Lonely Nightmare XIII: Lucky Weather
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0
***
“Must be lucky weather when you find the kind of wind that you need.”
***
He stepped out of the police station into the blinding glare of a sunny winter’s morning. The snowplows had been through already; Mulder could tell by the snow banks as high as his waist. Their rental car was plunged nose-first into one of these.
“Nice driving,” he said. He stood off to the side and waited for her to back out enough for him to get the door open.
“This is the last time, Mulder, I’m warning you,” she said, as he collapsed into the front seat.
“Uh huh. Make sure you put that in writing,” he said. Then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
She went into the motel room with him to call the State Patrol.
“They’ll be here in an hour or so,” she said, hanging up. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling like he’d just gotten home from the worst party of his life. “I’m going to go to the Nelson’s. They need to know.”
He nodded.
She sat down on the bed next to him, still smelling of the cold and fresh snow. “Make sure you drink some water, not too cold, and don’t get in the shower. Take a bath instead.”
“Scully--“
“Mulder.”
He sighed.
“You probably shouldn’t sleep since they hit you over the head, but I’ll be back in an hour or two, so if you want to--“ She nodded. “You’re going to be fine, Mulder.”
He sighed again. Sure, he would. Nothing a bath and a nap and some food wouldn’t fix. Scully seemed to understand that it was that fact that had him upset.
“Okay, I’ll be back,” she said. She hugged him with one arm, and was gone.
He turned on the t.v. and drank two tepid glasses of water, and took a tepid bath, and put on a clean t-shirt and underwear, and crawled under the polyester bedspread, and was asleep by the time the sand slid through the hour glass on Days of Our Lives.
In his dreams, he was not free. Scully was on the table next to him, her belly swollen and pregnant under her cheerleader sweater, but that didn’t stop the police, it didn’t stop Austin from rutting with her, her hands held above her head as she screamed and he screamed too, and Austin looked, but it wasn’t Austin, it was something else, something in a cop’s uniform, something swamp-colored and foul with a mouth full of teeth.
He must have shouted, because Scully was there, shaking him. He didn’t want her to look at him like that, like he was broken and needed to be repaired, although he supposed in some ways that was true. He sat up, away from her hands. His room was dark, the t.v. off, and he noticed that the lights in her room were on.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, gesturing to the door.
“They fixed it.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Mm hmm.” They sat in silence for a moment. Mulder toyed with the edge of his t-shirt. Scully watched him. “So since you’re up,” she said. “I was going over some of the stuff we got at the crime scene today, and I was wondering if you wanted to fill me in on some of the details.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure.”
She left and came back with her laptop, sitting down on the bed next to him. “Here are the initial photographs . . . ” she said, and he told her what he knew about the storage room where he had been found, about the sounds and the dust, and the number of men he thought were present. Scully, in turn, explained to him what she had found when she had come in looking for him, the resistance of the police to her questions, the strange dust on their shoes, her coercing them into the holding cells in the back, the police officer she had been forced to shoot because he pulled his weapon on her when she tried to get into the storage room door, the bites of indeterminate origin on Lisa Nelson’s body, and the confession of none other than Officer Kowalski, who was at least a decent enough human being to confess.
“It was them the whole time, Mulder. They were taking the kids and abusing them, and burning the bodies afterward.”
“The dust,” he said, remembering its thick oily taste. He did not feel like vomiting, but he wished he did. So Lisa had been right after all: not the devil, but the devil’s men.
Scully nodded.
“Why in pairs?” he asked.
She looked down at her hands, at the reports. “One of the officers seems to have had a preference,” she said.
“Oh.” He felt, dull, stupid. That was obvious: he should have caught that.
“It also made their cover story easy,” she said. “They conducted the search, there was no evidence of foul play, the kids ran away, and people stopped looking.”
“Yeah.” He knew she was looking at him, that she was waiting for him to say something, so he did. “What about the beast?”
“It’s one of those things, Mulder, like the Bogeyman. The kids made it up to explain what was happening. You said yourself that Onowani has no history of paranormal occurrences.” The words were the ones he expected to hear from her, the rational, the reasonable, but her voice was tired. They were going through the motions.
He wanted to tell her what he had felt in that room, that evil had placed its teeth against his throat and only she had saved him, but it seemed like so much. He felt like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up the hill only to have her push it back down again. He knew he should be feeling grateful to her for rescuing him, for being so completely the woman she said she was, and he *was* grateful, and maybe that was why he couldn’t mention it to her. She would ask questions, and he didn’t think he could answer them. He said nothing.
“What are you thinking, Mulder?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Okay.” She went back to the case file, and eventually he drifted back to sleep to the sound of her voice explaining the jurisdictional hairball that this was going to be.
When he awoke the next time, shuddering and sweaty with the memory of teeth on his throat, she got up from her chair at his bedside and lay behind him, propped up on one elbow. She ran her hand over his hair, and pressed her check against his, and whispered “tell me, Mulder,” her lips moving like kisses on his skin, and he told her.
He told her about Lisa calling his name, and the sound of the bites of “indeterminate origin” on Lisa’s body, and the smell of the beast as it passed over his face, and the feeling of its tongue on his skin. He knew without her even saying that she had seen nothing when she came into the room, no animal sitting on his chest, not even a house cat or a rat nearby to explain it. She would not believe him. She was Scully, and she would not believe his crazy story about some beast. But he told her anyway, because she was Scully. While he talked, he felt her heart beat against his back, and her breast pressed against his arm, and her arm curled around his body, and her hand holding his against his chest, and the next time he woke up it was morning.
The State Patrol took his statement the next day, and two agents from Madison, Meyers and Patruchillo, came up to handle the rest of the investigation of the Onowani police force, so Mulder had to provide a statement for them, as well as his number in Washington and Skinner’s contact numbers. Meyers and Patruchillo, who were both women and both had very short stylish hair, got along with Scully famously and seemed torn about how to feel about him. They had seemed impressed when he gave them Skinner’s name, but he caught them tossing him pitying looks out of the corner of his eye, and he knew that to them he would forever be the man whose woman partner saved him. It wasn’t as embarrassing as he might have thought, although Meyers kept wanting to pour him coffee and fix his tie.
Scully spent most of the day writing her own report. He would have to write one himself, he knew, and go see the counselor to make sure he wasn’t a danger to himself or others (he wondered why they only asked that after you’d had some traumatic experience, when it made so much more sense to ask it before: he knew some agents who had only become reasonably safe after some perp kicked the shit out of them and they learned caution) and Skinner would want the whole nine yards, but Mulder got out of all of that for the moment by holding his head a lot and pretending to be dizzy. Scully knew, of course, and kicked him under the table.
They went back to Milwaukee that evening, and stayed at the Marriott again, and ordered outrageously expensive room service and watched t.v. She slept in her own room, although the door was wide open, and they got up the next morning and had breakfast at the over-priced restaurant in the lobby and made it to their plane in plenty of time.
Mulder knew that he had been avoiding talking to Scully, really talking to her since the night he told her about the beast. That wouldn’t go in her report, of course, but he hadn’t mentioned it to the State Patrol either, or Meyers and Patruchillo. He had meant to go forward and tell them what he believed--speak the truth though the heavens fall--but when they had asked him to give them his version of events, somehow he had failed to mention it. He could always add it in later, he supposed, but somehow it didn’t seem as important anymore. It was as if the details of that night were fading the further he got from Onowani. He still remembered everything that had happened, but it no longer had the sharp edge of urgency it had when he was lying on the table resigned to death.
The other things he had thought, the things about Scully, those seemed to have lost their urgency as well. She read a magazine, or looked out the window, and seemed calm again, happy, as though saving him had restored an equilibrium to their relationship that had been missing for some time. For a second, he thought about telling her of the conclusions that he had come to on that table, that she was more than a partner to him, that even Samantha paled in importance next to her. He even spoke her name, but when she turned to look at him, he noticed she had gotten a nosebleed from the dry air on the plane, and she had to go the lavatory to get cleaned up. He thought that Scully seemed to be prone to nosebleeds this winter--maybe he would get her a humidifier as a thank-you-for-being-the-cavalry present.
When she came back, she looked a little pale and tired, and Mulder decided he would wait until they got back to Washington and things settled down make his Declaration. That was how he thought of it, in capital letters, and it didn’t seem right to make a Declaration in the coach seats of a passenger jet when your partner had a ball of Kleenex stuffed up her nose. It had waited this long, it could wait a little longer. He had all the time in the world.
***end 13/13***
If you’re lonely in your nightmare: