Dr. Doppleganger’s Mystery Mansion
The good doctor lost his parents in a car accident when he was 11. His sister was slashed to death the following winter when she fell down in a busy ice skating pond. Since that fateful time, he dedicated himself to the work of replicating life, taking back what was stolen from him. Without love or friendship to distract him, his advancements in the field of cloning surpassed what anyone else would have been capable of dreaming of for another 100 years. Blastocysts dissolved, cells were extracted, failure mounting on top of failure, and yet just as quickly the discoveries and solutions kept coming, science seemingly merging with fiction to unlock the next door in a maze of unvisited hallways. Soon the tendrils of a nervous system found their coating in a mulch of skin, wrapping, forming limbs that could kick, thumbs that could curl. As the scalpel carved away the muck between his first fetus’ trembling head and the petri dish, Phase 2 of his work began. Inoculation.
He began to invite strangers into his home, daring them to guess the secrets of his incredible findings, letting them scoff and deride his accomplishments as parlor tricks. All the while, he used their cynicism as fodder to keep his likenesses inside, beating it into their heads that the world outside hated and denied them, that he was their only friend, their father, their brother, their Good Doctor. For lack of a frame of reference - there was no TV, and no books in the library but those devoted to science - they had no choice but to obey.
From there, the years dragged on, and the clones began to show signs of fatigue. Bloodshot eyes and coughing, constant coughing from every corner of the house. But the Doctor was not In. It was winter, and the pond outside the window had frozen over again. He stared unblinking out the window, more preoccupied with a little girl’s laugh he thought he heard than the coughing and moaning all around him. Until a hand gripped his shoulder.
“What have you done, boy?”
The doctor turned to see an older, taller man with his face, charred from some horrible burn, blood caked on his ears and down his chest, body covered in black tire tracks, shuffling towards him. Next to him, another clone in a pink dress and pearls, with his jaw snapped off, moaned and dragged closer and closer.
“What have you done to us?”
The Doctor bumped up against the window when a pair of ice-cold hands burst through the glass to grab him. They belonged to another clone, wracked with 8-inch-long gashes across his forehead, throat and eyes. He whispered in the Doctor’s ear:
“You will always be alone.”
When the Doctor came screaming to, he was soaked in sweat on the couch by himself. Not a creak in the floorboards to be heard, no coughing, no broken window, no one to just the crackling of the fireplace and a soft rustle of his unfinished papers. He sipped his coffee and, with a heavy sigh, he took the papers to his study. There was work to be done.
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