Sins of the Father (19 page)

Walter arrived a few minutes early, carrying a number of large, awkward packages and nearly tripping over his own feet as he entered. Julia ran to his side and helped steady him, taking one of the packages from his arms.

“Here,” she said. “Let me help you, Doctor Bishop.”

“Thank you, Astrid,” Walter replied, seeming distracted—as if he was already thinking about something else.

“Astrid?” Julia frowned. “My name is Julia.”

“Oh, of course it is,” Walter replied, tipping his head to the left and muttering to no one. “Why did you say her name was Astrid?”

Julia frowned at him. His eyes were glazed and pupils dilated.

He’s on something
, she thought, and she felt like cheering. This was too perfect.

“Did you drop acid again, Doctor Bishop?” she asked.

“What?” He turned to his left again, making it look as if he was listening to someone or something other than her. “I suppose you’re right,” he said to thin air, “but I don’t see how that’s
relevant
.”

“Will you be working on your generator again tonight?” Julia asked, already knowing the answer, but wanting to confirm it.

“It’s a new blend,” Walter replied, answering her first question and ignoring the second. “Seems to have a strange effect on my sense of separation between the past and the future. But I believe it will also boost the electrical output that I’m able to channel through my generator.”

“Well, you’d better be careful—remember the last time? When you blew the circuit and set the phonebook on fire?” Julia set Walter’s package on his workstation. “Here, let me check all the burners, and make sure the gas is turned off.”

Walter ignored her completely, focusing on whatever was going on inside his head. Julia smiled and walked over to the closest burner, gripping the knob so hard that its cold metal edge dug deeply into her fingers. She paused, her heart slam-dancing in her chest, feeling light-headed and sweaty. It was one thing to plan something like this, but another thing to actually do it.

It was just the smallest movement of her wrist. Just the slightest turn to the left. Just enough to allow a slow, undetectable leak. So that when Carla tried to make Walter burn the journal…

It doesn’t matter
. They
don’t matter. I’ve got what I want.

Just do it.

She turned the knob, and quickly backed away.

“They’re all off,” she called over her shoulder. “It’s safe now.” She picked up her own backpack, and headed for the door. “Have a good night, Doctor Bishop.”

She could hear him muttering to himself as he hunched over his packages. He probably didn’t even know she was still there.

On her way out, she took the small fire extinguisher off the wall and slid it into her bag.

* * *

Walter thought he heard a female voice coming from behind the centrifuge, but it sounded strange—distorted and foreign, as if it were a weak pirate-radio broadcast, perhaps from another country. The only words he could make out were, “
Doctor Bishop
.” And even though it was his own name, something in the vowels seemed sinister, unrealistic. The sibilant
sh
sound lasted far too long, resonating snakelike inside his left ear.

He turned back toward the green fairy with whom he’d been conversing, and found that she was gone. In her place was a younger version of himself. Twenty-two and utterly guileless in that ratty old Norfolk jacket he’d worn every day until it disintegrated into rags sometime in the mid-seventies.

This younger Walter was staring at him with a worried frown.

“I think we might be in trouble,” Younger Walter said.

“Trouble?” Walter frowned. “What kind of trouble.”

For a moment, Younger Walter didn’t speak. He looked emotional and unsure, as if struggling with a difficult task, like the decision to euthanize a suffering pet. When he opened his mouth again to speak, the voice that came out was a woman’s voice. A soft, familiar voice, speaking words that he would never forget.

“Walter,” this impossible voice said. “There has to be a line somewhere.”

Then another voice spoke, coming from behind him and to his right.

A male voice.

His own voice.

“There’s only one God in this lab.”

Walter spun to face the source, and saw yet
another
version of himself. This one was older than the first, but still a few years younger than he was now. His eyes were cold and hard, like iron. As if they belonged to someone else.

“Walter?” The woman’s voice again.

When he turned to face the speaker, the twenty-two-year-old version of himself was gone. In his place was Carla Warren, looking both tired and worried.

“Walter,” she said, her voice imploring. “We need to talk.”

In her pale, slender hands, she held his journal.

“How dare you?” the Hard Walter demanded, stepping forward. “That’s private.”

Walter peered at him, and noticed Hard Walter was now wearing his familiar stained lab coat. When he looked down at his own chest and arms, he discovered that he was now wearing the long-gone Norfolk jacket he’d loved so much in his twenties. And his hands—his hands were youthful, smooth, and unscarred.

Had he somehow become his younger self, while that chilly doppelganger had taken over his modern self?

It was all so confusing.

“Please,” Carla was saying. “Look at me, Walter.”

He looked up from his tattered tweed sleeves, and saw that she wasn’t facing him. She was talking to the Hard Walter. He also noticed that she had sprouted flaming wings so large they swept the ceiling. Like an angel, but not a cute greeting-card cupid. A fierce, Old Testament angel, both beautiful and terrible to behold. Then, in a flash, the flaming wings fluttered and disintegrated into black ash, swirling around them both like the glitter inside a snow globe.

“Carla?” Walter said, taking a step closer to her.

She ignored him completely, as if he were invisible. She remained focused on the Hard Walter, and looked exceptionally beautiful.

Beautiful and sad.

“You need a reality check,” she was saying. “You’ve lost sight of the things that really matter. Like Peter. Why did you bother to bring the boy here in the first place, if you’re just going to ignore him? Can’t you see he’s dying for your attention?”

Her curly blond hair pulsed with a strange internal glow, as if each individual strand had been replaced with a delicate optical fiber. The brilliant tips swayed around her small, anxious face, stirred by a nonexistent current.

“The families of great men have to accept the fact that they will always come second to the work,” Hard Walter said with a dismissive shrug.

“The work?” Carla replied with a frown. “The
work
?”

“
My
work,” Hard Walter repeated. “It is the only thing that matters. Everything else is just window dressing.”

“But what is the point of
any
work if it drives away the people who care about you? Peter. Elizabeth.” She paused, biting her lower lip. “Me, Walter. I care about you, and that’s why I can’t let you continue down this path. I know you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Hard Walter said. “If you did, you would never be so impudent as to question my priorities.”

“I know the good Walter,” she said. “The Walter I care about is still there, inside you. He knows that what you’re doing is wrong, just as well as I do.” Her voice softened. “Don’t you?”

“I…” Walter started to say, but Hard Walter turned to him and hissed a wordless warning, cold eyes flashing like sparks struck from iron. Then he turned back to face Carla.

“This conversation is asinine and irrelevant,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. You can put that journal back where you found it.”

“Please, Walter,” Carla said, gripping Hard Walter’s forearm and looking up into his hard eyes. “Don’t shut me out.”

Walter shivered, feeling the ghostly brush of her fingers against his own arm, burning through the rough fabric of his old jacket. When he looked down at his sleeve, he saw that there were smeary red fingerprints, as if he’d just been touched by a bloody hand. He was hit with a sudden crushing vertigo, forcing him to cling to the edge of a nearby worktable.

He wanted to say something, to cry out or make any kind of noise at all, but his mouth was filled with tangled organic fibers that strangled any sound before it could escape.

When he tried to move toward Carla, desperate to signal to her in some way, it felt as if he were struggling against a vicious riptide. Meanwhile, she was leaning in toward Hard Walter, whispering. The glow that infused her golden hair was spreading beneath her skin, making her pulse with strange light that seemed to emanate from the center of her chest, as if her heart had been replaced with a miniature supernova.

Walter tried to breathe slowly and evenly, clinging to his rational, scientific objectivity as tightly as he clung to the edge of the table. This was just a particularly vivid and intense hallucination, that’s all. For all he knew, Carla wasn’t even there in the lab.

He forced himself to focus, to think.

This new blend of acid he had dropped was supposed to be quite mild, and intended simply to enhance his more esoteric brain functions without impeding his thought processes or distorting his perception too strongly. In previous tests, it had produced a sense of sharpness, even focus—accompanied by some minor visual hallucinations that were limited to subtle changes in the color, texture, or shape of existing objects or individuals.

But nothing like this.

So what, exactly, was happening to him?

Was it hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder? Certainly, he’d ingested enough mind-altering chemicals over the years that a flashback remained a distinct possibility. But he’d never suffered from anything like this in the past.

Then again, many of the people who knew him might argue that his perceptions hadn’t been normal to start with.

Suddenly, an even more disturbing thought struck him.

Could it be some kind of genuine psychotic break? He’d been troubled by a persistent sense of disassociation lately, and suffered from several small blackouts. When they ended, he found himself in the midst of a task he didn’t remember starting, or saying goodbye to someone over the phone—even though he had no idea who was on the other end of the line.

More and more it seemed as if his work was the only thing that made any kind of sense. His only anchor in a world where day-to-day events seemed like complex puzzles that refused to be solved. The only time he felt completely at ease was when he was here, in the lab. Only here did he feel sure of himself, and the world around him.

And now, he was being forced to doubt even that reality.

Because the last and most awful possibility was that this terrifying, inexplicable series of events was real. That there really
was
another him—a terrible, cold, alien version of him who had been slowly, stealthily taking control while Walter wasn’t paying attention, and now had broken free.

But
why
?

Before he could answer any of these questions, Carla reached up and touched the other Walter’s cheek.

And everything changed.

The strange, invisible riptide against which he’d been fighting suddenly reversed and he was swept off his feet, hurtling headlong through the air and crashing into Hard Walter with such force that it stunned him, knocking the breath out of him.

When he twisted around and peered at his own body, he saw that he hadn’t just bumped into the other Walter—he’d melded into him, leaving a crooked, multi-limbed monstrosity, like conjoined twins, that never could have survived outside of the womb.

He glanced at Carla. To his surprise, she didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about him. She was looking up into his face with her sad blue eyes.