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.”
2
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.”