Mr. X

 •Ned's body stiffened, twitched upward, and slammed back down on themattress. Before be plummeted away, he saw Star's stricken face glide toward him.

    Through walls of blue fire, he was rushing behind Mr. X up an asphalt driveway toa suburban house with a conspicuous new addition on its left side. A bicycle leaned on its kickstand. A flat-faced moon glared down from above a row of mountain peaks unreal as a backdrop. Fir trees scented the chill night air.

    Theatrically, Mr. X pressed the bell. When the door opened, he rammed a knife into the belly of the man before him and walked him backward. The invisible pressure that had blown Ned up the asphalt drive pushed him into the room. From speakers on either side of the fireplace, the voice of Frank Sinatra unrolled a long phrase about an immovable object and an old, irresistible force.

 •Robert stood listening at the attic door.

 •“Mr. Anscombe, I presume,' said Mr. X.

    The man gaped at the purple ropes sliding out of his body. In an unexpected atmospheric shift that returned to him the odd memory of a stuffed fox lifting its paw within a glass bell, Ned took advantage of Mr. X's pleasure in his task and stepped backward until he struck the door. Veils of blue fire drifted over the walls, and Frank Sinatra insisted that someone had to be kissed.

    Gleeful Mr. X opened 'Michael Anscombe's' throat.

    Ned glanced to his left and through an intervening wall caught a snapshot-like vision of a heavy woman with tangled blond hair lying in bed readingGoodnight Moon. With the vision came certain unhappy information: the woman on the bed had given birth to a dead child who had been horribly, appallinglywrong.

    Ned raced into a brief hallway ending at a closed door. Before him, uncarpeted stairs led to another, narrower doorway.

 •Robert pressed his hands against the wood and focused on what was going on beneath him. Transparent blue flames licked in past his feet and traveled in bright, ambitious lines across the attic floor. The faint sounds from below told Robert that 'Michael Anscombe' had been slit open by a joyous being finally within reach of its quarry. Robert's life depended upon his capacity to evade this predatory being's annual descents into this strange, transitory existence.

    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...