Adam froze. And even though his body seemed to have melted at the foot of the toilet, he managed to get his mind to react, at least enough to understand that the surprise of the encounter had come from him alone. His double hadn’t even flinched.
He blinked fast, trying to adjust to the dim lighting.
The stranger wore a beard that further obscured his countenance, but beneath it was hidden a face identical to his own; those severe eyes confirmed it.
What Adam had in front of him was some sort of doppelgänger, an evil double, some sort of post-apocalyptic version of himself.
And before he could say anything, the stranger turned and left.
Adam picked up his soul from the floor and went after him. He left the stall and bumped into someone. It wasn’t the one he was looking for, just a random guy waiting to use the toilet.
He looked away. Among the cluster of men, his sort of twin fled from the restroom. The boys in front of the urinals got in the way of the chase. Adam pushed them aside and ran for the exit.
He crossed the restroom’s threshold and got back into the heavy shadows of the VIP platform. The number of people filled his field of vision. He peered into the figures outlined in the clouds of vapor and multicolored lightning, but he couldn’t find his double.
Who was he? Why was he running away? Why show his face just to run away?
His eyes went from side to side. Nothing.
If he had only paid attention to the way his double dressed, maybe it would have been easier for him to search for the man; but the lights were dim, and the darkness was deep, and his face—Damn! Would he have loved to freeze time and switch on the lights!
It just must have been someone with a striking resemblance, he tried to convince himself.
No. This wasn’t a ‘Sorry, I thought you were someone else,’ type of situation. He knew what he had seen. Discarding it would have been an easy way to ease the frustration of not being able to… what? Catch the stranger? Assault him with questions? Watch him closely?
He thought he recognized the doppelgänger among those descending the stairs to the dance floor. He shouted at him, though his voice disappeared in the racket, so he ran toward him.
He went down the last few steps. He had lost him again, this time maybe for good. If upstairs he had had a hard time finding him, down there it would be almost impossible; the club was four times the size of the VIP platform and there were thousands more people.
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‘I could have sworn I let you in a few minutes ago,’ Little John had said. ‘I knew the beard was not your thing.’
Of course! The bouncer had allowed his double to enter the club, thinking it was him.
“Have you lost someone, handsome?” a voice whispered in his ear, and a shiver licked up the back of his neck.
He turned on his heel and found a face just inches from his. A woman who offered him the most wicked smile that anyone had ever offered him in his life, something that put ice in his gut. It was the kind of smile that a praying mantis, if it had lips like that woman’s, would have made just before eating its prey; wide, fleshy lips, painted with a black tone that highlighted the paleness of her face, a gray face... almost blue, as he could see through the lights—none of the other faces he had around him looked like that—And not only was the color of her skin striking, but so was the rest of her appearance. Her eyes, also outlined in black, shone with a bewitching violet color, transforming her gaze into something magnetic, so much so that Adam took a while to notice that, above those eyes, there were no eyebrows and that, higher up, there was no hair either. The strange woman did not have a single hair on her head, decorating it only with shimmering crystal earrings, so long that they almost touched the base of her neck.
Adam took a step back to get a better look at her.
The woman must have been in her fifties, perhaps in her sixties; some furrows around the eyes and on the neck gave it away. To tell the truth, though, none of the young girls around her were at the same level as her physical condition. Not any woman at that age could afford to wear a miniskirt and look as sexy as she did. Her hips would have intimidated the devil himself, and her legs would have made anyone who had taken vows of chastity tremble. However, that strange baldness, that disconcerting lack of eyebrows, those violet eyes that intimidated him, but at the same time, didn’t let him go—Damn!
He tried to move away from her, but his movements were clumsy, as if his own muscles refused to obey his orders.
Until a crackling of lights brought the image of his doppelgänger back into his thoughts and snapped him out of the spell. He had to find that man!
But the woman, seeking to hold him back, ended up digging her nails into his arm. What the hell?!
Adam wriggled free, and when he turned around, ready to bark a few rude words at her, she was gone. That bitch had slipped away.
He rubbed the scratch. It burned! He tried to check if she had left a mark, but with such darkness, there was little he could see. He thought of warning Little John about that lady so that he would prevent her from entering the club next time; but no. Screw her! Finding his doppelgänger was more important than reporting a lunatic.
However, five minutes went by, and nothing.
The voice of reason told Adam that he would not find him, not because there were a lot of people in the club, but because the stranger didn’t want to be seen; otherwise, he wouldn’t have run in the first place. Tracking him down in a nightclub that big would be a waste of time.
And suddenly, something warm and wet slipped between his nose and mouth. He wiped it off with his fingertip. It was something dark. Was that—?
He rushed to the nearest men’s room, made his way through the guys, and faced the mirror.
He had blood. Blood was dripping from one of his nostrils.