Lonely Nightmare V: Passing Glimmer
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0
***
“ . . . and a passing glimmer warm beneath your skin . . . ”
***
The Onowani Lodge was back near the highway, about fifteen minutes from downtown. Scully drove. The headlights cut through the dark and the light sprinkling of snow that was beginning to fall. Mulder looked out the window into the utter blackness of a winter night without streetlights or the moon to brighten it. He didn’t know if Alan Nelson was right, but he understood why the kid was afraid.
They had adjoining rooms, of course, and Mulder shucked his outer clothes and piled the thin pillows of the bed up against the faux headboard that was nailed to the wall. The Marriott it was not. The bedspread beneath his socks was pilled in that strange way that happened to polyester blends that had been washed one too many times, and the mattress felt like a board beneath his ass. What could you expect for $21.99 a night, he supposed, listening for the sound of Scully’s shower.
She was a night showerer, another sign of their innate incompatibility. How could someone shower at night and then go to bed and get up and put clean clothes on? It seemed wrong to him in some complete and universe-defining way, but when he had tried to explain it to Scully, she had just looked at him with a blank expression on her face, as if his statement had been below the effort of her response. Lisa Nelson’s expression had been remarkably similar, come to think of it.
He plugged in the laptop, and the phone cord, and got to work. Disappearances, folklore of Wisconsin not specifically tied to Onowani, the yeti, occult activity . . . he ran through the databases on intuition, darting here and there, searching, reading, saving, seeing if he could pull together something that would make sense of the case in an X-files universe. He would wait for Scully to cover the more mundane possibilities: serial killer, kidnapper, pedophile, coincidental and/or copycat runaways. He found nothing. Some interesting Native American legends about animal spirits and hauntings, but nothing that entailed the kidnapping of teenagers.
Scully’s shower went off, and her heard her rummaging in her room. After a while she showed up in her pajamas, her own laptop tucked under her arm. She had no make-up on, and her hair was still damp. He remembered the first time he had seen her this way, on their second case. That first case, also involving disappearing teenagers, he remembered suddenly, making a mental note to go back through that file, she had come to his room afraid that she had been marked. She had hugged him, he remembered, and he has been fool enough to not really hug her back.
But the second case, she had not come running to him, just knocked and come in, in her thick robe, her computer under her arm and her face clean of make-up, just like she was now, only slightly younger. Mulder had been touched by her confidence in revealing her naked face to him so soon in their partnership. It seemed like a brave thing for a new female agent to do. It still touched him, sometimes.
“Anything good?” she asked.
He shook his head, running down all the possibilities he was looking into. She picked up where he left off, with the human offender possibilities, and they were off and running.
***
Three and a half hours later, they still had nothing. Actually, they had less than nothing, because Scully had accessed the local web version of the newspaper (“welcome to the twenty-first century” he’d said with amazement, when she turned her screen triumphantly toward him), and the dates of the disappearances did not seem to coincide with any discernible pattern, either of the occult or of a ritualized serial killer.
“So if he is human, he’s not following a pattern we know about,” she said, resting her chin in her hand.
“And if he’s not human?” Mulder asked, mostly because it was required of him.
“We’re fucked,” she answered. They both laughed.
Scully sighed, closing her laptop with a definitive click. “That’s it for me,” she said. “I’m going to bed.” When she stretched, her pajama top lifted, almost revealing her stomach. Mulder tried not to stare, hoping. He was sorry for what he had said to her, before, about needing to get away from her, about knowing she would be in Philadelphia. He was sorry, because he thought that someone else might have gotten to see her stretch before bed, and he hadn’t realized it at the time, but he didn’t like that thought.
“You don’t want to watch some bad interviews on late night t.v.? It’s on an hour earlier here in the Midwest.”
She smiled. “No thanks, Mulder. Tomorrow we go to the high school, right?”
“Fun with adolescents,” he said. “I can hardly remember myself being that young.”
She stopped in the doorway, considering something. “I was thinking,” she said. “I don’t remember being that old, when I was their age.”
“The world moves on, Scully.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Maybe it shouldn’t. G’night, Mulder.”
“Night.”
Ten minutes later, she was back in the doorway, two pillows in one hand, and a thin cotton blanket in the other. Mulder looked up.
“If you’re spoiling for a pillow fight, I should warn you that I forgot my negligee,” he said.
She wrinkled her lip at him. “My heater’s broken.”
“Uh huh. So you’re not interested in the fact that I wear women’s clothing to bed?”
“It’s broken,” she said.
He went and looked, and sure enough, it was broken: the knob would turn and turn on both directions, but the electric heating coils would not kick on, and there was no answer at the front desk because it closed at nine according to the cardboard flyer in the nightstand drawer. Mulder wondered what they would have done if they had not had two rooms to begin with.
“Okay,” he said, pulling back the covers. “Come into my parlour.”
He knew that she knew he was kidding, but her smile was still strained, and after she lay down, she turned on her side away from him.
“Will the t.v. bother you?”
“Where’s the remote?” she asked.
“Chained to the table.”
“I’m fine,” she said. She was apparently telling the truth, because a few minutes later her breathing had slowed and she was asleep.
***
He woke up from a dream of sex in total darkness, anonymous fucking with an unknown woman who was definitely Scully although he couldn’t see her face, couldn’t even touch her, just slide in and out and in and out and want to die because it felt so good, and he knew that someone was looking for him, someone dangerous, someone snuffling around the window, but he couldn’t give this up, he couldn’t stop fucking Scully, and he woke up hard, and rubbing a little against the mattress, and mortally embarrassed that he might have woken her as well, with his own private horror show pornography.
He hadn’t.
She was still asleep, facing him now, her skin reflecting the silver blue flicker of the t.v. screen. She had one hand under her face, and the other curled against her chest, and her face was so close to his that he could feel her breath, almost. Her mouth was slightly open.
Mulder pulled his hand up from underneath his stomach. He slept on his back on the couch all the time, but in bed his body rebelled and he inevitably ended up on his stomach, hands and arms numb from being slept on. The psychologist in him felt that this was a sign of insecurity, that the increased room in the bed left him feeling vulnerable. He often ignored the psychologist in him.
He reached over, touching his fingertip to the smooth skin of her lip. Her breath was warm and moist against his finger. She did not wake.
He wanted to slide forward and kiss her while she was still asleep, so that he would feel her wake up against his mouth. He wanted to taste her return to consciousness. He wanted to drape his arm over her shoulder and pull her to him, so that she would be curled up against him and the wind could howl all night, and when he woke up from its noise he would feel her breasts against his chest and sigh and go back to sleep. He sighed, and did not move.
Besides the fact that she would probably knee him in the balls if he laid a hand on her, he couldn’t do these things because he wasn’t sure why he was doing them. Sure, Scully was beautiful; sure, Scully was smart; sure, Scully was everything he could ever want in a woman and she had danced through his private fantasies more than once over the last three years or so, but these almost irresistible impulses had never been there before, not until he told her he was taking a vacation. Not until he found out she had maybe taken a little vacation of her own. Not until Ed Jerse.
So he couldn’t, no matter how much he wanted to. Not until he was sure that it was Scully he wanted, really Scully, and he was just having some territorial pissing contest with some wacko murderer who had, despite his wacko murderer status, quite possibly seen his partner naked.
Mulder sighed.
He was a pathetic jealous jerk. A pathetic, jealous jerk with a hard-on.
He watched Scully for a while, watched her shoulders rise and fall with the even tide of her breaths, watched her eyelids flicker in REM sleep. After a while, he joined her.
***end 5/13***
I can’t help myself; it’s a New Religion: