Gangers

Looking into the dark by the mirror, Harry said, ‘Oh, my God.’
The figure turned, half hidden in shadow. ‘God, Harry? I’m the one who believes in God.’
Harry studied the face of this ... this what? Fiend? No, he thought. Sounds too much like something out of Poe, Lovecraft. This thing was real. He wanted to reach out now, touch the creature in the shadows that smiled at him, taunted him. Yes - maybe fiend was the word. Six months in pursuit of a fiend. Now this. The reckoning. He remembered the hotel register, seeing the name. Not the same name then, of course – that was later. He wrote Harry Holmes, and was about to put his address, when he saw the words on the opposite page: The same bold hand, the flourishing H’s, the very black ink, and - he knew it, he just knew it - the same broad nib of the same Mont Blanc. The letters slanting the other way, but the same. The very same.
‘Nice to have you back, Mr Hughes,’ said the receptionist, smiling. Then she looked down at the page. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I thought you were ...’
‘You thought I was what?’
‘Somebody else, sir.’
Somebody else. If only the fiend had stayed somebody else.
The fiend was grinning now. He could see it knew it had turned his life on its head: when, for example, he’d come back from holiday and someone said they’d seen him yesterday at the hospital and playing golf at the club. And then - his whole body shivered now like a goose just walked over his grave - when he got an email from himself, asking how he was. Then more of them, five, six times a day. And finally, just two hours ago, the phone call: Hello, Harry. I think it’s time we met. Don’t you? Come over to my place.
My place: this wild, nightmare house on the edge of Dartmoor. Lovecraft and Poe would have loved it.
The fiend’s grin turned to a smirk as it stepped into the light of the moon. ‘Look, Harry.’
And he looked, stared.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said the fiend, raising his eyebrows, wanting a reply. ‘Cat got your tongue, Harry?’
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
The fiend walked over to him till they were face to face. His own eyes, nose, lips. The same full lips. The fiend leaned forward and ... kissed him. Passionate, hard, trying to probe with its tongue – He tore himself away, wiping his mouth. ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m not bloody queer,’ he said.
‘Queer?’ said the fiend. ‘Is doing it with yourself queer?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it bloody well is.’
‘You’re so tediously fucking straight, Harry.’
‘Normal.’
‘Normal, Harry? I could be normal, if I tried.’ The fiend walked away from him now, ten paces or so. Then stopped, turned back. ‘But I’m not sure that I could be a surgeon like you, though. I’m all thumbs, me.’
‘And you’re right-handed. I know from your signature.’
‘Clever boy, Harry,’ the fiend said. ‘And you’re a leftie. And, of course’ – a smile – ‘you’re good, Harry, aren’t you? Very good. And I’m ... now, what do they call it?’
Enough. He took out the Remington and cocked the trigger. ‘I’m not that bloody good,’ he said, and took aim.
‘Gosh, Harry. Now, here’s a coincidence.’ The same make of gun came out of the fiend’s jacket. The click of the safety.
‘But have you got the balls?’ said the fiend.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
Bam.Two shots exactly together.
They stood facing each other for the very last time.
‘Oh, dear,’ said the fiend, frowning. ‘So, we’re not at all alike, are we?’
He sank to the floor as the fiend said, ‘You, I suspect, couldn’t hit a barn from the inside. Me, I just never miss.’
The fiend came over. The same oxblood brogues, cavalry twills. He looked up his own nose. ‘Help me,’ he said.
‘The Lord helps those who help themselves, Harry,’ said the fiend, and squeezed the trigger of the shiny automatic.