When he turned to face the speaker, the twenty-two-year-old version of himself was gone. In his place was Carla Warren, looking both tired and worried.
“Walter,” she said, her voice imploring. “We need to talk.”
In her pale, slender hands, she held his journal.
“How dare you?” the Hard Walter demanded, stepping forward. “That’s private.”
Walter peered at him, and noticed Hard Walter was now wearing his familiar stained lab coat. When he looked down at his own chest and arms, he discovered that he was now wearing the long-gone Norfolk jacket he’d loved so much in his twenties. And his hands—his hands were youthful, smooth, and unscarred.
Had he somehow become his younger self, while that chilly doppelganger had taken over his modern self?
It was all so confusing.
“Please,” Carla was saying. “Look at me, Walter.”
He looked up from his tattered tweed sleeves, and saw that she wasn’t facing him. She was talking to the Hard Walter. He also noticed that she had sprouted flaming wings so large they swept the ceiling. Like an angel, but not a cute greeting-card cupid. A fierce, Old Testament angel, both beautiful and terrible to behold. Then, in a flash, the flaming wings fluttered and disintegrated into black ash, swirling around them both like the glitter inside a snow globe.
“Carla?” Walter said, taking a step closer to her.
She ignored him completely, as if he were invisible. She remained focused on the Hard Walter, and looked exceptionally beautiful.
Beautiful and sad.
“You need a reality check,” she was saying. “You’ve lost sight of the things that really matter. Like Peter. Why did you bother to bring the boy here in the first place, if you’re just going to ignore him? Can’t you see he’s dying for your attention?”
Her curly blond hair pulsed with a strange internal glow, as if each individual strand had been replaced with a delicate optical fiber. The brilliant tips swayed around her small, anxious face, stirred by a nonexistent current.
“The families of great men have to accept the fact that they will always come second to the work,” Hard Walter said with a dismissive shrug.
“The work?” Carla replied with a frown. “The work?”
“My work,” Hard Walter repeated. “It is the only thing that matters. Everything else is just window dressing.”
“But what is the point of any work if it drives away the people who care about you? Peter. Elizabeth.” She paused, biting her lower lip. “Me, Walter. I care about you, and that’s why I can’t let you continue down this path. I know you.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Hard Walter said. “If you did, you would never be so impudent as to question my priorities.”
“I know the good Walter,” she said. “The Walter I care about is still there, inside you. He knows that what you’re doing is wrong, just as well as I do.” Her voice softened. “Don’t you?”
“I…” Walter started to say, but Hard Walter turned to him and hissed a wordless warning, cold eyes flashing like sparks struck from iron. Then he turned back to face Carla.
“This conversation is asinine and irrelevant,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. You can put that journal back where you found it.”
“Please, Walter,” Carla said, gripping Hard Walter’s forearm and looking up into his hard eyes. “Don’t shut me out.”
Walter shivered, feeling the ghostly brush of her fingers against his own arm, burning through the rough fabric of his old jacket. When he looked down at his sleeve, he saw that there were smeary red fingerprints, as if he’d just been touched by a bloody hand. He was hit with a sudden crushing vertigo, forcing him to cling to the edge of a nearby worktable.
He wanted to say something, to cry out or make any kind of noise at all, but his mouth was filled with tangled organic fibers that strangled any sound before it could escape.
When he tried to move toward Carla, desperate to signal to her in some way, it felt as if he were struggling against a vicious riptide. Meanwhile, she was leaning in toward Hard Walter, whispering. The glow that infused her golden hair was spreading beneath her skin, making her pulse with strange light that seemed to emanate from the center of her chest, as if her heart had been replaced with a miniature supernova.
Walter tried to breathe slowly and evenly, clinging to his rational, scientific objectivity as tightly as he clung to the edge of the table. This was just a particularly vivid and intense hallucination, that’s all. For all he knew, Carla wasn’t even there in the lab.
He forced himself to focus, to think.
This new blend of acid he had dropped was supposed to be quite mild, and intended simply to enhance his more esoteric brain functions without impeding his thought processes or distorting his perception too strongly. In previous tests, it had produced a sense of sharpness, even focus—accompanied by some minor visual hallucinations that were limited to subtle changes in the color, texture, or shape of existing objects or individuals.
But nothing like this.
So what, exactly, was happening to him?
Was it hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder? Certainly, he’d ingested enough mind-altering chemicals over the years that a flashback remained a distinct possibility. But he’d never suffered from anything like this in the past.
Then again, many of the people who knew him might argue that his perceptions hadn’t been normal to start with.
Suddenly, an even more disturbing thought struck him.
Could it be some kind of genuine psychotic break? He’d been troubled by a persistent sense of disassociation lately, and suffered from several small blackouts. When they ended, he found himself in the midst of a task he didn’t remember starting, or saying goodbye to someone over the phone—even though he had no idea who was on the other end of the line.
More and more it seemed as if his work was the only thing that made any kind of sense. His only anchor in a world where day-to-day events seemed like complex puzzles that refused to be solved. The only time he felt completely at ease was when he was here, in the lab. Only here did he feel sure of himself, and the world around him.
And now, he was being forced to doubt even that reality.
Because the last and most awful possibility was that this terrifying, inexplicable series of events was real. That there really was another him—a terrible, cold, alien version of him who had been slowly, stealthily taking control while Walter wasn’t paying attention, and now had broken free.
But why?
Before he could answer any of these questions, Carla reached up and touched the other Walter’s cheek.
And everything changed.
The strange, invisible riptide against which he’d been fighting suddenly reversed and he was swept off his feet, hurtling headlong through the air and crashing into Hard Walter with such force that it stunned him, knocking the breath out of him.
When he twisted around and peered at his own body, he saw that he hadn’t just bumped into the other Walter—he’d melded into him, leaving a crooked, multi-limbed monstrosity, like conjoined twins, that never could have survived outside of the womb.
He glanced at Carla. To his surprise, she didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about him. She was looking up into his face with her sad blue eyes.
“Science is a tool,” she was saying. “Like a wrench or a shovel. Or a gun. You choose what you want to do with that tool. What you want to build, and what you want to destroy.
“You choose, Walter.”
And then, the floor beneath his sneakers cracked and opened up, and before he could react, he was plunged into the icy water beneath.
For a terrifying moment, the shock of it—the vicious toothy cold so intense it felt like burning—completely overwhelmed his senses.
He flailed, and thrashed in the water, consumed by a blind panic, his eyes clenched tightly shut. But when he opened them, he found that he could see perfectly, as if he w
ere wearing goggles in a clear, clean pool. There were throbbing red shapes dancing around the edges of his vision, and he could see that he wasn’t alone.
A small child was floating, just out of reach, asleep or unconscious. Head tucked down, dark hair drifting around a pale face. Walter stretched his arm out, fingers brushing against the child’s sleeve. The contact seemed to jolt the child back to terrified consciousness, body jerking and face turning, eyes wide and unseeing.
Peter.
Now that he was turned toward Walter, he seemed to age. It was clear that this was Peter today, thirteen years old and dressed in the same black sweatshirt and jeans he’d been wearing when he came to the lab earlier.
Peter…
Was this a hallucination, or a memory? Had this already happened? It seemed so vivid and real at its core, as solid and unquestionably true as any other memory. But it couldn’t be. It was impossible.
He and Peter were alive.
Or were they?
Walter tried to say his son’s name, but all that came out of his mouth was a rush of silver bubbles. Peter reached out his hand, eyes desperate and pleading as he began to sink into the inky darkness below.
His lungs ached for air. Close to blacking out from lack of oxygen, Walter flailed with all his remaining strength, paddling toward the receding form. Reaching out, he gripped the boy’s hand. It felt ice cold and rigid—like the hand of a corpse.
He pulled his son into his arms, not sure what he actually planned to do, but not willing to let him go down alone. Above them was an unbroken bluish-white ceiling of ice. They were trapped.
Darkness began to eclipse his vision, the unforgiving cold swiftly shutting his body down and making his thoughts sluggish and murky. Just before he blacked out completely, he looked down at Peter and was shocked to see a totally different child, looking back up at him. A strange, frail child with a smooth, bald head like that of a chemotherapy patient, and big dark eyes that seemed to look right through him.
Then he felt a dozen hands gripping him, all at once, grabbing his arms and twisted fistfuls of his shirt and hauling him rapidly upward until he slammed violently against the ice. Only now it wasn’t a ceiling above him anymore, it was a wall. An opaque smooth wall, like frosted glass. And he himself was no longer underwater.
He was standing upright in the middle of his safe familiar lab.
The strange child that used to be Peter was gone.
He took a moment to collect himself, to breathe deeply and try to stabilize his thoughts. This was just a bad trip. A particularly vivid, frightening trip, but nothing Walter couldn’t handle. The key was to remain calm, rational, and objective. Observe the unusual effects of this new blend and accurately remember them in detail, so that he would be able to use this data when the time came to reformulate.
Yet he still felt scattered and breathless, heart skittish and desperate like a trapped rat in his chest. He remained pressed against the inexplicable glass wall that trapped him in the middle of the lab, unable to move. Nothing seemed certain. Even the simplest, most fundamental things seemed ephemeral.
Who was he, really?
And who was that other me?
As if summoned by his question, the other Walter—the hard one—appeared on the other side of the frosted glass, facing away. Indistinct and blurred at first, just a sinister shadow, then becoming clearer as the glass became clear around him, the way a warm hand melts the frost on a winter window.
Walter touched the glass and found it soft and yielding, like living skin.
By peering over Hard Walter’s shoulder, he could see Carla standing there, still glowing as if lit from within.
“You need to burn it,” Carla was saying, holding up the journal. “It’s the only way.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hard Walter replied. “Why should I do that?”
“No,” Walter whispered. “It’s my… my life’s work…”
“This isn’t your life’s work,” Carla said, her hand on the cover of the journal. “You are your life’s work. You choose who you want to be. But you need to make the right choice.
“Burn the journal,” she insisted. She walked over to one of the worktables and placed the journal in a steel basin. Then she reached into the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a heavy silver cigarette lighter.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Hard Walter said.
“Carla… please,” Walter said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she agreed. “You need to do it.” She held out the lighter and thumbed back the cover.
“You need to do it,” she repeated, and she struck the flint.
A burst of roiling blue flame engulfed her. Instantly her curly blond hair was on fire, her mouth wide open in a silent scream. Then she flailed her burning arms, knocking the steel basin and several glass beakers from the table. The beakers shattered on the floor. The journal slid across it toward the open cubbyhole where Julia had found it, stopping just inches short.
As the glass shattered, the flammable liquid caught fire, too, releasing a toxic cloud of choking smoke and sending burning tendrils flowing toward the diary.
Walter was still trapped behind the soft glass, pounding his fists against it and screaming Carla’s name, but time seemed to have slowed to a crawl in the lab. On the other side of the barrier, the graceful serpentine flames were almost beautiful. Carla looked beautiful, too, as if she were dancing a dreamy, slow motion ballet. He could see the other Walter, standing between the burning angel that Carla had become and the threatened diary. Hard Walter was equidistant between them, and Walter could see that he was torn, deciding who—or what—he should save.
There was a large, ratty blanket stuffed into one of the lower cupboards, put there the last time Walter had slept in the lab. The other Walter could grab it and throw it over Carla to smother the flames and save her life. But if he did, the flaming liquid would reach the journal.
On the other hand, he could save the journal, dive across the floor and push it back into its hiding place, replacing the fireproof tile that had protected it all these years. But by the time he did that, it might be too late to save Carla.
It was no choice at all.
So why was the other Walter hesitating?
“Go!” Walter implored. “Save her.”
He pressed his hands against the soft glass, desperately searching for any breach or weakness where he might be able to break through. It was a solid membrane that would bend, but not break. More than that, it was all around him now, on all sides and above in an unbroken ovoid shell that gave him little more than the space taken up by his outstretched arms.
“Save her!” he cried again, banging on the glass to try to get the other Walter’s attention. “Don’t just stand there, save her! Carla!”
But then, to his horror, the Hard Walter dove for the journal.
Walter felt the impact of that decision as if it was a kick to the stomach. He cried out in wordless anguish, turning to see Carla collapse to the floor, her angelic flames lost in the sea of fire that was swiftly engulfing that entire side of the room.
When he shifted to see what the other Walter was doing, he found himself on the other side of the lab, crouching over the cubbyhole in the floor, pressing the fireproof tile back into place.
There was no glass membrane.
No other him.
He had chosen to save the journal, instead of rescuing Carla.
And with that awful revelation came a deep, rumbling crack down the center of his psyche, splitting him open from inside and sending him spinning into a bottomless abyss of madness.
Peter sat on the sofa, a book open in his lap, but not reading.
He was staring resentfully at his mother, who was “napping” on the other couch in front of some vapid television program. She was always napping these days, an empty glass never far away.
She had been napping when he got home from school and decided to go over to his father’s lab, and was napping again when he ret
urned from the strange, cheerfully manic trip to the ice-cream parlor for root-beer floats. Which Peter didn’t even like all that much, but he was so happy to have his father paying attention to him again that he sucked one down without protest. His father had even looked at his chemistry test, and said that he was proud of Peter. He still had a warm, happy, birthday kind of feeling in his belly when he got home, but that feeling quickly drained away to a dull depression.
She had changed clothes since the last nap, and now had an empty rocks glass instead of an empty wine glass. Other than that, nothing had changed.
Probably never would.
The more isolated Peter became, the more disconnected from his family, the more convinced he became that he didn’t fit in anywhere. And any time he would experience a moment of shared intimacy or a feeling of belonging, it would be quickly eclipsed by moments like this. Moments where he felt alone again, even with someone else in the room.
He’d made a concerted effort to find friends, carefully studying other guys who were popular and adopting their mannerisms and tastes. He found that he was extremely good at mimicry and manipulation, but although he was able to charm people into thinking they liked him, those other kids didn’t really know him. They knew the easygoing, friendly, wisecracking mask Peter presented for their benefit.
But under that mask, he still felt like an outsider. And he secretly resented them for befriending him only after he’d made the effort to pretend he was the kind of person they liked.
Then he started pulling little scams in the lunchroom, tricking other kids out of their coveted snack items. It wasn’t that he actually wanted the candy—he could just have bought whatever he wanted from the vending machines. His mom gave him plenty of money.
It was her morning ritual, a bleary, red-eyed routine. She fished the money out of her purse and pressed it into his hand like some kind of payoff. Maybe it made her feel better for checking out on him every night.
No, he perpetrated these minor swindles because he could. And because it was fun. He’d even thought about trying something involving real money, but that was probably a bad idea. Because no matter how disconnected he felt from his family, he couldn’t stand the thought of his father finding out about something like that.
Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father Page 13
