Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

He was a large, portly man with a thick crown of blond curls and a meaty, square-jawed face that had probably been handsome twenty years and way too many three-martini lunches ago. A high-school quarterback gone to seed. His cheap, gaudy robe had been haphazardly tied and was gaping open to show his bare chest and hairy belly.

She was an aging model type, strawberry blond with a rail-thin, cocaine physique under a floaty sheer tangerine baby-doll negligee. She wore heeled gold mules with marabou on the toes and her long, horsey face was shiny with night-cream.

“No problem,” he was saying. “We’re gonna be okay. We’re insured.”

“We are not okay!” the woman screeched at him. “What exactly are you planning to put on the claim? Act of God?”

“Would you shut up for one second and let me think?”

Just then a young man in blue jeans and a western shirt ran out of a building across the street and jolted to a stop beside the caved-in Mustang, his jaw hanging open.

“Who did this?” he shouted. “Who the hell did this to my car?” He looked up at the man in the pajamas, who was pointlessly trying to match up jagged fragments of shattered records. “Is this your stuff? Is this your TV? Did you drop your goddamn TV on my brand new car?”

The older man backed up as the car owner advanced menacingly toward him.

“I didn’t do anything!” the older man said, empty hands held out like a peace offering. “It just happened! My wife and I were just getting ready for bed, and all of a sudden, everything in the room starts shaking and flying around, smashing through the windows and dropping to the street. It must have been some kind of an earthquake.”

“There was no earthquake!” The angry young car owner looked around at the gathering crowd. “Did anybody feel an earthquake? No. Did you?” He shook his head. “You’re talking out of your ass, pal!”

“So what are you suggesting?” the wife said, getting fearlessly in the young man’s face, stabbing his chest with a pointy red fingernail. “Do I look like I could have thrown a goddamn piano out a window?” She waved her hand. “Does he ?”

Walter turned away as the argument continued, and looked up at the building. On the third floor, the floor directly adjacent to the room in which Bell and he had just taken their trip, all of the tall, elegant Victorian bay windows had been smashed out, casements splintered, sills shattered, revealing the insides of an apartment that now looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

Furniture was upended, draperies sagged off broken curtain rods and flapped in the wind, pictures hung crooked on the walls. And standing in the middle of it, his hands in tight fists at his sides, was a staring, teenaged boy, sharp-featured, mop-haired, dark-eyed, and utterly and absolutely terrified.

“In my dream, I have hands,” Walter repeated softly under his breath.

“What did you say?” Bell looked around at him, frowning.

For a long moment, Walter didn’t reply, just pursed his lips, thinking.

“Belly,” he finally said, “I know that you’re familiar with the latest theories of poltergeist activity.”

“I was afraid you were going to come to that conclusion,” Bell replied. “Yes, of course I’m familiar with those theories. The repression of rage, of frustration, building up in the hormonally charged cortexes of pubescent adolescents, is thought to manifest itself in telekinetic storms that are often mistaken for the work of malicious ghosts.”

Walter nodded.

“And perhaps in demented old men, as well.”

“What are you saying?” Bell asked. “You believe the two events were different occurrences of the same phenomenon?”

“I’m afraid I believe more than that,” Walter replied.

“We can’t know that,” Bell countered. “There’s no reason to cast blame on...”

“Oh, come now. It can’t be a coincidence.” Walter waved a hand at the wreckage that surrounded them. “This kind of event is so rare as to be the stuff of myth. Modern science has never managed to verify that it has ever truly occurred. Ever! And yet we have just witnessed not just one instance, but two. Two! And both happening at the exact moment when we were in the middle of...”

“Keep your voice down, Walter,” Bell hissed. “We don’t want to add to the already considerable panic.”

He took Walter’s arm and led him back down the steps into Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment, and then out through the kitchen into the back yard, where things were quiet and calm and green, and the world didn’t seem quite so crazy. The cement bunnies remained serene and unaffected by the chaos.

“What the hell is going on out there?” Nina called from inside the apartment.

Walter hardly heard her. He was still trying to make his point.

“There must be some correlation,” he said. “There has to be!” Then he remembered what he’d seen when he first came out of the trip. Bell and Nina kneeling face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes.

“Belly,” Walter said. “You linked minds with Nina, didn’t you?”

“Well,” Bell began, unable to meet Walter’s gaze.

“Embarrassment has no place in scientific method!” Walter said brusquely. “Anyway, never mind all that, tell me—did you or did you not link minds with Nina, instead of me?”

“Yes,” Bell admitted. “I have no idea how it could have happened, when she wasn’t even tripping.”

“Clearly she was the one who was foremost in your thoughts in that moment,” Walter said. “Not that I blame you, given her apparent aversion to brassieres, but that’s something for us to analyze later. What’s far more important to consider is the fact that both times we used this particular blend, a powerful psychic link was created. The first time it was you and me, then later on, with the killer as well. This time it was you and Nina. Am I correct?”

“Yes, you are correct,” Bell said. “Okay, so...?”

“So, she wasn’t tripping with us, but somehow our own heightened psychic abilities caused any latent power in her to be activated, as well.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is this—what if our special blend not only enhances our own abilities, but also causes some kind of psychic pulse that radiates outward. We become, for lack of a better word, amplifiers, like the ones in a radio set. Perhaps, in our heightened state, we pick up weak psychic energy around us, such as the angst of a teenager, for instance, or the unfocused rage of a demented old man, and amplify it a hundredfold.”

“Or maybe it was the gate itself that activated and amplified the phenomenon,” Bell countered.

“Could be,” Walter said. “But either way, this amplification of latent psychic power occurred, and all of a sudden the repressed frustration hidden inside the affected individuals explodes outward in a storm of psychic fury and... and...” Walter paled as something occurred to him. “My God, Belly. We are very fortunate that no one was killed.”

Bell gave him a cold look.

“You’re acting as if you believe this is our fault.”

“Of course it’s our fault!” Walter was almost shouting now. “Maybe it was a side effect of the way our minds were enhanced, or maybe it was caused by the gate that we opened by using the special blend, but ask yourself this: Would any of this have occurred if we hadn’t done our experiment?” Before Bell could reply, Walter continued. “It would not! We are directly responsible for that poor woman’s wounds, and for all that property damage on the street.”

“I told you to keep your voice down, dammit.”

“But...”

Bell grabbed his arm.

“Listen to me,” he hissed into Walter’s ear. “We can analyze what went wrong and discuss our own responsibility or lack thereof in private, but shouting that we are responsible out here, where that angry mob out front can hear us? That’s a very bad idea.”