The Witness
"We must witness the miracles of the Lord without
question."
Reverend Finley "Revelations"
Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic United States
April 22, 1998
1:16 am
The plane was crowded and hot and seemed to be moving at a crawl. Every time she looked at her watch it was only a minute ahead. Even when she closed her eyes and counted to one hundred, time seemed to slow to frustrate her--no matter how long it seemed to take for her to reach the magic number, her watch only showed a minute or two of progress. What was happening to Kevin in these minutes? How did he feel? Did he know that she was coming after him? Did he have even the minuscule comfort of believing that she would be there? She wanted to scream.
The last time she had felt this way had been in the hospital with her . . . with Emily. Pressed up against the glass, watching as the little girl drew her shallow breaths, Scully had longed to touch her, feeling that if only she could love her enough then Emily would be spared.
Except she hadn't been able to save Emily. No matter how much she loved, something was at work in Emily that could not be stopped, not by love or science or even God himself maybe. But if anything was at work in Kevin, though, she thought it might be divine, and so maybe she could help. She could save Kevin, if only she could get off the goddamn plane and get to him. She could save him. She could.
"I guess asking you not to get emotionally involved would be beside the point."
Scully started at her partner's words. He was watching her, his eyes large and soft with concern. She could feel him wanting to touch her face, or her hand, to reassure her. To comfort her. She hated it.
He didn't understand, he never had. He didn't want to understand how she felt about Kevin Cryder. When she had been with Emily, so had Mulder--she could feel his support, his earnestness, his steadiness. In California, she had been able to count on him, to know that if he didn't feel what she felt, then at least he understood. But Kevin . . . Mulder was too busy running from the possibility of God to see how she felt about a ten-year-old boy who had been marked and then sent out to suffer alone. Mulder didn't understand that Kevin was as much her emotional child as Emily had ever been. Maybe more. Maybe.
"A boy is missing, Mulder," she said, attempting to keep her voice low and calm. "And yes, I am emotionally involved. He called and asked for my help. If you don't want to be involved you don't have to stay in Ohio."
She wanted to sound reasonable and composed, but she knew she didn't. She wouldn't apologize, not when Kevin was missing. Mulder could just take it for a change. Kevin was missing.
Last week she had seen an angel. A seraphim. Supposedly. She'd seen something, something when she was under severe emotional distress, something that could have been a result of her own desire to make sense of her--of Emily's horrible death. None of it seemed as real at this moment as her memory of Kevin's hand gripping hers as she pulled him out of danger. That had been right, good. Clear. Unlike the hazy miasma of that time in the hospital, or the light that called to those girls. If Mulder didn't want to come on board, that was fine with her, but she would stay until Kevin was found. She had an obligation.
Scully glanced over at Mulder, almost apologetic, but he had already tilted his seat back and loosened his tie, falling into his standard flight-long doze, or pretending to. Eventually, he would lean over and rest his cheek on her hair, maybe drool on her a little, and she would shrug him off, just like this were any flight on it's way to any case. As if it weren't Kevin.
She leaned back in her seat, wanting to cry and knowing that she would not.
*****
Akron/Canton Airport, Ohio
2:07 am
They saw him immediately when they got off the plane in Ohio, the only teenager who looked like he wasn't waiting to get on a plane, the only one without a bag. He didn't walk towards them, but asked "are you Miss Scully?" when they approached.
"You can call me Dana," she said, longing to slug Mulder for his barely concealed amusement. "This is my partner, Fox." That ought to do it, she thought. "Are you Nathan?"
"Un huh. Kevin described you, that's how I knew." He shifted awkwardly, his hands in his pockets. He was tall, almost as tall as Mulder, but thinner, undeveloped. His blond hair hung over his forehead in a soft wave, and Scully fought the impulse to reach out to him. He looked . . . lost.
"My dad said I should take you back to our house so you could see Kevin's room, unless you want to go right to the motel. They're with the Social Services people still."
"Nathan?" Mulder's voice kept the boy from turning away. "What do you think happened to Kevin?"
Nathan shrugged, his face miserable beneath his fine yellow hair. "They took him," he said.
"Who took him?"
"The devil."
"The devil?" Mulder sounded disbelieving. "Like Satan, Lucifer?"
Nathan flicked his eyes from one of them to the other, as if he were judging how much he should say. He shrugged again. "Whatever."
As they followed the boy to the rental counter, Scully leaned in close.
"You're not catching the next flight out?"
"Are you kidding, Scully? It's not often I get the chance to dance with the Prince of Darkness." He smiled at her for a second, waggling his eyebrows.
She wanted to punch him again, but in a good way. She hadn't wanted him to go, no matter what she had said on the plane. She knew she was dangerously close to this case and Mulder's acidic humor and resistance would keep her from tipping over the edge.
Scully watched her partner walk and chat idly with Nathan Cornell, and for no reason at all she suddenly suspected that things were going to get worse before they got better.
*****
"Thanks for riding with me," Nathan said as Mulder slid into the passenger seat. "I've only got a learner's permit."
"No problem."
"How come Dana didn't ride with me?"
Mulder smiled. "She likes to drive."
Nathan nodded, pulling out of the parking lot and watching his rear view mirror to make sure her lights were behind them. "Me, too."
The truth was that Scully had whispered to him at the counter that he should go with Nathan, see if he could find out what the boy knew.
"Why?" he had whispered back. "You're the point woman here."
"I want . . . I don't want to be alone with him, Mulder. Just do it."
She didn't want to be alone with him for reasons Mulder could only guess at, but at the top of his list would be coincidence--the coincidence that their one witness just happened to have a younger sibling abducted in the course of some events which may or may not have been supernatural, just like her dear friend and partner. What luck. Maybe Scully didn't want to be alone with Nathan Cornell for her own reasons, but more likely to Mulder's mind was that she did want him to be alone with the kid. So here he was, although what he said was also true--Scully did like to drive.
"So if you've only got a learner's permit, how'd you get to the airport, Nathan?"
Nathan grinned a little, glancing over, his face lit then dark, lit then dark in the pattern of the streetlights. "I figured if I got a ticket, Kevin would get you guys to get rid of it."
Mulder nodded, turning his grin away. "So you think he's all right then?"
Nathan's face became impassive, like stone. "Yeah. I'd know if he weren't, I think."
"What happened to him?"
Nathan blew out his breath in an irritated puff. "I told you. They took him."
"Who, Nathan? Who took him?" Mulder inclined toward him, straining slightly against the seatbelt. Nathan Cornell knew something and if he had to pressure the kid a little to get it out of him, Mulder wasn't above it. Scully was wedded to finding Kevin Cryder and Mulder would help her, but the sooner they got the hell out of this case, the better he would feel.
The tear creeping from the corner of Nathan's eye startled him.
First one, then another, and another, and another, and the boy was suddenly sobbing, crying so furiously that Mulder reached over and took the wheel with one hand, easing the car to the side of the road.
"Nathan," he said, once the car had rolled to a stop. "Tell me what you know. You can't help Kevin if you're hiding something."
Nathan shook his head. His hands lay still in his lap, a sight which disturbed Mulder more than the tears. Anyone would have cried about his little brother being taken, Mulder knew, but this kid was a teenager--he should have been wiping his face, fidgeting, hiding, doing something to cover himself up, defend against these emotions, but he wasn't. He was just sitting there with his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth open a little. The kid was in trouble.
Mulder saw Scully's flashers come on in the rear view mirror, and then the dim flash of her door opening. She could handle this blubbering kid, he thought, he was only along for the ride. But as he thought it he knew it wasn't true. This was what he had been sent to do, what he meant to do the whole time, since sliding into the front seat, since the first question, perhaps since making the flight reservations. He wanted to put an end to this, to ease his partner's mind.
"Tell me what you know, Nathan," Mulder said again, killing seconds until his partner could reach the door.
"It's--"Nathan gasped, chest hitching. "I . . . it's my fault!" And then his hands did come, Nathan's covering his face, and Mulder's over the back seat to wave Scully off.
"What do you mean, it's your fault?" he asked.
"I was supposed to meet him," Nathan mumbled through his fingers. "At the ice cream stand after I got done with my math. But . . . I didn't and by the time I got there he was gone."
"Why were you late?" Mulder kept his voice low and persuasive. The kid would tell him anything now in the hope that he would be absolved. He wouldn't be.
"Amy called." The tears stopped, and Nathan wiped his face in slow deliberate strokes like a cat grooming itself. "This girl from school. By the time I got there the guy at the counter said that Kevin had left with his friends. I--" His chest hitched again. "I was suh-supposed to be there. He--I was supposed to watch out for him. He was my responsibility." A fresh bout of sobs shook his shoulders.
Mulder felt his stomach knot up. My responsibility. My fault. The words were like a homecoming to him. If they didn't find Kevin Cryder alive and relatively whole, they would become a place of residence for Nathan as well.
"Nathan, it's not your fault," he sighed, knowing that the boy would not believe him. How many times had Mulder heard those words? How empty and used up could a set of words be?
"Do you have a little brother?"
Mulder looked into angry, blotchy, embarrassed eyes.
"I have a younger sister."
"Then you know."
Mulder nodded, looking out the back window at Scully, standing patiently at the bumper of the car waiting for his signal.
"I know," he said. Nathan nodded at him and dug some ratty tissue out of the pocket of his over-sized pants. After a moment, Mulder leaned back in his seat, waggling his fingers at his partner.
"Is it possible he did leave with friends? Maybe he got tired of waiting for you and went off with them."
"Kevin didn't have friends, Fox. He was different."
"Hey," Scully leaned her head down by Mulder's half opened window. "You guys okay?"
"Sure," Mulder said, watching Nathan. "Just a little car trouble."
Nathan managed a smile. "It just runs a little hot sometimes, Dana. We're fine."
"Okay." She slapped the door lightly and headed back to her car. Nathan turned the key and began scanning traffic, looking for a break in the lights large enough for both cars to pull out.
"Can I ask you something else, Nathan?"
"Sure," he said, easing the car onto the pavement.
"You said Kevin was different. What did you mean by that?"
Nathan glanced over at him, a wry smile twisting his mouth. "Kevin said you guys knew, but maybe he just meant Miss--Dana. Kevin's from God."
*****
"So what was that all about?" she asked him as they sat in the Cornell's comfortable living room waiting for Nathan to return. He had gone to call his parents at the police station and when he returned he was wearing ratty red sweatpants and a t-shirt with a hole at the neckline. Boy's pajamas.
"You can stay if you want" he said before heading to his room just off the hall. "My mom said she'd give you the guest room and the couch. They should be home in a half hour."
"Thank you Nathan, but we'll probably go to the motel after we see your parents," Scully said, smiling at him. "It was nice to meet you."
"Yeah, see ya," he murmured, running his hands through his hair.
When she was sure he was in his room, she asked again.
Mulder shrugged, resting his elbows on his knees. "He thinks it was his fault. He was supposed to meet him."
Scully whistled her breath out, sitting comfortably close to him on the couch. "You don't have to stay, Mulder. I'll have Kevin's parents bring me to the motel."
He shrugged. "There's a couple of things I want to ask them anyway."
She waited. He would come out with it as long as she didn't ask.
"He said Kevin was from God, that the devil took him. Whatever actually happened to Kevin Cryder, his brother's convinced it has something to do with the stigmata."
"What do you think, Mulder?" she asked, but her partner's answer was interrupted before it began by a scream from Nathan's room, and they were both on their feet, both remembering a ten-year old boy ripped from a bathroom with a barred window in only a minute of carelessness.
They burst through Nathan's door, Mulder in the front, and found the boy standing in the dark, his back against the window, arms outstretched. He screamed again as they entered, and it looked as if something was holding him up there, pressing his back against the cold glass.
"Nathan!" Scully yelled, and his head whipped forward like a dog responding to his name. He moaned, and took two steps, falling forward into Mulder, dragging him down to the floor.
"Nathan?" She asked again, kneeling beside them, reaching out for his arm. As he had fallen he had brought his knees up, somehow hooking them around Mulder's back, wrapping himself around Mulder's neck and waist in a death grip. Nathan shook, trembled, his cheek pressed against Mulder's shirt front, his eyes wide open in shock.
"Nathan," she said, again, touching his forehead. "Nathan, what happened?"
"I saw him," he whispered. "I saw him. He was on the cross." He turned his face from her, into the cotton of her partner's dress shirt. She glanced at Mulder over Nathan's tousled hair. He looked back, his face miserable and pained, and she knew he was unsure of what to say, what to do. She watched her partner and the disconsolate boy in his lap and knew--if she was the one sent to protect Kevin Cryder, then surely Mulder was the one who would save Nathan Cornell.
*****
Starlight Motel
Bethlehem, Ohio
4:10 am
Scully knocked on the open connecting door between the two rooms, pushing it wide without waiting for his response, but she paused just inside the room, squinting at him.
Mulder lay on his side across the bed diagonally, head propped on one hand, tv flickering over his face. "Hey," he said.
"You look like Nathan Cornell," she said. He glanced down at his posture and smiled, his face wan and drawn in the artificial light.
"You finally responding to my boyish charms?"
She ignored him, moving to sit behind his shoulder, resting herself against the thin lumpy motel pillows. Mulder rolled onto his stomach so he could see her. He was so comfortable in himself sometimes that it startled her. He twisted himself into convoluted and unmasculine postures, sitting indian-style on a bed, pulling his legs up into an armchair, sprawling on the carpeting like a kid. She envied him that comfort, keeping her knees together, legs crossed at the ankle.
"What do you think, Mulder?" she asked.
He sighed, hanging his head between his shoulder blades. For a second, Scully considered resting her hand there, near the base of his neck, feeling the warmth of his skin just above the open collar of his shirt. He had come because of her, she knew, and regretted her sharpness on the plane. Her hands stayed in her lap.
"I don't know," he said. "I know what Nathan believes, and I know what you thought last time Kevin Cryder was missing, but this seems straightforward to me. A kidnapping. We follow the leads and hope something turns up."
She nodded.
"I wasn't suggesting we wait for a vision, Mulder. We have an appointment at the secondary school tomorrow to meet with the boys who saw Kevin last."
He looked up at her, nodding.
"How's Nathan?" she asked. The smile faded a little.
"He's okay."
She nodded, understanding the meaning behind the words: he's okay, for now. Contingent on the recovery of his brother. After Nathan's parents had returned and answered a few wearily proffered questions, she and Mulder had moved to leave, passing through the living room where Nathan lay on the couch, watching television in the darkened room. Mulder had gone and sat on the edge of the sofa, murmuring to the boy in an unintelligible voice for a couple of minutes. In that instant, she had envied him and longed for Kevin, for a child who looked up at her the way Nathan had looked up to her partner.
"What'd you say to him before we left?" she asked.
Mulder's smile returned, full-force. "I told him to call me Mulder."
She smiled back, and slid to her feet, graceless and heavy with sleep.
"I'm going to bed."
"Want some help?" he asked. It was a rote question, but she hesitated, hovering near the edge of the mattress, and considered crawling back into his bed, curling up against him, resting on the solid sympathy of his body. Sometimes the only thing she wanted was to be close to him, the only one who knew what she had been through, who understood, forever. She settled for brushing her fingers over his hair.
"Good night, Mulder," she said, and staggered to her room for a night of fretful dreams.
*****end 4/12*****
