Clown of the Year 2013

5. That white boy's End Apartheid crop top.

4. That one seagull.

3. The lamp guy.

2. The famous Backrooms Camrip Intro Man.

A Thing of Deception, the Doppelgänger is fundamentally unknowable, because its Identity is the Deception. Fundamentally, its entire being is a Lie and thus you will never know its Truth.

A young girl is playing in her bedroom when she hears her mother call to her from the kitchen, so she runs downstairs to meet her mother. As she’s running through the hallway, the door to the cupboard under the stairs opens, and a hand reaches out and pulls her in. It’s her mother. She whispers to her child, “Don’t go into the kitchen. I heard it too.”

What's perhaps scariest about the Doppelgänger is the ease with which it accesses the Home. Its Deception is so potent that the Home itself believes the façade and may grant it entrance. Free entrance into the most Sacred Space, that which is most secure, may be violating.

However, if the Doppelgänger's Deception is exposed before it can access the Home, it may still be turned away. Its only weapon is the Deception, without that, it is powerless.

My dad used to get up Around 3AM every morning for work. Starting at a very early age I would wake up on my own and wander downstairs to see him before he left. One morning when I was about 4 years old, I made it to the bottom of the stairs and noticed that the front door was ajar. I opened it up and saw my father in his favorite workshirt making his way down the driveway to his truck in his typical workoufit (plaid shirt and dickies). I swung the door open wide and yelled for him to come back for a hug before he left. He slowly turned around and just STARED at me and started walking back towards the house. He was looking so strangely at me that it started to scare me and I began crying and asking what was wrong. Just as he had almost reached me a pair of arms encircled me from behind in a bear hug. I turned my head to see my understandably freaked out father staring at his doppleganger (in the SAME outfit). The double took one look at my dad and ran down the driveway, meanwhile my dad yanked me in the house and locked the door. Wierdest morning EVER. Never did quite figure that one out. I would not trust my 4 year old memory of the event if it wasn’t also witnessed by my father. He wont really talk about it these days but my mom has since told me that he called out of work and she spent the day reassuring him he wasn’t a nutcases.

A consideration must be made, though, for the homeless. What protections have you when the Space is not Sacred, but definitionally Accessible to all. The Deception would not even need to hold in a Space such as this. The Doppelgänger would not even need to Lie.