Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  Nina came out through the back door of Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment.

  “The paramedics have arrived,” she said. “Want to fill me in on what the hell happened out there?”

  Walter looked from Bell to Nina and back again. He nodded.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”

  As they stepped in through the back door of Nina’s house, Roscoe and Abby were coming in through the front door.

  “Man,” Roscoe said. “Looks like somebody bombed the building next door!”

  “I don’t think anybody was hurt,” Abby said, looking back over her shoulder. “But, oh, that poor piano!”

  “Crazy, huh?” Nina said, hustling Walter and Bell up the stairs. “We’ll see you later.”

  Walter heard Roscoe’s voice echo up after them.

  “What’s with them anyway?”

  Then Abby’s faint response.

  “Are there any more Ding Dongs? Little Bobby is starving.”

  Nina shut her bedroom room door and then ran over to the windows, peering out into the street below.

  “This formula we’ve created is obviously extremely dangerous, and unpredictable,” Walter said. “I can’t help but wonder if we will be causing more harm than good by continuing to experiment with it.”

  “But how else can we hope to send that monster back where he came from?” Bell asked. “I just don’t see any other way.”

  “We could just shoot him,” Nina suggested.

  “Maybe so,” Walter replied. “But putting aside the moral ambiguities of vigilantism, do we even know that he’s human? Maybe he can’t be killed, in the conventional sense of the word.”

  “He definitely seemed human,” Nina said.

  “I still think we need to stick to our original plan,” Bell said. “We brought him into this world, it’s up to us to send him away.”

  “Walter,” Nina said. “Before all of the craziness, you said you saw the gate, didn’t you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But it was smaller than the first time, and seemed kind of... I don’t know... unstable. I’m fairly certain that, because Belly was distracted and wound up linked with you instead of me, my own chemically enhanced ability wasn’t strong enough to keep it open single-handedly. Or, should I say, single-mindedly?”

  “So,” Bell said. “We need to figure out a way to link our minds together deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.”

  “What about some kind of biofeedback?” Nina said. They looked at her, and she continued. “I know a guy doing cutting-edge research on the use of biofeedback to regulate organ function. We should be able to borrow equipment from him.”

  “Biofeedback?” Bell grinned. “Yes, yes, a portable biofeedback setup might work as a basis for the type of machine that we would need. We’d need to find a way to synchronize our alpha waves and link our minds together during the trip, so that we can concentrate on holding the gate open long enough to force the killer through.”

  “We’ll need to make some slight modifications to the standard rig,” Walter said, grabbing a piece of paper from Nina’s desk and swiftly sketching out a schematic. “See here, if we can eliminate the need for wiring each person in individually, through the use of multi-wave broadcasters like this...”

  Nina turned away and began to leaf through the newspaper as Walter and Bell brainstormed ideas. But without warning, she leapt up with a gasp of excitement.

  “Guys,” she said. “You need to see this.”

  16

  With a feeling of apprehension, Walter accepted the paper Nina thrust under his nose.

  “Here,” she said, pointing out a classified advertisement about a third of the way down the page. “Look at this!”

  “Regarding incident at Reiden Lake,” Walter read out loud, pausing to exchange a significant glance with Bell. “Meet me at the northwest corner of Alamo Square Park at midnight 10/23. Crucial new information has come to light. A friend in the Bureau.”

  “A friend in the bureau?” Nina said.

  “Iverson,” Walter said.

  “Who else could it be?” Bell replied. He looked down at his watch. “But it’s nearly 11:45 now!”

  “Right,” Nina said. “Come on!”

  They dropped everything and went thundering down the stairs.

  “Hey,” Abby said as they barreled past her, holding a large wooden spoon slick with some kind of sauce. “Do you want some...”

  Whatever she was offering, they were out the door before she could finish her sentence.

  * * *

  The small park was bordered by colorful Queen Anne houses and seemed nearly deserted at that hour, except for a single older man in a trench coat and long, bright green plaid scarf, walking a large slobbery sheepdog.

  The northwest corner featured a break in the low wall that surrounded the park, marked by a pair of rounded stone posts like silent sentinels. A sloping path, bordered by whispering pine trees and willows, led up into the dark interior.

  There was no sign of Iverson.

  Walter nervously toed a crushed bottle cap while Bell alternated between scanning the street and looking at his watch. Since Iverson didn’t know Nina, and might be spooked by the presence of a stranger, she had decided to keep an eye on them from her Beetle, parked across the street. Walter couldn’t see her face, just the glowing tip of her cigarette.

  “Where is he?” Bell asked.

  “Do you think something might have happened to him?” Walter asked anxiously. “Latimer? Or maybe...”

  He didn’t finish that sentence, but didn’t need to. He could see that Bell was thinking the same thing.

  Had the killer gotten to Iverson somehow? Was yet another person dead because of them?

  Still, they waited. A young couple passed them, holding hands, all oblivious dreamy smiles and leaving behind a trail of pheromones. An old Chinese woman passed, going the other way, bundled up against the night like an Arctic explorer on a grim race to the North Pole.

  Still no Iverson.

  * * *

  They waited nearly two hours, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t going to show.

  “Now what?” Walter asked.

  Bell shrugged.

  “It’s not like we don’t have work to do,” he said. “We still have the deadline from the killer’s notebook. Even though we don’t know the exact date and time of his next murder, we do know that it will be sooner, rather than later.”

  “Very well,” Walter said. “Right. So we continue our experiments on getting the gate open and stabilized. But in the meanwhile, we should watch the classifieds, in case Iverson tries to contact us again.”

  Walter looked up and down the intersecting streets one last time.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  He couldn’t help but speculate what it was that Iverson wanted to tell them. Some new breakthrough regarding the gamma radiation? Or maybe something to do with the true nature of the killer? Or the nature of the gateway.

  Of course, this kind of speculation was a waste of mental energy, and he knew it. All they could do at that point was watch and wait.

  The two of them returned to Nina’s Beetle with slumped shoulders and glum expressions.

  “What the hell happened?” she asked, flicking the butt of her latest cigarette out the widow to join its slain brothers in a pile on the sidewalk. “Why didn’t he show up?”

  “No idea,” Bell answered. “He just didn’t.”

  “All we can do right now is go back to your place and get some rest,” Walter said.

  “Yeah,” Bell agreed. “I think we’re all feeling a little punchy.”

  “All right,” she responded, cranking the ignition and putting the Beetle in gear. “But I don’t like this. It seems, I don’t know. Weird.”

  Walter climbed into the back seat, hoping again that Iverson was okay.

  * * *

  From the safety of a stolen Volvo station
wagon, parked down the block, Allan lifted his binoculars and watched the two hippies and the red-headed bitch get out of her car and cross over to enter a Victorian row house that had seen better days. The bitch’s house, presumably, but he jotted down the address so he could check up on that.

  He’d had a dark, angry moment when he thought they might not have fallen for the ad he’d placed in the classified section. So angry, in fact, that he’d almost driven away and headed directly to Miranda’s house to execute her parents and take her that very night, rather than waiting for the perfect moment, like he’d planned.

  But lucky for pretty little Miranda, the hippies from Reiden Lake had showed up at the very last minute, all out of breath and wild-eyed and tumbling out of a brand new green Volkswagen Beetle. Allan wrote down the license plate number and then settled in to watch.

  They never once even looked at the Volvo, let alone at him, but he pulled the wool cap down over his forehead and slouched low in the seat, just to be on the safe side.

  He found it tremendously exciting to be so close to them without them knowing he was there. He only wished the redhead had gotten out of the car to wait with them. He felt no boredom, nor desire for time to pass more quickly as they waited, together but not together.

  In fact, he felt perfectly calm and content, studying every detail of the pair while composing taunting letters in his head, which he would send to them later. It was going to be extremely difficult to make himself wait for the right moment to let them know he was watching. Almost as difficult as waiting to be with Miranda. He was dying to see the fear in their faces as they realized he’d been watching.

  Eventually the pair gave up waiting in the park and led Allan back to their home base, just like he knew they would. And now he would be able to start stalking them in earnest. Getting to know them. Learning their routines. Connecting with them the way he’d connected with Iverson. Because although he could easily take them out from a distance, like hunted deer, it would be so much more fun to torment them. To terrorize them and watch them squirm.

  This was the best part.

  17

  Back at the house, Nina watched Walter stagger into the living room and plop down on one of the sofas beside the purring fur throw pillow that was Cat-Mandu. But Bell lingered in the hallway, hands stuffed in his pockets and that charming little half-smile on his face. The same smile that had caught her attention when they first met back in March, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Neurochemistry in New Orleans.

  They’d both been involved with other people at the time, but the neurochemistry between them had been difficult to ignore. It was a wild weekend, full of all kinds of drunken misadventures in the French Quarter, but somehow the two of them had never found a way to be alone together. On the last day, she’d given him her card and told him to stay in touch. She had figured she’d never see him again. Until he showed up on her doorstep with this wild tale of psychic gateways and atomic murder.

  When she looked over at him, his smile faltered slightly and he looked away. Things felt so strange between the two of them now, ever since the strange psychic link that they’d formed during the ill-fated acid trip.

  The thing that had been so astounding about that link was that, while it was the most profoundly intimate connection she’d ever experienced with another human being, it was neither romantic nor sexual in nature. It was this powerful sense of commonality. Something not unlike the discovery of a spiritual twin, of intertwined destinies and an unshakable life-long connection.

  All her life, Nina had found that nearly everyone she met was put off by her naked ambition. Men tended to feel threatened, and women were intimidated, but looking into Bell’s mind that night was like looking into a mirror, and Nina had seen her own voracious ambition reflected back at her with flawless synchronicity.

  But it wasn’t just some kind of hippy-dippy soul mate “spiritual bonding” thing. Because, underneath it all, there had been something very dark and ominous about their connection. A connection that seemed to propel them both into some terrible unknowable future in which the fabric of their universe would be torn asunder by their twin ambition.

  Yet that shared ambition felt stronger than ever in the face of such awful knowledge. And it was that understanding—that they were both willing to pursue their ambitions without regard for consequences—that had cemented the inexplicable bond between them.

  Nina had experimented with a wide variety of hallucinogenic substances before, and many of the trips she’d experienced had presented her with images or ideas that seemed immensely weighty and significant at the time, only to be revealed as trivial and silly in the sober light of day.

  In a way, she wanted desperately to believe that the dark bond she thought she had shared with Bell was just like that. An amusing figment of her chemically enhanced mind, like the time she became convinced that the paisley pattern of a friend’s shirt revealed the secret formula for a new clean-burning fuel that would revolutionize global transportation and make her a millionaire.

  But every time she locked eyes with him, she could feel herself resonating inside like a tuning fork, hungry for the success that she knew she wouldn’t be able to achieve without him. The success that he would not be able to achieve without her.

  And in the midst of all this impossibly weird mayhem, that small sliver of weirdness was the one that preyed on her, making her feel vulnerable and off kilter.

  Standing there with Bell in her darkened hallway, she knew that he felt it, too.

  “Crazy day,” she said softly, stepping deliberately forward into his personal space.

  “Yeah,” he replied. He didn’t step back. “Listen, about last night...”

  She reached up and pressed the first two fingers of her right hand against his lips. His breath was warm against her skin.

  She hadn’t planned to sleep with him yet, even though she’d wanted to. Now, it seemed so much safer— and simpler than facing the true nature of the connection between them.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

  He just looked down at her for a long, weighty moment, some kind of private war going on behind his dark eyes. She turned away and headed silently upward.

  There was a moment where she thought maybe he wasn’t going to follow her, and she paused halfway up, heart beating too fast. Then she heard the sound of his footsteps on the stairs behind her. She smiled and continued to her room.

  In her bedroom, she didn’t bother to turn the light on. She just walked over to the pool of yellow streetlight pouring in through her sheer curtains and, without turning around, pulled her sweater off over her head. Her hair crackled with static as she tossed it aside.

  She was very aware of Bell standing close behind her for a silent minute. Then she felt his big hands on the curve of her waist, tentative at first, then pulling her back against him and sliding over her belly and braless breasts. She leaned into him, feeling as if she was melting. All the madness, all the mayhem, all the strange and heavy events of the past twenty-four hours were melting, too, washed away in warm, dopamine oblivion.

  She turned to face him and pulled his mouth down to hers, kissing him just like she’d wanted to so badly, back in March. Pretending they were in the French Quarter, happy and buzzed and laughing like nothing mattered. Holding on tight to the solid physicality of his long, lanky body. To the simple biological imperative of their desire. The smell of his skin, the taste of his mouth, the feel of his hands on her body.

  All these things were so simple and so real.

  It was exactly what she needed.

  They tumbled together onto her bed, wrestling with buckles and buttons. Still half-dressed, but unable to hold back another second, they made love like over-eager teenagers. Graceless and hungry, as if it was the end of the world. Which didn’t seem all that far from the truth.

  * * *

  Afterward, Nina lay with her cheek against the black fur on Bell’s chest, listening to the s
low, even rhythm of his heartbeat and dozing breath. She felt warm and satisfied, but all the questions and uncertainty about the true nature of their connection still lurked there in the background, like wind rattling the windows of a cozy room.

  It was a long time before she slept.

  18

  When it became clear that the hippies were tucked in for the night, Allan decided he needed a little recreation. Something light hearted and non-committal.

  A quickie.

  One of the inexplicable side effects of having passed through the gate and into this strange and wonderful mirror world was that he rarely slept. His body and mind seemed fueled by the arcane energy burning inside his flesh, and the only time he ever felt tired was when he had gone too long between killings. As a result, he found that he got twice as much done, and became intimately acquainted with the fascinating, ever-changing rhythms of the twenty-four-hour city.

  The graveyard shift was his favorite time of night. The feeling of passing between building after building packed full of sleeping, vulnerable citizens made him feel like a kid in a candy shop. And those who were awake and walking the streets were a fascinating blend of the wild, the lost, and the forgotten. Very few of whom would be missed if they were to meet Allan in a dark alley.

  Still wanting to be thoughtful and pragmatic about his spur-of-the-moment plan, he figured it would be wise to head down into the Tenderloin, and not leave a dead mouse on the redhead’s doorstep. He didn’t want to spook his real prey.

  He took a long, roundabout stroll down the hill, zigzagging along random streets and occasionally doubling back when the mood struck him. He wasn’t in any rush, just open for suggestion. Polk to Myrtle to Larkin, then Olive back to Polk again and up to the tawdry circus of O’Farrell Street.

  The seedy single-room-occupancy hotels and low-rent apartment buildings in that neighborhood were like vending machines filled with victims. An embarrassment of riches. It was almost too easy.

  A young couple leaving the O’Farrell Theater caught his eye, making him feel a warm, gentle nostalgia for his lover’s lane phase. She was bleached blond and fat-bottomed in gold-lamé hot pants and cheap boots. He was a male model type on the skids, still handsome but a little too thin inside his barely buttoned eye-searingly tacky shirt.