanglish, most of the time I was not sure what she meant, also felt in danger of having my skin scratched by her long and razor sharp multicolored opal nails that she moved recklessly when she was talking.
That were my days, mostly. I read paperbacks and ate tacos. Sometimes I swam in the pool that was small and even under desert light was always cold. One day by the pool some guy gave me a Samuel Adams beer, I don't drink much by alcohol, but that tasted good. He was bulky and had tattoos of monsters all over his back and shoulders. I hoped that he was not an enemy, he could kill me by just slapping me, I was being paranoid I know, he was just a guy and I should not judge the book by his cover.
I wrote my last adventure by hand, because I had not a typewriter or computer. It took less time that I expected, I wrote like a maniac like I was in trance. I asked Lupita to go Cathedral City send it from there to my friend and novelist Ozzie Boone. He was the one stimulating me to write down all my adventures. I gave Lupita 50 bucks for this errand and she was eager to comply my strange request.
After reading the book about writing romances, I wondered if I was able to imagine and write things that were not based in my real life, not like real stuff about aliens and time-traveling hogs. Ozzie would be astonished of my romances, he wrote about ninety books that ranged from whodunits to hard sci-fi lite porn.
I had some fair share of romance in my life. Perky as I am, but lovely and real. The only woman in my life, Stormy was not in this world anymore. I miss her so much, in these silent and lonely days my heart ached. I declare that I still have a conflict in my mind, I long to be with her as soon as possible, but I would never commit suicide and even in my extreme experiences I avoid harm's way as much as possible and I hope to come out unscathed most of the time.
Taking my shirt off, I looked over the counter into the mirror. Under my left nipple I had a knife wound that was finally just a thick scar by then. It was an old wound that by the time I had to suppress the blood flow with just handy silver duct tape.
Scars were indicators that my accumulating actions would soon be over and I would join my love Stormy. If I was lucky.
Day 42, at Motel 6, after I returned from the swimming pool and got a peppery snack from the vending machine, I was surprised by a cellphone lying over my bed. Eddie found a way. Besides a little handwritten note that stated this line was 100% secure and I could call my friends, but should avoid expressing my location over conversations and soon she would come and pick me up.
Through the phone operator I reached my mentor writer and surrogate father Ozzie.
"Ozzie? It is me… Shakespeare." Yes, very clever, in all my previous manuscripts I always put some unsuspicious Shakespeare reference for Ozzie's enjoyment –
"Listen to me you fragment of excrement, I will not partake in your sick joke" I never heard him that upset and I gave myself liberty to soften his vernacular while describing it. "I don't know who you are, but you should stop it now or I will find a way to pounce your kisser."
I took me some time and some cross referencing to assure him that I was really me. The reason for his distrust was that a couple of days ago, late of night after reading Bleak House and drinking some vintage wine, he found something in his house that gave him sequential goose bumps.
Weird things happen around me all the time, like once I find a Spanish doubloon inside a hot dog bun, it spoiled my lunch, but someone found some value for it.
Besides his computer, his laser printer was manically gorging out paper after paper, about 240 pages came out and after reading it he found out, that it was apparently written by yours truly, me. He made strong coffee wich its compostion had almost no water, and spent the next 4 hours reading it. By his literary experience on text analysis he could state that the text really had my voice, it was like any other of my manuscripts. But this time it has not been written or sent by me.
To avoid confusion, from now one, let's call it: the alternate manuscript.
The story in it was strange because it related an encounter of Ozzie and me that never took place, it had referenced Annamaria, Eddie and Chief Porter. The narrative was about a plot to infect thousands of people with rabies during their visit to a carnival at Pico Mundo.
Everything was not remotely impossible, at first I received that as an omen, a good intentioned ghost writer sending me clues through a magic laser printer. But would it be so easy and explicit? If every time I would receive a script what of would happen I could have, at least, avoided being stabbed a couple of times or have chosen better ways to avoid traffic during car chase scenes.
But it was not the future, he said carnival was in Pico Mundo, but it had left two days ago, nothing relevant happened there other than the usual vomiting after the rides and a case of a midget guy that got himself locked inside the funhouse and suffered a small case of dehydration.
As he said, this text had caused sequential goose bumps also in me. The references and coincidences were uncanny. The carnival was the Sombra brothers, the one Stormy and I visited and received the card from the gypsy mummy arcade. The card stated that we would be together forever, I still have this card with me in my wallet. I would cut out some of my toes to have the opportunity to consult this mummy thingamajig and get another portent card, it would help my distressed heart, if the card came from magic or just random luck I would not care, that card was very important to me as a nostalgic token of a simpler time. Maybe the mummy could help me understand my mission or state when and how I would be reunited with Stormy.
The surprises of the text do not stop there. Because in the end of the alternate manuscript, I died.