The Doppelganger

Once a man, named Frederick married a Doppelganger; a kind of Demon that slowly steals away a person’s identity.

His close friends, Hans and Eric, had tried to warn him because they had heard  rumours about the woman from people, they said, who had lost members of their family to her.

“Please, don’t marry that…that thing”, they had pleaded, “It’s a monster who will take your form while you slowly fade away”.

But the man hadn’t listened. He’d just laughed it off. His wife seemed like a perfectly normal and charming young woman, after all, and he just couldn’t believe that she was any kind of demon.

But then, each day that they were together, the man saw his wife changing.

They were just little, superficial changes at first; like mannerisms; the way she walked and moved; her facial gestures and her tone of voice and he didn’t pay much attention to them.

But then he noticed her starting to wear his clothes and then, one day, she took a pair of scissors and cut and dyed her hair to look just like his.

“Still”, he thought to himself,  “That’s not so very odd. It’s just modern that’s all. My wife is a very stylish woman”.

But, after that, other things about her started to change as well; first she started to wear contact lenses, her deep blue eyes becoming dark brown to match the hair she had died from blonde to black; her face that had been oval started become squarer and her body that been slender, more muscular. He even saw black hairs appearing on her upper lip and chin though he dismissed these as the facial hairs that woman normally get.

But not only that; looking at himself in the mirror, the man noticed that he was starting to fade; his skin and hair and all the defining features of his face becoming blurry, like a smudged watercolour painting.

“You just have a problem with your eyesight”, his wife said in a voice that was beginning to sound, uncannily, like his, “You need to get your eyes tested; wear a pair of glasses, that’s all”.

But the man knew there was more to it than that and he even started to have strange, frightening nightmares in which he was always hovering over his own body, like a dispossessed soul, looking down on it.

“If you are me?”, his body would ask, “Then who am I?”.

And then, finally, one morning the man tried to open his eyes but couldn’t see anything except darkness.

“I’m blind”, he said.

“Don’t be foolish”, he heard himself say, “I just have your eyes, that’s all”.

Then he tried to move but he couldn’t feel his body.

“What’s happened to my legs and my arms?”, he asked in a terrified voice.

“I have them, of course”, said the voice, laughing, “And they fit very well, thank you”.

“My friends were right”, he said, despairingly, trying to weep but lacking the eyes to make tears, “You are a demon”.

“Hush”, said his wife and then the man could not speak anymore.