*IV*

3:15 A.M., Hegel Place

Dana Scully's mouth tasted sour; contact lenses felt brittle in eyes that
had scrutinized a gazillion mug shots. Her small sounds were transformed by
the stairwell into booming distortions that made her head ache. Reached the
top step and a few more loud reports from her heels and she shoved open the
fire door and walked the carpeted hall with relief.
She let herself in with a jangle of keys and slapped on the lights. Her
pumps tap-tapped--quieter--bringing her into his living room to survey with
hands on hips. It looked neater for the toss team's efforts. Maybe this
bunch moonlighted as a maid service. But she was pretty sure a white glove
test would turn up something.
Scully began in the kitchen. Opened cabinets to find plates, cups, glasses,
bowls--four of each--boxes of macaroni and cheese, cup-'o-soups, instant
mashed potatoes, heat-and-serve stew. She picked up a can of vegetarian
chili and looked at the label with pursed lips. Thought about other nights
when she'd ransacked this apartment--other, equally terrible times when
she'd feared he was hurt or dying or waiting to be killed. This fucking
chili had been there then, too.
Scully slammed the can back into the cabinet, pawed through a cache of
cookies and candy bars, a bulk-aisle plastic bag of sunflower seeds. Below
the countertop there were a few pots and a toaster, a colander and frying
pan. The drawers held four sets of silverware, knives, a church key and
spatula, a few wooden stirring spoons. In the refrigerator, a few bottles
of dark English ale, wrapped cheese slices, butter, and a few liter
containers of Sprite and Coke lying sideways on the shelf. Not enough to
count on her fingers; nothing to perish. She nodded to herself, moved
on--crossed the drab living room to follow the hall.
As the bathroom lights snapped on, Scully breathed Soft Scrub and the
whisky scent of his cologne. The glass bottle sat on the toilet lid--open;
razor precarious on the edge of the sink. Scully picked it up, fingered the
handle. Remembered Mulder bringing the blade down over the swell of a
cheek, along the line of his jaw. Saw him drag it carefully up a vulnerable
throat. The razor took stubble and foam and left pale, smooth skin over his
jugular's flickering course. A faster pulse answered memory's in the hollow
of her clavicle.
Scully found the double bed made up exactly as she'd last left it except
for a rumpled place at the foot where'd he'd sat to put his shoes on,
maybe. Her face felt hot and the white gloss wall paint gave nothing to
cling to--no paintings or posters, and when her eyes slipped down, no clock
on the bedside table and nothing but a comb and lint brush on the
dressertop.
She wiped her hands down her face, wrapped fingers around the brass pull of
the top dresser drawer. Inside were boxers and briefs, gym socks and dress
socks, shorts and sweats and jock straps. Before familiarity could loose
her purpose, she shoved the warped drawer closed and squatted to frown at
the tarnished pull of the drawer beneath.
It opened with a firm tug that shifted contents forward: birthday cards and
valentines and a crayon drawing of a box house with squiggled smoke from
its chimney. The photos were there, too--the beloved, cloying child on
Halloween, ripping open a Christmas gift, lighting the third candle of a
menorah; as an infant propped against a nervous, dark-eyed boy. And Scully
wished there were more images--pictures of bones and a shallow woodland
grave.
She shut the drawer and turned toward the closet as she rose from her
crouch. A little less fear in her stomach and she was glad. Whatever he was
up to, wherever he had gone, he had meant to come home.
The folding door to the closet always stuck. Scully gave the gold enameled
knobs a few tugs and a bash to the hinges before it revealed Mulder's full
collection of "FBI sugarboy suits," cleaned and starched shirts still in
the dry cleaner's bags, a rack of silk neckties. His cologne clung to the
fine cloths of the suit jackets. She worked her lip with front teeth as she
searched all the pockets, finding nothing but spare change and gum
wrappers.
Up on her tip-toes, Scully stretched calf muscles to grab and pull down a
green Rubbermaid storage box from the closet's top shelf. Carried it to the
bed and let it drop heavy on the mattress. The impressions of the handles
throbbed across her palms as Scully pulled off the lid off to see breasts
and butts and stiletto heels on magazine covers and video cases. Her lips
spread to a smirk. Where the real stuff was, God alone knew.
She pawed through the collection looking for something different, something
new. Found nothing.
"God damn it, Mulder!" Scully swore as she heaved the storage box back up
to its place on the shelf and kept moving. Went to the hall closet and
threw the door open. The blanket and pillow Mulder used were there, in a
folded stack on the floor beneath the hems of his coats. The pillow, she
saw, still carried the vague impression of his head. Scully picked up the
fluffy bundle and hugged it. The rush of air as she compressed it against
her chest released yet another microburst of cologne. She wanted to sit
down and weep, she wanted to pummel him, she wanted to hold him close, she
wanted to ream him a new asshole for all the grief he put her through. The
constant fucking grief. Scully threw the pillow back into the closet and
walked away.
Stiff-angry fingers flipped the switch to illuminate Mulder's study, lined
along three walls by crowded book shelves. Blue eyes ran over the lazy-boy,
her old living room floor lamp and a braided rug. Two books on the floor by
the chair and Mulder's reading glasses resting on the spread pages of the
top volume.
Scully sat, folded up the glasses and laid them softly on a shelf. Picked
up the open book and looked at the page header: "Sexual Slavery in
America." The left page was text. At right, the first of the
illustrations--a group of young women wrapped in blankets being led toward
ambulances and squad cars.
"These women were rescued by the FBI from an Oregon private estate in 1987.
All the women were sexual slaves of the estate's owner, a millionaire named
Kenneth DiAgosti," the caption read. "All had been bought by DiAgosti at
puberty and were submissives in DiAgosti's bondage and discipline
fantasies. The women had been left uneducated and cut off from the events
of the normal world. All required extensive reacclimation to society. The
process was not always successful. Several of the former slaves committed
suicide or later vanished, perhaps returning voluntarily to the only life
they knew."
She felt a quiver down the back of her neck, then along her spine. Knew
children and women and young men were bought and sold everyday in secret.
Hell, one of the FBI's 1908 mandates was not just to end forced labor, it
was to fight peonage. Put the book down and reached for the second: 'Sexual
Slavery in America.' by Mary Anne Graham.
Scully flipped the pages, feeling where the book wanted to fall open.
There--two-thirds of the way through. It was the same image. A piece of a
junk mail envelope tucked inside, covered in Mulder's notes.
Numbers--looked like a series of Bureau case numbers. She stuffed the list
into her coat pocket and carried the books with her to the living room.
The bills and letters on Mulder's desk had been stacked by the neat-freak
toss team. Scully looked through them, letting them fall more naturally,
then scanned the disks he kept in a vertical stack by the keyboard.
Frowning, she flipped his computer on and loaded the top disk; found it
empty except for a document titled "If this is Paris...." An eyebrow raised
and she double clicked the mouse. The document opened--showed one line of
six point type. Her heart pumped faster as she highlighted and raised it to
fourteen and....
"Hello, Scully. If you're reading this, I must be dead."
God damn him. "It wasn't funny the last time I fell for it, Mulder," she
snapped at the screen. "What as it then? 'Meet me in St. Louis'?"
Red-faced, Scully grabbed the next disk from the stack and loaded it. Found
postings from Duke, notices from other paranormal institutes, the latest
alt.fortean and alt.folklore and alt.urban_legend. Nothing. Just Mulder
keeping up with the parapsychological Joneses. The other disks held more of
the same from earlier dates. She clicked open the hard drive and took a
look around. There were no new documents and none she found substantially
changed. Scully shook her head, rubbed her eyes. Her brain hurt and she was
missing something. They were all missing something.
She looked up at southwestern print curtains and around the room again. The
back of her neck prickled--just...prickled--and the hair on her arms was
stirring. The unease made her turn full circle, skimming the walls and the
silkscreen prints. Her eyes returned to the curtains and dropped down to
the computer, now with its screen saver bringing up poetry.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together.
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar....
Fucking Eliot.
Nothing. Scully saw nothing. Just disks and bills and copies of the
'Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders IV,' the 'Crime
Classification Manual,' and the video tape drive.
Scully stared at the light winking on its face.
Mulder didn't have any tapes on his desk. Where did he keep his computer
video files? Slowly, she turned to her left, almost afraid that she
wouldn't see the audio cassettes that sat on his bookcase in a rack. But
his music was there: Tom Waits and Stravinsky and The October Project,
Pearl Jam, Public Image Limited, Ella Fitzgerald, and the copy of Tori
Amos's "Under the Pink" that she'd dubbed for him and....And Barry Manilow?
The tape felt heavy when she pulled it out; the case set solid and
comfortable in her hand with silver metallic coils gleaming in the tiny
windows. It was chrome computer tape. She blinked fast, feeling her tired
eyes burn and a wild giggle was stuck in her throat. A piece of it escaped
as Scully slotted the tape into the drive and opened the directory.
HNFSAM1, HNFSAM2. Suddenly she didn't feel like laughing anymore. Her
fingers felt tingly-numb when she opened the first file. For a moment, it
was like looking at the FBI tech lab computers. A face, modeled in planes,
stared back at her, then shifted to a more natural portrait: a woman with
unruly chocolate hair and large, dark eyes. Her cheeks ought to have been
fuller, but she looked underfed. But the lower lip was full, rounded, and
pouty. Scully swallowed and glanced at Mulder's bookcase and a snapshot
sitting at eye-level--dusty except for a thumb-pad swipe across the faces
of the children. The face on the screen was morphing into one of them.
Scully shook off a chill, muttered "Overkill." The missing persons
department of any cop shop in the country would know that parlor trick. The
face was rotating on the screen, shifting back and forth in age. Scully
eyed it with irritation. "All right. You've made your point. But what did
you tell Mulder? He's seen morphing programs bef--" she broke off as the
screen flicked to the interior of a home.
The camera work was unsophisticated and the staging crude. Two men led in a
young woman, blindfolded. Bafflement ended when the woman's blindfold was
removed. Then Scully couldn't watch anymore, no matter who this woman
really was. She squeezed her eyes shut, listened to screams and pleas and
moans through the tinny speakers and felt engulfed. There were three months
of nothing waiting to be filled. But not with this. Jesus, not this.
The video files were dated--the first from last August. Fifteen files and
the first one from August! Scully grimaced as she pictured her partner
sitting in the same chair, watching the images, letting them etch his
photographic brain. The videos might have been faked but Scully felt a sick
certainty that the video jockeys would tell her no. Tell her they were
real. Someone had told Mulder that, too. He was watching his sister and it
was all real.
Scully gritted her teeth and punched the eject, fingers closing,
white-knuckled, around the plastic case. She scrunched her eyes shut and
pounded her fist on the desk, "You bastard, Mulder, where did you go? You
promised me, you promised me you wouldn't pull this shit on me again! You
promised you'd let me in! That we'd...oh, Damn it!" Her arm snaked and the
tape clattered off the wall across the room. Scully stared at nothing, eyes
blurring. Her muscles trembled when she stood and walked to the kitchen to
stare at the coffee pot. Didn't know how long she stood there, but her
contact lenses were like glass when she finally blinked and shook her head.
She was bleary-eyed and her muscles felt slack. Wanted to give in, wanted
to sleep. Wondered if whoever had Mulder would let him sleep. The thought
snapped her eyes open wide. He had to have left her something--a piece of
the road map to his destination. With forced persistence, she strode back
into the living room to search Mulder's desk drawers then felt along the
underside of the desktop with her fingers. Got down on hands and knees on
the hard floor and looked up at the jointures of the wood. Just cobwebs.
"Shit!" Her cranium banged against dark-stained oak when she tried to stand
up.
One hand on her thrumming skull, the other gripping a hip, Scully took a
final long glance around the living room then rubbed her face hard and
tried to think of what to do next. Didn'tknowdidn't know--how was she going
to find him if she didn't know? Motherofgod. Had to to sleep a while. Human
weakness and, please God, Mulder, forgive.
--Lisby
lisby@earthlink.net