"No Fingerprints, Miles"

I had never seen Jack Belicec drink, not once in the years I'd known him. He once told me that he'd been bitten by the booze bug -- bitten to the bone -- and consequently, the hardest drink Jack ever swallowed was strong iced tea.

But here he was in the basement of his day-spa business, one hand firmly wrapped around what looked suspiciously like a tumbler full of ice and scotch. When I was within three steps of him I could smell the alcohol, and all suspicion was removed.

He was standing next to the body of his wife, Elizabeth.

No, that's not right. He was standing next to a body that looked very much like his wife, Elizabeth. Only this corpse was vague, almost immature in appearance. No lines, no wrinkles, no "I want" line stamped in her forehead between the eyes. It looked like Elizabeth if she had never experienced a care, a worry, a joy in her life.

"It doesn't have any fingerprints, Miles," Jack said, and now I could see why he had a death grip on the tumbler -- his hands were trembling. He drank deeply, looked at me with eyes that were trying to retain a grip on reality.

"No fingerprints, Miles. Look for yourself."

I did. He was half right. You couldn't lift a print from any of the body's fingers, but you could see the whorls, obscured by a layer or two of smooth skin. It was as if the prints were simply waiting to rise to the surface, waiting to be born in full form. And was I actually seeing them come into sharper focus?

Before I could put any words in my brain, much less like mouth, Jack continued: "It's not Lizzie, you know. I don't know what in hell it is, my friend, but it isn't Lizzie. She's upstairs, asleep."

That's when the body at Jack's feet opened its eyes.

Jack's astonished gaze met mine and I could hear his voice behind my eyes, shouting: "Jesus Christ! This can't be happening!" And right beneath his voice, my own inner scream: "We've got to wake Elizabeth!"

The body looked first at me, then Jack. Its lips cracked open with an audible pop as it prepared to speak its first words, and I knew it would sound like Elizabeth, the same way I knew that if I inked those fingers, I would now be able to lift fingerprints.

It was maturing, it was aging, it was becoming Elizabeth Belicec with every passing second. I had no doubt that once it spoke, the real Elizabeth would stop speaking, stop breathing, stop being.

Bill apparently had the same thought. He brought the tumbler down with a fury onto the impostor's face, drawing what looked like blood, and as it uttered a whistle of a scream, Bill ran to a pegboard on the wall, yanked a large spanner from its hook and continued his assault.

It took 22 blows before Bill was spent, and long before then the downward swings of the wrench had already worked their way through to the floor beneath the duplicate's head.

The only noises in the basement were Bill's sobs of angry agony and my own ragged attempts at breathing. I had just witnessed a killing -- not a homicide, because I don't think Bill killed a human -- but the gore looked the same.

Bill's sobs finally abated enough for him to raise his head and find his voice.

"Miles," he asked, "what the fuck?"