Chapter 5: Evidence of Absence

Fujiwara no Kintada, Wakan Roei Shu 184:

I did not move ahead
But stayed here on the mountain path,
For I wanted to hear again
The voice of the hototogisu.

Olivia glanced up when Peter walked in. He looked tired and distracted, and a little like he'd just walked into a wall. In sum, exactly as he had looked every day for the past two weeks.

She couldn't blame him for being depressed and withdrawn. His circumstances—being trapped in a world that looked like his world but wasn't, with a man who looked like his father but wasn't and a woman who looked like his lover but wasn't—would get to anyone.

But for the sake of their cases, Olivia wished he would snap out of it. The past couple of cases he'd offered the minimal level of help, spending not a minute longer at the lab than he had to and barely speaking to them.

This case though, she thought, might catch his interest.

"Hi Peter. How are you?"

"Fine." He didn't look at her. "What did you want me to take a look at?"

She turned to a folder of photographs in front of her. "Last week there was a small earthquake in Ontario, Canada. A few days later, there was an explosion in a coal mine less than a mile from the epicenter. The mine had been closed pending a damage assessment after the quake, so luckily no one was hurt. You may have heard about it on the news."

"Yeah. But it's not quite weird enough to land on our desk. Let me guess: there's something about the explosion they didn't mention on the news?"

"Of course." She flipped through the file until she found three graphs, which she turned so he could read them right-side up. "These are gravitational readings of the area before and after the earthquake and again after the explosion."

Even with his expertise in physics, it took Peter a minute to comprehend what the charts were showing, though the results didn't surprise him. "Several tons of rock disappeared after the quake, then about the same amount appeared in the mine at the time of the explosion."

"You've seen something like this before?" she inquired.

"Yeah. A building crossed over from the other side and merged with the same building on our side. It was horrible."

"I worked that case, too." Olivia told him. "It still haunts me. The thing about this is, the other side didn't report anything like it."

"So either they're lying..."

"And I don't see anything they'd gain by lying about this..."

"...Or the rock that exploded in that mine crossed over from somewhere else, some other dimension." Could it have been from the dimension he'd come from? Peter couldn't help but wonder.

He looked through the rest of the pictures, which were of a sinkhole that appeared after the earthquake and the mine after the explosion. Rocks were strewn everywhere in a violent pattern, rocks poked out of the walls, floor, and ceiling of the mine at unnatural angles. He shuddered to imagine what it would have looked like if the miners had not been evacuated before it happened.

Then he came to a photo that gave an idea of what that would look like. "I thought no one was in the mine."

"No one was. That's not human. It's some kind of animal."

"What animal that big lives that deep underground?"

"None," she replied. "We're still waiting for the results of genetic tests on whatever that thing was. At my request the Canadian government is shipping what they can find of the corpse to Walter's lab."

"Oh, he'll love that."

"As much as he ever loves anything."

Peter frowned at the reminder of how different Walter Bishop had become without his son in his life.

He missed his father.

His thoughts went back to his dream from two weeks ago. Every night since, he'd been falling asleep with the hope that he would see her again. But it hadn't happened. It was starting to seem crazy that he'd been so convinced it was real, that it was really his Olivia contacting him. It was just a dream.

But then, if anyone could cross dimensions to communicate with him in a dream, it was Olivia.