Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

“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 found 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.”