Lonely Nightmare VIII: Empty Promise, Empty Hand
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0
***
“ . . . when empty promise means empty hands . . . ”
***
Mulder had seen his partner like this a hundred times, but it was better to be the one watching rather than the one receiving her ministrations. It involved less physical pain, at least, he thought, watching her crouch in front of Alan Nelson, pulling the blanket tight around his shoulders.
“Did you walk here, Alan?” she asked, moving her finger in front of his eyes. Mulder had a vague sense of deja vu. How many times had she done that to him, one hand resting on his forehead, her blue eyes staring into his.
“I ran,” he said.
She nodded.
“And your sister?”
“She’s gone,” he said, in that same dull monotone.
“How do you know?” Scully asked, settling back on her heels.
“The door . . . ” Alan swallowed, and began again. “I was asleep. And I heard something, and the door was open, and there was . . . ” He bowed his head into his hands and Mulder knew that he was trying not to cry. “There was blood on the door. Her hand. A hand print.”
Scully draped her arm over the boy’s back, rubbing gently at his shoulder. Mulder nodded at her.
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing his own coat and handing it to her. She slung it over Alan’s shoulders. “We have to get you back home before your parents get there. We can’t let them find the bl--the door open.”
The snow had increased: everything was a flurry of white. Alan’s tracks up to their door were already half full of snow, and Mulder wondered how the kid had seen to even get to the motel, how he had run what must be at least five miles in this blizzard. Scully climbed in the back with Alan, and Mulder slid behind the wheel, feeling absurdly like this had been happening to him over and over again. Somehow he was always sitting in the front seat alone. He pulled out of the parking lot slowly, fighting to see through the endless swarming movement of the snow.
He couldn’t go more than five or ten miles an hour, squinting to see the sides of the road.
“The lights,” Alan said.
“What?”
“Turn off your lights. You’ll see better.”
Mulder flicked the lights off. Without the glare from the headlights, Mulder could see the illumination from the town on the clouds, and the dark shapes of the trees on either side. He sped up to twenty miles and hour and had to leave it there. Any faster and they would fishtail into a ditch and Lisa would be lost.
It took them almost half an hour to get back to Alan’s house, where, sure enough, the door was still hanging open and the lights were blazing. Mulder wondered what had happened to small town hospitality that none of the Nelson’s neighbors would have come over to see why their door was left standing open in the middle of a fucking blizzard, but when he looked around, all the other houses were dark. No one seemed to have seen. Or no one wanted to be seen, not when the beast was loose. It was stupid, but Mulder shivered anyway.
They took Alan inside and sat him in the living room. Mulder looked at the door. It looked like Alan had been wrong: the beast didn’t need to be invited in, it just knocked on the door and took you when you opened it. Right there, near the middle of the white door, right above the middle marker, was the handprint. It was a palm print, actually: the palm had hit the door and then been dragged downward, smearing the marking. No fingerprints. Of course, if it was Lisa Nelson’s, the prints probably wouldn’t have matched anyway. Girls like Lisa didn’t have records.
Mulder held his right hand over the print, measuring its size. Small, like Scully’s hand, probably smaller. And high up on the door like that: the print someone would make reaching for the door, if she were trying for the doorknob, say. If she were being carried away over someone’s shoulder.
Mulder spun on his heel, hand on his gun.
“Who’s there?” he demanded. He couldn’t see past the edge of the porch: everything was a blur out there, a swirl of shadows and snow. Nothing seemed to answer.
Mulder turned and went into the house, locking the door behind him. The wind howled.
***
Alan sat in front of the television, sipping soup from a cup with a glazed expression on his face. There had been a message on the machine for “Lisa, dear, and Alan” saying that Mr. and Mrs. Nelson would be staying in Madison overnight because of the storm, but not to hesitate to call if anything went wrong. Mulder had glanced at Scully when he heard that, but she had shaken her head. Best to wait, she was thinking, and for once, Mulder agreed completely.
They sat at the dining room table, looking at the back of Alan’s head, arguing in whispers.
“It’s a blizzard, Mulder!” she hissed. “We can’t go out there and look for her. Even if she’s still alive, we could never find her in this weather. We don’t know who took her, we don’t even know where to start.”
“Scully, you want to just sit here until his parents come home?”
She was angry, he knew, but not at the idea of going after Lisa. He knew that she wanted to do that more than anything. If anyone knew what it was like to go missing, Scully did. She didn’t want to sit here with a nice hot mug of coffee at her elbow and watch Alan Nelson slowly go into catatonic shock. Scully was reasonable, and she was right. They couldn’t go out in the storm, and they couldn’t just stay here.
Mulder stood up and grabbed his coat.
“Mulder!” she hissed, shaking her head at him, trying not to catch Alan’s attention. He leaned in close, so close that he could smell the scent of her soap on her neck.
“Stay with him,” he said. “I’m going to go to the police station, see if I can get the rest of those reports. Maybe there’s something in there.”
She sighed, and he knew she wanted to argue, but she wouldn’t. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was reasonably safe and might even help. She wouldn’t argue with him.
“Fine,” she said, finally. “But be careful.”
“Always am,” he said, smiling.
She grabbed the lapels of his coat and tugged on them suddenly, sharply. It was unlike her to be so abrupt: Mulder found himself staring down into her blue blue eyes.
“I mean it, Mulder,” she said. “Don’t go ditching me again. Be careful.”
This is what fear looks like, he realized, seeing the brief faint tremble of her lip. She didn’t want to hear any of glib promises now, or any of his smart remarks. A girl had done missing in the middle of a blizzard and left only a bloody handprint on the door, and Scully didn’t need his careless humor. She needed his truth.
“I will,” he said, and tried to smile, but she was already looking down, looking away, the way she always did when it was too much for them to look him in the eye. Someday, he thought, someday he would take her chin in his fingers and force her to look at him and that would be the day when he kissed her. “I will,” he said.
She let go of his coat.
When he turned back to pull the door shut against the wind, he saw that she was still standing there in the bright dining room, her arms folded around her waist, watching him. He did not smile.
***end 8/13***
How many reasons do they need?