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.
6
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.
7
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.”