Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

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 The room contained a single hospital-style bed with metal rails on each side, a motley assortment of outdated medical equipment, an army of pill bottles, and a bulky stainless steel bedpan.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.