Lonely Nightmare IX: Shadows Turning Red
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0
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“ . . . soldiers coming home like shadows turning red . . . ”
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He had been out in the snow before a thousand times. He had driven in it, had skied in it, had shoveled it. He had spent enough time in the snow to consider it familiar, even friendly. Mulder remembered going outside after midnight during a blizzard when he was ten, he and Samantha allowed to get lost in the white sea of snowflakes because the yard of the rented cottage they were at was fenced in for the dog. He remembered the feeling of being lost only a few feet from the back porch, the throb of his excited heartbeat when he realized that he could die out in the storm, but not really. His dad had come out fifteen minutes later, holding one end of a clothesline and walked them back in, carrying Samantha under his arm like a giggling sack of potatoes. Hunched against the snow in a small town in Wisconsin, Mulder suddenly missed his father.
He wished someone was coming after him with a clothesline, then thought of the bloody handprint on the door, and reconsidered. He had crossed the street immediately after leaving the Nelson’s house: the police station was on the opposite side of the street, and he had thought it would be easier to follow the houses and not accidentally walk past the station. He hadn’t considered the direction of the wind, however, and snow whipped off the roofs of the buildings across the street, adding to the frenzy already falling around him.
Snow swirled in his ears, and piled up in his shoes. It sifted into his collar, melting in silvery rivulets down his back. It kissed his cheeks with cold witch kisses and flew up his nose, trying to suffocate him. Scully had been right: this was a stupid idea.
But the police reports on the last two kids had been exactly the same and that wasn’t right. And an anomaly like that should be investigated, especially in a missing person’s case, unlike, say, a traffic report where the cut and paste on the computer was a cop’s best friend. And these were just kids, so the searches should have been conducted more carefully. And the Chief had seemed surprisingly angry about his reports being missing, instead of mildly pissed.
And it was the only lead they had.
Someone tapped his shoulder.
He shouted, turning into the wind, but all he saw was the dancing whirling of the snowflakes.
“Fuck,” he whispered, closing his eyes. Despite the snow, he turned his face upward, breathing hard through his nose. The cool slither of snowflakes on his throat seemed calming. After a moment, he continued on.
The police station was still lit, but he couldn’t see anyone inside through the slats of the blinds. He pushed the door open.
“Hello!” he shouted, stamping his feet on the welcome mat. “Agent Mulder! FBI!” No response. Even the drunk tanks in the back must have been empty. The coffee pot ticked once. The police radio hissed with static. The t.v. on the filing cabinet danced with images, but no sound. “Hello,” Mulder said again.
They were probably all out on calls, helping people out of ditches, checking for downed power lines and stranded motorists. He would have to help himself.
Technically, he hadn’t had the right to the files when he came in before: he and Scully had no cause to question the locallaw enforcement’s classification of the cases and without jurisdiction he couldn’t demand access to information about kids who had simply run away. Without evidence of an X-file he was overstepping his boundaries. Technically. But since Lisa Nelson had apparently been kidnapped, and since she was related to the case they were investigating, and since, X-file or not, kidnapping was a federal crime . . .
Officer Kowalski had gone into the storage room behind the table for the first two files, but he’d said the rest were in the basement. Basement, basement.
He went around the desk, into the storeroom where Kowalski had gone. No doors. Down the short hall, past the four empty holding cells. No doors. He turned to go back and saw it, behind the door which lead out into the main office, another door, situated so that they both couldn’t be opened at the same time.
Mulder went and turned the knob. The door opened. The stairs were dark, but the light switch turned on fluorescent lighting all the way down and he could see the green tile on the floor down there.
It wasn’t a full basement, and Mulder felt a little crowded by the low ceilings, but it was clean, and fairly well-lit. Two long card tables sat in the middle of the room, along with some cheap wooden-slatted folding chairs. Boxes lined one wall. A red, white, and blue rolled-up banner reading “olic for uly 4” was propped against them. And along the far wall, file cabinets, long ones.
He pulled open the drawer that read “1996.” Unlike most rural police stations, where the filing system was usually one old secretary who just remembered where she put things, Onowani seemed to have all their ducks in a row. There were dividers making each month, and manila folders with case names all written in the same neat hand. Mulder wanted to kiss the anal-retentive Chief Austin flat on the mouth.
Lisa had said that the first couple was taken after the bonfire for Homecoming. He began sifting through the folder marked “September.” Halfway through “October,” Fox Mulder hit the jackpot.
He pulled the rest in a matter of minutes, holding them in one arm, while he leafed through the cabinet with the other hand. They all had the same basic forms in them, varying only in the number of witnesses interviewed. A cursory glance deflated his hopes of some kind of police cover-up: none of the other folders had the same search reports as the ones Scully had found. Apparently, that was just some cop trying to save time by cutting and pasting instead of typing up a whole new report like he was supposed to. Still, there might be something in the files, some common thread that would determine why Lisa Nelson had been--
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
They had all been taken in pairs. There was always a boy and a girl, that was how it was always done. Taken at approximately the same time so that parents and friends would think they had run away together. There were always two.
Who was the other one?
Mulder slumped in one of the folding chairs, setting the files down on the table in front of him. Who was the other one? He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed *1.
“The person you are trying to reach--“
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whispered. He would just have to go back and tell Scully in person then. It wouldn’t be Alan, he was pretty certain of that. If whatever had taken Lisa Nelson wanted her brother, it had had the perfect opportunity and passed it by. Besides, Scully was there. He hoped Chief Austin had some spare trashbags around so he wouldn’t have to try to carry these things under--
The top folder slid away from him in slow motion, gliding off the pile as gracefully as a swan, opening and fluttering its manila wings as it vomited its contents all over the green linoleum floor.
“Fuck!” Mulder said again, feeling not only like a klutz, but like a redundant and unimaginative klutz. He dropped the rest of the files back on the table, reaching one hand out to steady them, and crouched down to pick up the loose papers. The file was that of the first boy who had been taken, Jeremy Stricher. His picture showed a big blond boy in a flannel shirt standing next to a cow. A farm boy. A hick, maybe, who according to Lisa Nelson was not friends with cheerleaders. Mulder gathered up the papers and tapped them on the floor to straighten them. When he picked them up, a sheet of notebook paper fluttered to the floor.
Leaned down to pick it up, recognizing the handwriting as the same neat penmanship that was on the label in the file cabinet.
“Stricher, J.” the writing said.
“Jameson,A.
“Williams, L.
“Miller, Je.
“Choy, S.”
There were more, about twenty more, Mulder saw, last names and first initials, the top eleven with small neat checkmarks by them. He was not surprised to see that the last name checked was “Nelson, L.” The next name on the list--Rhodes, J.--did not have a checkmark. Whoever that kid was, John or Jim or Jason Rhodes, was next. Looked like the police were involved after all.
“Holy fuck,” Mulder breathed, and that was the last thing he said before the chair came down on his head.
***end 9/14***
I’m hungry like the wolf: