Fortnight of Fear Read Online Free PDF

across the floor. Gil heard a voice saying, “You’re awake. I’m sorry. I should have come in earlier.”
    Gil lifted his head. Unconsciously, he drew his long tangled hair out of his eyes, and looked up. A man was silhouetted in the doorway, a man wearing a business-suit and polished shoes.
    â€œWho are you?” he asked, hoarsely. “What the hell has happened to me?”
    The man said, “You’ve changed, that’s all.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake, look at me. What the hell is going on here? Did you do this with hormones, or what? I’m a man! I’m a
man
, for Christ’s sake!” Gil began to weep, and the tears slid down his cheeks and tasted salt on his lips.
    The man came forward and knelt down beside himand laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t hormones. If I knew how it happened, believe me, I’d tell you. But all I know is, it happens. One man to the next. The man who was Anna before me – the man who took the body that used to be mine – he told me everything about it, just as I’m telling you – and just as
you’ll
tell the next man that you pick.”
    At that moment, the bedroom door swung a little wider, and the man’s face was illuminated by the light from the hallway. With a surge of paralyzing fright, Gil saw that the man was him. His own face, his own hair, his own smile. His own wristwatch, his own suit. And outside in the hallway, his own suitcase, already packed.
    â€œI don’t understand,” he whispered. He wiped the tears away from his face with his fingers.
    â€œI don’t think any of us ever will,” the man told him. “There seems to be some kind of pattern to it; some kind of reason why it happens; but there’s no way of finding out what it is.”
    â€œBut you knew this was going to happen all along,” said Gil. “Right from the very beginning. You
knew.
”
    The man nodded. Gil should have been violent with rage. He should have seized the man by the throat and beaten his head against the wall. But the man was him, and for some inexplicable reason he was terrified of touching him.
    The man said, quietly, “I’m sorry for you. Please believe me. But I’m just as sorry for myself. I used to be a man like you. My name was David Chilton. I was thirty-two years old, and I used to lease executive aircraft. I had a family, a wife and two daughters, and a house in Darien, Connecticut.”
    He paused, and then he said, “Four months ago I came to Amsterdam and met Anna. One thing led to another, and she took me back here. She used to make me makelove to her, night after night. Then one morning I woke up and
I
was Anna, and Anna was gone.”
    Gil said, “I can’t believe any of this. This is madness. I’m having a nightmare.”
    The man shook his head. “It’s true; and it’s been happening to one man after another, for years probably.”
    â€œHow do you know that?”
    â€œBecause Anna took my passport and my luggage, and it seemed to me that there was only one place that she could go –
he
could go. Only one place where he could survive in my body and with my identity.”
    Gil stared at him. “You mean – your own home? He took your body and went to live in your own home?”
    The man nodded. His face was grim. Gil had never seen himself look so grim before.
    â€œI found Anna’s passport and Anna’s bank-books – don’t worry, I’ve left them all for you. I flew to New York and then rented a car and drove up to Connecticut. I parked outside my own house and watched myself mowing my own lawn, playing with my own daughters, kissing my own wife.”
    He lowered his head, and then he said, “I could have killed him, I guess. Me, I mean – or at least the person who looked like me. But what would that have achieved? I would have made a widow out of my own wife, and