Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  A set of concrete steps led down to the door of the basement apartment. As they stood there, anguished wails continued to come from within.

  The phosphorescent lushness of the bougainvillea that crowded the doorway and the way Nina’s knock caused light to flash in the corners of Walter’s eyes let him know that he had not yet fully come down from the trip. The cries from within the apartment were also unnaturally intensified, seeming to bore their way into the soft tissue of his hypersensitive brain, like hungry maggots.

  He shook his head to escape the image.

  “Mrs. Baumgartner!” Nina called. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  The wailing stopped, replaced by a faint, papery voice with an old country accent.

  “Help me. Please, God help me...”

  Nina tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed through it into a neat little kitchen that smelled like a jarring combination of onions and cloying rose-scented air-freshener. Walter wrinkled his nose at the warring odors.

  The room was decorated in porcelain kitsch. Milkmaids and bakers and sad-eyed praying children. Cows with strangely human smiles on their bovine faces, and dapper pigs in waistcoats. The sound of canned television laughter came from further into the apartment.

  “Mrs. Baumgartner?” Nina called. “Where are you?”

  Another sob instead of a reply, and Walter and Bell tiptoed behind Nina as she crept through the dim kitchen and then into a narrow, cluttered dining room that lay beyond.

  They all had to turn sideways to inch past the massive antique table that filled the entire room. There was one single place setting at the far end, with a small, neatly folded pile of papers and clipped coupons beside it. The rest of the table was covered with another platoon of ceramic figurines, all rallying around a giant gaudy centerpiece of plastic fruit and candles that had never been lit.

  At the open archway to the living room, Nina stopped and gasped, then stepped back involuntarily into Bell. He took her shoulders and looked around her into the room.

  “What...” Bell whispered. “What happened?”

  Walter came forward and peered around them.

  “My God.” He winced and turned his head.

  The living room was as clean but cluttered as the kitchen and dining room had been, with too many doily-covered end tables, overstuffed velvet chairs, and a coffee table crowded with glass dishes full of ribbon candy and butter mints. There was a brown floral couch with a single pillow and a crocheted afghan, as if someone had made their bed there. A black-and-white TV was nattering away, some kind of a game show.

  Here the scent of fake roses was underscored with the bright iron reek of blood.

  In the center of the room sat an old man in a wheelchair. He was as scrawny and helpless as a baby bird, his frail, wrinkled neck barely up to the job of supporting his large, bald head. He wore oversized blue pajamas, a threadbare plaid bathrobe, and a bulky, hand-knitted scarf. His skinny, coat-hanger shoulders were stooped, his hands tucked under a faded yellow blanket on his lap.

  The old man was staring with wild, jittery eyes at a small, plump woman in a floral dress and pink cardigan, who lay cowering against the baseboard near a birdcage. She looked as if she had been mauled by a tiger. Her face, her hands, her forearms, and shoulders all had deep, ragged gashes in them, some nearly to the bone, all seeping blood into her already crimson-soaked clothes.

  She looked up at Nina with terrified eyes.

  “Help me,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “Mrs. Baumgartner!” Nina crossed the living room and knelt by the old woman, calling orders over her shoulder like a field medic. “Walter, Bell, make sure Mr. Baumgartner is okay and then check the rest of the apartment. Whoever did this may still be here. Then call an ambulance and bring me any first aid stuff you can find.”

  Walter and Bell glanced at each other, neither one relishing the idea of being the brave hero who found the escaped tiger in the bedroom. Finally Bell pulled a sturdy walking stick from a stand near the front door and started for the archway that led to the bathroom and bedroom. Walter went over to the wheelchair and put a gentle hand on the old man’s knife-blade shoulder.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Baumgartner?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s me,” the old man hollered, his voice shrill and cracking. The suddenness of it caused Walter to pull his hand back involuntarily. “Me! It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!”

  Clearly the poor old fellow was suffering from some kind of dementia, but he seemed to be more or less unharmed. Walter left him and went to check the front door. It was locked, chained from the inside. He grabbed a pink, floral print umbrella as a sorry excuse for a weapon and followed Bell into the bedroom.

  There was nothing. The room contained a single hospital-style bed with metal rails on each side, a motley assortment of outdated medical equipment, an army of pill bottles, and a bulky stainless steel bedpan.

  The bathroom had a shower with a yellowing plastic stool and a thick, blue rubber mat stuck to the tile floor by suction cups. On the toilet tank was a copy of Reader’s Digest and a doll with a crocheted pink-and-white dress that hid an extra roll of toilet paper. There was no tiger. No intruder. No signs of a break-in.

  Walter found a well-stocked first-aid box in a bedside drawer and brought it to back to Nina. Bell appeared seconds later with a stack of clean towels. He handed the towels to Nina, and then followed the cord to the tipped over telephone.

  As he dialed 911, Walter brought a pot of hot water from the kitchen, then squatted alongside Nina and tried to help her dress and bind Mrs. Baumgartner’s wounds. The old woman moaned and flinched at their touch. Walter took her cold hand and squeezed it.

  “Please try to calm down, Mrs. Baumgartner,” he said. “I realize that you have experienced an awful shock, but it’s vitally important that you tell us what happened. Who attacked you?”

  Mrs. Baumgartner started sobbing again.

  “I...” She clutched at Walter’s shirtfront. “I don’t know! There was no one! No one!” The tone of her voice was swiftly ratcheting up into hysteria. Walter squeezed her hand again, firmly but gently.

  “Please, Mrs. Baumgartner. Slow down and start from the beginning. Think it through. Do you mean you were attacked from behind?”

  The old woman stifled another sob and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I mean there was no one. I was sitting on the couch, watching The Match Game, you know? And then... then I got dizzy. Like maybe I was going to faint. Then something... something hit me! In my face! This thing, it kept on hitting me! Cutting me! But I couldn’t see it! There was no one there! No one!” She looked up at Walter as if it was all his fault. “Who was hitting me? Who?”

  A sob came from behind them. Walter looked up. There were tears running down the old man’s face. He was staring at Walter.

  “It’s me,” he said again. “It’s my dream. Don’t you see. My dream, it got out!”

  Walter turned to him as Nina continued to work.

  “What dream?” Walter asked. “Did you see what happened?”

  “Try to think,” Bell said, hanging up the phone and sitting on the arm of the couch beside the man. “Did you see who did this?”

  “It’s me,” the old man said again. “Me! I did it. It’s me!”

  “He’s obviously not in his right mind,” Nina snapped. “Can’t you see that?”

  The old man pulled his hands out from under the blanket. Only there were no hands. Just old, long-healed stumps.

  One stump was slightly longer than the other, and seemed to contain a functioning wrist joint so that its tapered tip curled and straightened as he held them out to Walter.

  “It’s me!” he shouted. “ME!”

  Nina let out a derisive snort.

  “See,” she said. “He couldn’t have done this.”

  The old man squinted at Nina, suddenly canny.

  “In my dream I can,” he said. “In my dream, I have hands. With
claws.”

  Walter stared at the old man, a flock of terrifying thoughts suddenly crowding into his head unbidden. Sweat prickled his brow.

  He turned to Bell.

  “Belly?” he said. “Do you think...?”

  “I don’t know a goddamn thing.” Bell turned to the door, showy anger like a stripper’s feather fan not quite covering his underlying fear. “Anyway, it’s not our job to figure out what happened. That’s for the police. I’m going to go outside and wait for the ambulance.”

  Walter watched as he went out the front entryway and up the shadowed stone stairs to the street, leaving the door wide open. Walter turned back to Nina. She looked up from binding a wound on Mrs. Baumgartner’s arm.

  “What?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready to say it out loud. I...” Walter shook his head. “I want to be wrong. I want this all to have a reasonable...”

  Footsteps brought his head up again. Bell was coming back down the stairs, his pace slow and measured. He stopped in the door. His face was a cold mask.

  “Walter,” he said. “You’d better come up and have a look at this.”

  15

  Walter rose from the old woman’s side, frowning.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “You’d better come and look,” Bell repeated.

  Walter looked down at Nina. She waved him on.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ve got it here. There isn’t much more to do for her at this point anyway.”

  He nodded, then crossed to the door and followed Bell up the stone steps. At the top, Bell stood aside and spread his hands at a scene of chaos and destruction.

  “I believe this is the source of the smashing sounds we were hearing earlier.”

  Walter stared, stunned. All around in the glow of the street lamps lay scattered and smashed pieces of furniture, kitchen appliances, record albums, books, shoes, clothes. A broken TV had caved in the roof of a white Mustang. An upright piano lay on its back in the middle of the street, split open like a dead whale and blocking traffic in both directions. A painting in a gilded frame was impaled on the spikes of the iron fence of the building next to Nina’s place. And in the midst of it all stood a middle-aged man and woman in their bedclothes, arguing violently.

  He was a large, portly man with a thick crown of blond curls and a meaty, square-jawed face that had probably been handsome twenty years and way too many three-martini lunches ago. A high-school quarterback gone to seed. His cheap, gaudy robe had been haphazardly tied and was gaping open to show his bare chest and hairy belly.

  She was an aging model type, strawberry blond with a rail-thin, cocaine physique under a floaty sheer tangerine baby-doll negligee. She wore heeled gold mules with marabou on the toes and her long, horsey face was shiny with night-cream.

  “No problem,” he was saying. “We’re gonna be okay. We’re insured.”

  “We are not okay!” the woman screeched at him. “What exactly are you planning to put on the claim? Act of God?”

  “Would you shut up for one second and let me think?”

  Just then a young man in blue jeans and a western shirt ran out of a building across the street and jolted to a stop beside the caved-in Mustang, his jaw hanging open.

  “Who did this?” he shouted. “Who the hell did this to my car?” He looked up at the man in the pajamas, who was pointlessly trying to match up jagged fragments of shattered records. “Is this your stuff? Is this your TV? Did you drop your goddamn TV on my brand new car?”

  The older man backed up as the car owner advanced menacingly toward him.

  “I didn’t do anything!” the older man said, empty hands held out like a peace offering. “It just happened! My wife and I were just getting ready for bed, and all of a sudden, everything in the room starts shaking and flying around, smashing through the windows and dropping to the street. It must have been some kind of an earthquake.”

  “There was no earthquake!” The angry young car owner looked around at the gathering crowd. “Did anybody feel an earthquake? No. Did you?” He shook his head. “You’re talking out of your ass, pal!”

  “So what are you suggesting?” the wife said, getting fearlessly in the young man’s face, stabbing his chest with a pointy red fingernail. “Do I look like I could have thrown a goddamn piano out a window?” She waved her hand. “Does he?”

  Walter turned away as the argument continued, and looked up at the building. On the third floor, the floor directly adjacent to the room in which Bell and he had just taken their trip, all of the tall, elegant Victorian bay windows had been smashed out, casements splintered, sills shattered, revealing the insides of an apartment that now looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

  Furniture was upended, draperies sagged off broken curtain rods and flapped in the wind, pictures hung crooked on the walls. And standing in the middle of it, his hands in tight fists at his sides, was a staring, teenaged boy, sharp-featured, mop-haired, dark-eyed, and utterly and absolutely terrified.

  “In my dream, I have hands,” Walter repeated softly under his breath.

  “What did you say?” Bell looked around at him, frowning.

  For a long moment, Walter didn’t reply, just pursed his lips, thinking.

  “Belly,” he finally said, “I know that you’re familiar with the latest theories of poltergeist activity.”

  “I was afraid you were going to come to that conclusion,” Bell replied. “Yes, of course I’m familiar with those theories. The repression of rage, of frustration, building up in the hormonally charged cortexes of pubescent adolescents, is thought to manifest itself in telekinetic storms that are often mistaken for the work of malicious ghosts.”

  Walter nodded.

  “And perhaps in demented old men, as well.”

  “What are you saying?” Bell asked. “You believe the two events were different occurrences of the same phenomenon?”

  “I’m afraid I believe more than that,” Walter replied.

  “We can’t know that,” Bell countered. “There’s no reason to cast blame on...”

  “Oh, come now. It can’t be a coincidence.” Walter waved a hand at the wreckage that surrounded them. “This kind of event is so rare as to be the stuff of myth. Modern science has never managed to verify that it has ever truly occurred. Ever! And yet we have just witnessed not just one instance, but two. Two! And both happening at the exact moment when we were in the middle of...”

  “Keep your voice down, Walter,” Bell hissed. “We don’t want to add to the already considerable panic.”

  He took Walter’s arm and led him back down the steps into Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment, and then out through the kitchen into the back yard, where things were quiet and calm and green, and the world didn’t seem quite so crazy. The cement bunnies remained serene and unaffected by the chaos.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” Nina called from inside the apartment.

  Walter hardly heard her. He was still trying to make his point.

  “There must be some correlation,” he said. “There has to be!” Then he remembered what he’d seen when he first came out of the trip. Bell and Nina kneeling face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes.

  “Belly,” Walter said. “You linked minds with Nina, didn’t you?”

  “Well,” Bell began, unable to meet Walter’s gaze.

  “Embarrassment has no place in scientific method!” Walter said brusquely. “Anyway, never mind all that, tell me—did you or did you not link minds with Nina, instead of me?”

  “Yes,” Bell admitted. “I have no idea how it could have happened, when she wasn’t even tripping.”

  “Clearly she was the one who was foremost in your thoughts in that moment,” Walter said. “Not that I blame you, given her apparent aversion to brassieres, but that’s something for us to analyze later. What’s far more important to consider is the fact that both times we used this particular blend, a powerful psychic li
nk was created. The first time it was you and me, then later on, with the killer as well. This time it was you and Nina. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, you are correct,” Bell said. “Okay, so...?”

  “So, she wasn’t tripping with us, but somehow our own heightened psychic abilities caused any latent power in her to be activated, as well.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What I’m saying is this—what if our special blend not only enhances our own abilities, but also causes some kind of psychic pulse that radiates outward. We become, for lack of a better word, amplifiers, like the ones in a radio set. Perhaps, in our heightened state, we pick up weak psychic energy around us, such as the angst of a teenager, for instance, or the unfocused rage of a demented old man, and amplify it a hundredfold.”

  “Or maybe it was the gate itself that activated and amplified the phenomenon,” Bell countered.

  “Could be,” Walter said. “But either way, this amplification of latent psychic power occurred, and all of a sudden the repressed frustration hidden inside the affected individuals explodes outward in a storm of psychic fury and... and...” Walter paled as something occurred to him. “My God, Belly. We are very fortunate that no one was killed.”

  Bell gave him a cold look.

  “You’re acting as if you believe this is our fault.”

  “Of course it’s our fault!” Walter was almost shouting now. “Maybe it was a side effect of the way our minds were enhanced, or maybe it was caused by the gate that we opened by using the special blend, but ask yourself this: Would any of this have occurred if we hadn’t done our experiment?” Before Bell could reply, Walter continued. “It would not! We are directly responsible for that poor woman’s wounds, and for all that property damage on the street.”

  “I told you to keep your voice down, dammit.”

  “But...”

  Bell grabbed his arm.

  “Listen to me,” he hissed into Walter’s ear. “We can analyze what went wrong and discuss our own responsibility or lack thereof in private, but shouting that we are responsible out here, where that angry mob out front can hear us? That’s a very bad idea.”