Repeat

1.

"Physic, heal thyself" he would mutter to himself while staring into the mirror. He would rant out loud, hating his reflection, and being hated in turn. Then, in the end, they would turn their back on each other and walk away, secure in the knowledge that they would reform. They would stop taking the easy way out. They would work. They would care.

They would be doctors.

Then the next day would dawn, and with it would come the stream of patients. All of them politely demanding their fix of chemical cocktail. Each of them demanding the time and attention of their little god of the modern age. And he would give it to them, the whole time wanting to feel horror, indignation, and guilt over his crimes. But that guilt, that sense that he was doing something to harm his fellow human beings, it just wouldn't come.

He didn't even know what it would feel like if it did.

He had no problem looking himself in the eye, and as poison thoughts bred in his mind he stopped having even those moments of clarity, those resolutions that this time, by god, he was going to shape up. He stopped having any feelings or thoughts at all.

2.

Enter Dennis Kimble. A young man stuffed into a red work-shirt and boot-cut jeans seated uncomfortably on an examining table, his boots already removed and set to the side. The first thing Stark really noticed about the boy was his eyes. Sharp and blue, they tapered ever so slightly at the edges.

Asian? He wondered, with eyes that blue? He scanned the rest of the face before him, and realized that he was seeing an incongruity. The features didn't match, any of them. Black hair, blue eyes, wiry yet somehow chunky, everything about this young man was somehow off. He looked like no one the doctor had ever seen before.

Have you ever taken an art class? A human figure is perhaps the most difficult thing to draw. A living body is always in motion, even when apparently still. Over time, artists have learned various tricks and techniques, rules of thumb for drawing bodies. One of these tricks is that any part of the body will exist in some ratio to the other parts. So we can say that the average human is about 7 heads tall, the hands fall to mid thigh, with similar tricks for other proportions.

This was what was so striking about Dennis. He was out of proportion. Not grossly so, not unattractively so, but his proportions were ever so slightly off. The doctor had walked into the examining room and found someone who was different. Pulling himself from his thoughts, he began examining his new patient.

"Hello...Dennis. Do you prefer to be called Denny?" Stark began his windup. Like all good sales, medicine was mostly in the pitch.

"Not since I was about 12, I guess."

Stark grunted and continued to page through a chart that told him nothing. Usually the receptionist would write what the patient was complaining of and that was that. Except that nothing was written under the "complaints and symptoms" heading.

"Well," Stark set down the chart and wandered about the room, arranging and shuffling things that didn't need arranging or shuffling. "What seems to be the trouble?"

Dennis hesitated and took two deep breaths. He was weighing something, that much was obvious. The doctor was used to this. Most patients had a moment where they were at war with themselves, divided between wanting privacy and wanting to get fixed.

"I appear to have a problem," he said finally, "I think I may be mentally ill." Exhaling a deep breath, tension drained from his face as he looked up at the doctor's back.

"In that case, I need to tell you right away that I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I have any real training in diagnosing such matters. If you want to come up to the front, I can recommend someone--"

"Oh no," Dennis laughed. "I know that! You don't need to recommend anyone. My aunt told me about you; she said that you could talk to me about my problem."

Stark considered this. "Who is your aunt? I don't remember any other patients named Kimble..."

"Her name is Phyllis Greane, spelt g-r-e-a-n-e."

The image came. He did know her, a delightful little hypochondriac, one of the few who didn't want drugs, just attention.

"Okay, well, in that event, and with the knowledge that I may very well not be able to help you, why don't you tell me what the problem is?" He seated himself on one of the cushioned and wheeled stools which somehow spawn themselves in doctor's offices and for the first time made eye contact with the young man.

Blue, how could I have thought his eyes were blue? Stark was startled by just how dark those eyes were. Beautiful, really.

3.

"Well, it began awhile ago, when I was just a kid in high school. My parents moved twice, once right after junior high, once right after my freshman year. I had had a best friend in my home town. Dalton, in Kansas. His name was Alan Tillerman. I missed him something fierce when we moved. Anyway, when I started school in Minnesota after we moved the second time, I had a real problem making friends. I missed Alan and people were real different up north. You know, when kids grow up together, going to elementary school and then junior high together, they aren't so accepting of new kids."

"Every day, I would wander the halls alone while others met up with friends, girlfriends, whatever. I wanted to join the football team, but it turned out my legs were too short for the rest of me, so I couldn't really play. I sorta gave up."

"Then something really weird happened. I saw Alan. I don't mean I went to visit him or he came to visit me, I mean I started to see him at school, walking to class or getting his lunch. Same features, same walk, same haircut, the only thing I could really see different was his clothes. But, you gotta understand, it couldn't be Alan. I talked to Alan every couple months on the phone. He was back in Kansas. I knew he was. But there he was, right in front of me, too."

The doctor broke in, "Did you try talking to him?"

"Not at first. I was kinda scared to. I played D&D, you know?"

Stark shook his head.

"Dungeons and Dragons? It's a role-playing game, a lot of kids play it; you, like, make up a character, like a warrior or a wizard, and you go around having adventures, all in your imagination. You have one guy run the game, like he makes up the story and stuff, and then the rest of the people play. There are rules for combat and spells and stuff like that, and you use dice. Anyway, in the game there are these monsters, right, called doppelgangers? They can change their shape to imitate other people so they can kill their friends and stuff. I thought maybe that was what this guy that looked like Alan was."

The doctor smiled.

"Yeah, I know how it sounds. But what else was I gonna think? Here was this guy, he couldn't be here, I knew he couldn't, but here was this guy who looked, talked, walked, and acted just like him. What else could it be?"

Stark shrugged, still smiling.

"Yeah, that's what I thought too, I didn't know. Anyway, so eventually I sat next to him in lunch, and I heard him talking, just chatting with his two buddies. And, I swear, he sounded just like Alan! I don't just mean his voice sounded like Alan's voice, I mean he had the same way of talking, the same way of moving while he was talking, he even talked about the same stuff, the same music, stuff like that."

The boy shifted around, getting more agitated.

"So I started talking to him. He was pretty cool. We started hanging out after school, doing stuff. His name was Alex, and he went by Al, just like Alan, how crazy is that? Soon enough, we were friends. I stopped worrying he was a doppelganger and was gonna kill me or something."

"Do you mind if I smoke?"

Stark shook his head, startled. "It's a no-smoking building. We could go to my office, if you want."

Normally he would never take a patient into his office, especially one who might be mentally ill, but something about the young man's narrative was interesting, even compelling. He wasn't well-spoken, but it was obvious the boy was telling the truth, or at least what he believed to be the truth.

As they walked down the long hall to the office both were silent. Stark thought about what the boy was saying. Coincidences like this were common, he himself had walked up behind a woman in a department store once, absolutely sure from her looks and the way she moved and talked that it was his sister, Martha, and slapped her on the back. The woman screamed and in about ten seconds he had fled the store, face burning from embarrassment. The resemblance was uncanny, though. Something else about that incident tickled the back of the doctor's mind, but it wouldn't come to the surface just yet. They reached the office and Stark sat down behind the desk while the boy lit a cigarette and breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction. The smoke plumed blue-grey from his mouth and nose, drifting up in the early evening light.

"Please continue," Stark said, motioning to a chair for Dennis to sit in.

"O.K., where was I?" he continued standing, looking at the smoldering end of his cigarette and shuffling.

4.

"We would hang out on Fridays sometimes, and I would sleep over at his house. We would play games and talk, listen to music, just hang out, you know?" Taking a seat, he swiveled back and forth nervously and continued. "Then one night, we did an all-nighter, playing D&D with a couple other guys. We got to bed around 10AM and slept through the day. Except that was when something else weird happened."

The boy paused as he looked for an ashtray. Stark pulled one stolen from a hotel during a medical conference in Boston out of a drawer and slid it across the desk to him.

Tapping his ash, Dennis went on, "I woke up around 7:30, and Al-the second Al-wasn't in his bed. I got up and looked around his house and no one was there at all. I figured maybe he had gone out and I went to the bathroom to shower and stuff. When I came back out, he was in his bed again, fast asleep. Now here's the deal...his door had been closed and the bathroom was in his room. There was no way he could have come in and laid down without me hearing him. I looked at the clock and it was about 8:15."

"I could hear his mom moving around in the living room, but I hadn't heard the door open or any car pull up. It was like Al and his mom had just appeared in the house. He woke up a little later, and when I asked him where he went he didn't know what I was talking about; he said he had been asleep all day."

Again, that little tickle in the back of the doctor's mind. Some buried memory that just didn't want to come to the fore and accept its fate. Had something like this happened to him once? More than once? Stark pushed the thought from his mind and continued to listen.

"I ended up figuring I had sort of had a little waking dream, you know? I was, like, just waking up and all, maybe I had just imagined it. I just went on with my day. But I noticed something else. Al's mom had made us dinner, but Al and his mom didn't seem hungry at all, just pushed the food around and nibbled, you know?" Dennis stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back in his chair.

"Maybe they were feeling poorly?" Stark asked. "Even small illnesses mess with appetite, you know?" Stark winced. That ubiquitous 'you know?' was finding its way into his speech. He wondered idly if speech patterns were catching like the flu. If this consultation went on long enough, would I start saying 'and stuff' and 'like'?

"Nah, they weren't sick, in fact they looked healthy and talked and laughed more than ever. It was just like they were already full, like they had eaten already."

The doctor nodded, satisfied, and waved his hand for the boy to go on.

5.

"Well, eventually summer vacation came, and this started happening more and more. I would see people I was sure I knew, and then it would turn out not to be them, they just looked like them. We went on vacation to New York, and I saw people from school, but it wasn't them. Same look, walk, sometimes even same voice and haircut. But it wasn't them. When we came back and school started, and I saw some people from New York I had seen there, again the same thing. I started to divide people into two classes in my head, Repeats and Uniques. Of course, some people I thought were Uniques would turn out to be Repeats later on; I just hadn't seen their Repeat yet." He took out his pack of cigarettes, seemed to consider them for a moment, and put them away.

"This became a normal part of my life. I went on in school and eventually graduated. I started to work for a pharmacy as a glorified janitor. My parents died in a crash when I was 19." He said this blankly, like it was something he had long ago exhausted all emotion over. "I even made it into a little game, trying to spot the Uniques."

"Why the Uniques? Why not try to spot the Repeats?" Stark asked.

"Well, 'cause by that point almost everyone I saw was a Repeat, wouldn't be much fun in that, would there?" Dennis finally relented to his impulse and lit another cigarette.

"What was the ratio?" Dennis looked blankly at the doctor. Seeing the young man didn't understand, he restated the question, "About how many Repeats for every one Unique?"

"Oh, I dunno. A lot, I guess. Maybe 100 or more."

Leaning over his desk, Stark asked, "So what you are saying is that most people are Repeats and Uniques are a tiny minority?"

Dennis nodded.

Stark thought about this for a moment. The little tickle in the back of his mind was becoming an itch. If this boy was mentally ill, he was very lucid, but from experience the doctor knew how little that meant. Many people who were delusional had extremely detailed and internally consistent stories. On the surface, it seemed that the boy had disassociated himself from a vast amount of humanity, but disassociation was usually a blanket affair, to only disassociate from some people and not others was odd. And Dennis had made clear that he had been close friends with at least one so-called "Repeat", was no longer scared of the Repeats, and did not find the phenomena sinister. So that ruled out most definitions of paranoia, as well as disassociation. Inconclusive. More data needed.

"How old are you now, Dennis?"

"I'm 22."

"So this has been happening to you for about seven years? And this is the first time you have come to a doctor about it?"

He nodded.

"Have you told anyone else about this?" This question seemed far more important than it should. That maddening itch in the back of his mind was getting worse, there was something about this whole story that rung strongly and true. Why am I afraid? Is there something wrong here?

Dennis shook his head, his hazel eyes taking on a sinister look in the lengthening shadows. The doctor leaned back again in his chair and asked "Is there anything else you can tell me about your problem?"

"Well, I think there is some connection with the people disappearing. What happened with Al and his mom has happened a few other times, once with a girl I was dating and another time in a library where is seemed most of the people in the library just disappeared while I was reading. I was sitting by the door, so it wasn't that they had left, it was more like I looked up and they were gone, and a little while later I looked up and they were all back, right where they had been, doing whatever they had been doing before."

"Were there any commonalities between these occurrences that you noticed?" Stark had returned to the endless shuffling of papers around the desk that kept him from having to maintain eye contact.

"It always happens sometime between 6 and 8; the people always come back around 8 or so. And it's only Repeats that disappear, Uniques always stay, but they never notice the others missing. If I ask a Repeat about it, they never know what I am talking about, either. They always say they were right there doing whatever, you know?"

Jonathan Stark nodded. He had no idea what to say or what any of this meant, but he was interested, excited, fascinated, scared, all at once. He was awake and involved in a way he hadn't been in years. This was special; this was somehow real and important. The earlier unease toward Dennis grew to a fever pitch of revulsion and terror, while that itch in the back of his mind became a burning, obscuring all other thought. At a loss for words, he looked over at his wall clock and thought that the time had gotten away from him...it was almost 6:15 and twilight was beginning.

6.

A neurological event. A bit of sensory white noise. His eyes rolled back in his head painfully and he shuddered, all senses momentarily shut down. When it was over, he opened his eyes and looked across the desk. The clock said the time was now 8:07.

Where Dennis had sat was what could only be referred to as a lump of meat strung on gleaming bone. Red wool and blue denim clung to strips of weeping flesh. A tangled mass of entrails hung out and spilled over the edge of the seat. The smell of blood was in the air. Steam rose from the loop of loose gut in the cool air of the office, and a syncopated dripping could be heard from the floor underneath the chair.

Stark reached over to the phone and dialed a number he did not recognize. Words not originating in his own mind came out of his mouth when the line picked up and silence answered.

"I need a lemure crew. He was a Prime, and he could partially See."

A lemure crew? What the hell was that? A prime? Like a prime number? Stark's mind swirled, trying to get a handle on what was happening. Already he couldn't remember the boy's-the corpse's-name and he found the events of the last hour becoming hazy, as if they had happened to someone else.

A voice came out of the telephone immediately, totally detached and blank. It had no accent, tone or inflection. It could have been male or female, young or old. It was like hearing all the voices he had ever heard or would ever hear, all at once.

That voice, that isn't human, he thought, but felt no fear or even surprise.

"Did he tell anyone?"

"No." The reply was as tonally blank as the voice on the phone. The doctor's answer came automatically. It was something speaking through him, using him as a flautist uses their instrument.

There was no click as the phone went dead. That awful voice had finished its business and fell away into a blank channel, all silence and line noise. The twilight pouring in the windows cast long shadows along the walls of his office, and from those shadows came a clicking, scurrying sound. Movement. Little monstrosities, no bigger than his hand, each with a dozen pairs of legs and mandibles that seemed to occupy half their bodies came writhing forward and began to consume the remains of the boy.

One of the insect-like creatures looked up at him apprehensively while it perched in front of a puddle of wet blood. A long tongue came out from between the clicking mandibles and began licking up the blood, leaving patches of perfectly clean carpet in its wake. These creatures, which could only be the lemures that toneless voice had spoken of through him, were efficient, and in less than five minutes there was nothing left of the corpse. All the blood was licked up, the scraps of clothing gone; all the bones were crunched and devoured by the little beasts. The creatures seemed to take no pleasure in their task; they were eating the way acid burns.

The doctor felt no surprise. He felt nothing at all. The lemures clicked and clacked their way back into the lengthening shadows and vanished. He got up from the desk and went into the private bathroom. He washed his face and looked up into the mirror. He had no problem looking himself in the eye.

"Tomorrow will be different. We will pull this together. We will work. We will care. We will be doctors." Once he was sure that his reflection believed him, they turned their backs on each other yet again and he walked back into the office. The young boy once known as Dennis Kimble was completely forgotten now. He gathered his things and made his way down the long hall, pausing to put a pair of boots he found in an examining room in the trash, and walked past the nurse's station.

He walked out into the waiting room and saw his receptionist, Jennifer, throwing out her trash from the day. As he picked up the last of the files and put on his long coat, she spoke.

"Heya, Doc. Wanna go get a bite to eat with me before calling it a night?" she looked over hopefully. He had harbored a vague suspicion she had been trying to land him in bed for years, but was never quite sure.

"Nope, sorry."

A small flicker of unease came over him. It passed and he couldn't think of what it had been about. He walked to the door and turned to beam a smile back at her.

"I already ate."

End