Fringe The Zodiac Paradox (Christa Faust) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

COMING SOON FROM CHRISTA FAUST AND TITAN BOOKS

FRINGE

THE BURNING MAN (JULY 2013)

CHRISTA FAUST

FRINGE

THE ZODIAC PARADOX

TITAN BOOKS

FRINGE: THE ZODIAC PARADOX

Print edition ISBN: 9781781163092

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781163108

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover images courtesy of Warner Bros.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Part One

Part Two

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PART ONE

SEPTEMBER 1968

He liked to kill the young men first.

Not because he was afraid of an act of retaliation, or heroism. This particular kid was a cocky little bastard, arm around the dull, dumpy blonde in the passenger seat like he owned her, but he’d be no match for Allan’s superior physical strength and mental acumen.

They never were.

No, Allan Mather would kill the young man first because he wanted to show the blonde that no one could save her. He wanted to give her time to live inside that terrible moment of understanding before she met her own, inevitable end.

Just thinking it, about sharing that special, intimate moment with a new girl sent a flush of heat over the surface of his skin, warming the cool barrel of the Whitmer 9 mm he had tucked into the waistband of his faded fatigue pants.

It was an unexpected Indian summer night, probably the last hot night of the year. Yet there was just this one car. Just this one couple. When Allan first started hunting here, a popular make-out spot like Reiden Lake would look like a drive-in on a Saturday night. Dozens of cars, all packed with sweaty human vermin, offering shallow promises in exchange for meaningless animal copulations.

Now the cocky kid’s souped-up ’66 Edsel Lynx was the only vehicle parked at the eastern scenic overlook. Which showed just how cocky he was—and how stupid his date was. Because the “Lover’s Lane” murders were all over the papers, and anyone with a lick of sense would have stayed home. It was almost like they wanted to be there. Almost like destiny.

* * *

A pair of young graduate students sat side by side on a rocky outcropping at the western edge of the lake, a small open cooler at their feet and a brand new red Coleman lantern casting a gentle glow across the rippling water. The autumn night was brisk, but comfortable.

The one on the left was clean cut and well dressed, his dark hair neatly combed into a mathematically perfect side part. Tall and rakish, he had a strong profile and a deep baritone voice that made everything he said seem weighty and significant. Particularly to female undergrads.

The one on the right looked like an unmade bed. With his long, frizzy, light brown hair, he might have been mistaken for a stylish British rock star, but in reality he only looked that way because he couldn’t be bothered to cut or comb it. His clothes, on the other hand, were square and schizophrenically whimsical. A moth-eaten tweed Norfolk jacket that might have been new in 1929, worn over a hand-me-down athletic shirt featuring the name of a Catholic high school he never attended. His pants were too short, revealing wildly mismatched socks, one solid brown and the other bright blue argyle. Both of his scuffed dress shoes were untied.

“Listen, Belly,” the one with the mismatched socks said. “While your argument for the inclusion of caffeine to provide an additional generalized arousal of the senses is both well reasoned and valid, I would counter that the unique balance between phosphoric acid and citric acid in grape Nehi will better complement the biosynthetic ergoline compound in our newly formulated pharmacological launchpad.”

“Forget it, Walter,” Bell replied. “I’d rather drink Denatonium Benzoate than grape Nehi. Besides, we must remain consistent in what we use as a supplement, so that the findings will be accurately measurable.”

“Fine,” Walter said. “I reluctantly capitulate to the cola option... this time.” He grabbed a bottle of RC Cola from the cooler and popped the cap. “However, I want it on record that I felt it was not the ideal combination.”

“Duly noted.” Bell removed a tiny vial and a capped syringe from the inner pocket of his sport coat. “We’re going with the usual five hundred micrograms, right?”

“Right,” Walter replied, taking a swig. “The dosage also must remain consistent, so that any observable differences in the effect will be clearly attributable to variations in the formula.”

Bell nodded, uncapping the syringe and piercing the rubber top of the tiny vial. He tipped the vial upside down and drew out the correct quantity of the clear liquid. Walter held out his cola, and Bell inserted the needle into the neck of the bottle, squirting the contents of the syringe into the fizzy beverage.

Walter balanced his bottle on the rock beside him and opened a second cola for Bell. Bell dosed it like the first, and then took the bottle from Walter, pocketing the vial and syringe.

Walter raised his bottle.

“To paraphrase the great German physicist Max Born,” he said. “‘Here’s to building our road behind us as we proceed.’” He frowned and looked out over the dark water. “Or maybe that was Donovan.”

“L’Chaim,” Bell replied with a crooked grin, clinking his own bottle against Walter’s.

Walter nodded, and they lifted the bottles to their lips.

* * *

The sky above Allan’s head was starless and blank, like the gray, dead screen of an unplugged television.

The still surface of Reiden Lake was the sky’s twin, just as dead.

Once the young man and woman were dead, the tableau would be perfect.

Allan’s night vision was already superb—sharp and clear, almost like that of a nocturnal animal—but now he was beginning to see and hear things even more clearly. The trees whispered, gossiping behind their crisscrossed branches. The rich, loamy dirt seemed to breathe under Allan’s boots, and shadows were gathering behind him like shy children. The acid he had dropped was just starting to kick in.

He’d calculated the dose so that he would be peaking right around the time when the murder was complete, and he’d returned to the safety of his own hidden car to bask in the afterglow, relishing and reliving each perfectly executed moment. He kept a notebook in his glove box, and that’s where he would compose his next epic letter for the local newspaper, describing the killing in glorious detail and taunting the hapless authorities.

If he was lucky, he might even get to watch the discovery of the bodies, and the investigation in process. That was his favorite part, watching the police and their pathetic, ineffectual flailing. It was like watching insects drowning in a gob of his spit.

It was time.

He was ready.

He pulled on his gloves, then slid the gun from his waistband and strode purposefully over to the passenger-side door of the Lynx.

The windows were down, and an infuriatingly banal pop song was bubbling out of the radio. The girl was wearing an unflattering, baggy floral print dress that looked like she’d borrowed it from a maiden aunt. Up close, it was clear that her blond bouffant was a cheap wig. Its coarse, synthetic texture was deeply disturbing to Allan’s chemically enhanced mind, reminiscent of dead insect legs and abandoned cocoons.

The shadows around his ankles struck up a high-pitched keening. Something was wrong.

Run, the shadows cried.

The girl turned toward him in horrible, unnatural slow motion and he was frozen, riveted, unable to look away.

“Police,” she said. “Drop your weapon.”

There was a gun in her thick, hairy hand. She wasn’t a girl at all. She was a man. A police officer. And so was her cocky date. Both of them were staring him down with steely eyes as cold and professional as the bores of their guns.

He was the one who’d let himself get too cocky, and now he would have to pay for his arrogance.

Walter looked longingly into the cooler, at a bottle of grape Nehi. Its gracious, almost feminine shape shimmered with lush condensation and he was suddenly convinced that this particular bottle contained an elixir of perfect, exquisite refreshment the likes of which had never been experienced by mere mortals. Its mysterious deep purple hue seemed profoundly significant.

Ordinary purple was at the very bottom of the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram, and represented one of the limits of human color perception. Yet this purple seemed to contain elusive, twisting glints of a color that was just beyond the normal range. If he were to ingest such a color, he felt sure that it would instantly bond itself to the rhodopsin inside the photoreceptor cells of his retina, and endow him with a new, unprecedented kind of vision.

He reached for the bottle and it slipped, mercurylike, out of his grasp. Taunting him.

“Note,” Bell said, writing in a small red notebook. “Initial onset of hallucinogenic effect observed at...” He looked down at his watch. “10:17 p.m.”

“Fifty-four minutes from ingestion,” Walter said. “That’s almost twenty minutes faster than the previous formula.”

He looked back at the seductive bottle of grape Nehi and saw that it had transformed into a small, purpleskinned woman with white, finger-waved hair and a hat shaped like a bottle cap. She undulated gracefully amid the ice cubes, seemingly unaffected by the cold beneath her tiny bare feet. The other bottles became women, too, and within minutes the entire cooler had become a miniature Busby Berkeley musical number, complete with synchronized swimming in the water from the melted ice.

While such a hallucination was cute and charming, it wasn’t particularly significant, or unusual. Walter needed to focus, to meditate and look inward, to try and elevate his consciousness to a higher level.

He turned away from the cooler and looked out over the surface of Reiden Lake.

* * *

A searing beam of light from a stealthy police zeppelin flooded the scene, half blinding Allan and causing a nauseating burst of agitated color around the edges of everything. His mounting anxiety was amplifying and intensifying the effect of the acid, but he had to keep it together. Had to use his superior intellect to beat these animals.

He knew what he had to do.

He dropped the gun and held up his hands.

“That’s it,” the cop in the wig said, reaching for the handle of the Lynx’s door. “Now go on and back up. Nice and slow.”

“Yes, sir,” Allan said, smirking inside.

This was his chance.

He did as he was ordered, but cheated his step toward the overlook. There was a low log rail edging the parking area, then a thirty-foot drop down an eroding bank to the sand dunes and sawgrass of the small public beach below.

The two undercover cops started shouldering out of the car. For a split second, their attentions were divided. Their guns lost their aim in the shuffle.

Allan jumped.

A lesser man, a weaker man, might have broken his leg falling down that cliff. Or maybe even his neck.

Allan was not a lesser man.

He was in peak physical condition. Strong, powerful, and at the top of his game. Even in his altered state, he maintained perfect balance and presence of mind. As heavy as he was, he could be as graceful as a cat when he needed to be.

The slope wasn’t entirely vertical—more like an eighty-five percent grade, he judged. He went down facing inward, hands crossed in front of his eyes and the steel toe tips of his combat boots digging into the crumbly clay to slow his descent. Still, it was a hard landing, buckling his knees and jarring his brain, and he crouched, gasping in the sawgrass for precious seconds.

His heart pounded unnaturally loud in his ears, Mandelbrot patterns spiraling in the corners of his eyes.

Not very catlike at all, he thought with irritation.

Above him, he could hear the pigs swearing. The dust kicked up by their frantic feet drifted out over the edge of the drop, transformed into glowing white ectoplasm lit by the dirigible’s searchlight. Then a bewigged head peered over the edge, silhouetted in the luminous cloud.

“Where the hell is he?” one gruff voice called.

“I can’t see a damn thing down there!” the other replied.

Just as Allan had planned. The blinding glare of the searchlight had turned the shadow of the cliff into impenetrable blackness. Within it, he was invisible.

“Come on, Charlie,” the first pig said to the other. “We gotta find a way down.”

Allan rose to his feet as the cop thudded off to the left, heading for the curving railroad-tie stair that led from the overlook to the beach. His knees sent spinning purple and red pinwheels of glowing pain into the night, lighting him up. He froze, suddenly certain that the police would be able to see his every step.

Keep it together. It’s just the acid. They can’t see you. He was the only one who could see the pain.

He limped to the right, hugging the base of the embankment and heading for cover of the pinewoods on the south edge of the beach. Before he got halfway there, the basso profundo rumble of the dirigible’s engines fired up, sending throbbing black pulses through his brain. The police blimp was on the move, edging out over the beach. His sheltering shadow began to narrow.

Then there was no more shadow except for the lurching black shape directly below him. The white beam of light smashed down on his shoulders with the weight of a waterfall, slowing him, trying to crush him to his knees.

“Stop or we’ll shoot!” a distant voice called, faint and nearly lost under the deep hum of the dirigible’s engine.

Allan glanced back the way he had come. The cops had reached the beach and were running toward him, guns out, kicking up the sand with their piggy cloven feet.

There was a loud crack, then another. He heard something thump into the sand close to his left.

He picked up his pace, fighting through the pain in his battered knees.

* * *

“There’s something special about this place,” Walter said. “Ever since I was a boy, I always felt this lake was... for lack of a better word, magical. That’s why I brought you here, Belly. I wanted you to feel it, too.”

“I...” Bell said, his forehead creasing. “I do. I feel it.”

Walter had been a loner as a kid, singled out as weird and uncool, but not unhappy with his isolation. Social interactions always left him feeling anxious and awkward. He’d never really understood the point of friendship as defined by books and movies, and preferred to spend time alone in the woods or the library. Or here, at Reiden Lake, where his Uncle Henry had a cabin.

When he’d first met Bell, they’d clicked instantly, bonded by their love of organic chemistry, and of chess. But while Walter was grateful for the company, and enjoyed having someone with whom to share his more controversial theories on the use of consciousness-expanding drugs, he never felt like he really understood William.

Bell was charming. He knew what to say to girls and, more importantly, what not to say. He knew which tie would go with which shirt. He had a cool car and never got lost. He was Walter’s only real friend, but he still seemed kind of like an alien, or a member of a different species.

Until that night.

That night, with their latest psychotropic formula coursing through their brains, Walter felt closer to Bell than he’d ever felt to anyone. Siamese twin close. The Hollywood cliché—of army buddies so tight they would take bullets for each other—suddenly made perfect sense to Walter.

Not only did Walter feel like he finally, truly understood his friend, but in that moment, he also felt completely understood by Bell. A feeling so monumental and unprecedented that it almost brought him to tears. Never once in his twenty-two years of life had he ever felt that level of understanding from another human being.

Not from family. Not from a woman. Not ever.

It was as if their skulls had become transparent, allowing the secret patterns of their thought processes to sync up in a mirrored burst of neurological fireworks. He looked at Bell, and heard that deep, distinctive voice even though his lips weren’t moving, except for the slightest hint of a Mona Lisa smile.

Unlike the previous blend, this formula seems to induce a profound empathy, bordering on telepathic.

Still clinging to the rigid guide rails of scientific method, even at the height of his trip, he forced himself to double-check his own slippery perception.

“What did you say?” he asked Bell.

“I said,” Bell replied, his lips moving normally, “That unlike the previous blend, this formula seems to induce a profound empathy...” But he didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he stared toward the lake, a look of awestruck wonder washing over his face.

* * *

Another bullet cracked off of a nearby rock.

“Ten more bodies,” Allan called out over his shoulder. “Ten more victims. Kill me now and you’ll never find them! Think of their families, never knowing what has become of their loved ones!”

It was a lie, of course. Allan never hid his work. But the police were fools, and easily manipulated.

“Sir?”

The voice was questioning, its owner desperate to be told what to do by someone in a position of authority. Hopeless without orders, like they all were.

“Awaiting orders, sir.” Another voice, another pig, equally flummoxed. Just like Allan knew they would be.

Pathetic.

“Hold your fire!” This new voice stronger, more cocksure. The boss pig. “Take him alive!”

And then there he was—a fat, pig-snouted silhouette, squealing orders from the cliff top, police lights edging everything with red and blue. Reinforcements had arrived. The bait had been taken.

With the police bullets held momentarily in check, Allan took advantage and broke for the pines at a dead run, keeping to the hard-packed sand and shale near the cliff. Behind him, the cops floundered in the loose sand of the beach, their sty-mates stumbling and squealing as they came stampeding down the steep embankment as if herded by predators.

In twenty strides Allan was under the sheltering shadows of the trees, pushing his way through the scratchy undergrowth. Above, the searchlight shattered into a thousand shining spears stabbing through the interlaced pine boughs like the shafts of light in a religious painting, shining down on the messiah.

He laughed softly to himself. While he was unquestionably superior—even God-like, in his own way—he certainly wasn’t on this earth to save anyone. Quite the opposite, in fact.

More like an Angel of Death.

Now that he was out of their line of sight it would be easy to evade the bumbling porkers and return safely home. By the time he reached the southern edge of the woods and returned to his hidden car, he would be nothing but a ghost, vanished into thin air, just like he always did. Laughing and taunting the flat-footed swine from the safety of the ether.

Behind him he heard his pursuers crashing through the undergrowth like the fat hulking beasts they were. But then there came a new volley of animal sounds, agitated barking, growling and baying that crackled like forks of blue lightning across his vision.

He looked back. Hunched and snouty pig shadows lumbered through the trees behind him, swinging flashlights in hoofed hands as they snorted and oinked to one another in their sub-human speech. But running ahead of them was an entirely different pack of animals. Predators, not prey. Allan could see little but the menacing, low-slung shadows with gaping, slathering maws flashing vicious teeth and lolling tongues. But he knew what they were, and that knowledge was like ice water in his belly.

Dogs. He hadn’t counted on dogs.

Humans were abysmally stupid, soft, pampered and useless, their ancient instincts atrophied by modern convenience. But hounds, they’d never strayed far from their natural state as hunters, gleefully free from the limitations of morality and civilization. They posed a genuine threat, ugly and amplified to nightmarish proportions by the acid surging though his synapses, and for a terrible moment, Allan found himself nearly paralyzed with fear.

Must think.

Yes, he needed to rely on his superior mental acumen. He might not be strong enough to single-handedly overpower a pack of hunting dogs, but he could easily out-think them.

Water. That was the answer. He could wade into the lake to throw them off the scent.

So he leapt over the mossy hulk of a fallen tree and veered left, heading for the shoreline. The trees and undergrowth grew denser and he had to force his way through. Pine branches and blackberry vines clutched at him like grasping, clawing hands, leaving tingling patterns of sensation on his body that glistened in the corner of his eyes like snail trails.

The trees seemed to be twisting and shifting to block him, deliberately getting in his way, then opening up again behind to let the howling hell hounds through. All of nature was working against him, jealous of his abilities.

Ahead, through the pulsing tree trunks, he saw the glimmer of water.

Almost there.

* * *

Without thinking, Walter turned to see what his hallucinating friend was staring at, expecting to see nothing, or some figment of his own chemically enhanced mind.

What he saw was a small slit in the air above the surface of the lake, approximately six feet from where they sat. About twelve inches long, it pulsed with a strange, shimmering glow around the edges. As he watched, the slit elongated and bulged slowly outward, until it was first the size of a child, and then the size of a tall man. It gaped open, disturbingly wound-like, and dark water began to flow through it like blood, creating strange spiral currents in the surface of the lake.

This wasn’t unprecedented. He’d seen glimpses of these kind of glowing “wounds” during past experiments. But this time he felt sure that Bell could see it, too.

“Tell me what you see, Belly,” he said, whispering without knowing why.

“An opening,” Bell said, staring transfixed at the shimmering slit. “Like a kind of... gateway.”

“Yes,” Walter said. “Yes, that’s it exactly.” He gripped Bell’s arm. “Do you realize what this means? Our minds have become perfectly synchronized! We are sharing the exact same vision. It’s incredible!”

“Incredible,” Bell repeated, although it was difficult for Walter to know if he had actually said that out loud, or just thought it.

Bell rose to his feet and waded into the lake, utterly unmindful of his designer trousers and expensive shoes. Walter never let go of his friend’s arm, wading in beside him without a moment’s hesitation. He barely noticed the chilly water and thick, clinging mud sucking at his own shoes.

“But if it’s a gateway,” Bell whispered. “What’s on the other side?”

Allan battled his way through the last rank of trees then caught himself on the edge of the lake, ready to slip silently into the water. But the bank was undercut. It gave way beneath him and he splashed awkwardly into the water in a shower of dirt and rotten leaves.

The dogs bayed louder, frenzied by his closeness.

He cursed. Betrayed again by spiteful nature. Finding his balance, he started right, hunching into the undercut, knee deep in water with his ankles tearing clinging reeds up from the mud with every step.

There was a boat landing just around the next point—nothing more than a dirt road that went into the lake so weekend sailors could back their boat hitches into the water. There were always a few rowboats and canoes tied off or turned upside down and stored to either side of it. With his strength, they would never be able to catch him if he took one.

Behind him, the dogs reached the bank, snuffling and milling around, reluctant to dive in. The squeals and grunts of their pig masters echoed their confusion, and the piercing beams of their flashlights darted everywhere. Except in his direction.

He laughed and, as silently as he could manage, headed for the closest canoe, only a few yards away. It was floating in the high tide, its tether submerged under the lapping waves. He squatted down in the cold water and reached for the knot, fingers groping blind in the weeds and mud until he found it. The wet rope was swollen, the knot slick and tight. Methodically, he went to work, pulling and teasing it apart.

As he did so, a dancing light on the surface of the water around the tether was mesmerizing. It carved swirling arabesque calligraphies into his retina, a cursive cuneiform that seemed almost decipherable, if only he could concentrate on it long enough. It was trying to tell him something—a story of other worlds, of pathways between realities, of an endless, ever-repeating, never-repeating pattern of possibilities. He thought he heard a clear deep voice, speaking directly into the vibrating cortex of his tripping mind.

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.

But the gateway, the stranger, and those awful bloody visions. They’d all seemed so real.

“Belly,” Walter said. “We are never using that formula again.”

Allan was cold, wet and terrified, and was having an extremely hard time distinguishing reality from hallucination. At first he had imagined that he’d fallen through some kind of gateway into another dimension, but now that he was starting to come down off his trip, the very concept sounded absurd. He found himself in the same old ordinary world.

Same dirt, same trees, same lake.

He took a moment to lean against the rough bark of a massive oak tree and collect his disjointed thoughts. How much of what had happened to him that night was real, and how much was pure hallucination?

Had he imagined the couple in the car? The entire encounter with the cops? There certainly was no sign of them now. No zeppelins overhead, no prowlers on the overlook, no baying dogs. Nothing. Even the crickets had fallen silent.

As much as it humiliated him to picture himself running alone through the woods, striking out against imaginary attackers, he was certainly happy to find himself a free man.

That’s when he noticed the handcuffs.

One manacle was clamped tight around his left wrist, and the other dangled, open. The metal was cool to the touch, and as solid as the ground under his feet. He must have had some kind of encounter with the police, at some point during all that madness. He certainly hadn’t handcuffed himself.

But where the hell were they now?

And what about those two kids in the water, the ones who seemed to be able to read his mind. He could still see their faces, so vividly—particularly the soft, almost girlish face of the long-haired hippie in the baggy tweed jacket. It was as if the kid had looked right into his brain, and barged his way in to Allan’s most treasured fantasies. That sense of unexpected intimacy was more than he could take.

And he could still feel the tactile sensation when he had shoved the kid away, plunging his frizzy-haired head down into the water before bolting for the shore.

But now, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d imagined that, too.

Clearly the only option was to return home and get some sleep. He was chilled and frazzled and running on fumes as he trudged down the long, winding deer path that would take him back to the spot where he’d hidden his car. Tomorrow, he would check the papers and scan the police band, and see if he could piece together what the hell had happened.

* * *

His car was gone.

It wasn’t just gone, it was as if it had never been there. There were no tire tracks. The place were he had parked was overrun with lanky, fragile white flowers that couldn’t possibly have grown up in the time he’d been gone.

Yet there had to be an explanation.

Could he have forgotten where he had left his car?

No, he didn’t forget things. And he could never have forgotten something like that. After all, Allan was a meticulous man, who prided himself on the attention he paid to the smallest details. His rigid adherence to each plan was what allowed him the freedom to drop acid in the midst of a murder, because he knew that no matter what happened, he could always count on the careful preparations he’d made while he was sober.

But there was no other place to hide a car on this side of the lake. He hadn’t seen it along the side of the deserted road, or at the overlook where he’d first spotted—or thought he spotted—the young couple who turned out to be cops.

No, his car must have been stolen.

The notebook.

His notebook was in the glove box of his car.

He felt a deep throbbing panic rise up in his guts. If his car had been stolen, then the notebook was stolen, too. That notebook was everything to him. It was the place were he gave voice to all his private demons and dark fantasies, and kept a meticulous record of every aspect of each one of his killings.

There was absolutely no way he could be incriminated by the contents of that notebook, because the police were far too intellectually inferior to crack his ingenious private ciphers. But just the thought of a random stranger turning those pages and holding the repository of his most private and sacred thoughts in their grubby little hands—it made him physically ill.

I’m starting to lose it.

Hands trembling, sweating, heart racing. Although he was no longer actively hallucinating, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything around him was abnormal.

The acid he’d taken must have been tainted somehow. That was the only logical answer to explain the bizarre, impossible events of the evening. All he could do now was to find a way to get himself home safely, and ride out the rest of this awful trip until the poison had run its course. He could come back out to Reiden Lake and look for his car in the morning.

For now he just needed wheels. Any wheels.

There was one lonely vehicle parked on the side of Lakeshore Drive. It had Massachusetts plates, but looked foreign. The unfamiliar brand name on the bumper, “Chevrolet,” sounded French or something. But the design of the car wasn’t entirely unlike the kind of standard American muscle cars made by Edsel or Hobart.

But that was irrelevant. What was important was that the door wasn’t locked, and he found the keys under the driver’s side visor, so he didn’t have to figure out how to hotwire a foreign car. Lucky for him, everything else about it was relatively normal, though curiously designed.

He redlined it all the way home.

* * *

It was nearly dawn by the time he made it to his house in Remsen. He ditched the stolen car several blocks away and walked the remaining distance home, left hand in his pocket to hide the cuffs.

First things first. He went directly in to the garage, planning to remove the handcuffs with a hacksaw. But inside the garage, everything had been rearranged. His tools, which he’d kept for years hanging on a custom built pegboard on the western wall above his workbench, were gone, replaced by floor-to-ceiling shelving full of what looked like gardening supplies. Big dusty sacks of grass seed, fertilizer and vermiculite.

Panic wrestled with confusion. There was no way someone could have broken into his garage, stolen all his tools, and built those shelves in the time he’d been at Reiden Lake. Even if it were possible, the shelves looked weathered and ancient, as if they’d been there for decades.

The acid. Clearly the tainted acid was still affecting him, making ordinary things seem strange. He knew there was a hacksaw in this garage. There had to be. It was just his mind playing tricks, telling him things were different.

He made himself search slowly and methodically, as if he were sifting through the garage of a stranger. Eventually he found a hacksaw inside a large rusted toolbox, although it was smaller and more narrow than his own. At least that’s how it appeared.

He told himself it didn’t matter. He had to get the cuffs off, and no amount of residual hallucination was going to stop him. He couldn’t seem to find his workbench— or anything even remotely similar—so he just squatted down on the floor and braced his left wrist against the stained concrete.

Once he’d sawed through the single cuff around his wrist, he hid the broken handcuffs inside a half-empty box of Slug and Snail Death, promising himself he’d dispose of them properly later, once he’d gotten some sleep and gotten his head back on straight.

When he took his keys out of his hip pocket and went to let himself into the house, he discovered the door that led from the garage to the kitchen was unlocked.

He never left any door in the house unlocked.

Never.

Inside his house, the feeling of wrongness ratcheted up even higher. All the furniture seemed different. Strange rugs and tables in unexpected places. Magazines with titles he’d never heard of. Panic set in again, making his heart race, but he squashed it down.

It’s not real. None of this is real.

Forcing himself to breathe, he pressed his palms against the wall, holding on like it was the only thing keeping him from flying into a thousand pieces. At least the walls were the same, rooms and hallways unchanged in their layout.

Familiar.

Safe.

Fighting to keep his breath slow and even, he followed the wall to his bedroom door. Grasping the doorknob, he paused, suddenly afraid. Deeply, irrationally afraid of what he would see if he opened that door.

He made himself turn the knob, and eased the door slowly open.

Inside, his dim bedroom looked relatively normal. The bed was in its normal place, though the room was small enough that there was really only one place a bed would fit. It was unmade, and the blanket looked slightly different, but nothing too jarring. His dresser was in its normal place too, though it seemed taller and narrower.

The window was open, allowing a light breeze and a spill of faint lavender twilight into the room. Strange, because he always kept the windows shut at night, but it wasn’t impossible that he might have forgotten to close it.

There was something on his bedside table. Something that was also completely normal, yet the sight of it evoked a profound icy dread.

His glasses were on the bedside table.

His hands flew up to his face. No, his glasses weren’t on the bedside table, they were on his face, where they belonged. His mind was playing tricks again.

But they looked so real, those glasses. So humble and ordinary and familiar. Nothing trippy or psychedelic about them. They were just his regular glasses, sitting right were he always set them when he went to bed each night.

The toilet flushed in the bathroom down the hall.

There’s nothing abnormal about the sound of a toilet flushing either, but Allan couldn’t have been more terrified if he’d heard a gunshot.

Someone else was in his house.

The bathroom door opened and a man came out, backlit by the light, face in shadow. He was the same height as Allan, but a little bit paunchier around the middle, dressed only in clean white boxer shorts.

When the man saw Allan, he let out a startled, wordless sound and staggered back, bracing himself against the doorframe.

Allan didn’t hesitate. He charged the intruder and wrestled him to the hallway floor. They fell together into the rectangular pool of light emanating from the open bathroom door.

The intruder was him.

Only, like everything else in the house, this him-that-wasn’t-him was just a little bit off. His hair was a little longer and styled differently. He was maybe ten pounds heavier, and looked soft all over, like he’d never done a hard day’s work in his life.

It looked like he had cut himself shaving the day before, leaving a small, healing nick on the right side of his jaw.

“Wh-who are you?” the intruder asked, breathless and stuttering with fear.

Who are you? Just like that kid had asked him back at the lake.

Objective rationality deserted Allan in that moment. Confronted with this impossible doppelganger—who was so like him but yet not quite an exact replica—Allan felt himself finally snap inside. In a strange way, it was almost a relief, not to have to fight against the wrongness anymore. Raw animal instinct took over as he closed his shaking hands around the doppelganger’s throat.

As he watched the intruder’s face—a face so like his own—flush and distort, eyes bulging and lips twisted into a gasping rictus, he let out an involuntary shriek of horror and fury.

At least he thought it came from him.

He slammed the doppelganger’s head against the floor, over and over again, until his arms and shoulders ached from the strain of it. Until the intruder was dead.

Until he was dead.

He’d killed himself.

Sobbing now, he struggled to his feet, unhinged by a soul-destroying terror beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He looked down at his own murderous hands and saw that they were crawling with tiny sparks, as if electric insects were crawling beneath the surface of his skin.

The flesh of the intruder’s throat was charred black and lit from within by some kind of grotesque and unwholesome glow, like a deep-sea creature or the poisonous numerals on a radio-luminescent watch.

He staggered into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door, as if the other him might spring back to life and attack with renewed fury.

Nothing happened for several minutes. All was silent. The sparks dancing in spirals around his fingertips began to fade, leaving behind perfectly ordinary, unremarkable hands.

Hallucinations. Terrible, terrifying, but still just hallucinations, rapidly fading as his body processed out the toxins.

None of this is real.

Utterly exhausted and unable to keep his body upright for a minute longer, he collapsed first to his knees and then, curling on his side, went fetal on the soft bathroom rug.

He fell almost instantly into a deep dreamless sleep.

When Allan woke, stiff and horribly dehydrated on the bathroom floor, it was already nighttime again. The little window above the bathtub was black. He’d slept through the entire day without even realizing it. Clearly his body and brain needed the downtime.

He got cautiously to his feet and leaned heavily on the edge of the sink, turning on the cold water and drinking deeply for several minutes, right from the faucet. He splashed the icy water on his face and neck, running his fingers over his bristly crew-cut hair. All things considered, he didn’t feel all that bad. Looking over his blurry and haggard reflection in the mirror, he made himself a promise.

I’m done with acid. Clearly the risks were too great.

Toweling his face dry and stretching his sore muscles, he began to feel in control again. He felt around on the floor until he found his glasses where they had fallen the night before. He stood and wiped the lenses with a fold of his shirt, making a mental list of tasks to triage after whatever mess he must have made the night before.

Once that was done, he’d close up shop as quickly and efficiently as possible. Clearly, it was time for another move. Rural New York State was no longer viable.

A new state, a fresh start.

New girls. New victims.

He felt almost cheerful, with a spring in his step as he put on his glasses, unlocked the bathroom door and turned the knob.

The door wouldn’t open. Something was blocking it from the other side.

He put his shoulder to it, forcing it with all his strength. He could feel the heavy mass on the other side yield to his efforts as it was slowly pushed out of the way. When the door was open about six inches, Allan could see something on the other side.

A pair of naked, hairy legs, tinged a dark bruised blue along the bottom.

The corpse of his murdered doppelganger was still in the hallway. Worse, the doppelganger clearly hadn’t been quite dead after all, and had somehow managed to crawl a few feet across the floor before finally expiring against the bathroom door.

It was real. It was all real.

Allan slammed the door again, pressing his back against it and then sliding down to a sitting position. He drew his knees up to his chest as the panic bloomed inside him, threatening to send his sanity spinning away into oblivion.

Now that he had his glasses on, everywhere his eyes went inside the claustrophobic bathroom, he saw things he didn’t recognize. Brand names he’d never heard of on the toothpaste and shaving cream. A framed painting of a happy frog holding an umbrella—he never would have chosen that. Even the rug he’d slept on, a garish, burnt orange and olive striped monstrosity that was totally unlike the simple navy blue one he’d chosen for his own bathroom.

He wasn’t tripping anymore. He really was somewhere else. Somewhere that looked very much like the real world, but was filled with mirrored doubles of everything.

This wasn’t his house, it was a double of his house, complete with another him who lived there and chose that god-awful rug and that god-awful frog. He really had gone through some kind of gateway the night before.

A gateway to a parallel universe.

It was hard to believe, theoretically impossible, yet there he was.

So he began to gather his thoughts. A lesser mind might have been crushed by this kind of paradox, but Allan was better than that. He had no choice but to take this bizarre new world in stride.

He had to start formulating a plan.

Because there was no doubt in his mind that the corpse on the other side of the door was real. Which meant he needed to get away from the scene of his crime, as quickly as possible.

West. He would go west. Would the cities on the crazy mirror version of the West Coast still be the same as the cities in his old familiar universe?

Only one way to find out.

AUGUST, 1969

Allan sat at the cheap, second-hand desk that came with this, the latest of several furnished rooms he’d rented. A forgettable room in a long line of forgettable rooms in forgettable neighborhoods in and around his new hunting ground of San Francisco.

After that strange, twisted nightmare he’d left behind in upstate New York, Allan had adapted quickly and efficiently to this new, slightly different version of the world, settling right back in to his familiar routines. Being mechanically inclined, he’d picked up a variety of odd jobs to pay the meager bills while pursuing his true mission.

The result was that his life was better than ever.

His last escapade had been a little problematic, and the boy had somehow managed to survive the attack, but Allan wasn’t worried that he would be identified. After all, he was a ghost in this funhouse mirror world, a man who had never been born. He had nothing to fear.

In retrospect he was starting to think that he might be getting over the concept of preying on couples. Outgrowing that scenario. He fingered the crude, handmade black hood sitting on the desk beside his gun, thinking of the next murder he had in mind. He’d planned to find a couple enjoying a romantic date in the park, and had no intention of abandoning his plan. But he decided that this would be his last couple, and it would be his finest work yet.

After that, who knew what he would do next?

He found himself suddenly thinking of Betty Lou, the pretty and vivacious teenager that he would forever think of as the Lake Herman girl. He’d tortured and killed several bums and hobos on his journey across the country, but she was his first female victim in this new world. He could still picture the terror in her big blue eyes when she saw her hapless boyfriend shot in the head at point blank range, knowing she would be next.

There was something so special about her, because her death had proven to him that although everything around him was different and strange, some things never changed. The sacred perfection of that moment when a young girl realizes that she is about to die—that never changed.

Maybe he ought to start focusing entirely on single women, he mused. Allowing himself more time with each individual girl, indulging in a more hands-on kind of methodology.

But for the moment, he had other business to attend to. On the desk was a clutter of crumpled papers and an open notebook. There were several different ciphers, and experiments with substitution codes of various kinds. It had been a real chore for Allan to devise a code that would be basic enough for unevolved mongoloids like the police and local newspapermen to solve. And, unsurprisingly, they had failed even then. It had required a pair of clever civilians—a teacher and his wife—to crack it, no matter how elementary it was.

The pigs in this universe were just as stupid as their counterparts in his own world. That didn’t surprise him in the slightest.

It was hot and oppressively stuffy in the little room, but he still kept the thick, cigarette-scented drapes tightly shut on the single window. To combat the swelter, he’d discarded his clothing and sat naked on the rickety wooden folding chair. Naked, except for a pair of leather gloves.

He checked and compulsively rechecked a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, then set it down on the desk and picked up a pen. He turned to a fresh page in the notebook and began to write.

Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking.

OCTOBER, 1969

The cabbie was chatty.

Allan didn’t mind. He planned to kill the man as soon as he arrived at the Presidio Heights street corner he’d selected as his destination. This had no effect on his willingness to engage in casual, friendly dialog along the way. It was actually somewhat enjoyable. Freeing, almost, because he knew that any memory of this conversation would soon be decorating the taxi’s dashboard, along with the rest of the cabbie’s brain.

“Tell me,” Allan said, “do you believe in alternate realities?” He closed a gloved hand around the grip of the 9 mm pistol in his jacket pocket.

“Say what?” The cabbie pulled up to a red light, signaling a left turn.

“Other universes,” Allan said. “Universes, not unlike this one, but just a little bit different.”

“You mean like a place where I’m four inches taller, four inches longer and married to Jane Fonda?” The cabbie let out a husky, sandpaper laugh. “Sign me up!”

Allan persisted.

“Do you believe it’s possible, through the use of mind-altering chemicals, to open doorways and travel from one universe to the other?”

“Say, you don’t look like one of them hippies,” the cabbie said. “But you sure sound like one.”

“Surely you’re familiar with Schrodinger’s cat?”

“Whose cat?” The cabbie shrugged and made the turn. “I got a pet cat myself. Cute little Siamese. I guess you could say I’m more of a cat person than a dog person.”

“It’s a theory,” Allan continued, ignoring the digression. “A kind of paradox. It posits that if you were to put a cat in a box containing an automated mechanism that had a fifty-fifty chance of releasing a poison and killing it, the cat would be simultaneously alive and dead inside the box until you open it and observe the outcome. At that point, your perception would lock it down into one state or the other, but until that solidifying moment of observation, the cat would exist in two universes at once.”

“Jeez, that’s terrible,” the cabbie said. “Who would do something like that to a poor little cat?”

“Don’t you see?” Allan said, looking out the window at the passing houses. Nice, upscale houses, lights on to chase away the night. “I’m like that paradoxical cat. A creature of two worlds, alive and dead at the same time.”

“Whatever you say, mister.”

Allan could see that the cabbie was becoming uncomfortable with their conversation. His shoulders hunched down, eyes locked on the road. Allan was about to try another, more mundane conversational gambit when he realized that they were arriving at their destination.

“Just a little farther down,” he told the driver. “There, at the corner of Cherry.”

“You got it.”

The cabbie pulled over.

“Do me a favor, would you?” Allan said, gripping the gun a little too tightly. “Put the car in park.”

“Sure.” The cabbie shrugged and did what was asked. “But what for?”

Pressing the barrel close, Allan shot the cabbie in the back of the head.

He pocketed the gun and got out of the back of the vehicle, casting a quick glance around him. The quiet, classy street was deserted. Only just before 10 p.m. and all the little human animals were already tucked into their upscale beds. Allan felt fine. Calm and warm inside, as if he’d just taken a slug of good whiskey.

He swiftly pulled the front passenger side door open and got in. He dragged the lifeless cabbie across the seat by his bloody shirtfront until the corpse slumped across his lap. He took the man’s wallet and keys and then, using a small folding utility knife, he cut a large square of fabric out of the back of the cabbie’s striped shirt.

Then, as he was holding that blood-stained trophy in his gloved hand, it started to happen.

The hot, unbearable itch in his hands, burning between his fingers. Like insects crawling under his skin.

Maddened by the sensation, he dropped the swatch, stripped the smoking gloves off his hands and threw them away, into the back seat, sure they were about to burst into flame. Once his hands were bare, he saw to his horror that the sparks were back. Just like that terrible night back in New York.

Just like every time since then. No matter how he tried to deny it. But this time it was more intense than ever.

He made himself breathe deeply, struggling to remain calm. Nothing was on fire. Nothing was hot or burnt. He would be able to control it this time. With each breath, the terrible sparks faded, their strange energy dissipating until they were gone.

He reached down and plucked his trophy off the floor of the cab, tucking the bloody fabric into his jacket pocket. He was about to push the dead cabbie back over to the driver’s side and exit the cab, and he actually had his right hand on the door when he suddenly realized the implication of having taken off his gloves.

Fingerprints. He’d left fingerprints.

It was too late just to get the gloves out of the back seat and put them back on. It’d be like closing the barn door after the horses were out, anyway. No, the only option was to wipe down the surfaces of the cab as best he could.

He took out his handkerchief and wiped down the dashboard, the seat, and the interior of the door. Then he got out and wiped first the outside of the passenger door and then the driver’s door. He was fairly certain he hadn’t touched the driver’s door, but he couldn’t be too careful.

He heard sirens in the distance. Growing closer.

Time to go.

He walked away, heading north on Cherry Street. When he made a right on Jackson, he spotted a police prowler driving slowly toward him.

His heart stopped, then revved like a race car. His throat constricted, suddenly dry and parched. The sparks flared in his hands, and he shoved them deep into the pockets of his slouchy blue jacket, terrified that the pigs would see the glow.

One of them turned toward him, looking right at him. Allan wrapped his fingers around his pistol. There was no way he was going to surrender without a fight.

The cop turned away, and the prowler continued down Jackson without slowing.

He felt a surge of elation so powerful it was almost sexual. He’d beaten them again. He imagined the young pig being forced to explain that he’d seen the legendary Zodiac Killer in the flesh, but hadn’t bothered to stop him. A small, private smile played over his lips as he turned on Maple and headed north, into the Presidio.

PART TWO

SEPTEMBER 20, 1974

Walter stood alone beside a small, cheaply produced poster for the paper he and Bell had just presented— Use of Fluorescent Probes to Investigate Hepatic Microsomal ‘Drug’-Binding Sites.

The paper had been very well received, although he couldn’t help but notice that more than half the audience was female. Striking odds when contrasted against the fact that the attendance for the annual conference of the American Biochemical Society tended to be more than 75 percent male.

But Walter was an enthusiastic supporter of women’s lib and was pleased to see so many vigorous and inquisitive female minds seeking to embrace and decode the intricacies of the natural world. He stood by, ready, willing and able to discuss the finer details of sigmoidal reaction velocity with any one of these eager young scholars.

Yet for some reason, they all ignored him and clustered around Bell.

Maybe Bell was right about Walter’s jacket. He had only one jacket, which he had worn every day for ten years. It had originally belonged to his father, a tweed Norfolk that had a few moth holes and was a little frayed around the cuffs, but was still perfectly serviceable. It had deep pockets that could hold up to a dozen rolls of Necco wafers, as well as his notebook and several spare pens. He seemed to lose pens like a shark loses teeth.

Yet Bell had repeatedly threatened to throw that jacket away or set it on fire while Walter was sleeping. He had even gone so far as to buy his friend a new jacket, a snazzy plaid double-knit sport coat like the ones that Bell favored, but the pockets on the outside were fake, sewn shut and just for show, and the one inner pocket could barely hold two rolls of Necco wafers and a single pen. So that jacket stayed in his closet back at MIT, and Walter had worn the Norfolk jacket again to U. C. Berkeley, just like last year.

And none of the women wanted to talk to him, just like last year.

Bell, on the other hand, was holding court in the center of a crowd of enraptured females. Bell, with his sharp sport coat and rust-colored turtleneck and charming smile. The scientist in Walter liked to believe that he could replicate the results by duplicating the methods, but in his heart he knew there was something about Bell that couldn’t be duplicated.

Off to the left, he noticed an older, slightly mannish woman and her chubby friend deep in conversation. They were the only two females who seemed unaffected by Bell’s charisma, and Walter found himself eavesdropping on them.

“Can you believe he’s back?” the older one was saying, pointing to an article in a folded newspaper. “I swear I was just starting to feel safe at night.”

“But how can they be sure the new letters are from the same guy?”

“They used handwriting analysis. It’s him, alright. I wonder if the killings are going to start back up again.”

“Jesus,” the older woman said. “I took a cab to work for two years after I saw that letter where he threatened to shoot senior citizens on a city bus.”

Walter’s blood suddenly felt like liquid nitrogen in his veins.

“Excuse me,” he said, stepping closer to the two women. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. What were you saying about a letter threatening to shoot people on a city bus?”

“It’s the Zodiac Killer, man,” the chubby woman said. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“I’m...” Walter’s throat was so dry he could barely form words. “I’m from the east coast. I guess I don’t really keep up on national news.”

“Well,” the chubby woman said, warming to the topic. “This psycho killer was running around murdering people about four or five years back. He sent letters to the paper and used this... what did they call it? Like a code.”

“A cipher,” the mannish woman said.

Nausea bloomed and twisted in Walter’s gut.

“But the bus...?”

“He said he was gonna shoot senior citizens on a city bus, wrote it in one of his letters,” the mannish woman replied. “What was that, ’69?”

“October, ’69,” the chubby woman said, shivering slightly and wrapping her thick arms around her body. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“But he never followed through,” the mannish woman said. “Not yet anyway. Here, look.”

She handed him the paper.

He looked down at the article, but the headline and the text below never registered. All he saw was a crude police sketch of the suspect. A sketch he recognized instantly.

It was the man at Reiden Lake.

A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he braced himself against the wall.

“Hey, are you okay?” the chubby woman asked, although her voice sounded as if it was at the far end of a long tunnel.

Walter nodded absently, then stumbled away from the two women, clutching the newspaper in sweating hands, a terrible memory seared into his reeling mind.

A Ridgid Tool calendar on a warehouse wall.

A girl in a bikini.

The date, September 21, 1974.

Today is September 20th.

Walter bulldozed his way through the crowd of female admirers around Bell and gripped his friend’s arm.

“Hey, watch it,” a tall brunette with glasses said.

“Jerk,” spat another, shorter brunette.

“Belly,” Walter hissed. “We need to talk.”

* * *

“You’re like a cold shower, Walt,” Bell said. “You know that?”

Bell extracted his arm from his friend’s desperate grip and dug in his heels, refusing to go any further.

“So what is it?” Bell demanded. “What the hell is so important that...”

“The man we saw at Reiden Lake,” Walter said breathlessly, “the one who came through the gate. It wasn’t a hallucination. He’s real.”

“Are you having some kind of flashback?” Bell gripped Walter’s chin. “Let me see your pupils.”

Walter shrugged him off and thrust the crumpled newspaper into Bell’s hand.

“Look at this!”

Bell rolled his eyes and looked down at the paper with a skeptically arched brow.

When he saw the police sketch, all the color drained from his face.

“I guess you could say there are... similarities in certain features,” he said.

“Similarities? It’s him, Belly. You know it’s him.”

Bell looked up at Walter, his expression grave.

“If he is real,” he said, “then what is he? He seemed... so human.”

“Human, yes,” Walter replied. “But... different in some way.”

“In what way?” Bell asked.

“I remember that strange glow,” Walter said. “Like sparks in the palms of his hands. Almost as if there was some kind of unknown process disrupting the very atoms of his flesh.”

“Maybe he’s a time traveler from a future that’s been poisoned by atomic warfare,” Bell suggested.

Without skipping a beat, Walter responded.

“Or perhaps some kind of pan-dimensional being who only adopts a human form in order to facilitate contact with the people of Earth,” Walter said. “Maybe that glow is his true form showing through the artificial skin.”

Bell tapped the article.

“But why would a pan-dimensional being want to shoot people with a normal gun?”

“It’s so much worse than that,” Walter replied. “This man publicly threatened to shoot senior citizens on a city bus. Just like in our vision. He hasn’t made good on that threat yet, but in the vision, the bus shooting took place on September 21st, 1974.” He paused, gripping Bell’s sleeve. “Belly, that’s tomorrow!”

“My God,” Bell said, looking disoriented. “What are we going to do?”

“That’s obvious,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop him.”

The Doe library at U.C. Berkley was the kind of place where Walter could happily spend the rest of his life, under different, more peaceful circumstances. Built in the early nineteen hundreds, it was a large, stately building fronted by classic Doric columns and decorated with richly patinated copper trim. Several large rectangular skylights were embedded in the red tiled roof.

Walter took the stone steps two at a time, huffing and breathless as he pushed through the door. Bell was close behind.

Inside it was tranquil and beautiful. He was immediately attracted to a large, airy room with a curved, tiled ceiling and large arched windows. Leaded glass skylights filled the chamber with gentle natural light and each of the dozens of sturdy wooden tables had its own wrought-iron reading light. Tall shelves packed with colorful volumes lined the walls, beckoning Walter with their intriguing titles and vast cornucopia of knowledge. The smell of foxed paper and wood polish was seductive, and made him wish he was there for any other reason.

The librarian at the main desk was one of the tallest women he had ever met, a little over six feet and standing eye to eye with Bell in her flat, sensible shoes. She was in her late fifties, with a stiffly lacquered poodle haircut that likely hadn’t changed in twenty years. On the left lapel of her modestly cut blouse she wore a red Bakelite brooch in the shape of a key, and a name badge on the right that labeled her as Mrs. Alder.

Her face was wide and plain, but her green eyes sparkled with intelligence and wit.

“How can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.

“We’re looking for information on the so-called Zodiac Killer,” Walter told her.

“Ah, yes,” she said with a knowing nod. “Popular topic these days.” She indicated a stairwell off to the right. “Newspaper archive is in the basement, at the end of the hallway on the left.”

“Thank you,” Walter said.

“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?” she asked.

Walter and Bell exchanged a look.

“Good God, I hope so,” Walter replied.

* * *

The newspaper archive boasted a lot of carefully preserved newspapers, but it was primarily devoted to floor-to-ceiling shelves of microfilm. Where the upper areas of the library were quaint and old-fashioned, evoking images of turn of the century scholars in waistcoats and wire-rim glasses, the archive room was sleek and ultra modern, coldly illuminated by recessed fluorescent lights and outfitted with cutting-edge technology.

There were six brand-new microfilm readers, two of which already were taken by students. One was female, blond and wan with very pale skin and an underfed physique beneath her bulky striped sweater. The other was male, black and prematurely balding with glasses and a leather jacket. Both were so engrossed in their own research that they didn’t even look up when Walter and Bell walked into the room.

The librarian in charge of the archives was a man, just a little bit older than Walter, with bushy sideburns and frizzy hair bullied into an ill-advised Afro. He wore a baggy green suit and a joke tie featuring monkeys with typewriters. His name badge read “Mr. Sternberg.”

“How you doing?” he asked, revealing a hard New York accent. “What can I do for you?”

“Fine, thank you,” Walter replied. “We are looking for information on the Zodiac murders.”

“Man,” he said. “You’re lucky that Graysmith guy’s not here today. He’s in here all the time, pulling every single thing we have on the Zodiac and going over it with a fine-toothed comb.” He turned around and grabbed a large cardboard box from a metal library cart behind his desk, setting it in front of Walter and Bell. “You’re also lucky that I’m a lazy bastard and haven’t re-shelved all his microfilms since his last visit. This is pretty much everything. Enjoy.”

Walter couldn’t imagine that he would “enjoy” reading up on the murders that had been committed by the man from Reiden Lake, but he made himself smile and thank the librarian. Bell grabbed the box and headed over to the closest available reader.

He set the box on a nearby table, sat down, and sorted through the microfilm reels to find the one labeled with the earliest date.

“December, 1968,” Bell said, opening the cardboard box and holding up the reel. “Why, that’s just two months after...”

His voice trailed off, and he looked around at the other people in the archives.

Walter nodded, understanding Bell’s unfinished point. He held out his hand for the microfilm, and Bell handed it over. Walter pulled up an extra chair for himself.

He threaded the microfilm into the reader with a sense of dread, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to know the awful truth.

* * *

The two of them spent nearly three hours glued to the reader, studying article after horrifying article of the torture and mayhem caused by the man from Reiden Lake.

It began with a young couple at Lake Herman, in Vallejo. The boy was seventeen, the girl only sixteen, and the pair had been parked in the Lover’s Lane area near the lake when they had been approached by a man with a 22. caliber semi-automatic pistol. According to the police report, their killer shot the boy first, point blank in the head, then shot his terrified girlfriend five times in the back.

Worse, Walter instantly recognized the pretty blueeyed brunette from his vision at Reiden Lake. He’d seen her death, exactly as it happened two months before it occurred!

The next two unsuspecting teens were shot in a Lover’s Lane area, as well, this time at Blue Rock Springs, also near Vallejo. Only this time, the boy actually survived the brutal attack, describing the killer exactly the way Walter remembered him.

The police had received a phone call from a man claiming responsibility for the shootings, describing details of the crime that could only have been known by the killer. That caller also took credit for the previous shootings, and the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands.

The third attack, at Lake Berryessa near Napa, was by far the most bizarre and frightening. A young couple were approached by a man wearing a black hood, with a white crossed circle painted on a flap of fabric that hung down over his chest. After some surreal conversation, the man tied the couple up and started stabbing them repeatedly. When he was finished, he just walked away, leaving them bound and bleeding. After being discovered by a local fisherman, both victims were rushed to the hospital. The young woman didn’t make it, but her boyfriend survived the attack to relate all the horrifying details to the press.

Again the killer made another call to police, as well as leaving a written message on the victims’ car door, listing the dates of previous murders. It was signed with the same crossed circle symbol.

Walter was appalled to find so many details that he remembered from his vision. The more he read, the more he started to feel punch drunk and overwhelmed.

The last case that was confirmed as a Zodiac murder was the shooting of a cab driver in the city, in an upscale neighborhood known as Presidio Heights. Another grimly familiar story. Walter was starting to wish he’d never found out about the killings.

Having gone through the details of all the murders, Walter and Bell began to examine the letters and ciphers that the killer had sent to various newspapers in the area, including the letter in which he threatened to shoot school children on a bus.

The more they read, the more a dull, drowning sense of hopelessness began to wash over Walter.

“What have we done?” he asked Bell.

“I think a more important question,” Bell replied, “would be, what are we going to do about it?”

Walter paced up and down the length of the Howard Johnson hotel room he’d shared with Bell for the conference. They had spent nearly the entire day in the newspaper archive, digging up every single scrap of information they could find on the Zodiac Killer.

More and more, Walter was haunted by the faces of the victims. The teenage girl at Lake Herman. The cab driver with the mustache. But the one face he just couldn’t get out of his mind was the face of that old black woman in the red coat.

LINDA’S GRANDMA.

On the scratchy bedcover beside him was a copy he’d had printed out of one of the Zodiac letters. His eye kept coming back again and again to the bottom of the page.

Senior citizens make great targets. Okay, I think I shall wipe out a city bus some morning, just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the grannies as they come bouncing out.

“We have to contact the authorities,” Walter said. “I just don’t see any other option.”

“That’s brilliant, Walt,” Bell replied. “What are you going to do? Tell the police that you saw the future while you were on acid? That’ll go over well—I’m sure they’ll leap into action.”

“I’m going to tell them the truth, Belly.” He picked up the receiver of the bedside telephone. “I have a moral obligation, as a scientist.”

“Would you just stop and think for a moment...” Bell began.

Walter ignored him, dialing the operator.

“Yes, hello,” he said when she came on the line. “Give me the San Francisco police department.”

“Just a moment,” she replied.

“Come on, Walter...”

A gruff male voice answered on the first ring.

“SFPD,” it said.

“I’d like to speak to someone in charge of the Zodiac case, please.”

A long, weighty sigh on the other end, then, “Please hold.”

Bell looked away, exasperated, and started studying a Xerox copy of one of the ciphers.

Walter waited patiently until a woman came on the line. She had a gentle voice, like someone’s mother.

“Hello and thanks for calling the Zodiac tip line,” she said. “Please state your information.”

“Yes, I...” Walter looked over at Bell, who was deliberately ignoring him. “I need to speak to someone in charge of the case. It’s extremely urgent.”

“I’m sure it is, sir, and if you’d go ahead and let me know why you’re calling, I’d be happy to pass your information on to the detectives, right away.”

“But...” Bell was still ignoring him. “Well... This is probably going to sound pretty out there.”

“Go ahead, honey,” the woman said. “It can’t be more out there that half the cranks I hear from every day.”

“I’m a scientist,” Walter said. “Specializing in biochemical processes within the human brain. I believe I may be responsible for bringing the man you’ve been calling the Zodiac into our world.”

A moment of silence on the line, then, “I’m listening.”

Walter told her everything about the trip, the gateway, and the vision he’d shared with the strange man. When he was done, he felt exhilarated—and a little bit sick to his stomach. He hadn’t realized how it had been eating away at him, keeping that awful vision bottled up inside him for so many years. It felt like such a tremendous relief to let it all go, and put the burden of responsibility in the capable hands of trained law enforcement professionals.

“So what you’re saying is that the Zodiac Killer is a radioactive alien from another dimension?” the woman said slowly.

“Well, not exactly...” Walter frowned and switched the receiver from his left ear to his right. “I mean, there’s really no way of knowing precisely where he’s from until he can be captured and questioned, but that’s hardly the issue. I think it’s infinitely more important that he be stopped from killing those people tomorrow. Naturally, I’m happy to work closely with the detectives in order to deduce the location of the shooting, but time is of the essence. It’s imperative that investigation begin immediately.”

“Thank you very much for your interest in this case,” the woman said, her tone rote and dismissive now. “I’ve recorded your information exactly as given, and will pass it on to the detectives as soon as they come back on shift tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?” Walter said. “But that will be too late!”

“Hello?”

He was talking to a dead line.

“So,” Bell said, without looking up from the cipher. “When does the cavalry arrive?”

Walter slammed the receiver back into the cradle.

Walter lay on his back, staring balefully at the ceiling. Several hours had passed, and they were no closer to devising a plan than they had been when Walter had first shown the article to Bell.

Clearly, there would be no help from the police.

“We did this, Belly, can’t you see that?” Frustrated, he ran a hand over his eyes. “It’s up to us to save that poor old woman.”

“But how?” his friend replied. “We have no concrete data.”

Any answer Walter might have come up with vanished with a sharp rapping on the hotel room door.

Walter got his bare feet under him and walked over to the door, leaning against it and opening it as much as the security chain would allow. Peering through the gap, he saw two men wearing identical suits and serious expressions. The man closest to the door was a grim, gray, older man. Gray hair, gray eyes, and gray skin. His companion was younger, with slick, black hair like patent leather, and pale blue eyes magnified by thick-lensed glasses.

“Walter Bishop?” the gray man said.

“Yes.” Walter, looked back over his shoulder at Bell. “Can I help you?”

The gray man held up a photo ID inside a slim leather wallet.

“FBI,” he said. “Please get dressed. We’ll need you to come with us.”

“Belly,” Walter called back over his shoulder. “There are men here from the FBI.”

“William Bell?” the gray man said, leaning into the crack in the door. “We need to talk to you, as well.”

Bell was on his feet in a heartbeat, eyes wide with alarm.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Walter said, struggling to get his sockless feet into his shoes without toppling over. “But we’d better do what they say.”

“Let’s go, gentlemen,” the gray man said. “Chop chop.”

“I don’t like this,” Bell said. “Why are they here?”

“This must be about the Zodiac,” Walter stage whispered to Bell, slipping the chain off the door and opening it all the way. “Is that what this is? The Zodiac Killer?”

“Sir,” the gray man replied, “I’m not currently at liberty to discuss the details of why we’re here. Please come with us.”

Walter looked back at Bell, suddenly anxious and unsure. Only minutes ago, he’d been longing for someone in a position of authority—someone who would step in and take this whole awful mess out of their hands. Now he was afraid.

It wasn’t as if there was any other option, but for some reason he felt certain that going with these men was a terrible idea.

Bell stepped up beside him and slung his arm around Walter’s shoulders.

“Don’t tell them anything, Walt,” he whispered between clenched teeth. “Not a goddamn thing.”

The FBI men led them to an unmarked black car waiting in a no-parking zone. They were placed in the back seat, and it wasn’t until the doors were closed that Walter noticed there were no handles on the inside.

“Not a goddamn thing,” Bell repeated.

Walter nodded, hands twisting anxiously in his lap.

* * *

He wasn’t familiar enough with the Bay Area to have any idea where they were being taken. Since they hadn’t crossed a bridge, he assumed they were still on the Berkeley side of the bay. They drove along several different, unremarkable streets through forgettable neighborhoods, and then down into the underground garage of a bland, beige office building with no visible sign or company name.

Walter’s anxiety ratcheted up a notch as they pulled up beside a bank of elevators. The man with the shiny black hair stayed in the car while the gray man got out to meet two more men—presumably agents—who were waiting by the elevator. Both of them looked like they had been grown in the same cloning vat as the gray man. Same conservative, dated haircuts, and same colorless, lifeless complexions.

They looked like men who spent way too much time under florescent lighting.

“Which one is Bishop?” one of the new agents asked the gray man, as if Walter wasn’t standing right there. Like he was livestock, incapable of speech.

“I’m Walter Bishop,” Walter said, indignant. “What is this about? I know my rights!”

“You’ll be fully briefed in due time, Mr. Bishop,” the gray man said.

“Listen,” Bell said, placing himself protectively between Walter and the stone-faced agents. “My friend, he’s a little bit... eccentric.” Bell touched his temple. “Reads too much science fiction. He gets... weird ideas sometimes, but it’s nothing serious. Really, he’s harmless.”

“We’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Bell,” the gray man said.

“No, really,” Bell persisted, gripping Walter’s arm and looking into his eyes like he was trying to tell him something other than what he was actually saying. “He’s crazy, get it? Crazy.”

Walter got it.

The elevator door opened and the two new agents each took one of Walter’s elbows, escorting him with gentle but implacable force. The gray man stepped in front of Bell, preventing him from entering the elevator with his friend.

“Hey, wait a minute—” Bell was saying, but it was too late.

The elevator doors closed, and Walter was alone with the two agents.

His mind was racing, wondering where he was being taken, and what was happening to Bell. He thought about what Belly had said, telling him to act like he was crazy. But why?

Bell harbored a powerful but understandable distrust of police and government agents. He had watched friends and fellow students being tear gassed and arrested for protesting the war in Vietnam. But perhaps these agents were the people in charge of the Zodiac case, and they wanted Walter’s help.

Maybe they would be able to help stop the bus killing.

The elevator doors opened, revealing a long, institutional green hallway. A short, chubby man in a lab coat poked a Geiger counter at him before he was allowed to exit the elevator.

“What is the meaning of this?” Walter asked. “I’m not radioactive!”

“Just a precaution, sir,” the man in the lab coat said. “Right this way, please.”

He was led down a hallway, then another, through several turns and into a small, windowless room, empty except for a metal desk, two folding chairs, and a boxy camera bolted above the door. The agents withdrew, leaving him alone.

Walter sat in that room for what felt like an eternity, giving him plenty of time alone with his thoughts. Every second that passed brought September 21st closer and closer. He kept on seeing that old woman in the red coat, looking up at him with that terrible questioning look in the endless second before she was gunned down in the street.

He tried to distract himself with a mind game, in which he was working his way through the periodic table, seeing how many different words he could make by rearranging the letters that spelled each element. He was up to selenium, which was a great word with plenty of vowels and nice common consonants, but he couldn’t stay focused. His mind kept returning to that awful vision over and over, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking.

He checked his watch, then checked it again.

The passing minutes felt like a slow torture. Each minute gone left them less time to find and stop the killer.

Finally, after what he estimated to be nearly three hours, someone came in to talk to Walter.

Where the previous men had been grim, gray and serious, this guy was tan, hearty, and way too friendly, with twinkly blue eyes and a big, rubbery smile like a used car salesman.

“How you doing, Walt?” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you Walt, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Special Agent Dick Latimer.” He gripped Walter’s hand and pumped it exactly three times, then took a seat in the empty chair. “I understand you have some information that you think will help us with the Zodiac murders. Is that right?”

“Um...” Walter pressed his lips together. “I... well...”

“Why don’t you just start by telling me what you told Mrs. Berman on the tip line.” Latimer leaned forward, predatory smile still at full volume.

Walter was torn, unsure. He still wanted desperately for someone in a position of authority to step in and take care of this terrible situation, but there was something about this guy Latimer that he just didn’t trust. He wished that Bell was with him. Belly would know what to say. He always knew what to say.

And what not to say.

“I don’t recall exactly,” Walter said. He had hoped to sound confident, but his voice felt constricted in this throat.

Latimer’s thousand-watt smile dimmed for a heartbeat, and his blue eyes went cold.

“Come on now, Walt,” he said. “This is no time for games. You told Mrs. Berman that you had urgent information for us. Something to do with...” He leaned in even closer, so close Walter would have scooted his chair defensively back if it hadn’t already been pressed against the wall. “Radioactivity?”

“I did, didn’t I...” Walter paused, looking down. Then he looked up again. “Would you happen to have any grape Nehi?”

“I’m afraid not,” Latimer replied. “But there’s a soda machine down the hall. I’d be happy to get you a 7 Up or something, as soon as you explain exactly what you meant by the suggestion that the suspect has been giving off an unknown type of radiation.”

“I’m afraid it has to be grape Nehi,” Walter answered. “Only grape Nehi contains the precise balance between citric and phosphoric acid to adequately protect us from the cosmic radiation from the future.”

Latimer narrowed his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“Don’t you watch The Outer Limits?” Walter asked. “It’s just like ‘Demon With a Glass Hand,’ only this guy has a radioactive hand. He’s a soldier from the future, like Robert Culp. I’m from the future, too. That’s how I know.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a roll of Necco wafers, offering one to the increasingly annoyed Latimer. “Candy?”

“Look, Walt, why don’t you just take it easy and try to stay focused.”

“I was hoping to get boysenberry pancakes at the Howard Johnson’s, but they only had blueberry,” he said earnestly. “Do you suppose that’s some kind of regional thing? When I was a kid, my mother used to make the best boysenberry pancakes. The trick is to coat the berries in powdered sugar before you add them to the batter. Of course, you can substitute lingonberries, but I’d increase the amount of sugar to compensate for the radiation.

“Have you ever been to Vienna?”

Latimer stood up, metal chair scraping loudly against the linoleum floor.

“Enough,” he said.

“Enough?” Walter asked, on a roll now. “That’s a pretty subjective concept, enough. It’s really relative to how much you already have, and how much more you imagine you might want. It’s not a good solid concept like, for example, a number. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have three of something. Like three rolls of Necco wafers. You might think three is enough, while someone else could reasonably argue that three is too many. I, on the other hand, may believe that three is not anywhere near enough. And although we are each right in our own minds, none of us is right in the minds of the other two. Therefore, we are all both right and wrong at the same time.

“Are you familiar with quantum physics?”

“Jesus,” Latimer said, reaching out to press a button Walter hadn’t noticed on the underside of the table. The two stone-faced agents reappeared in the doorway. “Get this crackpot out of here, will you?” Latimer instructed.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Dick,” Walter said over his shoulder as the two agents hustled him out the door. “I hope you’ll visit me in the future. I think you would really enjoy the year 1999.”

His last glimpse of Latimer as the door closed behind him was of the big man wiping his hand over his face like an exasperated teacher. Walter really hoped he’d done the right thing.

The unmarked car dumped Walter and Bell on a nondescript street corner, just a few blocks from some kind of highway. It was getting dark, and few of the streetlights seemed to be operational. There was a damp chilliness in the air. The buildings all around them were a mix of industrial and office buildings, currently vacant or closed.

“You can’t just leave us here...” Walter began.

But they did, pulling away the second the door was closed.

“Where the hell are we?” Bell asked.

Walter pointed out a disreputable looking gas station, barely visible on the other side of the street about five blocks down.

“Maybe we can get a map at that gas station.”

“Is it even open?” Bell responded.

“Look, there’s a phone booth.”

Bell patted his pockets for change.

“I think I know someone who can come pick us up.”

“Someone with two X chromosomes, I presume.”

Bell didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

He pushed in the folding door on the phone booth, kicking aside a slew of crushed beer cans and urine-soaked newspaper in order to enter.

“Hold that door open, Walt,” he said, lifting the grimy receiver as if it might bite him. “I don’t want to asphyxiate from the ammonia fumes in this toilet.”

Walter put his foot against the folding door while Bell held the receiver to his ear, joggling the cradle.

“Nothing,” he said.

An olive green ’69 Oldsmobile Cutlass pulled up alongside the phone booth. In the driver’s seat was a man with unfashionable glasses and thinning light brown hair. His slim build and ill-fitting suit made him seem younger than Walter, like a kid playing dress-up in his dad’s clothes, but there was something in his haggard face that aged him twenty years. Behind the magnifying lenses of those glasses, his watery blue eyes were sleepless and haunted.

“Get in,” he said, reaching across the seat to open the passenger door.

“What?” Bell dropped the useless receiver and stepped out of the phone booth, hand protectively across Walter’s chest. “Who the hell are you?”

“Special Agent Jack Iverson. You want to know what’s really going on with the Zodiac Killer, you’d better come with me.”

Bell looked over at his friend, brow arched. Walter could see he was skeptical, but Walter was dying for some answers. And there was something about this man’s tortured gaze that drew him in. Where Latimer had seemed smarmy and insincere, this guy seemed to be raw and wide open.

He cast one more look back at Bell, then got into the passenger seat of the Cutlass.

“Come on, Belly,” he said.

Exasperated, his friend got into the back seat.

“Just make room for yourself back there,” Iverson said over his shoulder. “This car has become kind of like a second office, since I’ve been out on medical leave from the Bureau.”

As soon as Bell closed the back door, Iverson peeled out, anxious gaze obsessively scanning the empty street.

“Medical leave?” Walter asked, peering into the back seat at all the crooked stacks of files and fast-food wrappers.

“You can’t be too careful,” he said. “I’ve been followed.”

Walter was starting to wonder if getting into the car had been a bad idea. But if there was something more going on than what had been made available to the public, then Walter needed to know.

“We can’t go back to my place,” Iverson said, pulling into the empty parking lot of a closed carpet and flooring company. “So this will have to do for now.” He eased the Cutlass into a slot under a jaundiced sodium light and killed the engine. The windows began to fog up almost immediately, the damp bay chill creeping into the interior of the car.

“Tell me what you told the woman on the tip line,” Iverson said, turning to peer at Walter. “I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Latimer.”

“Well...” Walter said, pulling the worn lapels of his jacket tight around his throat, and wishing he’d taken time to put on a scarf.

“Look,” Bell interrupted, leaning forward from the back seat. “Why should we trust you? Any of you?”

“You shouldn’t trust Latimer,” Iverson said. “I wouldn’t. That weasel thinks he can capture the Zodiac Killer and figure out a way to use him as a weapon. He’s got... ambitions.” He said the word ambitions like he might have said herpes. “He was the bastard who hijacked my idea, for the formation of a special scientific division to handle cases that fall outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal criminal activities. Cases like this one.” He shook his head, rueful and defeated. “When he took over the project, he told our superiors that I was cracking under pressure, and campaigned to get me sidelined on medical leave.”

“Okay,” Bell said. “So we agree that it’s not a good idea to trust Latimer. But why should we trust you?”

“Because,” Iverson said, “the Zodiac Killer has been writing to me. He still does, tells me everything. Things Latimer doesn’t know. Even...” He reached into the back seat and grabbed a green folder off the top of a teetering stack, flipping it open and extracting the first sheet of paper inside. “About you two.”

He held up a rumpled, repeatedly folded sheet of paper. At the top of the sheet, the words “Dear Special Agent Iverson” appeared, above a few lines of the familiar code Walter had seen in his vision and in the newspaper accounts. At the bottom there was a rough sketch. It pictured two floating heads, hovering above a double row of stylized waves like a child might draw. The heads were simplistically rendered, but the heavy, strongly arched brows on the left and the wild curly mop of hair on the right made it obvious who they were supposed to represent.

“He says he’s from another world,” Iverson continued. “And that you two opened a psychic gateway that allowed him to enter this one.”

“Did he describe his own world?” Walter asked, excitement flaring magnesium hot in his belly and making him feel reckless. “Is it another planet? Or another dimension?”

“Hold on,” Bell said. “Start at the beginning.”

Iverson nodded, his look solemn.

“I don’t know why the killer became fixated on me,” he said, breath steaming in the chilled interior of the car. “It’s not like I was in charge of the case, or in any kind of position of power. I was just one of several junior agents working under Latimer. But for some reason, the bastard singled me out. He’s been writing to me, calling my house in the middle of the night, taunting me. I don’t sleep. My wife left me. But in a strange way, I think Latimer is jealous.” He shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it?

“Anyway,” he continued, “the last confirmed and undisputed Zodiac murder on public record was the cab driver in Presidio Heights, back in ’69. But the truth is, the killer was just getting warmed up. After two of his male victims survived his attacks, he gave up on messing with couples and started concentrating on single women.” He flipped through the pages in the file on his lap, until he came to a photograph of a barely dressed dead blonde wearing the remains of a burnt polyester blouse. “Donna DeGarmo, age twenty-six, a dental hygienist from Alameda.”

“I recognize this woman!” Walter said, nauseous but unable to look away. “I saw her blouse, burnt like this.”

“There’s something else that’s different,” Iverson said. “When her body was found, it was giving off highly concentrated gamma radiation. Especially in the throat and... um... ” He cupped his hands over his pecs. “Chest area.”

“My God,” Walter said, remembering the vision, and the sparks dancing over the killer’s hands.

“The landlady who discovered the body and two of the first responders on the scene were subsequently hospitalized with acute radiation sickness. The entire block was evacuated and the residents quarantined. Naturally it was kept out of the papers, to prevent widespread panic. ‘Sewer leak.’ That was the cover story. But here’s the weird thing.”

“What?” Bell said. “Weirder than a radioactive corpse?”

Iverson nodded.

“Much weirder. See, it took us several hours to mobilize all the equipment we needed to enter the location safely and dispose of the body. I mean, the levels of radiation we were dealing with, standard lead shielding would have been as useless as lingerie. We were actually talking about filling the whole apartment with quick-dry cement, demolishing the rest of the building around it and trucking the cement block out to the Nevada desert for disposal. But, less than three hours later, before we could get a conclusive reading on the type of gamma-emitting radioisotopes we were dealing with, the radiation was just gone.”

“Gone?” Walter frowned. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

“That’s impossible,” Bell said. “Radiation doesn’t just go away. It can take centuries to decay.”

“Yeah, I know,” Iverson said. “Impossible, but true. It was as if the unknown radioactive isotope somehow bonded with oxygen in the air and rendered down into harmless water.”

“Astounding,” Walter said. “Unprecedented.”

“And worse, that was only the first time.”

Iverson fanned out a handful of photos, each one featuring a different woman. All beautiful. All dead. Thirty-two total.

“The unusual gamma radiation was only found in six out of the thirty-two, but that’s because the bodies of those women were discovered within three hours or less of their deaths. It seems to be getting stronger with each new victim, but after the three-hour mark, the radiation still dissipates without a trace, leaving behind nothing but garden variety water.

“Regardless, the killer has claimed responsibility for all of them, proving it with samples of their hair or clothing in the letters he mailed to me.”

“This is horrible,” Walter said. “It’s so much worse than we ever could have imagined.”

“But what exactly is going on here?” Bell asked. “Could this be some kind of unique, short-burst radiation that’s as normal as sunshine in his world?”

“Or,” Walter continued, “maybe the killer’s very atoms have been somehow destabilized by passing through the gateway, resulting in a mirrored gamma-raylike effect within the flesh of his victims.”

“But why does he only seem to emit radiation when he’s killing someone?” Iverson asked. “We’ve tried tracking him with Geiger counters, figuring that anyone as close as he was to so many repeated radioactive events must give off some trace radiation—something that would be detectable. But that hasn’t been the case. It’s as if he lets off this intense burst at the climax of each murder and then... nothing.”

“Agent Iverson,” Walter asked, dreading the answer. “In the letters he’s sent you, has he mentioned anything more about a city bus?”

“It’s a recurring theme,” Iverson replied. “Repeated over and over again in almost every letter. He claims the women he’s killed are all tramps—easy prey that nobody cares about, anyway—but that shooting senior citizens would be the ultimate thrill. Not so much for the sheer pleasure of killing, although that’s clearly a factor. He claims that killing innocent grannies would provoke the maximum amount of outrage.

“He sees public outrage as a kind of ovation for his symphonies. Makes him feel powerful. Look at this.” He handed Walter another handwritten letter. “In his most recent message to me, he expressed a lot of anger because details of his activities had been kept out of the media.

“The fact that he was able to get a few cards and letters through our net, and made it into the newspapers, has made him cocky. He claimed responsibility for several murders we know he had nothing to do with, just to mess with us. But that score at the bottom of his last public letter, ‘Me = 37, SFPD = 0,’ that’s the only hint the media ever got of what he’s really been up to, over the past five years.”

“Listen,” Walter said, unsure if it was the right thing to do, but unable to stop himself. “I think we might know where the Zodiac Killer will be tomorrow...”

A pair of headlights pierced the gloom, refracting off the condensation on the rear windshield. A car pulled up behind them, and two ill-defined, fuzzy silhouettes got out and started walking toward Iverson’s car.

The agent rolled down his window and peered back at the approaching men.

“Latimer!” he said, cranking the ignition and flooring the gas pedal.

Walter, who wasn’t prepared for such sudden acceleration, bounced off the seatback, dropping the letter he was holding as he braced himself against the dashboard and the door with his palms.

Bell swore in the back seat as an avalanche of files slid into his lap, burying his feet.

It took Walter a second to realize that Iverson was headed straight for a chain-link fence, with no sign of slowing.

“Are you nuts?” Bell cried, voice constricted with fear.

Instead of answering, Iverson just crashed through the fence, dragging a large section of chain-link that had hooked onto the wipers as the Cutlass slalomed down a dirt embankment and cut across honking traffic. At that point, Walter covered his face with his hands, convinced he was about to die in a flaming wreck.

Bell’s swearing in the back seat became louder and more creative, but Iverson was disturbingly silent. The pounding of Walter’s heart seemed like the loudest sound in the car.

Then, just as suddenly as he’d taken off, Iverson screeched to a halt.

“Out!” he cried, reaching across Walter’s body to open the passenger side door. “Go, run. I’ll distract them.”

He scooped up the file of letters off the floor and pressed it into Walter’s hands.

“Find him!” he said, his haunted gaze locked on Walter. “You have to find him and stop him.”

Walter took the file and scrambled out of the car. Looking back, he saw that another vehicle had pulled in behind them. Its lights were on, but it was just sitting there.

They were in a narrow alley, and there was an open loading dock on their right. The moment Walter and Bell got out of the Cutlass, Iverson threw it into reverse and drove backward until he slammed into the pursuing car, wedging it in tightly between two dumpsters and blocking it from proceeding down the alley.

“Come on,” Bell said, climbing onto the high loading dock and giving Walter a hand up.

Walter looked back down the alley at the furious agents who were waving their arms and trying to climb out the windows of their trapped car. Then he stuffed Iverson’s file down the front of his trousers and ran with Bell into the building attached to the loading dock.

* * *

It was a warehouse of some kind—stocking smoked and pickled fish, by the smell of it. But Walter barely had time to register his surroundings or the quavering protests of the ancient night watchman before the two of them burst out through the front door and onto a neighboring street.

“Belly,” Walter said. “Maybe we should...” Before he could finish, Bell gripped his arm and dragged him across the street, into one end of a narrow greasy spoon café.

The place had its own oniony atmosphere so thick that it felt like walking into a lard sauna. It was nearly empty except for a thin, cadaverous fry cook doubling as a waiter and a single morose, genderless patron bundled up in multiple threadbare sweaters and an oversized tam-o’-shanter.

The fry cook’s jaded, wordless greeting turned to baffled disbelief as Bell charged straight through the restaurant’s narrow boxcar length, dragging Walter in tow like a reluctantly leashed cocker spaniel.

“Sorry...” Walter called back over his shoulder at the frowning fry cook, not even sure what exactly he was apologizing for.

They burst out of the back door of the restaurant, which led to yet another alley, this one redolent of old frying oil and slick rotting garbage. Walter was so turned around at that point that he had no idea where he was in relation to the FBI building, or the parking lot where they’d talked with Iverson, or even the other alley where they’d seen him last.

He had a vague notion that their current alley might be parallel to the previous one but he would not have sworn to it in a court of law. For all he knew it was perpendicular.

What he did know was that he was glad Bell was there to take the lead.

“Where the hell are we going, Belly?” he asked between gasps and huffs. “I’m afraid I can’t possibly...”

“There!”

Bell pointed to a pickup truck parked near the mouth of the alley with its engine running. No driver in sight. When they reached it, he opened the driver’s side door, then shoved Walter in and across the bench seat before getting in behind the wheel.

“We can’t just...” Walter began, but he swallowed his protest as Bell punched the gas and peeled out of the alley.

“Listen,” Bell said, blowing through a red light and making a squealing left turn. The plastic hula girl on the dashboard wobbled fetchingly, seeming to wink at Walter. “We need a safe harbor. Somewhere we can hunker down and formulate a plan. And we’re going to need a native guide. Someone who knows this city and can help us find the location of the bus shooting before it happens.”

“And then what?”

Bell didn’t reply, but they both knew the answer already.

They had to find a way to stop the killer. Linda’s grandma and the rest of the passengers were counting on them.

Walter was so deeply exhausted by the impossible events of the past six hours that he found himself dozing off to the hypnotic sound of their borrowed truck’s tires humming as they crossed over a long bridge and into San Francisco.

He was awakened an unknown time later by Bell’s gentle hand on his shoulder.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Where’s ‘here’?” Walter asked, suddenly alarmed when he realized the steep downward slant of the street on which the truck was precariously balanced.

“Nina’s place,” Bell replied with a little private smile. “Let’s go.”

Walter went to open the door and gravity pulled it out of his hand so that it bounced on its hinges, and then settled wide open. He cautiously put one foot on the impossibly steep ground, but was reluctant to let go of the frame of the truck.

“Are you sure it’s safe to park on a hill like this?” Walter asked.

Bell chuckled.

“What do we care?” he said with a shrug. “It’s not our truck.”

Walter felt an irrational pang of sympathy for the now abandoned plastic hula girl on the dashboard. While Bell wasn’t looking, he detached her from her magnetic base and put her into one of the deep pockets of his Norfolk jacket, before shouldering the heavy door closed and joining Bell on the sidewalk.

They were standing in front of a dilapidated group of identical Victorian row houses, distinguishable only by their peeling pastel paint jobs. The one on the far end of the block had been cheaply renovated, its delicate gingerbread details buried under bland aluminum siding. There was a faded “for sale” sign out front, but it didn’t look as if there had been much interest. That one house reminded Walter of an older guy trying to impress women while his shabby, drunken buddies crowded around him.

That’s when Walter noticed the tower.

Although he wasn’t familiar with this city or its landmarks, he instantly recognized the looming gun-muzzle tower on the top of a nearby hill. It was just like his vision, only at night it was lit with a ghostly pale glow that made it seem even more sinister.

A bad omen.

He shivered, pulling his collar closer for protection against the chilly night air.

The house that Bell approached might once have been a delicate shade of lavender, but over the years the accumulated grime had rendered it more the color of an asphyxiated corpse. In contrast to the grim, faded exterior, the warmly glowing windows were all covered with colorful Indian scarves, tie-dyed flags, rock and roll posters, and whimsical hand-made stained glass. It seemed like a friendly house. A sanctuary.

Bell took the front steps two at a time and knocked decisively on the door. Walter was close behind when a man appeared in the long multi-paned window set into the door.

The guy wasn’t exactly handsome, with a long dour face and large ears that protruded comically from long brown hair that had apparently never met a comb, but his dark, deeply shadowed eyes were intelligent, intense, and compelling. He was dressed in tight, brick-red corduroy pants that laced at the fly, a large, gaudy pendant, and nothing else.

“Is Nina home?” Bell asked, silently bristling at the sight of this unexpected shirtless person—although Walter couldn’t imagine why. It seemed to him that Bell should feel some sense of kinship with the stranger, since the two of them had very similar eyebrows.

“Sure, man,” the guy said, seemingly unfazed or unaware of Bell’s unspoken hostility. He set to work unlocking what seemed to be a preposterous number of locks and chains. “Come on in.”

Once the door was open, the man just turned and walked away without another word. Walter and Bell had no choice but to follow him in.

The stranger led them past a narrow staircase and down a musty hallway lined from floor to ceiling with taped-up psychedelic posters, and into a large common room shaped like a rectangle married to half an octagon. There were several mismatched sofas from various eras, all hiding their imperfections under colorful blankets, and clusters of mirror-studded pillows.

Every wall was covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lamps were shrouded in sheer or metallic scarves. Candles burned in cracked teacups. Instrument cases were clustered against one wall, most of them approximately guitar shaped, but also for a banjo, an autoharp, and a fiddle.

A strong miasma of strawberry incense and marijuana overlaid a faint old-house mustiness and the distinct tang of a cat’s litter box.

There were two other young men in the room already, one on a couch and one sitting cross-legged on the floor. They were sharing a joint and seemed to be in the midst of a spirited debate.

“I’m not saying that we should compromise who we are as artists,” the one on the floor said. He was a tall, lanky guy with a mournful, horsey face and astounding blond mutton chops. “I’m just saying we gotta get with the times, man.”

“No way,” the guy who let them in said, as if he’d never left the conversation. “The minute you compromise to fit into the top-forty status quo, you lose the right to call yourself an artist.”

The guy on the couch, a stocky Latin fellow with arms like a bricklayer and brambly black beard spoke up.

“Did you sleep through Altamont, or what?” He passed the joint to the shirtless guy. “The summer of love is over, Roscoe. Janis and Jimi are dead. Times, they are a-changing, whether you like it or not.”

A fat Himalayan cat appeared suddenly, weaving in and out of Walter’s legs, seemingly oblivious to the brewing argument among his human companions.

“So what,” the shirtless guy replied, flushing a dangerous crimson. “You want to get a couple of Swedish bimbos with tambourines to take over the lead vocals? Or maybe I should start dressing up like a satanic wizard or a hooker from Mars.” He gave the other men in the room a baleful glare. “In fact, why don’t we just change our name to Violet Sedan Starship?”

“Please forgive the interruption,” Walter said, unable to keep quiet for another second, and forgetting about everything else for a brief happy moment. “But you gentlemen wouldn’t happen to be... Violet Sedan Chair?”

The shirtless guy took a deep toke off the joint and squinted at him.

“Yeah,” he said, smoky voice hard and sarcastic. “Sure. Maybe you remember us from back when we used to be cool.”

“And you...” He pointed right in the center of the shirtless guy’s chest, ignoring the self-deprecating sarcasm. “You’re Roscoe Joyce, aren’t you?” Walter couldn’t keep the big, enthusiastic smile off his face, and his words seemed to fall all over each other as they rushed to get out. “I loved ‘Seven Suns’! Absolutely transcendent! ‘Hovercraft Mother’ is my personal favorite, not to take away from the rest of the tracks. But I have to know, is it true what they say about the eleventh song?

“I, myself, am very interested in the scientific study of the various methods by which one can induce hallucinatory effects to the human brain.”

“William?” A new voice. A female voice. “William Bell?”

Walter turned toward the source and was treated to the sight of two young women. One was a waifish Keane-painting blonde in gingham granny dress whose delicate, slender limbs seemed barely up to the task of supporting her massively pregnant stomach. But that husky, arresting voice belonged to a stunning redhead with a thick spill of russet waves around her pale, serious face and sharp blue eyes that he would wager missed nothing. She wore green velvet flared trousers and a tight, cream-colored sweater. It was embarrassingly clear to Walter that she was not wearing a brassiere.

He made himself focus his eyes on her brown suede platform shoes, instead.

He needn’t have bothered. She went right to Bell as if there was no one else in the room, and snaked her arms around him. She said something to him that was too soft to hear, even though the whole room had gone silent as soon as the women had appeared.

Bell smiled in response to whatever she was saying and hooked an arm possessively around her waist.

Meanwhile the pregnant blonde drifted over to Roscoe, who put a hand on her belly and passed her the joint.

“How’s little Bobby?” Roscoe asked her.

“You’re so sure it’s going to be a boy, aren’t you?” she asked, wrapping a dreamy smile around the moist end of the rapidly shrinking joint.

“Sure I’m sure,” Roscoe said, tapping his temple. “Just like I’m sure he’s going to be a rock star. Like his daddy.” He spoke directly into her tummy. “Isn’t that right, Bobby?”

“Nina,” Bell said, waving a hand in Walter’s direction. “I’d like you to meet my colleague Walter Bishop. Walter, this is Nina Sharp.”

Walter wanted to say oh, yes she is, but he bit his tongue.

“Walter,” Nina said with a knowing smile. “I’ve heard a lot about you. These are my housemates Roscoe Joyce and his lady Abby. The guy under the sideburns is Chick Spivy...”

“And you,” Walter jumped in, gesturing at the guy with the black beard. “You’re Iggy, right? Ruben ‘Iggy’ Ignacio. Drummer. But where are Alex and Oregon Dave?”

Roscoe shook his head, unable to suppress a smile.

“We don’t all live in the same house, you know,” he said. “We ain’t the Partridge Family.”

“Well, I suppose that’s to be expected.” Walter nodded, thoughtful. “But I can’t tell you how pleased I am to meet you three.”

“You’re pleased now,” Roscoe said, eyes going strange and unfocused. “But when we meet again, far, far in the future, we won’t remember having met.”

Walter cocked his head and touched his chin, curious.

“What makes you say that?”

“Sometimes I think Roscoe is psychic,” Abby said, offering the joint to Walter. “He knows things.”

“Is that true?” Walter asked.

“Yeah,” Roscoe said with a self-deprecating shrug. “But I can never see the stuff that really matters.”

“I’d love to perform some tests...” Walter began, reaching out.

“Walter,” Bell said softly, shooting him a significant look and blocking him from taking the joint. “We need to have a private word with Nina.”

Walter frowned, embarrassed and ashamed to think he could have gotten so swept up in meeting his favorite band that he’d forgotten all about Linda’s grandma and the Zodiac Killer.

“Will you excuse us, gentleman?” Walter asked, ducking his head sheepishly.

“Hey, no problem, man,” Roscoe said, hands spread magnanimously wide. “It’s a pleasure to meet a true fan.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Walter replied as he let Bell and Nina led him up the stairs.

Nina’s room took up the majority of the third floor, one end featuring four large windows that followed the same half-octagon shape as the living room below. To Walter’s surprise, her private space was unexpectedly Spartan compared to the rock-and-roll Moroccan bordello look of the rest of the house. There were no candles or tchotchkes or figurines on her bookshelves, just precisely organized books, mostly non-fiction covering a wide range of intriguing subjects from physics to feminism to psychic phenomena.

The pristine white linens on her sleek, modern bed were neatly made with sharp hospital corners. Only one pillow. She had a small, well-organized desk centered in the windows with a brand new white Olympia typewriter and a matching telephone.

The only artwork on the clean white walls was a single black-and-white Japanese woodblock print of an owl. Walter imagined that her fashionable wardrobe and the various items that women require in their day-to-day beautification rituals—such as cold cream and hair brushes and lipstick and so on—must have been hidden somewhere in this mostly empty room, but he couldn’t imagine where.

Walter himself preferred to be surrounded by soothing, friendly clutter, and rooms that were too empty like this made him uncomfortable, even antsy, like a little kid at the Guggenheim Museum.

The only places to sit were on her bed, on the desk chair, or on the floor. When Nina waved for them to take seats, Walter chose the desk chair, assuming—based on her previous amorous behavior toward Bell—that the two of them would be comfortable sitting together on her bed.

He was not wrong.

“William,” she said, slipping off her big clunky shoes in such a way that they remained precisely together and aligned with the edge of the bed. Her small, perfect toenails were painted a pale, frosty coral. “Naturally I’m glad to see you, but I can tell it’s not just my feminine charms that brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on.”

Walter didn’t even know where to begin, so he let Bell speak for them.

* * *

When Bell was done, there was a long pregnant moment where Nina just silently sized the two of them up, like a casting agent evaluating a questionable Vaudeville act.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “You believe that this special blend of acid that you created allowed the two of you to link minds and open some kind of gateway, allowing the Zodiac Killer to enter our world?”

“That’s right,” Bell replied.

“And during this trip, back in 1968, you say you also linked minds with him and had a vision of him killing senior citizens on a bus here in San Francisco.”

“I didn’t realize it was San Francisco at the time,” Walter said. “But that tower...” He gestured toward the windows, even though the tower wasn’t visible from that angle. “I saw that tower on the top of the hill.”

“The Coit Tower?” Nina’s rusty red brows knitted. “That’s where you think this shooting is supposed to take place tomorrow?”

Walter shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “I saw lots of different things, murders, ciphers, and letters. But the shooting, it was in this warehouse of some kind.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “I’m going to need a minute to process all this.” She reached into a bedside drawer and extracted a pack of cigarettes, shaking one out and placing it between her lips. “You do realize how nuts your story sounds, don’t you?”

She doesn’t believe us, Walter realized with a jolt.

“Belly,” Walter said, feeling a sudden panicky anxiety in his gut. “You said this girl would help us, but I fail to see any evidence to back up your hypothesis. I’m beginning to believe that you have allowed your libido to override your good sense.”

“Hey,” Nina said, pausing with a lit match halfway to her cigarette. “I’m right here, okay? Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room.” She lit the cigarette and blew out the match with a stream of smoke. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a little girl, I’m a woman.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“And another thing,” she continued, steamrolling right over Walter’s meek apology. “I’m not some kind of decorative bunny who can’t handle anything more complicated than putting toothpicks in cocktail weenies and mixing martinis. I just received a dual Masters degree in Chemistry and Business Administration from Stanford. So how about getting down off your chauvinistic horse and treating me like a person?”

Chastened, Walter hung his head. He always tended to get flummoxed around women, and when they were angry even more so. He couldn’t have thought of an appropriate reply if she’d put a gun to his head. Anything he said would be the wrong thing, so he just stayed quiet.

“Listen, Nina,” Bell intervened, that warm, resonant voice of his pitched low and soothing. “We’re just on edge because time is slipping away, and we still don’t have a plan to stop this terrible thing from happening. I wouldn’t have come to you if I didn’t think you were smart, capable, and open-minded. We need you.”

“I never said I wasn’t going to help you,” she said, turning her face away from Bell, even though it was obvious from her body language that she was softening up to him. “I just said I needed a minute to wrap my brain around what you’re telling me.”

“Fair enough,” Bell said.

“Okay,” she said, staring at the tip of her unsmoked cigarette for a drawn out moment. “For starters, do you remember the number or route of the bus?”

Walter looked up at the tin ceiling as if the answer might be found in its swirls and flourishes.

“It’s been so long,” he said. “Some details seem so vivid, and others have blurred and faded in the passing years.”

“Was it 4?” Bell suggested.

Walter frowned, still focused on the ceiling.

“Yes, no... 44, maybe. And something starting with the letter P.”

“You said the shooter was in a warehouse, right?” Nina asked.

“That’s right,” Walter replied.

“The 144 runs down Parkdale through an industrial neighborhood,” Nina said.

“Yes!” Walter nearly leapt out of the chair, restraining himself at the last second. “Yes, that’s it. 144 Parkdale!” He grabbed the telephone receiver, causing the base to tumble into his lap, cord tangling around his wrist. “We need to call the transit authority right away, tell them to suspend all bus service immediately!”

Nina stood and gently took the phone from his hands.

“It’s 3:15 in the morning, Walter,” she said. “There won’t be anyone in the office.”

“Right,” he said, struggling to compose himself. “Right, of course.” He paused, and then looked up at her. “So what do we do? Wait until morning to make the call?”

“Look how well things went the last time you tried to tell someone the truth about your vision,” Nina said.

“But what should we do?” Walter asked. “We have to do something!”

“We could fake a threatening letter,” Bell said. “We have enough of the Zodiac’s letters in the file from Iverson, it shouldn’t be hard to mimic his handwriting and syntactic style.”

“Ah, right. The file!” Walter patted his stomach, then extracted the file from the waistband of his trousers. “I’d forgotten all about it. I was wondering why I’ve been feeling so uncomfortable when I sit down.”

“Perfect,” Bell said. “Even if our letter is eventually discovered to be a fake, they’d still cancel the bus service alone that line, wouldn’t they? Just to be on the safe side?”

“But it’s too late to post a letter,” Nina said. “It wouldn’t arrive in time.”

“Maybe we should go in to the office first thing in the morning,” Bell suggested. “Say that we received a threatening phone call.”

“I think it would be best if you two stayed off the radar for a while.” Nina smoked, thoughtful for a moment. “We don’t want to tip off Latimer and his spooks.”

Walter looked down at the file in his hand. One of the letters was poking out of the top, the Zodiac’s handwritten salutation. Dear Special Agent Iverson...

“Do you think Special Agent Iverson is alright?” he asked, thinking of how the man had put himself at risk to allow Walter and Bell to get away.

“No way of knowing,” Bell said. “But he would want us to stop this senseless tragedy before it occurs.”

“Look,” Nina said. “I think we should forget the transit office and trying to get authorities involved.” She crushed her cigarette into a pristine glass ashtray on her bedside table. “We have to find the location where the shooting will occur, and intercept the bastard before he gets his chance.”

“She’s right,” Bell said. “It’s really our only option.”

Walter found himself remembering that terrible glimpse into the Zodiac’s mind and shuddered. They were dealing with a disturbed and dangerous person—if he could even be defined as a person at all, and not an unknown kind of being from some far-flung region of the universe. It was perfectly sensible to be afraid. After all, they were scientists, not Green Berets.

But just as vivid in Walter’s memory was the questioning look in Linda’s grandma’s dark eyes, seconds before her life would be brought to a brutal, pointless end. Gunned down in the street by someone or something that wouldn’t even be here in the first place if Walter and Bell didn’t open up that mysterious door and invite him, Dracula-like, into this world.

“Okay,” Walter said, not without trepidation, but willing to do whatever it took. “You’re right.”

“You said you saw a bar in your vision,” Nina said. “Do you remember the name?”

Walter could see the woman and her red coat and her book so clearly, but the bar had faded to fragments.

“Night something?” Walter said.

“Eddie’s,” Bell said. “I thought it was Eddie’s.”

“But I’m sure the word night was in there.”

“Hang on,” Nina said.

She padded barefoot over to a small filing cabinet beside her desk and extracted a copy of the yellow pages. She laid it out on the desk, flipping to the listing for bars.

“Big Eddie’s?” she asked, tracing the listings with a perfect oval fingernail.

“I don’t think so,” Walter said, feeling increasingly unsure. “I’m almost sure it was Night something.”

She turned the page and there it was. Just a cheap, basic listing with no fancy extras. Telephone and address.

“Eddie’s All-Niter?” Nina asked.

“That’s it!” Walter said.

“Yes!” Bell said. “That’s the one!”

“Okay,” she said, tracing the address. “It’s 1315 Parkdale, that’s right on the 144 line. That’s got to be it.”

“We should go there right now!” Walter sprang up, file sliding off his lap and spilling the Zodiac’s madness across the floor.

A photo of one of the dead women landed face up between Nina’s feet. She bent to pick it up, and rather than looking girlishly squeamish or frightened, her blue eyes narrowed and hardened.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Listen,” Bell said, kneeling down and gathering up the scattered letters and ciphers, “we’ve been up and running all night. I don’t know about you, Walter, but I need to rest, just for an hour or two. We can’t be going off half-cocked or half-conscious.”

“It’s okay,” Nina said, handing Walter a bus schedule. “The first bus on that route doesn’t leave the garage until 7 am and will take at least forty minutes to reach that section of Parkdale. Never mind the fact that transit busses are almost always late. Meanwhile, William is right. We could all use some rest.”

“If you insist,” Walter said. “But I’m far too wound up to sleep.” He took the gathered papers Bell offered him. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just look over these letters until it’s time to leave.”

“Fair enough,” Bell said, handing the file folder to Walter but looking over at Nina. “But go look at them downstairs so we can get some rest.”

Nina flashed Bell a challenging smile.

“There’s blankets and pillows in the hall closet,” she said, slinking over to her bedroom door and holding it open. “You boys are welcome to any couch that doesn’t already have someone sleeping on it. I’ll set an alarm and be down to wake you up at sunrise.”

“Oh,” Bell said, hesitating for a moment. “Well, alright then.”

Although Walter couldn’t decipher all of the complex subtext woven into that exchange, it seemed clear even to him that Nina had effectively taken the upper hand in the ongoing sexual negotiation. In all the years of their friendship, Walter had never seen anything like that happen. This was an extraordinary woman, this Nina Sharp.

Together, Walter and Bell headed down the stairs.

Nina turned her shiny green Volkswagen Beetle east on Glascock Avenue and started checking the street signs. They were searching for Eddie’s All-Nighter.

It was 7:37 am.

“What was that street name again?” she asked.

Walter clutched her seat back, anxious and grinding his teeth. It seemed as if every passing second was absolutely crucial, and they were bleeding time at an alarming pace as the little car wove through the frustratingly illogical streets.

“Parkdale,” he said. “It’s Parkdale.”

“You’re supposed to be the one who knows this city,” Bell said, his worry coming off as snappish hostility.

“Of course I do,” Nina replied, utterly unflappable. “Only as far as I’m concerned, we’re not really in San Francisco any more. Everything south of Army Street might as well be another planet.”

“Please,” Walter said. “Please drive faster! This terrible tragedy could be happening at any moment. In fact, he already could have started shooting!”

“Walter...” Bell turned in the passenger seat. “Do you recall a particular time of day in the vision? I can’t seem to remember anything specific. We might have hours, yet.”

“Or no time at all,” Walter replied. He frowned, struggling to recall, then shook his head. “The light was just like this. Gray, diffuse, no distinct shadows.”

“That’s all day, every day in San Francisco,” Nina said.

“That bus runs until 10 pm,” Bell said. “We may be in for a long—”

Walter cut him off as the sign at the next street came into focus.

“Parkdale!” he practically shouted. “There! Turn left! The address is north of here. Hurry!”

Nina rolled her eyes at him in the rearview mirror.

“One-way street, Walter. Have to take the next one and circle back.”

His knuckles ached from clenching. It was all he could do not to bang his head on Nina’s headrest.

“What a... uniquely aggravating city.”

“Compared to say, Boston, for example?” Nina smirked and let out a short, sarcastic laugh. “I’ve never been lost in my life, but I got lost in Boston. I’d rather drive in Hong Kong.”

Walter ignored her minor barb at his own beloved city and stared up Parkdale, looking for the bus as they passed through the intersection. He didn’t see it, but that gave him no relief. Was he too late? Had the shooting already occurred? Surely there would be police. Or had he not looked far enough. Was the tragedy hidden behind a bend in the street?

Nina turned at the next corner, Flint Street, and bounced and jolted through a minefield of potholes between looming warehouses. That at least seemed right. It had been a warehouse in the vision. Three or four stories high. And now they were surrounded by them.

“Address?” asked Bell.

Walter consulted the page he had torn out of the yellow pages.

“1315 Parkdale,” he replied

Bell looked out the window.

“Eleven hundreds,” he said. “Two more blocks.”

“Could you not possibly go faster?” Walter pleaded.

“Nitida’s a good little bug.” Nina patted the Beetle’s tan dashboard. “But these streets are like Swiss cheese, and she’s no hot rod.”

“Cotinis nitida?” Walter asked, momentarily distracted by the familiar Latin name.

“I named her after the Common June Bug,” Nina replied. “Naturally.”

At last they traversed the thirteen-hundred block and Nina turned left onto Bentwood, then left again onto Parkdale. Walter desperately scanned the length of the street, searching for the dive bar he had seen in his violent vision. The east side of the street was a cliff of monolithic old industrial buildings, strata of bricks and dust-covered windows layered five stories high.

The shooter could be in any one of them, but which one?

The west side of the street was all businesses. One-and two-story storefronts and Quonset hut garages. Auto repair, metal work, tool-and-die. A big truck was being loaded with palettes full of roofing tile, but he didn’t see the bar. Where was the goddamn bar?

There!

As Nina edged around the big truck, the sign appeared from behind its bulk. Walter yelped and stabbed his finger at it.

“There it is!” he cried. “The bar! Eddie’s All-Nighter! Stop the car. Stop the car!”

“There’s no parking,” Nina said. “It’s all loading zones. I’ll have to go down a little.”

Walter could feel his head getting hot, sweat under his collar. He was going to explode.

“But...” he stuttered. “But...”

“Relax, Walter,” Bell said, looking through the back window and all around. “The bus isn’t here. There are no signs that anything has happened yet. We still have time.”

Walter forced himself to let out a long slow breath. Bell was right. They’d made it.

They had beat the killer to the site.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “But please be as quick as possible.”

“Here,” she said, indicating a small empty parking spot between two trucks. “But it’s tight, even for Nitida.”

She tossed her long hair out of her eyes and looked over her right shoulder, backing the little car carefully into the slot. She had to cut in and back up again several times to work her way into the snug space. She was infuriatingly cautious, precise, and concerned about getting the car parallel to the curb.

“Look,” Walter said, ready to smash the tiny rear window and jump out. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Would you just let me out?”

He looked back at the bar, then did a double take as he saw a flash of white through the back window.

A bus.

It was jouncing down Parkdale at the back of a line of traffic, only a block north of the truck. A block away from Eddie’s. A block away from a massacre.

Walter spun, shoving at Bell’s seat.

“Out!” he cried. “Get out NOW! The bus! It’s coming! It’s here!”

“Walter!” Bell shot him a glare as Walter’s shoves bumped him forward in his seat. “Keep your shirt on!”

Walter leaned forward and hissed in Bell’s ear, pointing back through the rear window.

“Look!”

Bell looked back up the street and his glare disappeared. Suddenly he was clawing at his seat belt and pushing at his door. It flew open while the car was still rolling backward, and Bell was nearly knocked off his feet as he stepped out and the open door backed into his shin.

He hopped out, cursing, and turned to fumble with the seat release. Walter threw himself forward then squeezed out, breathlessly stuck for what felt like an endless moment until he popped out into Bell’s arms.

Bell helped him steady himself.

Nina looked at them from the Beetle, still half-in, half-out of the space.

“What about the car?” she called. “I can’t just leave her like this.”

“You’re welcome to finish parking, and then stay in the car where it’s safe,” Bell replied, taunting her. “Leave the dirty work to the menfolk.”

“Not on your life, Neanderthal,” she snapped, throwing open the driver’s side door. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything!”

Walter paid no attention. He was already running down the street. The bus was almost to the big truck now.

He could hear the clack of Nina’s heels join the heavier thud of Bell’s shoes as they followed close behind him down the sidewalk.

He looked up at the warehouses across the street as he ran, trying to figure out which was the one the killer would be shooting from. It had been clear in the vision, but he had only seen it from the inside. He had no idea what it looked like from the outside.

Walter tried to think. Tried to see it again. Had it been directly across from Eddie’s All-Nighter? A little north? A little south?

Then he saw it. A dark square in the grid of dusty windows, three stories up. A missing pane. No gun was visible, but he was afraid that it was there, and that the killer was there behind it. Watching and waiting like a hawk in a tree, ready to strike at the hapless rabbits below.

He dropped his gaze to the bottom of the building and was confronted by a wall of blank brick. No doors.

They must all be in the parking lot in the back. They’d have to run all the way around the block. And by then, he was certain, they would be too late.

No, wait!

A narrow service alley, too small for cars, ran between the killer’s warehouse and the one to the south. Walter tore across the street, heedless of traffic and the cacophony of horns from the vehicles that slammed on their brakes and swerved to avoid him.

“This way!” he cried.

Bell and Nina dodged cars and ran after him. Nina was cursing.

“Walter, keep it down, will you?” Bell shouted. “The killer will hear you!”

“You think he hasn’t seen us already?” He gestured to the one missing window pane high above them, sucking in a gasping breath. When was the last time he had run for any reason? High school? Grammar school? “Maybe seeing us will shock him and...”

There was a flat crack, followed by an echoing bang, like a twig snap followed by a firecracker. Walter looked around as he reached the sidewalk and saw the bus swerving in the street, the pale and frightened driver wrestling with the wheel. The back end of the vehicle grazed the roofing tile truck and rocked them both.

Dozens of hands slapped against the windows as the passengers inside tried to brace themselves.

The driver hit the brakes and the bus shuddered to a stop, right in front of Eddie’s. Right where it had been in the vision. Exactly. Walter felt light-headed, anxiety spiraling like barbed wire in his gut. It was one thing to be tripping out on acid, to imagine that something like this might happen. Quite another to see the bizarre vision playing out in real time, just like any other ordinary series of events. Seeing the future might have once seemed compelling and exciting, the kind of thing he thought he would be thrilled to experience. Now, as he watched the horrible scene unspooling before his eyes—just the way it had happened in his vision—it only made him feel ill.

He shook his head, forcing himself to snap out of it and carry on. There was no other option. He ran as fast as he could down the alley, still puffing and breathless, cursing his sedentary lifestyle.

There was a door up ahead, heavy, banded with steel straps, and caged with mesh across its tiny window. But amazingly, it was minutely ajar, a quarter inch of frame showing in the crack.

Impossible luck.

But no. It wasn’t luck. It had been left open by the killer. This must have been the way he had entered, and the way he intended to leave. He had obviously left it open so that he could make a quick getaway.

“We have to go back to the bus,” Bell called as Walter shouldered through it. “We have to tell the passengers to stay inside!”

“No, we’d be shot before we made it across the street,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop the killer from shooting them.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Bell asked as he caught up.

Walter ignored him and stepped into the space. It was nearly black, the only light filtering through the thick grime obscuring a row of narrow windows at the top of the back wall, far to their right. Where were the stairs? Walter peered around, frantic.

Strange angular shapes rose up in the gloom like the exo-skeletons of mechanical spiders, obstructing his view. He craned his neck, searching, but it was Nina who spotted them first.

“Straight across,” she said. “There, behind the looms.”

So that was what the hulking spiders were. Walter stumbled and wove around them, banging his shins and shoulders as he made his way toward the dark hole on the opposite wall. As he ran, his whole body cringed in anticipation of the terrible sound of another shot. A sound that would mean he’d been too late.

The hole became a doorway, with an all-steel stairway beyond it, and even less light. The three of them charged up the stairs as quickly as they could. Walter also made an effort to be as loud as he could, causing the metal treads to ring with every stomping step, then raising his voice to shout up the dark open well in the center of the stairs’ square spiral.

“Police!” he said, trying not to let his gasping exertion show in his voice “Put down your gun! You are surrounded.”

“Walter,” Bell hissed. “Are you insane?”

There was no response from above—at least none he could hear over the ringing of their feet on the metal treads—but that was good. No response. No shot. No dead woman. Maybe they already had changed the future. Changed the vision. Maybe they had saved the day after all.

It wasn’t until he got to the second landing that what they were actually doing sank in. They were running empty-handed to stop a man with a gun. There was a very good chance that they would be shot as soon as they ran through the door and into the third-floor space.

Walter found himself faltering on the stairs, icy fear suddenly crystallizing inside him, filling him with bitter black doubt.

Though he wanted to consider himself a rational man of science, Walter was at his core a passionate dreamer. He had followed his heart all his life, rarely if ever allowing practical considerations to get in the way.

Belly didn’t push manfully past Walter to confront the killer either. He hung back several steps down. He had probably been aware of their situation all along.

He was a good man, and by no means a coward, but he had never once let his heart make decisions for him. Although he had occasionally been led astray by the functions of a more vulgar, southward organ, when the time came to make decisions that really mattered, Bell relied solely on cold, clear logic. Logic that would never allow him do something as foolish as running blind into a room with an armed killer, no matter how many innocent lives were at stake.

Yet he’d put that logic aside and followed Walter on this headlong fool’s errand—one that might get them both killed. Nina, too. That knowledge weighed heavy on Walter in that moment, but he still couldn’t shake that haunting image from his head. The image that had driven him here, and eliminated all other considerations.

The image of Linda’s grandma in the fleeting moment before her death. Her red coat and her colorful scarf, her dark eyes silently asking why? Why did Walter let this happen?

To hell with practical considerations.

Walter threw himself through the third floor doorway without slowing, and charged the window, ready to do anything to save that woman.

Once he reached the window, he realized that there was nothing to do.

He skidded to a stop, confused. The space was exactly as he had seen it in his acid-induced vision, all those years ago. There was the Ridgid Tool calendar. There was the well-endowed pin-up with the feathered hair. There was the blacked out window grid with the single missing pane letting a square shaft of pale gray daylight into the far end of the room.

But the killer wasn’t there. The gun wasn’t there.

The only movement was the glittering swirl of dust that danced in the light from the open pane. He looked around the rest of the room. It was entirely empty, and entirely open. Bare concrete floors and rusting I-beam pillars all the way to the dusty back windows. There was no place for anyone to hide.

“He... he’s not here.” Walter looked back at Bell and Nina, hovering cautiously in the stairwell beyond the door. “He’s gone.”

They edged in, eyes scanning every inch of the space, then relaxed as they realized that he was right.

The killer was gone.

“We did it,” Bell said, disbelieving smile spreading across his face. “We chased him away.”

“Walter did it,” Nina said. “Good thinking there, Walter. I thought you were insane with all that shouting, but it worked.”

He hardly heard her. His eyes were drawn to the missing pane. He stepped to it. Looked through it, down at the street. The bus filled the frame as the harassed driver struggled to fix the flat. In front of it, a crowd of senior citizens, all chattering excitedly now that the big scare was behind them and no one had been hurt.

In the middle of the group, the old black woman in the red coat was laughing with the rest, gesturing at the flat tire with her cane.

Linda’s grandma.

She was all right.

Walter’s heart lurched as he watched her, and he had to fight back tears.

“She doesn’t even know what almost happened,” he said, half to himself. “None of them know.”

Bell put his hand on his shoulder.

“And we certainly aren’t going to tell them.” He looked past Walter and out the window at the crippled bus. “We’re going to leave it be, aren’t we? Let them all have whatever lives they were meant to live before we...”

Before Bell could finish, Nina cut him off, speaking between clenched teeth.

“Boys.”

Bell’s head snapped around.

“What?” He frowned. “What is it?”

Nina was scanning the room again, shoulders tense and eyes gone hard and hyper-vigilant.

“If your gunman isn’t here,” she said, voice low and constricted, “And he couldn’t have gotten out without passing us, then...”

“You’re not police.”

The new voice came from the doorway, flat and dull as the concrete floor. They turned. A man was standing there. Stocky, sturdily built, with an unremarkable yet familiar face.

He was aiming a rifle at them.

Walter blinked. The killer must have gone up to the fourth floor, then waited to see who they were. Clever, and frighteningly calm.

“What do you...”

He cut off abruptly, his bespectacled gaze flicking wide-eyed between Walter and Bell, Bell and Walter. His calm faltering for a critical second.

“It’s you,” he said, voice barely more than a breath.

As he hesitated, to Walter and Bell’s stunned surprise, Nina pulled a small handgun from her fringed suede purse and drew a bead on the killer.

“Drop it,” she hissed.

“Well,” the man replied, flashing a thin reptilian smile like a cut throat. “This is an interesting development.” He made no move to lower the rifle, aiming right between Walter’s eyes. “I never would have guessed that the bitch would turn out to be the one with the balls. What do you say, Annie Oakley? Think you’ve got balls enough to shoot me in cold blood before I pull the trigger on your boyfriend?

“Or...” He shifted his aim to Bell. “Is this your boyfriend?”

Nina gaze shifted from the killer to Bell and back again. There was a gloss of sweat on her quivering upper lip. Walter was desperate to do something, say something, anything—but his whole body felt frozen, throat clenched tight as a fist.

“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” The killer was chanting, shifting from Walter to Bell and back again. “Catch a hippie by his toe. If he hollers let him go. Eenie, meenie, miney...”

Instead of saying moe, he made a lightning fast lunge toward Nina, gracefully sidestepping her gun hand and whacking her above the ear with the butt of his rifle. Nina sagged bonelessly to the floor, gun skittering away across the concrete.

Anger swiftly overcame Walter’s fear and natural disinclination to violence, and he launched himself forward, arms flailing. Bell followed him in, trying to pin the stranger’s arms and prevent him from shooting Nina where she lay.

Their desperate and poorly coordinated attacks failed. The killer was as strong and precise as they were weak and uncertain. He kicked Bell in the chest, sending him crashing into the wall, then knocked Walter’s strikes away with the gun butt and punched him in the face.

Walter had never been punched in the face in his life. He’d never even been slapped. The shocking impact of it jarred his skull, short-circuiting his thought process and filling his eyes with blinding tears. Then the hot wave of pain washed over him and his legs buckled, the world black and spinning.

Still he managed to grab at the killer’s shirt, clawing at him, trying to drag him down.

“Walter!”

Bell lunged in again, and the killer shoved Walter away, spinning to face him. Walter hit the unforgiving concrete in a cloud of dust and something cracked him across the face, precisely where the stranger had hit him before.

The rifle. It was lying across his chest. Somehow he had managed to come away with it as the killer had turned.

Bell slammed down beside him, raising more dust, and the killer turned back to Walter, reaching for the rifle. Nina rolled and grabbed the killer, locking her fingers around one of his booted ankles.

“Shoot him, Walter!” she screamed. “Shoot him!”

Walter crabbed back toward the door and staggered up as the killer drove his heel into Nina’s mouth.

He trained the rifle on the killer.

The killer held out his hand.

“Give it to me,” he said.

Walter swallowed, dry throat clicking and clenching on nothing as he edged back, finger on the trigger. In that moment, even when confronting a ruthless killer, Walter was ashamed to find himself hesitating. He had never fired a gun, let alone had a reason to take a life, and he hoped to live out the rest of his natural days without ever doing so.

Even if he could find the courage to pull the trigger, and got lucky enough to hit his target, would the man go down? He looked so calm, so completely without fear, that Walter wondered if he might somehow be invulnerable. Or perhaps he could read Walter’s mind.

Perhaps he knew.

Well, there’s only one way to find out.

Walter sucked up a little half-swallowed sound he hoped wasn’t really a whimper, and backpedaled into the stairwell. He turned to the rail, then dropped the rifle down the well in the center of the stairs.

A solid body smashed into him, pushing him against the handrail, crushing his ribs. Hard knuckles punched him in the back of the head. The world turned to blur and static, but a voice cut through it, hissing in his ear.

“Smart,” it said. “I’ll give you that. Too bad it won’t be enough.”

Then Walter slumped back onto the cold metal floor of the landing, wincing and wheezing as footsteps rang away down the stairs, fast and steady. A moment later— at least it might have been a moment, it was hard to tell— fuzzy black shapes filled the door to the third floor and he heard a gruff curse from a familiar voice.

“Walter. Are you alright?”

The fuzzy shapes came closer, and knelt beside him. It was Bell and Nina. Nina had retrieved her gun but she looked terrible, with a long gash on her forehead and a split lip that had bled down to her chin.

Bell was pretty bad off, too. He had a bruise forming on his left cheek, and was as white as Walter had ever seen him.

“Help me.” Walter reached up to them. “We have to go after him.”

Bell gave him a flat look.

“And when we catch him, then what?” he asked. “More of the same?”

“But he must...” Walter tried to sit up, stabbed by a vicious pain in his ribs that nearly stole his breath. “...be stopped!”

Bell and Nina took his arms and helped him up. Nina squeezed his arm.

“We stopped him from killing those people,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?”

Walter winced as his ribs twinged again, an echo of the earlier sharper pain. It still hurt to breathe.

“Of course,” he said. “But it won’t be enough. He said so. He’s not going to stop. He’s going to do something else. Kill someone else.”

“Well, we can’t be the ones to stop him.” Bell spread his arms, and looked down at himself. “We tried, and look what he did to us with his bare hands. He knows what he’s doing. We don’t.”

“So maybe we’re still the same ineffectual wimps we were back in the schoolyard when we were kids,” Walter said.

“Speak for yourself,” Nina muttered under her breath.

“I’ll be the first to admit that a life of reading and lab work does not a warrior make,” Walter continued. “But that doesn’t mean we just give up. We can’t give up! We saved the people on this particular bus, but what about the next one? And the one after that?”

He started down the stairs, cringing with every step as his battered body protested.

“But... but he could be down there right now,” Nina called after him. “Waiting. With his gun.”

“And how long do you propose we wait to go down?” He looked up at her from the landing. “Will it be safe after an hour? Two hours? Five? And who else will he have killed while we were waiting?”

Nina sighed.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I see your point. But let’s go slow and quiet this time, alright?” She raised the gun. “And let me go first.”

“But...”

“Listen. If he’s running, he’s already gone. We’ll never catch him. If he’s down there, waiting, pounding down the steps like stampeding buffalo will only let him know we’re coming. He’d pick us off one by one as we came through the door.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Walter said. “Slow and quiet does make a good deal of sense.” He grimaced and turned to start down the next flight. “Particularly since I don’t think I could run if I...”

He stopped as he saw something small and rectangular on the next step. He bent, groaning, and picked it up. It was a pocket-sized notebook. There was too little light to make out anything more.

He turned to Bell and Nina.

“Did one of you drop this?”

Bell patted his own pockets, then pulled out a small, red, leather-bound notebook of his own.

“No,” he said. “Mine’s right here.”

“Nina?”

She shook her head.

Walter flipped it open. The pages had writing on them, but more than that he could not tell.

“I can’t...”

Nina’s hand appeared and flicked her disposable lighter. The flame illuminated the page.

Walter stared.

Ciphers. Page after coded page of seemingly random letters and symbols. Even though it was illegible, there was a kind of toxic madness in the familiar, slanting handwriting that sent a cold chill through Walter’s veins.

There was only one person who this notebook could belong to.

“If we can crack this code,” Walter said, fingers tracing over the mysterious, jumbled letters, “not only could we gain the advantage over our opponent, we may learn more about who he really is, and where he came from.”

“Well, we’re not going to crack any codes by cowering in this stairwell,” Bell said. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Walter slid the notebook into an inner pocket of his jacket, and the three of them began their slow and cautious descent.

* * *

The killer was not in the warehouse. At least, he didn’t choose to show himself or shoot them as they crept slowly down the stairs. And the rifle was gone, too. They searched the bottom of the stairwell carefully. It wasn’t there.

Walter edged open the door they had come through and looked into the alley, still afraid of getting a bullet in the forehead. There was no one there. He beckoned to the others, and they all stepped out, squinting in the light, looking left and right.

“Should we check the lot behind?” Walter asked.

“No,” Bell replied. “We should not. Come on.”

He turned and started back toward the street. Nina followed him, but Walter hesitated, feeling guilty, and sick that they were giving up the chase. How could they just let the killer go? On the other hand, as Bell had said, how could they catch him? He had already lost them. And even if, by some miracle, they did manage to catch him, what would they do then?

They were like sheep trying to take down a wolf. Becoming his next victims wasn’t the way to save the other sheep.

But perhaps there was another way. Walter patted the breast pocket of his coat where he had tucked the notebook, then started after them.

The VW had a parking ticket tucked under its windshield wiper when they returned to it. Walter was stunned at the breadth and vulgarity of Nina’s vocabulary. It really was quite astonishing.

Allan was breaking down his rifle and packing it into a Ghirardelli shopping bag he’d scavenged from a trash can behind the warehouse. He’d been forced to abandon the duffle bag he normally used to carry the rifle, after that stupid scuffle with the kids from Reiden Lake. He couldn’t just walk the streets with an assembled weapon in his hands, so he’d had to improvise.

But his hands were trembling as he removed the buttstock from the receiver legs, and wrapped it in crumpled newspaper. He’d tried so hard to stay cool, to stay in control, but the fear was back and raging inside him. The same fear that had nearly swallowed him alive on that strange night almost exactly seven years ago.

His destiny had been disrupted. The moment he’d dreamed of for years, the moment in which he would become the most hated and feared killer of all time, that sacred, perfect moment had been utterly ruined. Ruined by a couple of hippies Allan had thought were nothing more than figments of his tripping mind.

Worse, the hippies had brought with them a swarm of unanswered questions. And while he had easily evaded the bumbling idiots, the questions dogged him still. Questions about that strange and awful night. Questions about himself, and why he was here.

He was shaken to his core by this inexplicable encounter. The new life he’d established in this new world had been nearly perfect, and getting better with every new victim. His other life in that other world seemed like a fading dream.

But now, he suddenly felt unsure about everything again.

When he reached into the pocket of his navy blue windbreaker to touch the comforting, familiar shape of his notebook, he found that it was gone.

The fabric of the pocket had been torn during his struggle, and was hanging in a loose flap. Clearly, his precious notebook had tumbled out at some point during the whole fiasco.

An even greater panic dug its hooks into his chest, making it hard to breathe. His heart was beating way too fast, and he felt sure that he would vomit.

Everything was falling apart.

He was falling apart.

He was desperate to run back to the warehouse and look for it, but he was afraid those stupid kids might have called the cops. What he needed to do was run, get the hell out of there, but he was frozen.

“No,” he whispered to himself. “No, no, no!”

“Hey, man,” a male voice from behind him said. “You okay?”

Allan spun to face a young Chinese man with long, shaggy hair and a concerned expression. He was wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform.

Something let loose inside of Allan and he launched himself at the concerned stranger, tackling him and knocking him down. The young man was surprisingly strong, but his hard, angry punches and vigorous struggle inflamed and infuriated Allan more that they hurt him. The flare of sparks in his hands and forearms became hotter and brighter than ever, burning the flesh off the stranger’s skull like a blowtorch as Allan smashed his face against the curb again and again. The unfortunate stranger stopped screaming and went limp in Allan’s grasp, but he couldn’t stop battering the lifeless body for several endless minutes.

Cracked and blackened teeth scattered down the alley like loaded dice.

His hands felt as if they were being attacked by angry hornets, deadly sparks flying with every blow like a blacksmith hammering hot metal. When he finally forced himself to stop and back away from the charred corpse, he felt spent, but calm.

He couldn’t allow the idiot hippies to get the upper hand. He had to keep a clear head and think, to rely on the superior mental acumen that had gotten him this far.

He easily hefted the slender young man’s body and tossed it into an open dumpster, covering it with damp, moldy cardboard and newspaper. He closed the lid, and then gathered up the scattered teeth, slipping them into the left front pocket of his fatigue pants. There was a rather substantial amount of blood around the edge of the curb, but it had turned dark brown and lumpy, flash-cooked on the concrete by Allan’s furious heat. It looked more like the sludgy leakage from old rotten garbage than the evidence of a recent murder.

Allan had nothing to worry about.

He stuck the shopping bag under one arm and strolled casually back around to the door of the warehouse. No one was there. No authorities had been called. He slipped in unobserved.

* * *

He didn’t find his notebook.

He scoured the stairwell and the whole of the third floor. It was gone. Which could mean only one thing.

They had it. The hippies from Reiden Lake had his notebook.

Well then, he thought. Let the games begin.

Back at Nina’s thankfully empty house, the three of them sat on the soft, musty couches in the dim living room, trying to rethink their strategy, to brainstorm and see if they could make any headway with the coded notebook. But within minutes, the fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and stress—combined with the lack of sleep the night before—caught up to them with a vengeance.

Before long they were all out cold, as if they’d been sapped.

Walter woke to the soft, gentle clink of a teacup and saucer. When he peeled his sandpapery eyelids open, he saw that the fluffy Himalayan cat had curled up on his chest and Abby the pregnant blonde was sitting crosslegged on the floor, drinking a cup of tea and leafing through the pages of a large book featuring the art of Alphonse Mucha.

“Hi,” she said with a sunny, childish smile when she saw that he was awake. “Would you like some tea? I just made a fresh pot.”

“My dear,” Walter said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes and gently moving the placid cat from his chest to the couch so he could sit up. “In this moment, I believe my body needs caffeine more than it needs oxygen.”

“Did somebody say caffeine?” Bell asked from underneath a purple and red paisley throw pillow.

“Four hundred and fifty milligrams, administered intravenously, please,” Nina said, sitting up, rotating her neck, and twisting her tangled hair into a topknot. “With cream and sugar.”

Abby looked at Nina, then back at Walter with her big eyes even bigger than normal. Walter followed her gaze back to Nina and saw what Abby was seeing. The bruising, the spit lip, the signs of their ill-prepared hand-to-hand struggle with the killer. Walter’s hands flew involuntarily to his own face, running his fingers over the damage there. Even the slightest contact made him wince.

His body hurt, too. Everything hurt.

Nina, noting the shocked look on Abby’s sweet, simple face, shook her head, letting her red hair fall back down.

“You should see the other guy,” she said.

“Wow,” Abby said. It was all clearly more than she could wrap her pretty blond head around. “I mean... wow. I’d better... you know... go get that tea.” She got to her feet with minimal struggle, considering her enormous belly, and then drifted away into the kitchen.

Walter took the killer’s notebook from his pocket and was about to open it when Nina gave him a sternly arched eyebrow and a terse shake of her head.

So he slipped the notebook back into his pocket as Abby returned from the kitchen, balancing a tray of steaming mugs, a fancy silver Victorian creamer, a bouquet of mismatched spoons, and a whimsical ceramic sugar bowl shaped like an octopus. The minute she set the tray down, the three of them fell on the tea like animals. Walter drained more than half of the scalding hot liquid in one foolhardy gulp, utterly unmindful of his burnt tongue.

“Thank you, Abby,” Nina said, getting to her feet with her mug in one hand and gesturing toward the stairs. “Now, will you excuse us? We’re going to go on upstairs. We’ve got a few things to discuss.”

“Oh...” Abby said. “That’s cool.” She picked up the lazy cat. “I’ll just hang out down here with Cat-Mandu.” She turned the feline over and cradled him like an infant, any shock or questions about their bruises long gone from her mayfly mind. Even if she realized that they didn’t want her overhearing their conversation, she didn’t seem to care at all.

She set the cat down and went back to her book without another word.

Walter and Bell followed Nina up the stairs, mugs in hand.

Back in Nina’s large Spartan bedroom, the three of them plunked their sore, beat-up frames into the same seats they’d chosen before the madness. Nina and Bell together on her tightly made bed, and Walter at the desk by the windows.

“Okay,” Nina said. “We’re all thinking it, but I’m going to say it. That was really, really stupid. If I hadn’t brought my gun, we’d all be dead.”

“But we saved the passengers,” Walter argued. “You said so yourself—isn’t that what matters?”

“Nina’s right,” Bell said. “We didn’t think things through, but we got lucky. Next time, we might not be so lucky. We need a plan.”

Walter nodded, duly chastened.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “So from here on out, we need to find a way to fight the killer with brains, not brawn. Attack this problem like scientists, not... Dirty Harry.”

“Right,” Bell replied. “And what is the first thing a scientist does when confronted with surprising or atypical results?”

“Repeat the experiment.”

“Repeat the experiment?” Nina echoed. “We almost got ourselves killed today. If you want to repeat that, you can count me out.”

“I’m not talking about repeating the events of today,” Bell began.

“Repeat the original experiment,” Walter finished. He felt that old familiar flush of excitement—the one he got when he and Bell were perfectly synchronized in their thinking process, on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. “Recreate the original formula. We need to see if we can reopen that gate.”

“Because if we can do that,” Bell said, pausing to let Walter finish.

“We can send him back.”

Nina looked from Bell to Walter, a slight frown creasing her brow.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” she asked. “I mean, the last time you opened this gate, you let a killer stroll right in to our world. What if it happens again?”

“She’s right,” Bell said. “What if we unleash a whole army of Zodiacs?”

“But I don’t see any other way to stop him,” Walter said. “We can’t just let him keep killing.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I’ll stand by with Lulu.” She pulled the handgun from her purse and gave it an affectionate pat. “Anyone or anything comes through that gate, I’ll let ’em have it.”

“I don’t know if I can condone that plan of action,” Walter said. “I mean, yes, clearly the last person or being that traveled through the gate has an unquestionably violent and unstable disposition. But that doesn’t mean that every single individual from the other side of that psychic gateway can be condemned to death, based solely on the actions of one man.

“I wouldn’t want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example,” he continued. “The next being that passes through might be a scholar or a scientist or a grandmother not unlike the ones we saved today.”

“Fair enough,” Bell acknowledged. “But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.”

“Also,” Walter said, taking out the killer’s notebook and laying it on the desk, “I think it would be wise to spend some time working on decoding this. It may contain information about the world on the other side of the gate. Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“You see if you can get anywhere with that notebook, Walter,” Bell said, pulling his own red notebook from an inner pocket. “And Nina and I will see about acquiring the chemicals and equipment required to recreate our original formula. Good thing I keep every single formula written down.”

But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.

Chinese food.

Up until that moment he’d only been vaguely aware of a distant discomfort somewhere in his midsection, but when the smell hit him, he was suddenly voraciously hungry. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat.

He lifted his blurring, exhausted eyes from the scattered pages of his notes and saw Nina and Bell. He hadn’t noticed them leaving the room, but they clearly had gone somewhere and returned. Bell was carrying a large box of beakers and burners and heavy, brown glass bottles.

But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food. At that point, Walter was willing to trade his right arm for one of those wonderful little folded paper boxes.

“Nina,” Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. “You are my angel.”

“And what am I?” Bell asked. “Chopped liver? Ergot seems to grow on trees in this town, but do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain monopropellant-grade anhydrous hydrazine?”

“Are there any forks?” Walter asked, peeling open his box of noodles and breathing in the fragrant steam.

“Just these,” Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks.

“That’s okay,” Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

“Lovely,” Nina said, separating a pair of the chopsticks for herself and delicately dipping them into her own container. “Just try not to make a mess on my desk.”

“No, no—of course not.” Walter moved a page of his notes over to the right to cover a large splat of sauce. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“So Nina’s got a small lab we can use, set up in the basement,” Bell said. “Small, and nothing fancy, but it’ll do. There’s even a darkroom for Chick’s photography.” He peered over Walter’s shoulder. “How are you getting on with the notebook?”

Walter slurped another mouthful of noodles, talking around them.

“I tried all the basic approaches,” he said. “Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.”

He poked at the notebook with a saucy finger.

“I started off with frequency analysis. Searching for pairs, right?” He flipped the pages and pointed first to a double Q and then a double F. “Hoping to lock down my L. The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double L, of course, challenged only by the double T. But here’s the thing. It’s rarely the same.” Another massive mouthful of noodles. “There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.”

“Vigenère?” Bell asked, putting down his box of chemicals and grabbing some food of his own.

“Could be,” Walter said. “But that seems like such a pain. Plus we have a few symbols mixed in here and there, though not on the last ten pages.”

“What’s Vigenère?” Nina asked.

Walter sorted through his notes until he came up with the Vigenère’s square he’d laid out.

“It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers,” he told her. “One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.” He pulled out a list he’d made of logical guesses that he’d already tried. Words like Zodiac and the names of several known victims. But none had panned out. “We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I’m fairly certain he’s using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn’t say it’s crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.”

Bell had stopped eating with his chopsticks frozen halfway to his mouth. He put the box of noodles down and came over to the desk, eyes zooming in on the last written page of the notebook.

“Try Reiden,” he said.

“My God,” Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.

* * *

Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered. He held the handwritten translation up and read it out loud to Nina and Bell.

* * *

After I take down the bus I shall kill another teenage whore. A pretty brunette, like the first one on this side. I’ve been watching one girl who I think will fit the bill perfectly. Her name is Miranda.

My last girlfriend was older, a sad drunken waste of a person, and I found myself abruptly distracted at what should have been my most beautiful moment by the loose skin on her neck and the baggy, worn-out shape of her breasts. Yet the sparks in my hands were brighter and burned longer than ever before.

Not that I regret my previous choice. It’s only that the anticipation of killing has me feeling particularly appreciative of youth. That young teenage whore will be the perfect reward for what is sure to be my most acclaimed performance to date.

I’d like to see that sad sack Iverson and his FBI cronies try to keep this one out of the press.

I think I shall make myself wait a few days to claim my reward. The sparks are getting hungrier every day, but controlling appetites is what separates man from beast. I shall wait until

“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.”

“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.