Building up to Christmas with Dusty the Demon Hunter - A Blast from the Past - Doppelgänger - Part 2

This is Dusty's 4th adventure.

I remember stories of Doppelgängers from when I was at school and they captured my imagination - much like the fairies and their changelings did.

I wrote this story with the more sinister aspects of the creatures in mind.

Part 1

Pictures from Google free to use search

---

Doppelgänger

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. 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 were 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 there 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.

That night Hunter stayed over. He slept on the sofa in the living room. Ben, Dusty’s granddad, stoked up the fire before he went to bed and made certain that Hunter knew that he was welcome to put more wood on the fire if he started to get cold.

“I should be ok ‘til the morning, thank you,” Hunter assured his host. In the tranquillity of the house, it didn’t take long for Hunter to drift off to sleep and he slept soundly.

The clock in the kitchen ticked around to 3 o’clock and the house was silent. Everyone was asleep and peaceful. The outside light, the one that was set on a motion detector to illuminate the back yard, winked on and a figure followed the path made by Dusty and Hunter earlier, to the back door.

The girl from the snowy field walked around the house and this time, she left footprints in the snow. She looked down at the imprints and she smiled. Although she was the exact image of Dusty, the smile was not the same. It was curved in a cruel line on her mouth and the malevolence was apparent – if anyone had been awake to see it.

She peered in through the downstairs windows and when she came around to the living room, she saw Hunter wrapped up in the quilt. The light from the moon shone through the gap in the curtain and the shadow of Dusty’s double fell across him, and he stirred in his sleep and frowned.

She was still there as the dawn’s light pierced through the trees behind her. She didn’t want to go, but Dusty was waking up in the bedroom above where she stood, and she was compelled to leave. She walked towards the trees where she would be hidden in the shadows, but because Dusty was awake before she reached the tree line, the double’s footprints in the snow ceased to follow her into the trees.