Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

“You heard me,” Virginia countered. Now that she had come out with the words which had obviously been eating away at her, she seemed calmer, more in control of herself and her emotions.

Cait, on the other hand, felt much less so. She stood suddenly, her calves shoving the wooden chair back on the ancient floor with a loud squeal. She began pacing in the tiny kitchen. Kevin started to rise and she motioned him back down in his seat.

“I have to tell you,” Cait said, choosing her words carefully. “If you thought that statement was somehow going to clear everything up, to answer all of my questions, you were very much mistaken. Why would my own brother—my own twin! —murder me? What possible reason would he have? And furthermore, how can you say such a thing when you only knew us for a couple of hours years ago? When we were only infants?”

Virginia seemed unruffled by the outburst. “You remember what I told you about the frequency of twin births occurring throughout this family’s history, and how it is a statistical impossibility?”

Cait nodded, saying nothing.

“Well, in every instance of twin births into this bloodline—and when I say ‘every instance,’ I’m talking about a history going back hundreds of years—one of the twins has wound up dead at the hands of the other. Every single instance. Bar none.”

Nobody moved and the kitchen was silent.

“What? Why? How is that possible?” The questions sounded hopelessly insufficient to Cait as she asked them. She trudged back to her chair and sat, stunned and confused.

“I believe, and your father believed as well, that the cause of this tragic history is related directly to the quirk of genetics that allows you to see the flashes—Flickers, as you call them—into the lives of others. When a single child is born with the gift, as I was, for example, the normal notions of right and wrong—what we know as ‘conscience,’ for lack of a better term—are as fully developed as they would be with any other human being. This is important, because it means that each time I, for example, receive a Flicker, there is no natural inclination to use the information gained from the vision in a destructive way.”

“You make a choice to behave in an acceptable manner.”

“Exactly. It’s like walking into a candy store and seeing no one behind the counter, but all the candy is placed out in the open where it is easily accessible. You are faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the wrong thing—waiting for the proprietor and paying for the candy, or shoving it into your pocket and leaving the store.”

“I understand the concept of conscience and choosing to do the right thing,” Cait said, realizing she sounded harsher than she intended but not caring. “I just don’t see what all this has to do with twins and the ability to receive Flickers.”

“I’m getting to that,” Virginia said patiently. “So you agree that we all face situations in our lives where we must choose between right and wrong?”

“Of course,” Cait replied with a shrug. “We face those choices daily, both large and small.”

Virginia nodded. “Yes, we do. Now, let me ask you a question. Can you ever recall a time in your life when you received a Flicker and were tempted to use the information you received in a destructive way? With malicious intent?”

“Well, often the Flicker is pretty nonspecific. A lot of the time, the information isn’t anything that could be used for good or bad.”

“Understood. But there are times when the opposite is true, and you see things in your head that could be used either in a positive or a negative way, correct?”

“Of course.”

“Well, in those instances, have you ever been tempted, even a little bit, to use the Flicker in a negative way, to turn the information to your advantage somehow?”

“Of course not!” Cait flushed and drew her head back as if she had been slapped. “That would be wrong!”

Virginia smiled. “It’s never occurred to you that even though you face the same struggles with right and wrong—good and evil, so to speak—as everyone else in the world, every day, you’ve never once had to do the same thing with a Flicker?”

Cait furrowed her brow, her indignant reaction of a moment ago suddenly forgotten. She was silent for a long moment. “I—I guess I’ve never thought about it in that way.”

“Of course you haven’t, dear, because doing the right thing when you receive a Flicker is the most natural thing in the world to you. It’s like breathing, or blinking. When was the last time you gave either one of those things a conscious thought?”

“Never.”

“Exactly. And that’s my point. It goes against your very nature to use a Flicker negatively or destructively.” Virginia stopped talking and Cait sat unmoving, absorbing this strange revelation. Kevin sat next to her, saying nothing, spellbound by the entire bizarre conversation.

“Then my twin brother…” Cait’s voice drifted off as she digested the implications of what she had just learned. A sense of dawning horror wormed through her.

“That’s right, your twin—in this case it’s a brother, by the way, but it didn’t necessarily have to be, you could just as easily have been born the same sex—has undoubtedly been receiving Flickers his entire life, just like you. But in his case, the natural reaction is to mis use the information he receives. Seeking a negative, destructive outcome with Flickers comes as naturally to him as taking a positive path does to you.”

Cait sat back in her chair, thunderstruck. She felt like Alice after falling through the rabbit hole. Suddenly reality was warped and reflected in ways she would never have imagined just an hour ago. It was like looking at life through a fun house mirror. “But… why?”

“Well, as I said before—and keep in mind, this is only conjecture, the best theory your father and I could come up with after spending months thinking about it once we discovered I was pregnant with twins—we theorized this dichotomy is somehow related to whatever psychic ability we possess that allows us to receive these Flickers. Or maybe everyone has the ability, but the average person is unaware of it. In any event, your father and I guessed that this psychic ability must be somehow incompatible with twin fetuses as they develop in the womb, that the sense of morality that accompanies the deciphering of Flickers cannot be split. Thus—”

“One of the twins reacts to Flickers as good and one as evil,” Cait interrupted, so caught up in following her mother’s chain of logic that she was unable to stop herself from blurting it out.

“That’s the conclusion we came to.”

“But it still doesn’t explain why one twin would murder the other.”

Virginia smiled. “You’re quite the sharp cookie.”

Cait said nothing, concentrating on trying to puzzle out the mystery.

“Now we’ve descended into a realm so far removed from normal behavior patterns that it becomes difficult even to hazard a guess, but the best theory we could come up with is that the psychic ability that allows us to receive Flickers is similar in some strange way to the positive and negative polarity of a magnet. If you place the two oppositely polarized sides of a magnet together, they cling to one another, but if you place the two similarly polarized sides together, they reject one another, making it impossible for them to occupy the same space.”

“You’re saying I’m the same as some maniac who wants to kill me.”

“Only in the sense that you have the same psychic ability, an ability containing a moral component that is impossible to split equally, so one side—the good—receives the morality gene, if you will, while the other side—the evil—gets, unfortunately, passed over. Through no fault of his own.”