Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  He was inside what appeared to be a warehouse of some kind. There was a Ridgid Tools calendar on the wall beside him, featuring a photo of a well-endowed blonde with strangely styled hair that looked like wings around her face, and the smallest bikini Walter had ever seen.

  The date on the calendar was September 1974. All the days had been crossed out, up to the 21st.

  The large, multi-paned window at the far end of the room was mostly blacked out, except for a single missing pane on the bottom left that let in a pale gray wash of daylight. The stranger stood beside the broken pane, the delicate snout of a shouldered rifle poking through the window frame and a mesmerizing dance of sparks swarming over the surface of his hands and forearms.

  The stranger didn’t seem to notice Walter or the unnatural sparks. He was utterly focused on whatever he had in his sights. Walter walked over to the window and looked out over his shoulder, through the missing pane.

  A city bus with a blown tire had pulled up to the curb across the street, in front of a disreputable, shuttered bar with an unlit neon sign that read Eddie’s All Niter. The narrow rectangular screen above the windshield displayed the number 144 and three letters; PAR. The rest of the letters that would have spelled out the name of the route were missing or broken.

  A chubby, anxious man was helping a group of frightened senior citizens off the incapacitated bus. The first one out was a tiny, ancient black woman with a multicolored scarf tied under her chin and thick cat-eye glasses. She had on a red cloth coat and was holding a library book with one gnarled finger stuck in between the pages to hold her place. She was leaning heavily on a chipped wooden cane and looking like she was trying very hard not to cry.

  The window Walter was looking through had to be at least three stories up and on the opposite side of the street, yet some how he was able to see every little detail of that woman, with disturbing clarity. Her heavy brown orthopedic shoes and thick, swollen ankles. The title of her book, The Other Side of Midnight, and the peeling library sticker scotch-tapped on the spine. A gold toned musical note pinned to the left lapel of her coat. Her handmade canvas totebag with colorful felt letters that spelled out the words:

  LINDA’S GRANDMA.

  Then it dawned on Walter what was happening.

  The stranger had shot the tire. He was going to shoot the woman. And all the other passengers from the bus.

  In that instant, Walter couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he was underwater, tangled in seaweed and unable to move his cold, sluggish limbs. He was desperate to get to the stranger and knock the rifle out of his sure, steady hands, but even though they were mere inches apart, somehow Walter just couldn’t seem to reach. All he could do was watch, helpless as the stranger squeezed the trigger.

  On the street below, the old woman seemed to look right at him, her dark eyes silently asking why.

  Why is this happening?

  Then a bullet smashed into her high, round forehead, driving her back in a gaudy spray of blood and shattered bone. Her book flew from her outstretched hands and landed open in the gutter, pages fluttering in a sudden wind.

  Then the scene at the warehouse disintegrated into fragile ash, whirling away and leaving Walter floating in a vast abyss of nothingness.

  Still he couldn’t breathe. Now he was drowning, a crushing weight on his chest as his limbs went numb and useless. Spangles of greenish light swarmed across his vision and he realized that he could no longer feel any attachment to Bell. He was utterly alone in that abyss, heart like a small panicked animal scrabbling to escape from his aching chest.

  Bell was lost, gone forever, and Walter was alone.

  Alone.

  Then he felt a hand on his arm, pulling him roughly upward.

  Walter broke the surface of the lake with the desperate gasp of a newborn, hands clutching at Bell’s soaking wet shirt.

  “God damn it, Walter,” Bell said. “When you went under... Man, I thought I’d lost you.”

  He hugged Walter way too hard.

  “Where is...” Walter sputtered, pulling back from the embrace, coughing and spitting algae-tainted water out of his burning throat. “...that man...? Was he real?”

  “I saw him, too,” Bell said. “A truly remarkable shared hallucination, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.” He slung his arm around Walter’s shoulders, helping him to the shore. “But then, out of nowhere, the trip turned dark and heavy, with all these images of blood and murder.

  “And then you went down, under the surface of the water. By the time I was able to find you and pull you out, my adrenalin must have burnt off any residual effects of the drug. Right now I feel pretty damn straight.” He shook his head. “Too straight. How about you? How do you feel?”

  Walter looked around. The lake was quiet, pristine and calm. Their cheerful little Coleman lantern on the shore was burning low, nearly out of fuel. The cooler was still there, too, sitting right beside the lantern, filled with perfectly ordinary soda. No sign of any tiny women. No kind of cosmic gateway, and no one there but him and Bell.

  But the gateway, the stranger, and those awful bloody visions. They’d all seemed so real.

  “Belly,” Walter said. “We are never using that formula again.”

  4

  Allan was cold, wet and terrified, and was having an extremely hard time distinguishing reality from hallucination. At first he had imagined that he’d fallen through some kind of gateway into another dimension, but now that he was starting to come down off his trip, the very concept sounded absurd. He found himself in the same old ordinary world.

  Same dirt, same trees, same lake.

  He took a moment to lean against the rough bark of a massive oak tree and collect his disjointed thoughts. How much of what had happened to him that night was real, and how much was pure hallucination?

  Had he imagined the couple in the car? The entire encounter with the cops? There certainly was no sign of them now. No zeppelins overhead, no prowlers on the overlook, no baying dogs. Nothing. Even the crickets had fallen silent.

  As much as it humiliated him to picture himself running alone through the woods, striking out against imaginary attackers, he was certainly happy to find himself a free man.

  That’s when he noticed the handcuffs.

  One manacle was clamped tight around his left wrist, and the other dangled, open. The metal was cool to the touch, and as solid as the ground under his feet. He must have had some kind of encounter with the police, at some point during all that madness. He certainly hadn’t handcuffed himself.

  But where the hell were they now?

  And what about those two kids in the water, the ones who seemed to be able to read his mind. He could still see their faces, so vividly—particularly the soft, almost girlish face of the long-haired hippie in the baggy tweed jacket. It was as if the kid had looked right into his brain, and barged his way in to Allan’s most treasured fantasies. That sense of unexpected intimacy was more than he could take.

  And he could still feel the tactile sensation when he had shoved the kid away, plunging his frizzy-haired head down into the water before bolting for the shore.

  But now, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d imagined that, too.

  Clearly the only option was to return home and get some sleep. He was chilled and frazzled and running on fumes as he trudged down the long, winding deer path that would take him back to the spot where he’d hidden his car. Tomorrow, he would check the papers and scan the police band, and see if he could piece together what the hell had happened.

  * * *

  His car was gone.

  It wasn’t just gone, it was as if it had never been there. There were no tire tracks. The place were he had parked was overrun with lanky, fragile white flowers that couldn’t possibly have grown up in the time he’d been gone.

  Yet there had to be an explanation.

  Could he have forgotten where he had left his car?

  No, he didn’t forget things. And he could never hav
e forgotten something like that. After all, Allan was a meticulous man, who prided himself on the attention he paid to the smallest details. His rigid adherence to each plan was what allowed him the freedom to drop acid in the midst of a murder, because he knew that no matter what happened, he could always count on the careful preparations he’d made while he was sober.

  But there was no other place to hide a car on this side of the lake. He hadn’t seen it along the side of the deserted road, or at the overlook where he’d first spotted—or thought he spotted—the young couple who turned out to be cops.

  No, his car must have been stolen.

  The notebook.

  His notebook was in the glove box of his car.

  He felt a deep throbbing panic rise up in his guts. If his car had been stolen, then the notebook was stolen, too. That notebook was everything to him. It was the place were he gave voice to all his private demons and dark fantasies, and kept a meticulous record of every aspect of each one of his killings.

  There was absolutely no way he could be incriminated by the contents of that notebook, because the police were far too intellectually inferior to crack his ingenious private ciphers. But just the thought of a random stranger turning those pages and holding the repository of his most private and sacred thoughts in their grubby little hands—it made him physically ill.

  I’m starting to lose it.

  Hands trembling, sweating, heart racing. Although he was no longer actively hallucinating, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything around him was abnormal.

  The acid he’d taken must have been tainted somehow. That was the only logical answer to explain the bizarre, impossible events of the evening. All he could do now was to find a way to get himself home safely, and ride out the rest of this awful trip until the poison had run its course. He could come back out to Reiden Lake and look for his car in the morning.

  For now he just needed wheels. Any wheels.

  There was one lonely vehicle parked on the side of Lakeshore Drive. It had Massachusetts plates, but looked foreign. The unfamiliar brand name on the bumper, “Chevrolet,” sounded French or something. But the design of the car wasn’t entirely unlike the kind of standard American muscle cars made by Edsel or Hobart.

  But that was irrelevant. What was important was that the door wasn’t locked, and he found the keys under the driver’s side visor, so he didn’t have to figure out how to hotwire a foreign car. Lucky for him, everything else about it was relatively normal, though curiously designed.

  He redlined it all the way home.

  * * *

  It was nearly dawn by the time he made it to his house in Remsen. He ditched the stolen car several blocks away and walked the remaining distance home, left hand in his pocket to hide the cuffs.

  First things first. He went directly in to the garage, planning to remove the handcuffs with a hacksaw. But inside the garage, everything had been rearranged. His tools, which he’d kept for years hanging on a custom built pegboard on the western wall above his workbench, were gone, replaced by floor-to-ceiling shelving full of what looked like gardening supplies. Big dusty sacks of grass seed, fertilizer and vermiculite.

  Panic wrestled with confusion. There was no way someone could have broken into his garage, stolen all his tools, and built those shelves in the time he’d been at Reiden Lake. Even if it were possible, the shelves looked weathered and ancient, as if they’d been there for decades.

  The acid. Clearly the tainted acid was still affecting him, making ordinary things seem strange. He knew there was a hacksaw in this garage. There had to be. It was just his mind playing tricks, telling him things were different.

  He made himself search slowly and methodically, as if he were sifting through the garage of a stranger. Eventually he found a hacksaw inside a large rusted toolbox, although it was smaller and more narrow than his own. At least that’s how it appeared.

  He told himself it didn’t matter. He had to get the cuffs off, and no amount of residual hallucination was going to stop him. He couldn’t seem to find his workbench— or anything even remotely similar—so he just squatted down on the floor and braced his left wrist against the stained concrete.

  Once he’d sawed through the single cuff around his wrist, he hid the broken handcuffs inside a half-empty box of Slug and Snail Death, promising himself he’d dispose of them properly later, once he’d gotten some sleep and gotten his head back on straight.

  When he took his keys out of his hip pocket and went to let himself into the house, he discovered the door that led from the garage to the kitchen was unlocked.

  He never left any door in the house unlocked.

  Never.

  Inside his house, the feeling of wrongness ratcheted up even higher. All the furniture seemed different. Strange rugs and tables in unexpected places. Magazines with titles he’d never heard of. Panic set in again, making his heart race, but he squashed it down.

  It’s not real. None of this is real.

  Forcing himself to breathe, he pressed his palms against the wall, holding on like it was the only thing keeping him from flying into a thousand pieces. At least the walls were the same, rooms and hallways unchanged in their layout.

  Familiar.

  Safe.

  Fighting to keep his breath slow and even, he followed the wall to his bedroom door. Grasping the doorknob, he paused, suddenly afraid. Deeply, irrationally afraid of what he would see if he opened that door.

  He made himself turn the knob, and eased the door slowly open.

  Inside, his dim bedroom looked relatively normal. The bed was in its normal place, though the room was small enough that there was really only one place a bed would fit. It was unmade, and the blanket looked slightly different, but nothing too jarring. His dresser was in its normal place too, though it seemed taller and narrower.

  The window was open, allowing a light breeze and a spill of faint lavender twilight into the room. Strange, because he always kept the windows shut at night, but it wasn’t impossible that he might have forgotten to close it.

  There was something on his bedside table. Something that was also completely normal, yet the sight of it evoked a profound icy dread.

  His glasses were on the bedside table.

  His hands flew up to his face. No, his glasses weren’t on the bedside table, they were on his face, where they belonged. His mind was playing tricks again.

  But they looked so real, those glasses. So humble and ordinary and familiar. Nothing trippy or psychedelic about them. They were just his regular glasses, sitting right were he always set them when he went to bed each night.

  The toilet flushed in the bathroom down the hall.

  There’s nothing abnormal about the sound of a toilet flushing either, but Allan couldn’t have been more terrified if he’d heard a gunshot.

  Someone else was in his house.

  The bathroom door opened and a man came out, backlit by the light, face in shadow. He was the same height as Allan, but a little bit paunchier around the middle, dressed only in clean white boxer shorts.

  When the man saw Allan, he let out a startled, wordless sound and staggered back, bracing himself against the doorframe.

  Allan didn’t hesitate. He charged the intruder and wrestled him to the hallway floor. They fell together into the rectangular pool of light emanating from the open bathroom door.

  The intruder was him.

  Only, like everything else in the house, this him-that-wasn’t-him was just a little bit off. His hair was a little longer and styled differently. He was maybe ten pounds heavier, and looked soft all over, like he’d never done a hard day’s work in his life.

  It looked like he had cut himself shaving the day before, leaving a small, healing nick on the right side of his jaw.

  “Wh-who are you?” the intruder asked, breathless and stuttering with fear.

  Who are you? Just like that kid had asked him back at the lake.

  Objective rationality deserted Allan in that mo
ment. Confronted with this impossible doppelganger—who was so like him but yet not quite an exact replica—Allan felt himself finally snap inside. In a strange way, it was almost a relief, not to have to fight against the wrongness anymore. Raw animal instinct took over as he closed his shaking hands around the doppelganger’s throat.

  As he watched the intruder’s face—a face so like his own—flush and distort, eyes bulging and lips twisted into a gasping rictus, he let out an involuntary shriek of horror and fury.

  At least he thought it came from him.

  He slammed the doppelganger’s head against the floor, over and over again, until his arms and shoulders ached from the strain of it. Until the intruder was dead.

  Until he was dead.

  He’d killed himself.

  Sobbing now, he struggled to his feet, unhinged by a soul-destroying terror beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He looked down at his own murderous hands and saw that they were crawling with tiny sparks, as if electric insects were crawling beneath the surface of his skin.

  The flesh of the intruder’s throat was charred black and lit from within by some kind of grotesque and unwholesome glow, like a deep-sea creature or the poisonous numerals on a radio-luminescent watch.

  He staggered into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door, as if the other him might spring back to life and attack with renewed fury.

  Nothing happened for several minutes. All was silent. The sparks dancing in spirals around his fingertips began to fade, leaving behind perfectly ordinary, unremarkable hands.

  Hallucinations. Terrible, terrifying, but still just hallucinations, rapidly fading as his body processed out the toxins.

  None of this is real.

  Utterly exhausted and unable to keep his body upright for a minute longer, he collapsed first to his knees and then, curling on his side, went fetal on the soft bathroom rug.

  He fell almost instantly into a deep dreamless sleep.