The Imposter Syndrome
by Eric Nash
Rachel came home early that day and disturbed the ritual. He’d been caught. Tom rushed to pull up his jeans and grab his jumper, heart pounding. She stared at him, open-mouthed in the doorway, a shadow framed by the glare of the hallway light. Her umber hair glowed Indian yellow like a glorious halo, its intensity sizzling into his brain for a later canvas. Even in this moment of shame, art remained at the forefront of Tom’s thoughts.
“What were you up to?”
He combed his fingers through his hair and flashed her an embarrassed smile. He’d been naked, lying in the middle of the lounge floor. What could he possibly say?
She clocked the ceremonial candle flickering in the hearth, the hazel twigs on the carpet, forming a pentacle within a circle of sage leaves. She moved around him, crouching down for a closer look. “What on earth is this?”
She’d picked up one of the twigs before he had a chance to stop her. It caught on a sage leaf, flicking it away, breaking the circle.
“Rachel!”
“What?”
“You mustn’t disturb the ring of protection! It makes us vulnerable.”
She laughed. “Don’t talk daft.”
He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, swiftly uttered the spell’s closing words, and snuffed out the candle. His eyes darted from corner to corner, checking for… well, he hadn’t done this before, so he wasn’t quite sure…
She discarded the twig and took a seat on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.
“What is all this shit, anyway?”
They were different, she and Tom. She had studied economics; he had studied art. A lot of her decisions were black and white; he viewed his crazy life though a kid’s kaleidoscope. She anchored him; he encouraged her wild side. They were good together. But his one passion frustrated Rachel, and her cold logic could not let it slide. They’d left their friends and family behind for a brand-new house in an unfamiliar town, mortgaged to the hilt but filled with excitement. Charlie, her son, struggled to adjust to the move, and they soon saw they’d need all the help they could get. Financial, practical and—Tom thought—spiritual.
“It’s a blessing. For the house. For us.”
Rachel bit down on her hollow laugh, letting the air whistle through her teeth instead. “Are you really that worried?”
“No. Not really. I’m just shifting the balance in our favour. Boosting our capital.”
“Talking of which, I managed to get you a job interview at Evans and Brown out on Redlynch Road.”
He nodded thanks and turned away to tidy the artefacts—better that than get into another row. She knew how he felt about being pushed! But he couldn’t say anything—she’d only take it the wrong way—so he swallowed his bitterness. Was it healthy? Probably not, but she did it, too. She didn’t say anything when he quit his job to work full-time as an artist, nor when he took it on himself to convert the empty box room into his studio, before she got any ideas about a nursery. That’s why the air between them often felt stretched. It could snap at any moment, and the thought terrified him.
“Will you go?” she asked.
He could sense her watching from the sofa.
“Sure.”
They both knew his paintings sold—Apple Lane Gallery was exhibiting his work as they spoke. Tom was gaining a good reputation, but he needed more time to prove things to her. If he got this new job, the workload would limit his time, slow down his commissions. Stress and tiredness would stifle his creativity; couldn’t she see that? He’d have to give up painting. He rubbed his arms to dispel the new chill that had crept in.
“Why are you home, anyway?”
“Stupid roadworks outside the office. I couldn’t think straight with all that noise, so I came home. That’s alright, isn’t it? I’ll set my laptop up in the bedroom like before.”
“You going to pick up Charlie from school? He’d like that.”
“I need to finish a report, Tom.”
She never stopped.
He thought about that for a moment. She really didn’t. She was dedicated to their life together in a way that sometimes made him ashamed. Perhaps, he should help share the load by going back to work. Take some of the pressure off her. Otherwise, it’d only be a matter of time before their seething frustrations boiled over, scalding them both.
“You best get started then. I’ll make you a coffee before I go.”
When he came back out of the kitchen, they met in the hallway. She smiled, taking the drink wordlessly, then climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
“I’ll be off soon. Love you.”
“Okay,” she called down, shutting the bedroom door.
The afternoon light began to fade, allowing the shadows, once confined to the corners of the living room, to reach out and cast their gloom. He hated this season, the numbing cold, the impatient dark. The brief winter’s light could be dazzling and pure, but it embraced melancholy like a tragic heroine.
“Tom.”
He turned around, expecting—hoping—to see Rachel close behind him. But he saw nothing. Nobody.
“Rachel?”
The deep voice didn’t sound like her. Had he imagined it? He went into the hallway and peered upstairs, then scouted the kitchen and checked the back door. He stood alone in the shadows, shivering, and tried to convince himself that the draught from the front door was the cause.
On his way out of the house, he notched the thermostat a click higher, his ear still pricked for out-of-place noises in the dark.
When Tom and Charlie returned home, his stepson bolted upstairs, eager to find his mum.
“Shoes!”
Charlie’s shoes tumbled down and landed in the hallway.
Tom tidied them and removed his outer layers, then headed into the living room. The house remained cold. He checked the thermostat, but she hadn’t changed it back.
“Tom.” The resonance of the voice tickled the tiny hairs in his ear. It wasn’t his imagination. Rachel and Charlie were upstairs, yet the voice was here, in the room with him. He flicked on the overhead light, heart racing.
He had repeated the words to close the spell, he’d extinguished the candle. But Rachel had broken the circle, hadn’t she? She’d broken the fucking circle. But it didn’t matter, right? He’d performed a blessing, not a… a summoning. It was just a little ritual of positive energy, something Rachel would dismiss as a placebo, plucked from the hundreds of new-age wonders posted on the internet.
“And yet here I am. Don’t be afraid, Tom.”
The source of the voice had shifted to the sofa. The air in front of it shimmered. A vertical fissure appeared in it—as tall as Tom, pitch black—splitting the agitated space. Widening. Tom retreated to the door, gasping for breath. It was so hot in here all of a sudden. His fingers fumbled behind him, but he couldn’t find the handle. Then the fissure, the shimmering air—all of it—vanished.
In its place, a man and a child sat on the sofa, quite content, paying him no mind. His doppelganger and Charlie. Tom’s head thudded. His eyes ached in their sockets as he gaped, trying to grasp what he was seeing. Their clothes were identical, he and the other Tom, down to the olive-green oil stain on the cuff of his jumper and the crumpled tissue poking out of his black jeans. The exact same shaving nick. The man was Tom’s reflection, freed from mirrored glass. He sat in Tom’s preferred pose—one leg perched on the other, an ankle resting on the knee—breathing as the other breathed, relaxing on a cushioned throne like royalty.
And by his side sat Charlie, or rather the boy’s counterpart—a little cherub in his St Peter’s school uniform, tie askew, big toes poking out of his worn, grey socks.
The overpowering eeriness of what he saw made Tom want to puke. The likenesses so uncanny and utterly convincing that Tom half felt himself to be fading, unable to comprehend he could exist in two places at once.
But what then revealed itself in the cast of the overhead light gave Tom some slender hope. The subtle, yet very real difference between the originals and the abominations on the sofa. The doppelgangers had a reddish tint to their brown hair.
Imposters, both! A trick! This chip in their illusion held Tom together. His breaking point sealed and bonded by the rising anger inside him. The audacity of the pair! To come into his home intending to usurp him. And look at them both: the man cuddling the boy, the boy leaning into the warmth. The other Tom was already a better parent!
He balled his hand into a fist.
The imposter raised his palm. “Not a good idea.”
Tom glanced behind him into the hallway, checking to see if the real Charlie or Rachel were coming down the stairs. Satisfied the coast was clear, he shut the door and strode toward the intruders.
“Get out of my house.”
“We have an offer for you,” his imposter replied, picking a nail absently.
“I don’t give a fuck. Out. Now.”
The space in front of him began shimmering again. Another rupture appeared. This time, the air around it bulged as if something on the other side forced the breach. The fissure convulsed and burst open. The head of a huge hound lunged out at him. Its red gaping maw, crammed with teeth as long as his forearm, could have swallowed Charlie easily, but the eyes were intent on Tom alone. As the jaws snapped shut, he jumped back, toppling onto his backside, spattered with gobbets of ropey saliva. The teeth had snagged the front of his jumper, and the monstrous thing now dragged him towards the opening. He tried to scramble backward, but the jumper dug into the back off his neck. Tom tore at the material, yanked it over his head, and threw it in blind panic. He wildly kicked at the hound as his shoulders struck the door behind him. A low growl rose in pitch and terrifying volume, and Tom shrieked, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Then it vanished. The hound had shot back into the tear, as if wrenched by an angry master. The tear shrank, shut, seamless and invisible; the air stabilised, and the room returned to how it had initially appeared, save for the imposters still waiting on the sofa.
“Wh… what was that?”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The man waved his hand in dismissal. “Charlie-boy will be coming downstairs soon enough, so let’s get straight to the point. You can have your art and keep Rachel, too. I’ll give you the skill to create wonders. Masterpieces, each one, and this gift will be yours to keep. Your art will be priceless out there in the world. You’ll never need worry about bills again.”
He paused as Tom took this in, mouth agape, caught for a moment in the vision. The other Tom smiled briefly and nodded.
“More than mere security. Your lives will be made. Rachel will be with you always; you’ll immortalise her in your work. Imagine it, Tom. Everything you wanted, without worry, without guilt. It’s yours for the taking, right now.”
The imposter ruffled the boy’s hair. “There is a price, of course. You must promise me to take my child for a year, treat him as your own. Keep him safe, Tom. Teach him your ways. Strengthen him.”
Who were these people? What was he talking about? And what the ever-loving fuck had tried to take a chunk out of him?
“You have until I leave to decide.”
He imagined working for hours in his studio and – for once – not feeling like an imposter himself. Pictured Rachel holding his hand, not divorce papers.
“How? How can you promise me all of that?”
“I call that a stupid question. Considering….” He gestured at the torn, spit-spattered jumper.
The lounge door struck Tom’s back. It remained ajar, pressed there momentarily, before swinging back and hitting him again. Tom gasped in pain but leant his weight against the glossed wood, attempting to hold it closed.
“Let me in!” Charlie demanded from the hallway. He shoulder-barged into the door for a third time, and Tom’s head snapped back, smacking hollow against the panel.
The air in front of the sofa shimmered.
“One time offer, Tom.”
The door banged into him again with childish fury.
“Stop it, Charlie!”
The small fissure split apart like a paper tear.
“Last chance,” the imposter said.
Immersing himself in his art, his passion. The life he’d always wanted, and guilt-free. Something nagged at him, a stray thought knocked away by the door.
“Tom, why won’t you let me in?” Charlie cried.
Everything he wanted, just to look after someone else’s kid. Hell, I do that already.
The couple were on their feet. The man was the first to slide through the gap. Life would return to normal, trudging on as though this had never happened: Rachel working herself into the ground, him giving up his dreams to salvage what was left of his marriage.
The man was almost through, only his hand remained, outstretched for the boy to take.
“I promise!”
The child vanished. With one hand holding the edge of the shrinking fissure, the imposter murmured, “Come on then, Charlie.”
Then he was gone.
The warm glow of the lamp pushed back the darkness; the soft cushions where the doppelgangers had sat moments before showed no indentations. The heating finally kicked in. Tom could have pretended the entire thing never happened, if it wasn’t for his tattered jumper.
The door pressed against him, hard, but less energetically than before.
“Pleeeeeeeease! I want to watch my cartoons. Mum said I could.”
As Tom stood up, his head felt full of cotton wool. He was off-balance. The world was a little too white. When Charlie entered, Tom grabbed hold of the door to prop himself up.
Charlie snatched the remote from the coffee table and slumped onto the sofa, where moments before his double had perched unnervingly still. The toes still poked through his socks, but Charlie had removed his tie, and a moustache of milk now lined his top lip. Tom felt giddy, plagued by a waking nightmare. That’s what it was, a twisted daydream. This was a reality he could grasp and might well have believed had the lamplight not revealed red strands in Charlie’s hair.
He’d been promised he’d be without guilt, yet the sickening emotion coiled in his gut like a worm, stealing his appetite, consuming him from the inside. Tom searched the house tirelessly for the real Charlie, but his stepson was gone. Swapped. Hostage against any harm to this other child, this changeling.
What had he done?
What he needed to do—for the sake of his family. But that lie did not sit well with him, pressing down on his chest like a pure lead weight.
At tea-time, the boy shovelled sausage and mash into his mouth with Charlie’s ferocious appetite. Rachel asked him about school, and, between mouthfuls, he answered nonchalantly in Charlie’s unbroken voice. It was bewildering. Infuriating somehow. They discussed football, his latest Nintendo game, the birthday party coming up on Saturday, and the boy knew all the right answers, performed Charlie’s mannerisms to perfection. Tom couldn’t tell the difference between the two boys, save for that occasional reddish tint to the hair when it caught the light just so.
Rachel might spot something, but probably not that night; she wasn’t herself, albeit in a more prosaic sense. She appeared listless and drained of colour. She climbed under the duvet clutching a hot water bottle a full hour before Charlie’s bedtime. Period pains, nothing more.
The next hour ticked by tensely. The child constructed a Lego fighter plane, sat cross-legged in quiet concentration on the lounge carpet. Tom switched on the television, allowing the on-screen chatter to dull mad thoughts of human masks and mind-control. But as the boy raced around the room flying his toy, nothing in his actions confirmed Tom’s fears. Not a flicker, until bedtime.
There in the bedroom, Tom read him the usual story, throat dry, his performance stilted as “Charlie” snuggled into the pillow. Look at him. His long lashes and snub nose, the young, fragile skin, dotted with freckles—it was all so perfect. Closing the book, Tom forced himself to smooth the boy’s hair as he did every night. He registered the coolness of it under his palm, then the heat of the boy’s cheek. The damned cuckoo even felt like his stepson. Tom’s vision blurred again, and he rubbed his temple. Maybe it really was Charlie curled up in front of him. Children’s hair often changed colour, darkening as they grew, he’d heard.
“Goodnight… Charlie.”
The eyes flicked up to meet him, and a thin smile crept up the boy’s plump cheeks like a vein of mould in Stilton.
“Goodnight, Tom.”
He closed the door and all but fled downstairs again.
Later, when he finally felt tired enough to sleep, he crept back up to the room he shared with Rachel. She had kicked the duvet off their bed, so he bent to retrieve it. As he did so, he glanced over and saw just how ill she now looked. Her matted hair stuck to her skull, her old t-shirt dark with sweat. He activated his phone torch and gasped at the devastation it revealed. Her cheeks were hollow, her arms stick-thin— even her thighs seemed little more than skin and bone. How could this have happened, and so quickly? Rachel’s age seemed to have trebled in a just few hours. A wave of nausea surged into his throat. He dropped the phone and bolted to the bathroom.
He’d caused this—he was sure of it. He’d brought death into their home. This wasn’t cramps, nor anything so natural. The boy was a decoy! A trap! His very presence was draining her dry. He could picture it, teeth clamped to Rachel’s throat like a damned vampire, even as he slept next door. Was it there now, clinging to her as Tom knelt clutching the rim of the toilet bowl?
He had to get Rachel away from the house, into an ambulance. He swiped the tears and snot from his cheeks with his sleeve, rinsed his face with cold water as he thought through the next steps. He stared at himself in the mirror, guilt and horror wrestling with determination. He could still make everything right.
Out on the landing, Rachel smiled at him, her body full and healthy but framed and mounted on the wall. Trapped in a sunset landscape he’d painted years before they’d met. She wore the work clothes from earlier that day, the same hairstyle, too.
You’ll immortalise her in your work.
He snatched the painting and hurried into his studio, only to be confronted by another Rachel grinning from an unfinished commission drying on the easel. He scoured the room and saw her over and over again. She haunted each sketch and canvas, every painting racked against the walls.
Rachel will be with you always.
He knew, then, that his wife would appear in all that he created, while her true self withered to dust in a hospital bed.
He set to work. Mixed colours to match the different shades of paint, and applied them with consideration to every landscape, portrait, and still life. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. He had to make this right. The Rachels faded under fresh layers of oil, her smiles smothered. By the end of the evening, he’d erased her completely, hoping to restore the original. Tom rushed to their bedroom, switched on the overhead light, and threw back the duvet to see if it had worked. The spotlight caught her curled in the foetal position. He steadied himself on the bedside table, a groan escaping his throat. The ridges of her ribcage stood out starkly, her hips whetted down to sharp iliac blades. Each thick knot of her vertebrae stuck out of her spine like a tooth on a cog trying to perforate the brittle skin.
He hadn’t removed Rachel from his paintings, he’d buried her.
His fingers curled around the handle of a scalpel. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He had no choice. The sharp blade sliced through his past: previous girlfriends, lost friends, heartache, and laughter. The discarded pieces of his work littered the floor like torn-up photographs as tears streamed down his cheeks.
Each piece had charted his progress as an artist: the painful steps and thrilling leaps of his skills developing. A record of the only thing he may have been good at; the one thing that made him feel more alive than anything else; a testament to years of sacrifice.
He tossed the last Rachel onto the tottering wreckage of his life’s work.
But in their bedroom, he found this sacrifice had made no difference.
He’d call an ambulance, get her to safety. Desperate, he knelt at her bedside, fumbling for his discarded phone. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I didn’t agree to this!”
Rachel stirred but did not wake. The duvet rose and fell with her laboured breath.
The stifled sound of a throat being cleared broke Tom’s concentration. He turned to see his imposter leant up against the wardrobe. It was smiling.
“You did this, you bastard!” Tom dropped his phone and scrambled to his feet.
It raised its hand in warning, and the air blurred between them.
Tom raised his fist. “I don’t care about your fucking dog!”
“But you care about Rachel. She’s not lost yet.”
The veiled threat punched him in the gut, leaving him breathless.
“You may be interested to learn that one of your paintings just sold for rather a lot of money.”
“I don’t want this.”
“It’s true. Check your phone.”
“Fuck you. Give Rachel back to me.”
“Check your phone. Now. Otherwise, you shan’t be getting anything.”
Tom had missed five calls from the gallery. A private collector had bought one of his paintings, paying a sweet million. The work had a price tag of two-hundred and fifty quid. It was utter madness, yet this madness suddenly elevated Tom above thousands of other artists, shoving his work into the spotlight. When describing himself as a painter from then on, he could truly believe it, rather than shrivelling inside from embarrassment. He’d have to brace himself for a whole new level of criticism, mind you. Reviews in respected journals and national papers assaulting his fragile ego. A million pounds, though. It gave him the freedom to create.
“I want Rachel returned as she was.”
“As she was? Are you sure? People believe in you now, Tom. Belief backed by hard cash, not the polite words she mumbled to bolster your ego. You know she never rated your work. She wanted you to give it all up! Don’t waste your gift, Tom. Don’t rob the world of your talent.”
“You can’t ask me to make this choice. This isn’t what you promised.”
“And yet here we are. It’s up to you, Tom. Your only chance. Will you take it?”
Tom met the doppelganger’s eye. What choice was there—really? He gripped the paintbrushes in both fists and raised them to eye level, ready to snap his tools in two. He held them there for what seemed like forever, the madness swirling inside his head.