Christa Faust: Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

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.