Doppelganger - Part the Second

“Am I seeing this”? I gasped, not realizing I was thinking aloud. “Oh yeah there, pancake, you know I’m real” came the eerie response. Now you may wonder why I’d describe this response as “eerie”. Well, for one, I was getting a rude, but conversational response from a mirror while sitting in the dark, and secondly, it was [eerily enough] my own voice, with perhaps a slight overtone of trying to sound spooky. For the moment, I played slug and did nothing. The silence pierced my ears like knives, and time seemed to pass so slowly I distinctly felt my heart beat backward. “Oh, for god sake, just look” he said, annoyed. When he broke the silence, I jumped so hard I had to clinch my ass because a very curious turtle wanted to see what was going on. You know the saying “I almost crapped my pants”? Well, this was the real thing. There’s a saying I live by – Don’t be afraid of cowboys, be a cowboy. I didn’t have any chewing tobacco in my mouth oddly enough at the time, but I did have some cheese-its that had been sitting in there since this ordeal had started, and they’d become a pretty good consistency. I gave a good old tough guy tobacco spit, which of course looked like a tracer round, and turned nonchalantly toward the mirror. I saw a silhouette that looked like me, but the posture was a bit off. “Oh stop it” he hissed, “turn on the light... or, should I”? I scrambled with the lamp cord next to me, but my fingers fumbled as if the dentist had been at them with his needle. Finally, gaining purchase, I yanked the cord so hard it broke off, the light blared on, the shade going askew and throwing light at bizarre angles, and basically just not helping to make the situation any less creepy. And there he was. What I saw indeed looked as though it were a perfect match of me, save for the fact that he had a pig nose. I don’t mean a little bit turned up like a snotty kid nose, but a really obvious huge pig nose. It was sick, it had big zits all over it and everything. That and his eyes looked like huge blackheads, and every time he breathed, they’d pop in and out just a little bit. It was like he had macaroons for eyes. I tried to think back to Sunday school for some clue to a way out of this, but they never let us talk about the good stuff. A loud tapping of glass snapped my attention to my left, and there he was, in the reflection of the glass of a large picture of my mother. His face was slightly transparent over hers. “Ooh, Mr., ooh, come here and give me a nice wet lickity kiss” he said in a crummy, mocking tone, licking his lips and making kissie-poo noises. “Leave her out of this” I shouted, batting the picture aside. It smashed through the window, flying into the night.