The Complete Short Stories

Picking his steps carefully, he moved back to the lounge window. The man’s face was still hidden, but a single glance confirmed that the visitor was not Bayliss. He was wearing the same cream suit Larsen had seen two days earlier, the same two-tone shoes. But this time the man was no hallucination; his hands and clothes were solid and palpable. He shifted about on the sofa, denting one of the cushions, and turned a page of the book, flexing the spine between his hands.

Pulse thickening, Larsen braced himself against the window-ledge. Something about the man, his posture, the way he held his hands, convinced him that he had seen him before their fragmentary encounter in the garage.

Then the man lowered the book and threw it on to the seat beside him. He sat back and looked through the window, his focus only a few inches from Larsen’s face.

Mesmerized, Larsen stared back at him. He recognized the man without doubt, the pudgy face, the nervous eyes, the too thick moustache. Now at last he could see him clearly and realized he knew him only too well, better than anyone else on Earth.

The man was himself.

Bayliss clipped the hypodermic into his valise, and placed it on the lid of the stereogram.

‘Hallucination is the wrong term altogether,’ he told Larsen, who was lying stretched out on Bayliss’s sofa, sipping weakly at a glass of hot whisky. ‘Stop using it. A psychoretinal image of remarkable strength and duration, but not an hallucination.’

Larsen gestured feebly. He had stumbled into Bayliss’s chalet an hour earlier, literally beside himself with fright. Bayliss had calmed him down, then dragged him back across the apron to the lounge window and made him accept that his double was gone. Bayliss was not in the least surprised at the identity of the phantom, and this worried Larsen almost as much as the actual hallucination. What else was Bayliss hiding up his sleeve?

‘I’m surprised you didn’t realize it sooner yourself,’ Bayliss remarked. ‘Your description of the man in the garage was so obvious — the same cream suit, the same shoes and shirt, let alone the exact physical similarity, even down to your moustache.’

Recovering a little, Larsen sat up. He smoothed down his cream gabardine suit and brushed the dust off his brown-and-white shoes. ‘Thanks for warning me. All you’ve got to do now is tell me who he is.’

Bayliss sat down in one of the chairs. ‘What do you mean, who he is? He’s you, of course.’

‘I know that, but why, where does he come from? God, I must be going insane.’

Bayliss snapped his fingers. ‘No you’re not. Pull yourself together. This is a purely functional disorder, like double vision or amnesia; nothing more serious. If it was, I’d have pulled you out of here long ago. Perhaps I should have done that anyway, but I think we can find a safe way out of the maze you’re in.’

He took a notebook out of his breast pocket. ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got. Now, two features stand out. First, the phantom is yourself. There’s no doubt about that; he’s an exact replica of you. More important, though, he is you as you are now, your exact contemporary in time, unidealized and unmutilated. He isn’t the shining hero of the super-ego, or the haggard grey-beard of the death wish. He is simply a photographic double. Displace one eyeball with your finger and you’ll see a double of me. Your double is no more unusual, with the exception that the displacement is not in space but in time. You see, the second thing I noticed about your garbled description of this phantom was that, not only was he a photographic double, but he was doing exactly what you yourself had been doing a few minutes previously. The man in the garage was standing by the workbench, just where you stood when you were wondering whether to take the can of petrol. Again, the man reading in the armchair was merely repeating exactly what you had been doing with the same book five minutes earlier. He even stared out of the window as you say you did before going out for a stroll.’

Larsen nodded, sipping his whisky. ‘You’re suggesting that the hallucination was a mental flashback?’

‘Precisely. The stream of retinal images reaching the optic lobe is nothing more than a film strip. Every image is stored away, thousands of reels, a hundred thousand hours of running time. Usually flashbacks are deliberate, when we consciously select a few blurry stills from the film library, a childhood scene, the image of our neighbourhood streets we carry around with us all day near the surface of consciousness. But upset the projector slightly — overstrain could do it — jolt it back a few hundred frames, and you’ll superimpose a completely irrelevant strip of already exposed film, in your case a glimpse of yourself sitting on the sofa. It’s the apparent irrelevancy that is so frightening.’