January Sun 5/7: Grace

by Justin Glasser and Dawn Pares

***
Suzie's Diner
Corner of Main and Raleigh
Bent, North Carolina
5:32 PM

They sat across from him, shifting on the vinyl seat like two
kids.  Mulder gulped his food; Scully toyed with hers.  Both of
them tried not to stare at him, and probably thought he was
crazy.

He wondered if telling Mulder had been a mistake.

He wondered if this whole thing had been a mistake, from his
impulse to come down here to his sharing of Mulder's room to
his frightened confession of recognition at the crime scene this
morning.  He should have kept his mouth shut, if this was the
reaction he was going to get.  Suddenly, he had a lot more
sympathy for Scully, and all she must have had to put up with
over the last six years.

After the waitress brought coffee, Mulder excused himself to
use the restroom.  Skinner watched his rapidly retreating back
and felt his own heart speed up in his chest.  He'd been a field
agent long enough to recognize a set-up when he saw one. 
Scully had been left alone to figure him out or open him up. 
He glanced at her.  She gazed into her coffee cup.

"I know you don't believe me," he said.

Her eyes met his, wide and blue.  He wondered how Mulder
had ever kept a secret from this woman.

"It's all right, Agent Scully," he said, trying to smile.  "I'm not
sure I believe it myself."

"What are you doing here, sir?"  Her hand came down on his
forearm.  Her nails were pretty--manicured half moons painted
a neutral beige color.  Once, on a whim, he had gone to the
Jefferson Monument at night.  He had stood on the dias and
looked up at Jefferson, looking up, a lone figure against the
black night sky, and at that moment he felt sadness overwhelm
him.  Jefferson alone.  For some ridiculous reason he did not
want to puzzle out, Scully's pretty nails made him think of that
moment.  They reminded him of Jefferson's circle of light and
the darkness that surrounded it.  They made him feel lonely.

"Mulder," she said.  Skinner looked toward the door, but
Mulder wasn't there, wasn't striding back through the aisle,
unbuttoned suit jacket flapping.  They were still alone.

"Excuse me?"

"You came because of him."

He sat back, pulling his arm out from under her hand.  "I was
called here, Agent Scully."

She was craned over the table, eyes locked on his, voice
pitched low.  "I'm aware of that, sir.  But there's more to it
than that, isn't there?  I've seen him do this before--with Lucy
Householder, Marty Glenn, Max Felig.  With you.  When you
were being framed for that woman's murder.  And he's doing it
again."

"What are you saying, Scully?"  He felt his arms cross over his
chest.  Walter Skinner in charge.  It felt like a lie.

"I'm saying Mulder believes, and it makes you feel better to be
near him."

He looked into her eyes and fought the urge to confess, to tell
her everything.  Maybe to cry.  *You, too, Scully,* he thought,
although he didn't know what he meant by that.

"I just want to know what's happening to me."

"That's how you're different, sir.   None of them did.  None of
them wanted to know what Mulder knew, but he believed
them, so they listened."

Skinner looked at her, wondering if she realized how sad she
sounded, how hopeless.  Was this supposed to be
encouraging?  "What is happening to me, Agent Scully?" he
asked.

Scully sat back, picking up her fork.  "There are many
possibilities.  Dreams which seem to foretell events are a
common occurence.  Almost everyone experiences what
appear to be psychic dreams at one point or another."

"So this is normal."

He saw her answer in the blank expression that took over her
face.

"Jesus," he whispered.

"I'm sure we can figure this out, sir." 

They could figure it out.  They usually did.  Sure.  And
Skinner could only hope that they would this time too, Mulder
and Scully to the rescue, but Skinner had read those reports,
the ones on Householder, and Felig, and Glenn, and he knew
that when Mulder came up with an answer, that answer didn't
usually help the person in question.  In fact, the people Mulder
believed tended to end up dead. 

***
Night
Bent, North Carolina

He knows where he is although he can't name it.  He's been
here before.  Once, in the second grade, he'd come here with
his class to take a tour that was crushingly dull, even for
second graders, but when you grew up in Bent, there just
weren't that many places to take field trips to.

*But I didn't grow up here.*

He's been here again after that, in the adolescent heat of his
teenage years, during one of the recession layoffs that
preceded the plant's shutting down for good.  The workers had
been gone, the machinery silent.  He and his date and three or
four other couples had come and run around in the dark
risking tetanus and a billion other stupid things so they could
scare the shit out of each other and grope in the dark.  He
distinctly recalls kissing someone who hadn't been his date,
someone illicit.  That had seemed dangerous at the time.

Now it does not seem so dangerous.  He wants to weep.

There is no heat anywhere: everything is clammy and cool to
the touch.  He is surrounded by tiles and one of the faucets
leaks and leaks and sometimes it makes him think he will start
screaming and never stop.  There are no lids on the toilet
tanks, nothing he can wrench up and swing as a weapon,
nothing he can do but feel his throat clench when the next
present comes along.  

Something in the rhythm of the leaking faucet reminds him of
the facile commercial jingle that used to play almost hourly on
the local radio station, which in turn reminds him of the
summer he'd spent helping old Mr. Clay teach the Sunday
School kindergarten when he'd been fifteen.  *But I didn't
grow up here.*  He remembers the stuffy whitewashed room
and the bored five-year olds, refusing to even attempt to
remember their verses for the Fourth of July Pageant.  The
entire Sunday School had smelled like paste and sweaty
toddlers; the very walls had been warm to the touch. 

Here the walls are cold.  He imagines sometimes that they are
paved with bone, but he knows, he *knows* it's only porcelain
tile, small and even and shining like teeth when the lantern
light hits them.  They're too small to do any damage, and they
refuse to sharpen. His fingers sting from the time he's spent
picking at the grout.

The mirrors here are brushed steel--he can't use them to slash
out his life and flush it down the drain.  He approaches them
warily nonetheless, wanting to see and not wanting to know.  

He takes only a glimpse, but he's shocked by his reflection. 
Surely his hair should have gone white?   He looks so normal,
pale, but so much like he was before, two weeks ago, before
he started to dream . . . dark hair, dark eyes, smile lines . . . 

Tears stripe his drawn cheeks, and there's a song he heard in
church a hundred years ago, when he and Sharon used to go to
church, words he knew when he was young and wore patent
leather shoes with buckles and taught Sunday school . . . 

*Patent leather is for girls.*

 . . . words that were once a comfort but are now an empty
litany, a cruel joke.  Once he was blind, but now he sees, sees
everything, sees too much.  His lips are numb, but he can see
them move, knows the mouth belongs to his reflection.

In the mirror, he meets the black eyes of a woman going mad.

***
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
3:03 am

She woke to Mulder's urgent whispers near her ear.

"Huh?" she groaned, realizing he was in the middle of a
sentence.  Mulder sat on her bed, one hand on her shoulder.

"--got to see this," he was saying, shaking her.

"Okay, okay." She shrugged his hand off, annoyed.  Another
night of sleep down the drain.  She wanted to crawl headfirst
under the cheap itchy bedspread and not come up until ten or
eleven in the morning.

"Mulder," she said.  She yanked back the blankets.  "Is
Skinner all right?"

"Shh."  He put his finger to her lips.  She resisted the urge to
bite it.  "C'mon."

Skinner lay on his back, sheets tangled around his hips.  He
wasn't sweating or moaning or tossing: in fact, he appeared to
be asleep, as she should have been.

"Mulder," she whispered.  "Why--"

"Shh," he repeated.  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her
alongside the bed.  "Listen."

Scully listened.  The sound was faint at first, inching around
the edges of her hearing, a dull murmur like airport
conversation heard through glass.

The sound was coming from Skinner.

She could hardly see his lips move in the shadow cast by her
body.  She bent near his head.

"What's he saying?' Mulder whispered.  She shushed him with
a flap of her hand.

" . . . wretch like me . . ."

Mulder moved as if to say something else, but Scully reached
back and yanked on his shirt.

" . . . lost, but now I'm  . . ." Skinner said.  Scully straightened,
holding her palm firm against her mouth.  She dragged her
partner to the end of the bed.

"Mulder," she murmured, choking back a laugh.  "Amazing
Grace."

"What?"

"It's 'Amazing Grace,' Mulder.  The song."

Mulder stared at her for a moment, eyes blank.  Then he too
clapped his hand over his mouth, shoulders heaving silently. 
Tears welled up in his eyes.

"I guess he's fine, then," he whispered, eventually.  But he was
wrong.

***
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
3:24 am

Scully sat across from him, leaning forward, the picture of
solicitude.   He could feel her wanting to touch him, to check
his forehead or scan his pupils for a clue as to what had gone
wrong with him.  He wished it were that simple--that he could
just take a pill and put an end to this whole thing.

Mulder sat beside him on the bed, leaning towards him, a
reflection of his partner's concerned expression on his face.

"Let's go over it again, sir," he said, his voice low.

"Mulder, we've gone over it three times.  I fail to see how
going over it again is going to help anything."  Skinner
reached up and rubbed his face with blunt fingertips.  His eyes
felt crusted over with sand.

"Are you absolutely sure that you dreamed of the crime
scene?" Scully asked.  "That it wasn't some form of deja vu?"

He scowled at her.  She was trying to help, he understood, but
trying and actually helping were two different things.

"I saw . . . some kind of warehouse.  I couldn't tell you where
it was.  It had a bathroom-there was a woman looking into a
mirror.  What I want to know is *why* this is happening to
me.  What's going on?"

"When did you say this started?"  Mulder asked.

"A couple of weeks ago.  I'm not sure exactly."

"And the dreams are always different?"

Skinner shook his head, and his head felt so heavy he
wondered if it would snap his neck.  "This one was new."

"Is this the first time you've seen her face?"  Scully asked.

"Yes.  It looked like the victims--all of them."

"What do you mean 'all of them'?" Mulder asked.

"All of them.  Dark hair, dark eyes, pretty--like all the
victims."

"It could be an amalgamation--" Scully said, but Mulder was
already tripping over himself, a manila folder in his hands.

"Mulder?" Skinner asked.

"Photos of every missing woman in a hundred mile
radius--Robertson got them for me."

"And you want me to look at them." Skinner said.  His voice
sounded dead in his ears.

"Mulder, the chance of some dream woman . . . " Scully
began, but her voice faded into the background.   Skinner had
opened the file.

The photos were all different shapes, different sizes, photos of
women laughing, eating cake, posing for the camera.  A few
of them were mug shots, some of them were women who
Skinner knew had never seen the inside of a police station, let
alone been booked.  Many of them had children with them in
the pictures, or men.

Skinner leafed through them slowly, aware of Mulder's neck
craned over his shoulder, of Scully's slightly annoyed pacing,
but he only saw the women, one after another, all different,
none of them--

He felt his blood turn solid in his veins, saw the folder fall
from fingers suddenly numb, watched the photos arc out: a fan
of lost lives on the carpeting.  He held onto one.

"It's her.  This is her."

Dark eyes.  A woman at a picnic, teeth shining like bathroom
tiles, her arm around a friend.  Dark eyes, darkness, shiny sink
face.  Pink face.

"Sir?  Are you sure?"  Scully crouched in his line of sight,
looking up at him.  He wanted to touch her face and smile,
admit he *was* kidding, because he couldn't be telling the
truth.  This was not happening. 

"I'm sure," he said.

Then they were talking about him again, looking at the label
on the picture, the fact sheet on the desk, while he sat and
stared into the picnic world of the picture, at a woman who
right now might be staring at the same face in a brushed steel
mirror, waiting for her next present.

Once, before, Mulder and Scully whispering about him would
have made him feel nervous, or awkward, or lonely.  Once, he
would have wanted to join them, to stand in between them and
feel the thrill of their electric current pass through him.  Once,
he had wanted to know them, to be part of them, to declare
himself their ally.  Once, the thought that Mulder and Scully
were concerned for his well-being would have made him feel
happy in a thin and second-hand way.

Once, five minutes ago.

Before he knew the name of Vivian MacElvey.

***

"Scully . . ." he began.

"Mulder, I can't help him.  I don't even know if there's
anything wrong with him.  He's been sleeping erratically, he's
probably operating under enormous sleep debt, he's down here
on a *whim*, and he says he recognizes this woman as our
next victim.  What am I supposed to do?"

"Believe him?" he suggested, keeping his eyes on the carpet. 
She was already worked up enough.

"Do you, Mulder?"

He shrugged.  "I don't know.  He seems convinced."

"We saw him like this before, Mulder, when that prostitute
was murdered, when he thought he was having visions.  He's
been to a sleep treatment clinic for just these types of things."

"All of that says nothing about the truth or falsehood of his
claims."

She looked at him for a long moment, then sighed. 

"Mulder, whether it's true or not, whether we believe it or not,
this isn't getting us anywhere."

"What do you recommend?"

"That he get some sleep, Mulder.  Uninterrupted, if possible. 
He's tired--we all are."

***
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
4:13 am

Skinner raised his head when he heard Mulder hang up the
phone.

"I told Robertson what we got," Mulder said.  "He'll get
started on it."
 
Skinner nodded.  "What'd Scully say?"

"She thinks you're crazier than I am."

Skinner thinned his lips in what he hoped would be mistaken
as a smile.

"She thinks you should get some rest."

"That's a surprise."

They sat in the dim and silent flicker of the television for so
long that Skinner could feel Mulder itching to move, just to
ignite an answer.  Skinner remained motionless.  He felt like a
sculpture in thin cotton, his own skin cold and detached.

"It might help if you lie down," Mulder offered.

"Mmmm."  Skinner lifted his legs and slid them under the
sheet.

"Mulder," he said, after he had turned away, the white sheet
like a shroud over his shoulder.  He didn't want to ask, but
there was no denying the question.  Mulder, at least, would not
tell anyone but Scully.  Mulder would not laugh.

"Yes?"

"What *is* going on?"

***

Mulder had no answer, and he knew he wasn't expected to
give one.  As if there was one to give . . . 

"I'm going to be up for a while anyway," he said, hoping
Skinner would interpret this as an invitation.  He knew he
wasn't good with people-only victims and Scully.  Even his
conversations with his mother were ragged around the edges. 
The world he lived in was divided into two categories-victims
and Scully-and Skinner fit into neither.

Skinner flopped over onto his back.

"There's nothing you can do, Agent Mulder.  It was a mistake
even to bring it up."

Mulder heard the lonely note in Skinner's voice.  "You don't
think it has something to do with the case?"

"I think it was a coincidence, Mulder, nothing more, nothing
less."

"Mmmm."  Mulder nodded, sitting down on the edge of his
bed, facing his boss.  He'd always known how physically big
Skinner was--he'd been on the receiving end of more than one
tackle--but seeing him spread out there, glasses off, looking
ragged and worn in the t.v. light, Mulder thought Skinner
seemed not only big, but dense, thick with isolation.

"You know, when I was younger," Mulder said, "I was
convinced that dreams were real, that they were a parallel
universe that we went to at night."

Skinner snorted lightly.

"I never understood why I couldn't just go back to the place
where I left off the night before."

"You remember your dreams?"  Skinner turned his face
toward the younger man.

"Don't you?" Mulder asked, and Skinner's expression closed.

"Sure," he answered.  "The bad ones."

"Are there any other kind?" Mulder asked, and was shocked
when Skinner's low laugh rumbled in his ears.

"We need to get out of this town, Mulder.  It's fucking
depressing."

"Yes, sir." Mulder said, slipping under the covers.  "Good
night."

"Don't let the bedbugs bite."

Mulder glanced over at his boss.  "Sorry?"

"That's what my mother used to say to us--'don't let the
bedbugs bite.'"  

Raising his head slightly, Mulder looked askance at the man in
the bed next to his.

"Wish she'd been on hand when I was staring at a giant
vampire cockroach hanging from my ceiling..."

Skinner was quiet for a while, and Mulder felt faintly vulgar
for having mentioned the episode.  Just another reminder of
how at odds he and Skinner often were.

Perhaps trying to make amends, Skinner's low, smooth voice
met his ears again.

"My mother used to leave a flashlight on the nightstand.  My
brother Daniel was afraid of the dark.  She'd kiss us good
night and check under our beds with this big square red
flashlight, must have been my father's once, and then leave it
for us, just in case.  To keep the monsters away."

"She had a monster spray.  My mom.   A plastic spray bottle,"
Mulder explained, "with water in it and some of her perfume. 
She would spray it in our rooms to protect us."

"Did it work?"

"I'm still here, sir," Mulder said, smiling in the dark.

"That you are.  Good night, Mulder."

"Night," Mulder murmured.  He didn't say it, but the phrase
kept circling, running around and around, chasing its own tail: 
don't let the bedbugs bite, don't let them bite, don't let the
bedbugs bite.  The giant, bloodthirsty, fanged, wall-crawling
bedbugs . . .

He dreamed of his mother that night, of perfume.

***end 5/7***