Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (3 page)

A profound empathy, bordering on telepathic...

The ripples turned jagged, and began jumping. Baying filled his ears. He looked up to see dogs and grunting, two-legged pigs splashing down from the pine bank and racing toward him as red and blue lights screamed and sirens bounced off the trees along the dirt road that led to the launch.

The water had tricked him! Made him forget the knot. He’d been crouching in the water just staring at the hypnotic patterns.

Enraged, he surged upward, tearing the canoe’s iron mooring stake out of the mud, using it to swipe around at the dogs that churned the water around him. But there were too many of them, all around him now. The pigs were among them, grabbing his arms, his shirt, his throat. A hundred piggy hoof-hands groping him and violating every part of his body as dog teeth tore at his pants and the flesh beneath.

His head was plunged maliciously into the water and then wrenched back out again.

“Cuff him!” This from one of the gleeful pigs. Their laughter and squealing swirled around them like thick, choking smoke from a grease fire.

“Careful!” one pig said. “We wouldn’t want him to accidentally drown while resisting arrest, now would we?”

“That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?” another replied.

“We have to take him alive!” This from a cop standing on the shore and calling over the shoulders of his more aggressive brethren. “What about the missing bodies?”

“Shut up, Jensen,” the first pig snapped.

Again, Allan’s head was shoved beneath the surface of the lake. Water filled his nose and throat, and blinded his eyes. The thrashing bites of snarling dogs tore at his wildly flailing limbs, then the bright bite of steel as a handcuff closed around his left wrist.

He lost his grip on the mooring stake and kicked out with a boot heel instead. The response was more piggy squealing, and a lessening of the crushing weight that was holding him down.

Allan fought his way to the surface, retching and gasping and swinging as dogs and pigs fell away all around him.

“Son of a bitch broke my damn kneecap,” an injured piggy cried.

“I told you not to...” the other began. Then his voice trailed off. “Wait... what... what the hell is that?”

Allan backed away from them, snarling and tearing at the dangling handcuff. He waited for them to charge again, wary and ready to fight to the death. But they didn’t. They were staring at something behind him, their snouted, pig-eyed faces bathed in a pale flickering light.

He looked back over his shoulder. The dented canoe was floating away from him in the knee-deep water, drifting further into the lake, but that wasn’t what had caught the eyes of the gaping, awestruck cops.

A strange shimmering fissure hung in the air, just a few feet away, like a rip in the night. As he looked, it seemed to grow. He thought he saw movement within it. He heard voices, whispers.

Was it another hallucination?

No. The pigs were seeing it too. Unless his visions were somehow bleeding into reality? Impossible. But yet...

“What are you waiting for, knucklehead?” one of the pigs bellowed. “Get him!”

Allan turned back around to face his pursuers. The swine and the hounds were coming for him again with renewed fervor. He took a sloshing step backward, instinctively reaching to catch the drifting canoe. His hand passed right through the plane of the shimmer and didn’t touch the canoe. Instead he felt a swirl of cooler water and a chilly breeze. Curious, because the air around them had been warm, still, and dead all night.

Then the pigs were reaching out for him. The dogs leapt, snarling and snapping. He had to act, and fast.

Allan threw himself backward, screaming defiance, falling.

The shimmer surrounded him, engulfed him. It’s curious, clinging glow filled his eyes, filled his lungs, filled his mind. A sickening disorientation overwhelmed him, obliterating any sense of up or down. All of a sudden, the squealing pigs and snarling dogs looked like salvation to him.

He reached for them, bellowing for them to pull him back, save him from this terrible spinning nothingness. His arms pinwheeled, trying to stop his fall, and then...

* * *

Walter and Bell each reached out a hand toward the undulating gateway, doing so at the exact same moment, as if they were two arms attached to one body. The edges of the gateway seemed to respond to them, sending out glistening tendrils in all directions, like the tentacles of a sea anemone.

A millisecond before their fingers touched the strange, shimmering substance of the gateway, a stocky, heavy-set man with a reddish brown crew cut came tumbling backward through the opening. He staggered against Walter and Bell, knocking them back so the three of them fell together, flailing in the shallow water.

A flood of terror and shock raced through Walter, induced by the sudden, inexplicable appearance of this strange man. As quickly as it manifested, it began to dissipate in Walter’s racing brain as he registered how utterly ordinary the man really was. This wasn’t some kind of trans-dimensional alien or spiritual messenger from a higher plane of existence. It was just a regular, everyday kind of man, about 5′10″, thick and barrel-chested. In his late 30s or early 40s. Unremarkable but for his muddy clothes and thick, chunky-framed glasses.

Walter couldn’t imagine that an extra-terrestrial being would need glasses. Besides, this man was likely a manifestation of the acid.

He was genuinely amazed that his own mind could create such a realistic, flawlessly rendered vision, down to the slight stubble on the stranger’s beefy jowls.

“Belly,” Walter said, helping his shivering friend find his footing in the slippery muck of the lake bed. “Do you see...?”

“Yes,” Bell said. Leaning against Walter for footing, he reached out a hand to help the wet stranger. “Who are you?”

Without responding, the stranger looked back over his shoulder at the swiftly shrinking gateway behind him, as if he expected something to follow. He turned again and narrowed his eyes at Bell, his gaze suspicious in the glow of the lantern, before reluctantly accepting Bell’s help to get back to his feet.

“Who are you?” the stranger echoed. His voice was as mundane as his looks, with just the slightest hint of a New England accent around the “r.”

Walter reached out to help steady the disoriented stranger and found a pair of handcuffs dangling from the man’s left wrist.

Before he could register the significance of the handcuffs, however, Walter felt the sudden brutal intrusion of a third mind into the warm, empathic connection he’d formed with Bell. The profound telepathic loop between the two friends was wrenched into a shrieking, distorted triangle by what felt less like a human presence than a howling void filled with jittering coded symbols and bitter, black rage.

Then the bottom seemed to drop out of the world, and Walter was suddenly plummeting into that terrible void inside the stranger’s mind, like a helpless Alice down a rabbit-hole filled with dark, violent imagery.

He saw page after flapping page of letters, many seemingly written using some kind of complex cipher or code.

He saw a pretty young brunette, no more than sixteen years old, her big blue eyes wild with terror as she ran away from a parked station wagon. She seemed to be reaching out to him, but before she could grasp his outstretched hand, she was gunned down, shot repeatedly in the back.

He saw the stranger pull a squared-off black hood over his head, repositioning his glasses over the roughly cut eye-holes. On his chest was a crossed circle, like the crosshairs of a gun sight. The afternoon sun flashed off a bright edge of a blade that was gripped in his bulky fist.

Walter saw a blood-spattered car door that had been removed from the vehicle to which it had once belonged. On that door, the handwritten words “Vallejo” and “by knife.” Then that same crossed circle seemed to burn like an all-seeing eye above a list of dates that twisted away before Walter could read them.

He saw the skyline of an unfamiliar city, a grim pale tower on the top of a hill, like the barrel of a gun pointed at the foggy gray sky, looming over a quaint cluster of homes.

He saw a yellow cab, the friendly, mustachioed driver talking casually over his shoulder to the stranger in the instant before the driver was shot, point blank in the head, his glasses flying off and clattering against the dashboard.

He saw the stranger tear a young blond woman’s brightly patterned blouse, his hands crawling with unnatural, flickering sparks that burned the fabric and the flesh beneath, but somehow left him whole and untouched by flame.

The burnt woman’s agonized screams followed Walter down deeper into the tunnel of bleeding wounds and charred flesh and anguished mouths until he abruptly hit bottom, a gritty cement floor inside some kind of industrial building. He couldn’t see Bell, but he could feel a deep, almost cellular awareness of his friend—close at hand, sharing his vision as he got slowly to his feet.

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.