“The Corner StoryTeller” ™
“Split-Level Shadows”: A gothic tale of déjà-vu, suburbia, and mislaid selves
The Maplewood subdivision I lived in looked harmless enough to outsiders: a lattice of cul-de-sacs, older minivans, and chemically perfect lawns. Every sunset was draped like a bruised lilac over the street, and the tidy houses shifted in my peripheral vision like penitents in a funeral procession. I had lived at 41 Sparrow Lane for six years, shut up behind curtains I kept drawn like funeral drapes. Crowds and cocktail chatter made my pulse stutter, so most evenings I stayed indoors, cataloging the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the grandfather clock that came with the house: sounds no harsher than a pocket watch placed against the ribs of a corpse.
The déjà-vu began on an April night in 2003, after a late storm smeared the moon into a wet palette of white. I was slicing a Granny Smith apple when the sensation struck with surgical clarity: I had sliced this very apple before: same arc of the knife, same squeal of the countertop, yet I knew I had not. The moment lasted three heartbeats, no more, but left my skin prickling and my breath fogging in my kitchen.
Within a week, the episodes multiplied. I would reach for the light switch and feel a second hand guiding mine; a cool, unseen palm overlaying my knuckles. I would glance at the television and see two shows at once: the news anchor’s lips moving to the cadence of a sitcom laugh track. Each incident folded like soft vellum over the next, translucent but stubborn, until reality itself became a palimpsest of almost-erasures.
Sleep offered no respite for me. I dreamed of hallways whose walls bled wallpaper patterns I had never owned, and I woke with the taste of foreign toothpaste in my mouth. By June, I was certain: someone else was leaning through the membrane of my world, and I was leaning back into theirs.
I immediately booked an appointment with Dr. Elaine Frobisher, a clinical psychologist with Harvard credentials, a professional appearance, and glossy business cards. Her office sat inside a converted Craftsman on the edge of the city, its porch sagging like a defeated jaw of a boxer. The waiting room smelled of varnish and lilies, an odor equal parts chapel and morgue.
“So,” Doctor Frobisher said after the introductions, scribbling in a notebook embossed with silver filigree. “You’ve tried exposure therapy for your social anxiety?”
“I’ve tried burning sage, breathing exercises, and exactly one dreadful mixer at St. Luke’s. None worked.” My voice sounded fractured, as though spoken through a cracked speaker. “But that isn’t what’s worrying me now.”
She pushed her heavy glasses up her narrow nose. “Tell me about it.”
“I’m meeting myself,” I said. “Plural.”
I explained: the stuttering dual images, the overlapping tastes, the sense that my thoughts were not entirely my own. She asked if I used narcotics (no), if I slept (poorly), and if I had a family history of epilepsy (none). I mentioned the apple, the light switch, and the laugh-tracked news. She was humming a single, cello-like note each time, a sound that could have been either empathy or skepticism.
“There’s a theory,” I offered, bracing for the laugh. “Déjà-vu as crossover; a momentary entanglement with parallel selves.”
Her pen stilled. She looked over her glasses and gave me a “What did you just say?” look. There was no smile or laugh on her face. “Walk me through it.”
That evening, sitting across from her mahogany desk, I tried words I had barely dared to think:
“There are other versions of me, living in branches of the universe where a different coin flip landed. We’re normally sealed off, but sometimes our timelines graze, like boats in a canal on a foggy night. The contact is quick and messy. Images double. Memories bleed all over.”
A thunderclap rattled the windows, though the sky outside was polite and cloudless. Dr. Frobisher’s eyes flicked upward, then back to me. “When the contact ends, how do you feel?”
“Hollow,” I said. “Like a book with half its pages torn out by someone who needed kindling.”
She assigned homework: to keep a journal, detailing every episode, including physical sensations, smells, and exact timestamps. If nothing else, data might pin the butterfly to the card. I agreed, though the idea of recording the hauntings filled me with more dread than my anxiety was capable of producing. Words trap things; cages sometimes swing open.
Over the next month, I documented forty-two incidents, contacts, and experiences. A sampling:
July 6, 11:14 p.m.— brushed my teeth and tasted both mint and cloves. The mirror showed me wearing a corduroy jacket I do not own.
July 13, 4:03 a.m.— woke to a child humming “Greensleeves” in the hallway. I live alone.
July 19, 9:27 p.m.— opened the fridge for milk, and found a jar of pickled beetroot where the jug should be; I blinked and the jar vanished.
Each note concluded the same: Connection severed.
During our fourth session, I confessed something new: the briefest flashes of thought were not in my voice. Linguistic fingerprints wrong, syntax skewed, yet unmistakably mine. One fragment lingered: Don’t let him smell the smoke. Another: Blue door, not red. They were warnings without context, postcards from a war conducted in corridors I’d never walked in my mind or life.
Dr. Frobisher’s pen raced. “Any idea who ‘him’ might be?”
“Not yet,” I said, though the question echoed long after.
Outside the office, the road into the suburb corkscrewed into a chiaroscuro maze. Streetlamps sputtered amber halos; hedge shadows lengthened like claws. One humid night in August, déjà-vu hit me on the corner of Hawthorn Drive and Myrtle. Reality telescoped in on me. I watched myself, well, three selves, or maybe four, standing under the same flickering lamp. One version of me wore rain-slick hair, another carried a stack of mail, the third held a crowbar crusted with rust. Our eyes met across impossible parallaxes, pupils contracting in restless synchrony.
Then a siren shrieked in some timeline, and the bond snapped. I found my hands empty, my hair dry, but my heart jackhammered with the vitality of the man gripping that crowbar.
Session seven. I placed my journal on Frobisher’s desk. She leafed through the pages, her lips forming silent syllables.
“I see emerging patterns,” she said at last. “Most overlaps occur after 9 p.m., often near reflective surfaces. Things like mirrors, windows, and television screens.”
“Like portals,” I whispered.
“Or triggers,” she countered. “Neurological, perhaps.” Still, her composure had fissured. I noticed sweat beads form at her temples, absorbed slowly by her aubergine headscarf.
“And the warnings?” I asked.
Her gaze drifted to the grandfather clock I had described: the inheritance that creaked and whined in my foyer. “Have you examined the clock’s interior?”
The question startled me. “No. Why?”
“Humor me, and look,” she said, and ended our session ten minutes early.
That night, the house felt freshly deserted, as though I were trespassing on my own life. I approached the clock with a screwdriver, heart hammering an SOS Morse code against my ribs. Removing the back panel revealed dusty gears, a pendulum, and wedged between bricks, a charred envelope. Inside lay three Polaroids: the façade of my house drenched in flames; a man in a corduroy jacket wielding a crowbar; and Dr. Elaine Frobisher, younger, standing beside the same burning house, eyes lit by infernal light.
Scrawled on the envelope flap: Don’t let him smell the smoke.
The room reeled. Déjà-vu cascaded in dizzying layers. I smelled cloves and charred timber; heard distant Greensleeves sung off-key; felt the cool overlay of a stranger’s hand guiding mine toward the crowbar hidden in the garage.
When the episode cleared, I dialed Frobisher’s emergency number. There was no answer. I drove, the first midnight drive I had attempted in years, straight to her office. The Craftsman was dark, the porch sag more pronounced, but the door was unlocked.
Inside, the waiting room lilies had wilted into brown cloaks around their vases. On the receptionist’s desk rested a single journal, mine, open to the latest entry in handwriting not mine:
August 27, 11:59 p.m.— Blue door, not red. Bring the gasoline.
A floorboard creakily groaned above. I mounted the staircase, each step exhaling dust. On the landing, two doors faced me: one painted red, one blue. The smell of smoke threaded the air, faint but accusatory.
The red door hummed with heat. Beneath it, a thin whiff of black soot leaked onto the floorboards. The blue door stood calm and silent, as if it was inviting me in and waiting for me to turn the knob.
Déjà-vu choked me: myriad selves queued at both doors, splitting according to motives I could not decode. The man with the crowbar chose red; the man clutching Polaroids chose blue; someone else, me, here, now, hovered undecided.
The warning pulsed: Blue door, not red.
So, I grasped the blue handle.
Inside, I found Dr. Frobisher seated at a small table, hands folded, her eyes glowing with a terrible relief. Around her hovered mirrors, dozens, propped against walls, arranged on the floor, facing one another in a cathedral of infinite regressions. My reflections multiplied to a legion, each variant wearing a different history like a borrowed coat.
“You listened,” she breathed. “Most don’t.”
“What is happening?” I gasped, throat scraped raw.
“Convergence,” she said. “Every lifetime spins toward its ignition point. Your house, the fire: one branch must burn, others must watch, or the orbit unravels.”
“Which branch is this?”
A roar answered: behind the red door, flames surged, hungry. Smoke crab-crawled along the ceiling, squeezing through the frame.
She beckoned me into the mirror-maze. “Choose your reflection, and step through before the fire decides for you.”
I moved among the mirrors, each surface jittering with static images: me at seven, me at fifty, me carving initials into a park bench, me lying without breath on a suburban lawn ringed by fire engines. I touched the glass of the calmest visage: my eyes patient, hands clean. The surface softened like pond water.
Behind me, the red door splintered, coughing embers. Heat was licking my calves. Dr. Frobisher, silhouetted in flicker-light, whispered, “Remember: some déjà-vu won’t fit inside one head.”
I stepped forward and crossed.
The world contracted, inverted, then blossomed into night air smelling of rain-washed asphalt. I stood on Sparrow Lane, under a lamp whose bulb burned steadily, with no stutter. My house sat intact, windows unlit, the grandfather clock silent. In my pocket, a single Polaroid remained: a photo of two doors, one red, one blue, unmarred by flame.
I breathed deeply once, then again. No overlap, no doubled taste. The street was emptier than if death had taken everyone. Relief unfurled inside my chest until I saw the house next door, number 43, blooming with orange tongues behind its curtains. Sirens howled from distant corridors of possibility.
A man in a corduroy jacket sprinted onto the lawn, coughing, carrying a grandfather clock. Our eyes met: identical irises, identical panic. Between us hung the brittle thread of recognition, then it snapped. He fled into the darkness, clock clutched under his arm like contraband in the arms of a thief.
I stood rooted, Polaroid trembling in my hand, and understood the arithmetic of multiverse bookkeeping: if one branch refuses to burn, another must kindle in its stead.
And somewhere, a psychologist now waits in a mirrored room, tracking a ledger of peculiar debts.
Weird stuff happens, but someone has to pay the fire bill.