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"I live in Connecticut. Unfortunately, it's a pretty long drive out to Rochester and we don't have much time so I'll just need to explain everything to you as best as I can over the phone."
She paused and I just waited. There was nothing I could possibly say in response to her telling me that someone was trying to kill me so I decided to just let her talk. If she started going off the deep end, I could just hang up on her and block her number.
I heard her take a deep breath. "Do you have visions?" she asked, not mincing her words.
I felt as the wind had been knocked out of me. How could this woman possibly know about my visions? I wondered if this really was my aunt and my visions were hereditary. That she had visions too. That meant I could finally have some answers to what was happening to me.
"Yes," I replied, not wanting to give her any more information than necessary, wanting her to do all the talking so that I could decide what to do with what she told me.
"It's a Kile family trait," she said with a humorless laugh. "One that only the women in the family share, although not every female in our family has them. The visions...they can be confusing if you don't understand what's happening in them. They're frightening regardless of whether or not you understand why you're having them. They're visions of the future. Of how these people will die. Or more accurately, how they'll be killed."
I shook my head at her words, even though she couldn't see me. "No, that's not true," I replied. None of the people I had visions about had died. Not that I knew of anyway.
"Caitlin, I know this will be hard for you to accept but many of the people you've seen in your visions have been killed." She paused. "You just think they're alive."
I felt anger start to well up inside me. This was ridiculous. Maybe this was my aunt, and maybe it was true that in my messed up family women had disturbing visions. But I knew it wasn't true that these people were actually dying. Being killed. Maybe this was the next stage of crazy. Maybe I would eventually start to believe my visions. I had a sick feeling that my family was cursed with mental illness.
"How is that possible?" I asked fiercely. "How could these people be dead but yet I still see them walking around? Are you trying to tell me they're ghosts or something? How do ghosts interact with everyone, seemingly living a normal life? That's insane."
"They're not ghosts. They're vardogers."
"They're what?" I was really starting to think it was a bad idea to talk to this woman.
"Vardogers," she repeated. "They're sort of like shadows of people. Everyone has a vardoger that looks just like them. When you get a sense of deja vu, like you've already experienced something, it's your connection to your vardoger making you feel that way. Your vardoger precedes you, visible but invisible at the same time."
"So you're telling me that there are dopplegangers out there and they're killing people off," I asked impatiently, disbelief coloring my voice. This sounded like some bad plot to a horror movie. "That's insane."
"No," she replied. "Dopplegangers are a figment of imagination, created to be a cheap thrill in some Hollywood movie. Vardogers are real. They're just hard to see because you don't know to look for them. They can't speak unless they enter a human body. Vardogers used to be harmless. They had no desire to be a part of the real world. They're not really people, just a carbon copy, so they have no feelings, no wishes. But this changed about a few centuries ago."
"Right, a few centuries ago," I repeated sarcastically. But despite my skepticism, I felt fear clenching my stomach. This woman had to be crazy. There was no way anything she was saying was true. It was laughable but I wasn't laughing. Because a part of me felt like all the pieces of the puzzle were finally settling into place.
"It's true, Caitlin," she said quietly. "About three hundred years ago something changed. We're not sure why, but suddenly the vardogers weren't content to just be shadows anymore. They wanted to overtake their human counterparts. A select group of people started being able to predict which vardogers would turn through their visions. They're called seers. The women in our family started having these visions. The Kile women generations before us started trying to stop them."
"So I come from a long line of vardoger slayers," I said, trying to sound bored but my voice shook, betraying my growing fear.
The woman gave a humorless laugh. "That's not too far from the truth. The vardogers are able to enter their person's body but only for a few moments at a time because they're not strong enough to keep hold. The person's soul automatically expels them although the actual person is usually never aware of what'
s happening. Vardogers can't talk, can't touch other people unless they're in their person's body. Most people would never realize that they're looking into the eyes of a vardoger. But seers can see the flicker of evil in their eyes."
She took a deep breath and continued. "By entering their person frequently over a period of time, vardogers strengthen the connection to their person. We don't think this allows them to hurt other people, but it gives them the power to physically harm their person. Kill them. The vardoger is able to overtake their person once the connection is strong enough to kill them. If the vardoger enters the body at the same moment the person's soul is slipping away, they can permanently attach themselves inside. So the person you see is no longer the same person. That person has died. You're seeing the vardoger that's stolen the body."
The woman paused, as if expecting me to reply, but I stayed silent. I didn't want to believe anything she was saying but my mind was whirring, as past experiences I had long buried rose to the top, corroborating her words.
I remembered the girl from high school. I had never spoken much to her because I usually tried to keep my distance from the people that were in my visions, but she was in my geometry class and sat next to me. She seemed like a nice enough girl, but I remember one day feeling a prickling sensation of being watched and I had automatically looked over at her. Her head was turned to me, her eyes boring into mine with a look of malice I didn't understand. She held my gaze for what seemed like minutes although in reality it was only for a few seconds. She looked at me like she hated me and I didn't understand why. There was no way she could have known about my vision of her. I had no Sarah back then, no one to confide in.
She had then turned away, breaking the intense gaze. I had spent the rest of class glancing at her, but she never looked at me again. When the bell rang, signaling the end of class, she had dropped her pencil as she was packing her stuff into her backpack. I had picked it up to hand to her, wanting her to look at me so I could see the expression in her eyes. She had smiled and thanked me, her eyes clear and untroubled without a trace of the earlier malice.
I suddenly thought of Simon. The night he had walked me home after I had helped him shop, he had looked at me oddly. With a coldness that seemed out of character for him. Could this have been his vardoger? The thought of something overtaking Simon's body was unthinkable so I pushed it away.
But maybe this explained what had happened last night with Jenny's friend Claudia. The way I had reacted to her. To her vardoger? But I still couldn't accept it. I went from thinking I was crazy to wishing I was crazy. That was far better than accepting that there was a world in which doubles were trying to overtake our bodies. That was pure insanity.
"I know that this is a lot to take in right now," the woman said gently. "I wish I could take more time to explain everything to you. To speak to you in person. But there's no time now."
"Why not?"
"Because I've had a vision of your vardoger killing you."
My lips trembled as I pressed them together. I tried to take in deep breaths to calm myself, but I felt as if I was going to burst with fear and anxiety. I wanted this call to have never happened. I would gladly welcome insanity for all this to not be true.
