DOPPELGÄNGER!

by James Lincoln Warren

It’s been over two years since I wrote about our having adopted two cats who are sisters, Emma and Lizzie. A week ago last Friday, while Lizzie was sitting in Margaret’s lap, Margaret felt three small bumps or welts on the skin of Lizzie’s left foreleg below her fur. Benign skin growths are common in dogs, but very unusual in cats.

Rory, a cat we had several years ago, had such a small growth on his head that turned out to be a mast-cell cancerous tumor (it was removed, and he suffered no permanent effects from it), so there was no choice but to take Lizzie to the vet on Monday. Cutting to the chase, the tumors were luckily benign1, but the only treatment is excision, and so the veterinarian surgically removed them. As Lizzie was under anaesthesia, I also had her teeth scraped and polished to alleviate her mild gingivitis.

When Lizzie came home that afternoon, she was wearing one of those so-called “Elizabethan collars” (the veterinary technician called it an “E-collar”) so she wouldn’t pick at her sutures. She’ll need to wear it for a total of ten days, until this Thursday.

Emma and Lizzie were adopted together because as kittens they were utterly devoted to each other. Their mutual devotion has remained consistent over the last two years, and they are constantly grooming each other and curling up together when they nap. But when Lizzie came home, Emma took one look at her and began to growl and hiss. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY SISTER?

I witnessed this same reaction several years ago between Rory and our other cat Molly, when Rory came home after a teeth-cleaning. Molly hissed and spat at him, ears flat against her head as she crouched and backed off. Both then and now, the innocent recipients of this rude reception were nonplussed and confused. Poor kitties!

Molly’s belligerence toward Rory only lasted a couple of days, but Emma’s toward Lizzie has lasted a whole week so far. I blame the collar. I expect that domestic harmony will be fully restored by Friday, when Lizzie will once again be free to groom herself and the THING around her neck will be gone. In the meantime, Emma is avoiding Lizzie, so at least there is feline peace if not feline amity chez Warren.

And this got me thinking about the doppelgänger, that sinister double image so common in folklore and ghost stories, and yes, in crime fiction. At its worst, it’s nothing more than a cliché so hoary it has become a joke, the Evil Twin, but at its best, as with Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat or Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar, it goes to the darkest of all crimes, the theft of souls.

It’s a tough thing to pull off. I myself wouldn’t even attempt it, because if it isn’t done exactly right, it comes off as the most ludicrous contrivance imaginable. Before his James Bond days, but after Simon Templar, Roger Moore was in a fine little British horror movie, “The Man Who Haunted Himself”, a fun and morbid little tale of a possibly supernatural, possibly psychopathological, doppelgänger. The thing that made the movie work was Moore’s potent, high strung performance, and also that the audience was kept guessing throughout—the mystery is never resolved, which I regard as a wise choice. Otherwise the whole thing collapses. But my point is this: although the film is highly regarded today, at the time it was released it was considered downright silly.

But there is nothing inherently funny about doppelgängers.

Izaak Walton, who wrote the only book in English (except the King James Bible) that has never been out of print, The Compleat Angler (1653), also wrote a biography of the great poet and clergyman John Donne, he of the “no man is an island” fame. In Walton’s account, while Donne was visiting Paris, his wife gave birth to a stillborn daughter in London, and in a waking vision, her image appeared twice before him, her hair hanging loose on her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms.

No wonder Emma was spooked.

1. Two of the bumps were tumors, collagenous nevi for those of you with an interest in such things, but the third was an allergic inflammation of the skin, probably caused by a spider bite. [↩]