Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

  12

  Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.

  Chinese food.

  Up until that moment he’d only been vaguely aware of a distant discomfort somewhere in his midsection, but when the smell hit him, he was suddenly voraciously hungry. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat.

  He lifted his blurring, exhausted eyes from the scattered pages of his notes and saw Nina and Bell. He hadn’t noticed them leaving the room, but they clearly had gone somewhere and returned. Bell was carrying a large box of beakers and burners and heavy, brown glass bottles.

  But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food. At that point, Walter was willing to trade his right arm for one of those wonderful little folded paper boxes.

  “Nina,” Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. “You are my angel.”

  “And what am I?” Bell asked. “Chopped liver? Ergot seems to grow on trees in this town, but do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain monopropellant-grade anhydrous hydrazine?”

  “Are there any forks?” Walter asked, peeling open his box of noodles and breathing in the fragrant steam.

  “Just these,” Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks.

  “That’s okay,” Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

  “Lovely,” Nina said, separating a pair of the chopsticks for herself and delicately dipping them into her own container. “Just try not to make a mess on my desk.”

  “No, no—of course not.” Walter moved a page of his notes over to the right to cover a large splat of sauce. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “So Nina’s got a small lab we can use, set up in the basement,” Bell said. “Small, and nothing fancy, but it’ll do. There’s even a darkroom for Chick’s photography.” He peered over Walter’s shoulder. “How are you getting on with the notebook?”

  Walter slurped another mouthful of noodles, talking around them.

  “I tried all the basic approaches,” he said. “Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.”

  He poked at the notebook with a saucy finger.

  “I started off with frequency analysis. Searching for pairs, right?” He flipped the pages and pointed first to a double Q and then a double F. “Hoping to lock down my L. The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double L, of course, challenged only by the double T. But here’s the thing. It’s rarely the same.” Another massive mouthful of noodles. “There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.”

  “Vigenère?” Bell asked, putting down his box of chemicals and grabbing some food of his own.

  “Could be,” Walter said. “But that seems like such a pain. Plus we have a few symbols mixed in here and there, though not on the last ten pages.”

  “What’s Vigenère?” Nina asked.

  Walter sorted through his notes until he came up with the Vigenère’s square he’d laid out.

  “It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers,” he told her. “One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.” He pulled out a list he’d made of logical guesses that he’d already tried. Words like Zodiac and the names of several known victims. But none had panned out. “We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I’m fairly certain he’s using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn’t say it’s crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.”

  Bell had stopped eating with his chopsticks frozen halfway to his mouth. He put the box of noodles down and came over to the desk, eyes zooming in on the last written page of the notebook.

  “Try Reiden,” he said.

  “My God,” Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered. He held the handwritten translation up and read it out loud to Nina and Bell.

  * * *

  After I take down the bus I shall kill another teenage whore. A pretty brunette, like the first one on this side. I’ve been watching one girl who I think will fit the bill perfectly. Her name is Miranda.

  My last girlfriend was older, a sad drunken waste of a person, and I found myself abruptly distracted at what should have been my most beautiful moment by the loose skin on her neck and the baggy, worn-out shape of her breasts. Yet the sparks in my hands were brighter and burned longer than ever before.

  Not that I regret my previous choice. It’s only that the anticipation of killing has me feeling particularly appreciative of youth. That young teenage whore will be the perfect reward for what is sure to be my most acclaimed performance to date.

  I’d like to see that sad sack Iverson and his FBI cronies try to keep this one out of the press.

  I think I shall make myself wait a few days to claim my reward. The sparks are getting hungrier every day, but controlling appetites is what separates man from beast. I shall wait until

  “Until when?” Bell asked. “Wait until when?”

  “That’s it,” Walter said. “The key shifts at this point, leaving these last few lines unreadable. Except for this.”

  He turned the notebook around for Bell to see. At the very bottom of the coded page were two words in plain English, scratched so hard into the page that they were imprinted deep into the paper.

  BY KNIFE

  “Son of a bitch,” Bell said.

  “A few days,” Nina repeated. “That has to be at least two, if not more. At least we can be fairly certain this won’t happen tomorrow.”

  “As long as his failure with the bus doesn’t cause him to change his plans,” Walter said. “But we have to proceed based on that assumption. It’s not nearly enough time, but better than nothing,” he added. “We should get to work immediately on recreating the exact pharmacological launchpad we used that day at Reiden Lake.”

  “Come on,” Nina said. “I’ll show you boys the setup.”

  13

  “Do you feel anything?” Nina asked.

  “Not yet,” Walter replied. “Belly?”

  “Nope,” Bell said. “Nothing.” He looked at his watch. “But it’s been only fifty minutes. According to my notes, it was fifty-four minutes before the onset of hallucinogenic effect on the night of the original experiment.”

  “Four minutes,” Walter said, “seems like four hours.”

  They’d already waited for what felt like ages for Roscoe and Abby to split for some kind of gallery opening. Chick and Iggy had never come home the night before, but according to Nina this was a fairly regular occurrence, usually attributable to drugs, women, or both. While Walter was glad everyone was gone, he had been particularly adamant that the pregnant Abby be as far away from their experiment as possible. He would feel horrible if anything happened to her and her baby, all because of him.

  Thinking about Abby and her baby set his mind back to Roscoe’s strange claim that he and Walter would meet again in the far future, but wouldn’t remember having met. Although Walter was the first to admit that his own memory wasn’t the best—that he forgot people’s names all the time even when he’d been introduced more than once—he found it hard to believe that meeting one of his musical idols could vanish from his memory, just like that.

  He fo
und himself struck by a sudden fear that something might happen to him in the future that would destroy his memory. Some kind of disease or mental breakdown. He became instantly sure that, if he could just remove the top of his own skull and peer inside, he would see that future synaptic disaster spelled out in the whorls and convolutions of his brain.

  Walter suddenly became aware of a strange chill seeping into his lower body. When he looked down, he saw that he’d sunk nearly to his nipples into the glossy hardwood floor. Alarmed, he stood up and found that he wasn’t trapped, as if in cement or quicksand. The surface had simply become liquid beneath him—a thin, water-like liquid, approximately knee-deep now that he was standing. He reached down to scoop up some of the liquid floor with his cupped palms.

  “Remarkable,” he said, allowing the floor to trickle out between his fingers. “Belly, do you see this, too?”

  He turned to his friend and was stunned to realize that Bell was gone.

  So was Nina.

  Walter was all alone in a huge, empty room with no windows. The room was so enormous that its distant walls were hazy and indistinct. There was no furniture. No detail. Just miles and miles of this strange liquid floor.

  Walter had never thought that solitary confinement sounded like particularly bad punishment. He enjoyed his own company, had plenty of mental games he liked to play, and a wide variety of intriguing theories to contemplate. In fact, the idea of being locked in a small room seemed kind of comforting. Almost womblike in a strange way.

  As a child, Walter had always sought out small hiding places as temporary refuges from bullies.

  But this vast empty room was the loneliest, most awful place he had ever been. Its dimensions were soul-crushing, making him feel as small and irrelevant as an ant in the middle of a salt flat. An ant without a colony, banished to die alone.

  His mind immediately seized on this metaphor and when he looked down at his wet hands he saw that they had taken on the elongated, dual clawed form of an ant’s bristly pretarsus. It should have been terrifying, but the very spook-show scariness of this newest twist had an opposite, pacifying effect on Walter.

  It’s not real.

  The image of his creepy ant-hands was nothing more than a standard, slightly silly hallucination. A day-glo carnival, haunted house kind of fear, rather than the all too real fear of loss and loneliness evoked by the huge empty room.

  Ant hands, he could handle. Pun intended.

  Walter was a scientist. A veteran user of consciousness expanding substances of all sorts. He wasn’t about to let himself be distracted by irrelevant mental trickery. He needed to focus.

  And just like that, the huge room was gone, and Walter found himself standing up to his knees in Reiden Lake.

  Only it was more like a soundstage dressed to look like Reiden Lake. The trees looked flat, like they’d been painted onto the walls in a harsh, stylized manner meant to read well on black and white film. The reeds and brush around the edge of the water seemed monochromatic and papery, and there were only three different groupings, repeated over and over all along the shore.

  The red Coleman lantern was there, too—the one they had been using the night of their first encounter with the Zodiac Killer. But instead of a flame, it was just a lick of flapping orange-and-yellow fabric. The water around his legs was the only thing that seemed real.

  But what was still really bothering him was the fact that Bell and Nina were nowhere to be seen.

  “Belly?” he called. “Belly, are you here?”

  Nothing. No reply. He was still alone.

  This seemed wrong somehow. It seemed impossible that their first use of that particular blend had evoked such a power empathic connection, and yet this time, Walter was off on his own disconnected trip, unable to even see his friend. Could they have gotten the mixture wrong somehow? Could one of the ingredients have been tainted, or of questionable quality?

  It was an annoying and frustrating setback, but there was nothing Walter could do but ride it out, record every aspect in detail, and then go back to the lab and try again.

  That’s when the gate started to open.

  At first, it just looked like the kind of subtle bubbling under the paint that might be seen when there was water leaking behind a wall, only it was the air itself that was bubbling and peeling away. Rather than being directly in front of Walter, the way it had been that first night, the budding gate was slightly to the left and lower down, tilted at a tipsy angle. As it started to split and gape open, Walter took an involuntary step back, green lake water sloshing around his shins.

  Where the hell is Nina?

  Nina and her gun were supposed to be watching over Walter and Belly, waiting for the appearance of the gate and any new, potentially dangerous visitors that might come through. But she wasn’t there, leaving the unarmed Walter alone and unprotected.

  Then it occurred to him that it was possible Nina could hear him, even if he couldn’t hear or see her.

  “Nina,” he said. “Nina, I hope that you can hear me. I’m going to do my best to verbalize what I’m experiencing.”

  He paused for a moment, wishing desperately for a reply, even though he was sure he wouldn’t get one. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t.

  “Alright,” he continued, determined to articulate as much information as possible. “I seem to be inside a kind of artificial environment. Almost like a... a simulacrum of Reiden Lake.”

  When he said the word simulacrum, the lake, trees and sky around him suddenly fluttered, like a painted curtain rustled by a passing breeze. He ignored the disturbing ripple and tried to focus on the gateway.

  “The gateway has opened,” he said, “but it seems smaller. Crooked, almost unstable. If I were to try and pass through it, I would have to do so on my hands and knees.”

  That’s when he was struck with a notion so compelling, he felt physically staggered by it. A notion so simple and obvious that he couldn’t believe it had never occurred to him until that moment.

  What if he did just that? What if he went through the gate?

  Of course, it was a terrible idea. He could almost see the raised eyebrow on Bell’s disapproving face at the very thought of it. After all, they had absolutely no idea what lay on the other side. Would the atmosphere be breathable? Would there even be an atmosphere at all, or would he find himself in some purely theoretical dimension? One of pure thought and energy, where mundane functions of the human body—such as breathing—would be rendered meaningless and irrelevant.

  But, could he truly call himself a scientist if he were to pass up such a unique opportunity? What about all the potential knowledge that might be gained on the other side?

  What about the danger? What if, in passing through, he was transformed into a radioactive monster like the Zodiac Killer?

  Walter stared, mesmerized and silent, at the glistening gate. He was locked in a profound inner war with himself. He knew he would be crazy to take that kind of risk, but he’d also be crazy not to.

  He reached a hand slowly toward the gate.

  Gracile, reaching tendrils started forming around the edges as the gate pulsed, widening, then narrowing, then widening again. It would be a tight fit, and Walter would need to time himself precisely to push through when the gate was at its widest.

  He took a sloshing step closer, fingers less than in inch from the undulating opening.

  That’s when he heard a terrified scream.

  He jerked his fingers back—convinced that the gate itself had screamed—and stood, unmoving and silent, for several heartbeats, waiting for something to happen. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the water against his legs.

  Then a thud, followed by the sound of breaking glass. As if reacting to the sound, the gate shrank and curled in on itself like a salted slug, and then it was gone.

  Another scream, this one even more drawn out and intense. Walter spun toward the sound...

  ...and found himself standing in the middle of Nina’s bedroom.
Disoriented and swirling with vertigo, he sat straight down on the suddenly normal, solid wood floor, pushing a shaking hand through his hair and struggling to pull himself together.

  He looked around and spotted Bell and Nina together on the other side of the room. They were kneeling, facing each other, holding hands and staring, enraptured, into each other’s eyes. Nina’s gun was on the floor beside her, forgotten.

  Walter jumped, startled when he heard another reverberating crash, this time coming from behind the left-hand wall, from the house next door. It sounded as if someone had knocked a television set off its stand. The floor actually shook with the impact.

  It was followed by a shattering of glass. Bell and Nina didn’t seem to notice.

  “Belly,” Walter said. Excited agitation obliterated any tactful desire to leave the two of them alone in their clearly intimate moment. “Belly!” He reached out and shook Bell’s shoulder. “I saw the gate! Just for a fleeting moment. But now the majority of the hallucinogenic effects have dissipated, other than a lingering audio component that sounds like screams and crashes.”

  “Crashes?” Bell shook his head, as if he’d just been woken up from a deep sleep. “I hear that, too.” This puzzled Walter, for he felt none of the empathic link.

  Nina also shook her head, looking down and quickly letting go of Bell’s hands, flushing crimson with embarrassment.

  “How peculiar,” Walter said. “Our minds failed to sync up telepathically this time, and yet we are sharing this minor auditory...”

  Another resounding howl of human misery. Nina leapt to her feet, gun in hand.

  “Jesus,” she said. “That sounds like Mrs. Baumgartner! She and her husband live in the basement flat next door!”

  The howl came again from the neighboring house. Actually it was more like crying now, ongoing sobs that ebbed and flowed like a tide.

  “You hear it, too?” Walter asked.

  “Of course I do,” she snapped. “It’s real!”

  “It sounds as if someone has been hurt,” Bell said. “We’d better see what’s happened.”