I once heard that each person in the world has seven doppelgangers. Seven people scattered all over the Earth who look exactly like you.

It all started when I lost my reading glasses. I couldn’t find them anywhere, and I was already late for work.

My wife Kelsey told me to check the master bathroom, or the chair in the living room, or maybe I’d taken them out on the porch to read morning cartoons to our four-year-old daughter, Ava. No luck. It was like they’d disappeared into thin air.

They weren’t imperative for me to live my life- they were just reading glasses, after all- so I kissed Kelsey and Ava goodbye, set the security system, and went off to work.

I hadn’t yet mastered the morning commute. We’d just moved to a small town in the Pacific Northwest about a month prior after living our entire lives in the Bible Belt, and I was surprised how tough it was to get acclimated. The trees were different, the air was different- even the traffic patterns felt alien to me.

Kelsey and I both grew up on a lot of land and that was non-negotiable for the new place. We ended up buying a nearly finished farmhouse outside the city- two stories, two garages, and thirty acres to call our own. It seemed like the perfect spot. Ava had her own room, and we even had a guest room for the first time. The realtor, Jamie, walked us through the place when we first laid eyes on it and made an offer.

“It’s a beautiful home. Very private.”

It had just been built, brand new, was a giant upgrade for us. I’d always wanted a basement, which it had, but Kelsey was planning to turn it into a library. I was hoping to set up a mancave somewhere but with Kelsey claiming the basement, the guest room set up for visitors, and no attic, I was out of luck. I’d have to settle for the family room.

Kelsey had never wanted to move up here, and I worried that she secretly resented me for making her. The truth was that I wasn’t too keen on leaving home either, but the opportunity was simply too good to pass up. The money was great and I figured that if we gave it a shot and hated it, we could just move back. Kelsey eventually agreed to give it a chance, but she’d hated it since the second we moved in. She hadn’t made an effort to explore or get to the know our new town at all. I could tell she was anxious about making friends, and she and Ava spent all their time at the house. I didn’t want her to be lonely and I was hoping she would come out of her shell over time.

This “too good to be true” work opportunity turned out to be just that- I was leading a team of engineers that were much less skilled than I was led to believe, and I ended up having to work late every night redoing their work and fixing their mistakes. We were under a strict deadline and, to make matters worse, the boss who hired me left the company just as I arrived. I was working for a new guy now, Adam, and he and I didn’t get along from the get-go. He seemed to confuse the engineers’ incompetence for my own, and the first three months on the job I was lucky to leave the office before 9PM.

Kelsey didn’t love this, but she knew it wasn’t my ideal situation either. We got up early together every morning and she would make breakfast while I read Ava the morning comics from the paper, but besides that, we were hardly seeing each other. Kelsey had started letting Ava fall asleep in our bed with her and by the time I was getting home each night, they were already passed out.

I was starting to develop a pathetic routine of getting home when it was dark out and my family was asleep. After a few nights of the garage door waking Ava, I had taken to parking out front and entering through the front door. It was quieter. I’d turn on the kitchen light, revealing Kelsey and Ava’s dinner plates in the sink and mine wrapped in saran wrap in the fridge. Every night I’d heat up my dinner, eat it as I started falling asleep, then wash all three dishes, set the security system, and pass out on the couch. Like clockwork.

But then I lost my reading glasses.

Kelsey swore she had seen me wearing them as I left the house the previous morning, and I figured I’d probably left them at work. That day, in between hour long meetings filled with bad news and personal meetings with Adam where he made his dissatisfaction with my performance clear (despite the lack of productivity not being my fault), I managed to get on my hands and knees in my office and search for my glasses. But no luck. They were gone.

The next few days at work were so stressful that I called in sick the next Monday and took the day with Kelsey and Ava. Adam was angry that I was sick because we had an important meeting with the heads of marketing about the project I was responsible for, but I needed a break. He could handle it on his own. Kelsey, Ava, and I went to the park and I finally got Kelsey into the city- she pretended that she liked it, but I don’t think she did. We ended up watching a movie with Ava that night and just as I was falling asleep, Kelsey woke me.

“I want to have another baby.”

The timing surprised me of course, but it wasn’t just that. The way she said it felt odd. Kelsey had never wanted kids before we started dating, and I practically had to beg her to be open once we got married. Now that we had Ava she was in love, but she had never said anything before to indicate to me she wanted a bigger family.

I knew the move had been hard on her and I was worried she didn’t actually want another child, she just wanted more company. I wasn’t making it easier by working all the time and I felt tremendous guilt for not being there for her during the adjustment period. I felt selfish.

Truthfully, now was probably the worst time to think about having another child but hearing her talk about the possibility made her so happy- I hadn’t seen her light up like that in ages. I told her it was a lovely idea as I set the security system, and she kissed me and took Ava to bed. I told myself I was going to follow her upstairs- our sex life had been nonexistent since we’d moved, and I was hoping this baby talk had her in the mood- but I fell asleep on the couch before I could even finish the thought.

The next morning, I was running late again. I was in a hurry to get dressed and was surprised to find my closet virtually empty. We’d thinned out our wardrobes for the move but I knew I had at least five dress shirts for work, because I’d been wearing a different one each day.

“Kelsey, did you do the laundry?” “Yeah, it’s up there.”

I went to the laundry room and found three dress shirts. I racked my brain for where the others could be while I buttoned one up, but when I asked Kelsey, she had no idea.

“I put the clothes in the laundry basket in the washer and dryer and I put them back. They’re here somewhere.”

I was slightly annoyed- they obviously are in the house, I thought, but it’s a mystery why they aren’t in my closet. As I grabbed my lunch and briefcase, bracing myself for another brutal pummeling from Adam after my sick day, something caught my attention.

“Kelsey...did you go outside this morning?” “No. Why?”

I asked Ava the same question. Kelsey said that Ava had been with her all morning. The security system had been disarmed.

“You probably fell asleep without setting it,” Kelsey said.

I knew I hadn’t. No matter how tired I was, being in a new place outside the city didn’t make me feel all that safe either. I made sure to set it every night and every morning.

I tried getting it out of my head because I had the morning commute to suffer through, and this morning was worse than usual. To cap it all off, when I arrived to the parking garage, I discovered my parking badge was nowhere to be found. Cars piled up behind me as I opened my door, anxiously moved my seat back and checked every inch of the car. I never took it out of my car- there was no need to. But, like my shirts and my reading glasses, it seemed to disappear into thin air.

A parking attendant eventually let me through, and I took the elevator up to my office- where I was surprised to find Adam waiting for me at my desk.

Not only did he had a few choice words about my late arrival, but he also berated me for my performance at the meeting with the heads of marketing the previous day- the one I missed while playing hooky with my wife and daughter.

“You looked like a zombie. How can you expect them to be excited about the product if you convey zero passion or excitement? You didn’t say a word.”

“Adam- I was sick yesterday. I wasn’t at that meeting.” He looked like he wanted to wring my neck.

Instead of dignifying my statement with a response, he instead told me he was going to bring another supervisor on board to help with the workload but made my responsibilities clear. We had a deadline coming up in three weeks and if we didn’t hit it, I would be fired.

My stomach was swimming with acid all day. I didn’t eat, didn’t drink, just worked and tore my hair out trying to problem solve. My team was behind and I felt bad being so hard on them, but suddenly I was worried that I’d just forced my family to move across the country only to be fired two months in.

I came home late that night again and did my routine, except I had no appetite anymore. I washed Kelsey and Ava’s dishes in the sink, set the security system, and decided to crawl into bed with them instead of sleeping on the couch. I didn’t care if I woke them- I needed company.

As I laid down and stared at the air vent on the ceiling, the worry and anxiety of my life started crushing me. I closed my eyes. My head was spinning, and suddenly I felt a burning sensation on my skin. That feeling you get when somebody is watching you.

I opened my eyes.

A pair of eyes stared back at me.

They were blue. Beady. Human. Staring straight down at me from the vent directly above. But the moment I saw them, they pulled back into the darkness and disappeared.

My heart skipped a beat. I waited for the eyes to return, to validate what I’d just witnessed, and felt a paralysis overcome me. But the eyes didn’t come back. For the rest of the night I debated whether I had even seen a pair of eyes in the first place or if it was just my sleep-deprived, stress out mind playing tricks on me. That vent led to nothing but a crawl space and the longer the vent remained eyeless, the more I was convinced I’d imagined it.

I ended up just buying new reading glasses because staring at the screens at work were giving me a headache. I tried to finish out that week strong and came home on Friday night more exhausted than I can remember being in my entire life. I was practically sleepwalking as I parked in the garage for the first time in a while- it was a Friday and I figured Kelsey would still be awake. On top of that, I was nervous if I parked outside, I’d fall asleep before I reached the front door.

THUMPTHUMPTHUMP.

As soon as I cut the engine, I heard them.

I was admittedly in a daze, but they sounded like footsteps. As if somebody were walking across the hood of my car, and stopped as soon as I cut the engine.

I listened for a few more moments but heard nothing.

I wondered if maybe it could’ve been Kelsey, but our garage didn’t have a floor above it. It was an A-frame attached to the house.

Which meant that somebody was on my roof.

I felt a surge of adrenaline and was suddenly wide awake. I tried to keep quiet as I turned on my phone light, found one of my golf clubs in the dark, and snuck out the side door outside.

It was silent with a chilling breeze rustling the trees that extended for miles around our property. I walked around the house a dozen times looking for a man on my roof or footprints in the grass but found nothing.

It had to have been in my head.

I walked in the door and checked the security system. It was armed. Kelsey and Ava were upstairs, safe and asleep in my bed as a kids show played.

As I washed their dishes in the sink, I stared at my pale, gaunt face in the window. I’d lost weight since coming here and I became very worried about what this job was doing to me. Adam had ridden me so hard since I arrived, I felt like I didn’t have a chance to make any friends at work. It was a bleak place that gave me a lump in my throat-

I stopped washing the dishes.

Because there were three of them.

I stared at them for a moment, confused- the plates were all covered in scraps of chicken and potatoes. Had Kelsey had someone over? She hadn’t mentioned making any friends. I opened the fridge to grab my usual saran wrapped meal when I saw it was empty.

Somebody else had eaten my dinner.

I fell asleep shortly after that and asked Kelsey the next morning as she made us breakfast who she had over for dinner the night before.

“Nobody came over.”

“There were three plates in the sink.”

“Because the three of us ate dinner together.”

She looked at me like I was an alien, coming over and feeling my forehead. “Honey, you feel hot. You don’t look very good.”

I looked over at Ava, who was waiting for me to read her morning cartoons, and she looked at me with the same sense of confusion. I didn’t think that Kelsey was lying to me, but I distinctly remembered pulling into the garage the night before and hearing the strange sounds from the roof.

“I was at work last night till late. You were asleep when I got home.” “No...you came home early. You parked in the garage, didn’t you?”

Normally, my car in the garage would signal me coming home early but I only did that because I was so tired. I remembered walking around the house the previous night in search of the source of the footsteps, and I remembered finding the dishes in the sink.

Was I losing my mind?

I could tell Kelsey was worried about me and my first response was to make her feel calm. She was already lonely enough in a new home in a new place, and I hadn’t made it any easier by being gone all the time. As unnerved as I was, I didn’t want to make her panic. I laughed off the exchange as being caused by some sort of stress-induced sleepwalking and took Ava outside to read her morning cartoons.

The next week went by without too much trouble. I felt like I was slowly crawling back on Adam’s good side and Kelsey and Ava took the train out of town for a few days to visit Kelsey’s old college roommate who was staying in a town nearby. I had a few days home to myself that I was looking forward to for a while.

The day before they left, I was squeezing a few seconds out my workday to scarf down the ham sandwich Kelsey made me for lunch when she sent me a text.

“I have a surprise for you when you get home :)”

I have to be honest- my initial hope was for some kind of gaming system. I desperately needed a hobby or distraction and I thought it’d be the perfect way to pass the time while the two of them spent the weekend away. I actually semi-convinced myself that I was right as the day went on and raced home for dinner, eager to see what it could be.

Kelsey made me wait until after dinner, a sly smile on her face the whole time as Ava told me about their day spent packing, until suddenly her expression soured.

I noticed. She was staring at me weirdly.

“What?” I asked.

She took a long sip of water and spoke quietly.

“Where is your wedding ring?”

I looked down at my left hand and to my surprise, my wedding band wasn’t staring back at me. Only a slight tan line where it used to sit.

I instinctively patted down my pockets and racked my brain. “Um...I don’t know, actually. Maybe I somehow...”

My voice drifted off. Truthfully, I was just as worried as she was. I never took my ring off and if I did, I certainly would’ve remembered. I tried to explain different ways it might’ve accidentally came off but none seemed to satisfy Kelsey. She was quiet the rest of the dinner.

That night, Kelsey tried to crawl into bed without giving me the present she’d promised. I was so desperate for any kind of care and attention from her that I begged her until she finally reached over to the nightstand, dug something out of the drawer, and thrust it in my chest without even looking at me.

It was a pregnancy test. A positive pregnancy test.

I stared at it in the dark as the hairs on my arms stood straight up. All the thoughts in my brain vanished at once and I heard only my heartbeat in my ears. Kelsey, awaiting a reaction, turned over in a fuss.

“That’s it? That’s your reaction?”

I looked at her with scared eyes, my mouth open but no words coming out. I wanted to be happy, to share this moment with her so badly...

But we hadn’t had sex since we moved here. How could we? I slept on the couch virtually every night and was such a ball of stress, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. It didn’t make sense to me how Kelsey could be pregnant. If she was, it wasn’t from me. The heartbreak of imagining her with someone else was matched only by my confusion as to why she would give me evidence of an affair as a present.

I looked in her eyes. She was waiting for me to be happy about our child, but I couldn’t shake myself out of my trance. Had I forgotten sleeping with her? Did we consummate a child and I was too whacked out of my mind by my job to even remember?

“I’m...I can’t believe it.”

That didn’t do it for her. As she threw the covers off and put on her jacket before grabbing the bags she packed for her weekend trip, I thought of how distraught she must feel. I thought of her wondering, taking stock of how she felt, going to the pharmacy, the feeling of seeing the positive test and the excitement to tell me. And then the heartbreak at my silence in the dark.

I knew I was driving her away. I begged for forgiveness as she told me she was going to take Ava to the train early, that she wanted some time away from me. As I tried to talk my way out of this, blaming it on the stress and the memory lapses, I felt the same sensation I felt a few nights prior.

I felt like I was being watched. I looked up at the air vent.

A pair of human eyes stared back. The same eyes I saw previous, only this time, there was enough light to see the outline of a man’s face just before he faded back into the dark.

“Hello?”

Kelsey was standing in the doorway, exasperated as I ignored her pouring her heart out to look up at the air vent.

I wanted to show her, but the eyes were gone- before I knew it, Kelsey had Ava over her shoulder as she rolled their suitcases out to the car.

The emotions that I knew Kelsey harbored finally came pouring out. She never wanted to move here and she hated it. She heard noises in the house when I was gone, and she didn’t feel safe. She missed her family and her friends, and I was working too much. I had no interest in her. I was mentally, physically, and emotionally absent to my wife and my child and after four months of feeling abandoned and forgotten about, she’d had enough. She told me she’d call when she felt better and let me say goodbye to Ava before driving off into the dark. I begged her to wait until the morning, but she was upset. And she had every right to be.

The first thing I did when I re-entered the house was grab a screwdriver and rip the airvent cover from the ceiling. I set the screws and vent on the bed and climbed on the nightstand until I could stick my head into the crawlspace.

It was too dark to see, so I bent down and turned on my phone light, stuck my phone in my mouth and stuck my head back into the vent space.

I only saw cobwebs and a small 2 ft x 2 ft space of ventilation. It seemed to extend a few feet in each direction until it reached a dead end.

There was no man. No animal. Nothing in there. Just space.

I had one more day of work before the weekend and I decided to sleep on the couch that night, but I barely dozed off. The heartache of being alone in the house kept me awake. It had been years since I felt that confused and hopeless.

I went to work the next day and managed to avoid Adam’s wrath. I felt I was being paranoid but just in case I wasn’t, I decided to call our realtor and get a blueprint of the house. She said she would email it over.

“Is something wrong?”

“Not particularly, I’m just worried we might have an animal in the ventilation system.” “Oh no. Have you smelled an odor, or just heard noise?”

“Just noise.”

“Well, be sure to check the attic.”

My blood ran cold. I was told when I bought the house, we didn’t have an attic. The blueprint came through just as I heard those words and I opened the email, scanned the build of the house with my eyes and, sure enough, there it was.

An attic. Right above the garage.

“You said we didn’t have an attic.”

“You don’t. Well, technically you do but it’s sealed off. Not accessible.”

“Then how could an animal get in there?”

“The vents. Outside of that, like I said- it’s sealed off.”

She was right. The only access point to the attic seemed to be the ventilation system.

I felt acid slushing around in my stomach. Maybe the eyes I saw were real. I thought of the footsteps I heard. I thought of the noises Kelsey complained about. I thought about the security system I armed every day to keep us safe.

I thought about how the security system wouldn’t work if someone was already inside.

I hung up the phone and left work without speaking to Adam. My car nearly ran out of gas as I pulled off the freeway, and I was so in my own head about what was awaiting me back at the house that I nearly didn’t see it until it was too late.

I pulled over at a gas station only to discover that I didn’t have my wallet. I was in such a rush to get home I was sure I left it at the office. Luckily, I had a few dollars stuffed in the center console and was able to nickel-and-dime just enough to get home.

I marched into the house and up the stairs. I grabbed a toolbox, unscrewed the vent, and this time-

I forced myself to crawl up inside. It was so tight that I could barely fit my body in it, but I fit. Both sides were dead ends and for a moment, I felt an extreme wave of claustrophobia. I immediately decided I did not like this and tried to thrash my way out, and as I twisted my body and tried to kick myself forward-

The wall behind my feet fell over.

I squirmed around and saw that what I had thought was a dead end was actually a thin piece of plywood that had been carefully placed to give the illusion that the ventilation tunnel stopped there. My phone was in my mouth, flashlight beaming, and I could see that this tunnel extended over the rest of the house.

I had nothing to lose. I knew I had seen something, and I was determined to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy. That I knew what was transpiring in my own life, no matter how strange it may be.

I crawled for what felt like miles through cobwebs and darkness, occasionally stopping to look down through vents at the house. From this tunnel, you could see everything.

I shimmied until I eventually came to a real dead end. I pressed it with my hands, but it was solid. It took me a few seconds before realizing that the top of the tunnel had been cut open. A giant hole covered by carpet.

I pushed up through it...

And found myself in the attic.

The room was a little smaller than a prison cell. It was dusty and dark, and the pink insulation looked blood orange when my phone illuminated it. A rotting stench hit my nostrils and I pointed the phone towards the back corner.

A plate of chicken and potatoes, a few days old, was covered in ants. A fork and knife from our kitchen were visible underneath.

There was a small, tattered blanket on the scratchy floorboards and a trash bag filled with something that sat at the top of the blanket, like a pillow.

I swallowed. Knelt on the blanket. Carefully stuck my hand in the trash bag and pulled out the first thing I wrapped my fingers around.

It was a sweatshirt. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t ours from the move. I kept digging, kept pulling out articles of clothing I’d never seen before but all were wrinkly and dirty, as if they hadn’t been washed in months.

The next item I brought out was an envelope. I poured out the contents on the blanket.

They were polaroids. Immediately, I recognized my own face staring back at me.

There were about thirty of them, all taken over the course of our last year at the old house. Pictures of Kelsey and I taking Ava for walks, me on my morning commute, me going to the gym, taking Kelsey out to dinner, mowing the lawn. Intimate moments of our lives all on film, chronicled forever by somebody.

My breathing got shallow as I reached into the trash bag and fished around for the last item inside. It was a wallet.

I flipped it open, and immediately took out the driver’s license.

I recognized the face staring back at me, but not in the usual way. I had never seen this man before; except I had.

I once heard that every single person in the world has seven doppelgangers. Seven people scattered around the world who looked identical to each other.

I think I just found mine.

Our faces were eerily similar. His ID picture suggested he was a bit younger, the same blue eyes, a little more stubble. His nose was a little wider and his lips a bit thinner, but if you weren’t looking closely, the resemblance was remarkable.

SIMON CARTWRIGHT. PARADISE VALLEY, ARIZONA. DOB: 4/14/1991.

The name didn’t ring a bell. I’d never been West of the Mississippi until we moved here. I was born in 1987.

Who was this man? And how could he look exactly like me?

Seven doppelgangers.

Instead of money, he had a folded up piece of paper inside the pouch of the wallet. I smoothed it out and used the light to illuminate it.

It was a police record printed in black and white. Simon’s police record, to be exact. It had a mugshot dated eight months prior, where the tips of Simon’s lips were curled up in an indifferent smile.

AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. BATTERY. ATTEMPTED KIDNAPPING.

In this more recent picture, Simon looked identical to me. I couldn’t believe it as I stared at the mugshot, horrified at what I was piecing together in my mind.

The garage door went up beneath me. I could hear the gears churning as a car waited patiently for it to open.

Kelsey. She came back.

I had to tell her immediately. She probably wouldn’t believe me at first- especially with my recent behavior, convincing her my doppelganger was living in the crawl space wasn’t going to be an easy task. But she’d believe me when she saw the room and the wallet and the police record and we’d call the police and high tail it back home. I was done with this house, this stress, this job and I had proof we were in danger.

I shimmied as fast I could through the ventilation tunnel towards our bedroom closet. I heard the garage door close as I crawled above the ceilings and between the walls, pausing briefly to look down through the slits revealing the rest of the house. Kelsey and Ava hadn’t come inside yet.

By the time I heard the door slam and the sounds of their voices in the kitchen, I was at our closet.

“Kelsey! Kelsey, come here!” I screamed.

I heard nothing.

I finally squeezed my body out of the vent and tumbled onto the nightstand.

“Kelsey! Kelsey!”

I bumbled out of the room and down the stairs, nearly tripping over my own two feet as I hit the first floor and burst into the kitchen.

Kelsey had ordered takeout and she’d set the table for dinner.

Ava was already seated, and her head snapped up with confusion as she saw me run into the room out of the breath, holding another man’s wallet and printed out police record, covered in dirt and grime and insulation.

Kelsey was seated next to her.

Simon was seated where I normally sat.

All was quiet for a moment as Simon and I made eye contact.

He was wearing one of my shirts- one of the ones that had magically vanished. My reading glasses sat atop his nose, which looked thinner than on his ID. It looked narrower now, like mine. The glasses fit him perfectly.

My wedding band was around his finger, and my wallet was on the table with the receipt for the dinner.

In my clothes, with my glasses and belongings, in my house, with my family- He looked exactly like me. There was no difference. He had been planning this.

Kelsey screamed as soon as she saw me and I dropped Simon’s wallet. It spilled out over the floor.

Kelsey instinctively grabbed Ava and Simon threw the two girls behind him as if they were the most precious thing in the world to him, and he would die before he let a stranger near them.

Simon grabbed a knife and stuck it out towards me.

He spoke in a voice identical to my own, as if he’d been practicing it for months as he listened to me through the vents.

His eyes narrowed with a faux scared expression and his smile curled the same way it did in his mugshot.

He took a step towards me. “Who are you?”