Dusty and the Doppelgänger Part 1

Dusty the Demon Hunter's 4th story in the series

Hunter spotted Dusty at the edge of the field behind her home. He was on his way to see her, and the sight of her out in the snow-covered field surprised him. He called to her but she must have been too far away or she was concentrating on something, because she didn’t seem to hear him. Then she had gone, hidden by the hedgerow that bordered the field. Hunter turned to continue on his way to the house. He would wait for her there. He’d pass the time by chatting to her grandparents if they were home. If they weren’t, he’d wait for Dusty and pass the time by mooching around in the front yard where the woods encroached on the property.

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Hunter knocked on the kitchen door. He turned and looked back at the snowy scene that spread out behind him. He could see his tracks across the lawn and farther on, across the field, right back to where he had climbed the stile and hopped into the deep snow. His progress was clear to see all the way back to the stile; the direct route he had taken looked very much like the wake of a boat. Then, just as the door was opened to his knock, he realised something odd. Though Hunter had seen Dusty up at the top of the field, parallel to where he had walked, he couldn’t see any tracks from her footsteps in the snow.

He turned around in surprise as he heard his name.

“Hunter? Are you coming inside or not? It’s freezing with the door wide open,” Dusty said.

“How did you do that?” he asked her as he crossed the threshold.

“Do what?” Dusty’s forehead was creased in a perplexed frown and she stopped what she was doing to study him closely. She was holding the kettle, and the water was running into the sink, but she was puzzled as to what he had meant and her task at hand was forgotten for the moment while she waited for his explanation. She came to her senses and filled the kettle. She put it to one side and crossed the kitchen to Hunter. He had taken a seat at the table and was returning the deep scrutiny in which Dusty was regarding him.

“How did I do what? Hunter, are you all right?” she repeated. She was concerned, he could tell by the tone in her voice.

She forgot about putting the kettle on to boil for a moment.

He waved her off and tried to smile at her to reassure her, but she wasn’t convinced. “I thought I saw you up at the top of the field. I wondered how you had got back to the house, changed and opened the door in the time it took me to get here.”

“It wasn’t me that you saw. I haven’t been outside all day. I think I’m coming down with something; I’m tired,” she told him.

“No, it couldn’t have been you; you were wearing different clothes to normal.”

“Different how?”

“Instead of black, you were wearing red, red jacket and red jeans. I couldn’t see your boots for the snow but then again...” He stopped talking and his brow furrowed. He looked out of the window. Then he stood up and went to the door. He didn’t open it, but he stood looking through the glass panels.

Dusty went back to put the kettle on. She got the cups ready to make him a cuppa. After everything was prepared, she went across to stand beside him and tried to see what he was looking for. He put his arm around her and pulled her close in an affectionate hug.

“I can see where I came across the field but I can’t see where you were standing or where you ducked behind the hedge,” he said, but Dusty didn’t think that he was talking directly to her; he was thinking out loud.

“It wasn’t me, I promise.”

Hunter looked at her then. He studied her for a moment and Dusty wasn’t certain that he believed her. “No, I don’t think it was really you, either,” he said. “Can we go out to look once we’ve had a drink?”

“Out in the cold? What about my lessons?”

“We’ll have plenty of time for lessons later. I want to take a look.”

That’s how Dusty and Hunter ended up trekking across a snow-covered field on a bitterly cold January morning. Her grandparents had laughed at her protests, so she knew she’d get no sympathy there. She was reluctant but not whining, wrapped up against the biting wind, on what seemed like a fool’s errand. When they came to the exact place that Hunter had seen the person who resembled Dusty, he stopped and looked around. There was no sign at all of any other person having been in the field since the last snowfall. There was not a footprint on either side of the hedge.

Dusty would have poked fun at Hunter if it were not for two factors. One was that he seemed genuinely puzzled, even to the point of being upset by the strangeness of it all, and two: she was frozen to the core. Dusty was not a cold-weather half demon, she much preferred the warmth of the fireside on days like this, days that transformed the British countryside to something more resembling the arctic tundra, and though she didn’t say as much, she desperately wanted to be going back to the warm kitchen where Hunter could teach her some of the more fun stuff that went with being half demon.

She stuck it out for another hour but finally her patience gave out and she gave in to it.

“Hunter, I’m cold and we haven’t found anything that resembles a footprint. Are you going to give it up as a bad job and admit that perhaps you imagined the figure?” She didn’t think she sounded whiny, but she felt close to it. Feet, hands, face and ears were becoming numb. Dusty was getting annoyed and Hunter was becoming frustrated.

He sighed and gave in. “Yeah, ok, let’s go back.”

They turned toward the house, its chimney sending up a stream of smoke - Dusty knew that her granddad had stoked the fire up and it would be lovely and cosy when they got back.

If either of them had turned back to take one last look, they may well have seen what Hunter had been searching for. There was a girl dressed in the exact same clothes as Dusty, except that her clothes were red and Dusty’s were black. She watched them as they trudged through the shin-deep snow back across the field. The other girl’s eyes were dark like Dusty’s were, but they held none of the friendly warmth that Dusty’s held. This girl’s eyes bore a deep-seated malevolence that spoke of spite, hate and nasty, sly pinches in the playground. The girl seemed to ooze with menace and it was perhaps a good thing that the field was covered in snow and that no animals were to be found, because this girl was the sort that would tear the wings off a butterfly and watch it struggle until it died.

She resembled Dusty in more than just her eyes. The girl was Dusty’s exact double; they could have been twins.

Hunter seemed to catch his breath, and he paused as they got close to the lawn area that marked the back garden proper. Dusty turned to see what was wrong and realised that he had stopped walking. His eyes seemed glazed, as though he was peering off into the middle distance, in a daze or even a trance, and because of the weirdness of the day so far, Dusty wasn’t impatient, she was worried.

“Hunter?” she said as she took hold of his hand and gently pulled him onward. “Are you ok?”

Hunter snapped out of whatever it was right then at the touch of her hand, and he looked at Dusty and realised her concern. “Yes, I think I’m fine. I’m sorry; I don’t know where I went to, then.”

Dusty’s double scowled at their backs as they walked away from her and then she faded into the shadow of the hedgerow. She didn’t know why she was here yet; she just knew that she hated the girl wearing black and the boy she was with was interesting.

When the pair got back to the house, the kitchen was toasty warm and inviting. Dusty’s grandmother was bustling about making lunch and she smiled as they walked in, but the smile dropped from her face when she saw Hunter. His eyes had taken on the glazed expression again, and his complexion, whilst never ‘rosy cheeked’, was never as pale as it appeared at the moment. He was almost as white as the landscape outside, and he had two points of red high on his cheekbones. Colleen, Dusty’s grandmother was concerned. She thought he had caught a chill; he looked to be feverish.

She sat him by the fire and brought him a mug of hot chocolate to warm him through. He was a little dazed but soon came around again and began to protest at the fuss they were making over him.

“I’m not ill, I feel fine,” he said.

“You didn’t look fine to me, on the lawn,” Dusty said. She had fetched a quilt and was wrapping it around his shoulders as she spoke, tucking it down the back of the chair so that his back wouldn’t get cold.

Hunter shook his head. He knew that Colleen was a caring person and nothing was too much trouble, especially if someone was ill. He took their ministrations in silence and smiled at the appropriate times. There was nothing he was going to be able to do about them at the moment, not until he seemed a little better at least. There was nothing to do but enjoy the attention.