Free Doppelgangers by H. F. Heard

spite of being hideous, it looked natural. It was simply one of those few misbirths with which beautician surgeons didn’t like to meddle because you’d have to tease the flesh so much it might refuse to heal and go malignant. So you gave “Suggest We Don’t Mind” mental treatment instead and asked people not to stare and they didn’t. Yes, he was simply a misshape. To his most careful scrutiny all that was revealed of the strange secret was the fine gossamer straight lines he had noticed in the sunlight on the model’s face as he left that hospital, the faint print of metamorphosis. But, now that he could give careful scrutiny to this fused-on mask, he saw how different it was from the mask worn by the model who had given him his last interview as he left the underground hospital. In that creature’s face there was nothing left but an anonymous smoothness; he wasn’t bad looking or good looking but blanker than a Chinese coolie’s face looks to a Westerner.
    But this further experiment which was now fixed on him for life—a far more awful confinement than ever the man with the iron mask suffered—he was now able to study in detail. There had been that growing exposure while he watched in the little mirror his face being shaved. He had seen from casual glances in mirrors as he passed its general disproportion but only now did he gauge how slipshod and unfinished it appeared. There were a number of apparently strong lines on the upper part of the face, deep furrows and convergent folds, and then they seemed to peter out and come to nothing. They should have swept down round the cheekbones and the setting of the nose and bound themselves round, finding purchase in a firm, strong chin. But the whole mask just lapsed. There were big puckers round the mouth and lapses on each side of the nose, and the lower part of the cheeks sank and hollowed. He tried to hope that his teeth would somehow remedy the effect and give back a little strength to that large, drooped, suffering mouth.
    He wondered what the effect would be, every time he caught sight of himself, to see this rather beaten, weary object looking at him. Surely, to his divided thought, it would act as a steady suggestion to further discouragement. He feebly thrust his tongue across the toothless gum of his upper front jaw trying to make the cheek take a less dismal fold. In vain; the cheek was far too loose and empty to be filled; it simply made a grotesque grimace. They had removed all the bicuspids as well as canines and incisors. Only the molars were left—like some degenerate ruminant, he thought dismally. They had not been content just to let his face fall in. With their hateful mutilations, they had added skin and flesh, making his mouth and cheeks and lips too big for even the support of the teeth which he had had. He would be a scarecrow even when they should give him back his teeth. For some reason they had wished to break his vanity, evidently, perhaps to make him a better, more selfless, agent, and so kill two birds with one stone, make him disappear, the handsome young agent whom one of the Bull’s agents might now know by sight, and also to ruin in him the last vestige of self-love so that he might become their slave for life. They had just mutilated him, as lecherous tyrants turned men into eunuchs to guard their harems. He must give up looking at himself.
    Well, it was time to be keeping his appointment, and he was tired of waiting, for he no longer had any will to strike out for himself; there was no longer any sense in such a thought. He had been making his way all the time easily to the destination, and, sure enough, there was the great façade of the office just across the boulevard. As the lights flashed a clear-way for pedestrians, he walked over.
    At the door the man scarcely looked at him as he took his card. He was shown straight up to a small booth in a vast office room and he was scarcely