Title:	Lonely Nightmare
Author:     	Justin Glasser
E-mail Address: Feedback happily read and
		answered at Julan777@aol.com 
Rating:     R for violence and adult situations and language
Category:	X/UST
Spoilers:   The story takes place between Never Again and Memento Mori. 
Keywords:   Mulder/Scully UST, X-file
Archive: Gossamer, yes; Ephemeral, yes; Spookys, yes; all others please ask
first.  This story can also be found at my website: 
http://www.geocities.com/justinglas

Summary:   	After Scully comes back from Philadelphia and before she is
diagnosed with cancer, she and Mulder go to Wisconsin to investigate the
disappearance of several small town teenagers.

Disclaimer: No permission has been granted, no money has been made, no
infringement is intended.

Dedication:  This story is dedicated to Marguerite, because even though time
and chance happen to us all, not all of us handle it with such grace and
strength.  For a remarkable woman.

This story was written at a white hot pace, and would have suffered
immeasurably without the enthusiasm and aid of some key people.

Marguerite

Jordan--under whose guidance I have learned the benefits of dreams, and the
importance of what is not said.  (I have also learned not to bug someone who
says your story is "fucking perfect, post is NOW NOW NOW" because even though
she's not right, she will not change her mind.)

JourneytoX--who despite being deathly ill, agreed to help me dot my "i"s and
cross my "t"s.

Dawn M. Pares--who when I showed her the draft said "I hate you" and "let me do
a read for you."  I like her for the former, and I'm grateful to her for the
latter.

Meredith--whose help I enlisted on a totally different story that she still
hasn't seen, and who shifted gears admirably when I sent this instead, turning
it all around in such a short time that I stand back in awe and appreciation.

Notes (in case you care):  

"Because you're lonely in your nightmare, let me in."

The title of "Lonely Nightmare" and all of the chapter titles for the story
come from the song "Lonely in Your Nightmare" by Duran Duran.  Duran Duran, for
those of you who don't know, was (is?) a cheesy pop group most famous in the
1980s for such hits as "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Girls on Film."  They were
an awesome group, frankly, and I highly recommend that you check them out
(especially the Decade album, which has all their greatest hits).  

At any rate, in a fit of nostalgia, I was listening to their second album, Rio,
when I heard the song "Lonely in Your Nightmare" and the idea for the story
came to me, complete, whole, and entirely finished in my head.  I wrote the
whole thing in three days.  And I hope you like it.  I will spare you the pain
of enduring them here, but if you would like the lyrics to "Lonely in Your
Nightmare," (even if you hate the story) please feel free to e-mail me: there
can never be too many people who like Duran Duran in my opinion.  J.


Lonely Nightmare:  I-Delta Traces
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

This story is also available at 
www.geocities.com/Justinglas

***

"I see the delta traces living lonely out on the limb."

***

He dreamed that Scully had a new boyfriend, which was silly because she didn't
even have an old one, but that didn't matter in the dream.  In the dream, he
saw her walking down the hall of his old high school wearing the black suit he
liked so much, the one with the long skirt, and holding hands with Tommy
Christley, the captain of the basketball team.  He stood by his locker,
watching her as she walked by.   His calculus book slid out of his arms and
onto his foot and he thought, "I am sorry."

Mulder woke up with a pain in his foot and empty arms.

He knew he should just shake it off--the dream was a combination of the growing
distance between Scully and himself, and a recollection of his high school
feelings of inadequacy and it didn't mean anything, not really--but it followed
him into the shower.  He stood in the scalding hot water (he couldn't get the
water hot enough lately, not even when he came out looking like a freshly
boiled lobster) and thought about the image of her all red hair and black suit
against the blue of the lockers, passing him by without a second glance.  Those
had been his old high school lockers--blue and gold for the school colors--and
he remembered standing just there, day after day, while girls walked by on the
arms of the other basketball players.  He hadn't been good with women then. 
Not like now, he thought, reaching for the soap.  Not like now, he thought,
reaching for himself, shaking his head in disbelief.

Afterwards, though, the dream had not left him.  He shaved, got dressed, looked
at thin approximations of food in his kitchen and headed out the door, and the
dream still followed him.  It went with him as he got in the car, it hung out
in the passenger seat when he almost rear-ended the woman in front of him, it
hovered near his shoulder when he pulled into the parking lot.  Over and over
again, he saw the scene in his head, the flash of red and black and blue and
Scully not looking at him, and the other guy not looking at him and the thud of
the book hitting his foot.  He no longer felt the pain, but riding the elevator
down to the basement, he thought it was weird that the scene should stay with
him so long.  He had had dreams before, even dreams that seemed precognitive,
hell, even dreams that *were* precognitive if you weren't Dana Scully, but this
one seemed different.  It wasn't telling him the location of a dead little
girl.  It wasn't telling him that someone he loved was in danger.  It wasn't
even telling him that he wanted to kill his already-dead father and have sex
with his mother, which would have been disturbing as he'd always thought Freud
was over-rated, but not surprising.  The dream wasn't telling him any of those
things, but it certainly seemed to be trying to signify something.

He sighed and pushed open the door.  

Scully was already there.  Maybe he would tell her the dream and she would look
at him like he was crazy and smile that broad goofy smile she always gave him
when he was being a nutcase. Maybe she would be ridiculously flattered.  Maybe
she had dreamed of him too, last night, and maybe he had been naked.

"Hey, Mulder," she said, looking up from his desk.  She was typing something on
the laptop, probably her version of the report from the last case.  That was
part of this new distance, he thought, hanging up his coat.  Before, she would
want to see what he had to say.  She would read his reports, frowning in spots,
looking up at him as if she could not believe he would put such things on
paper.  Then she would write her own reports and slide them over the desk,
leaving him to respond to her words in his own version.  They rarely agreed,
but they had been partners, shoring up each others arguments with their own
counter arguments.  Now she simply typed and printed and turned them in.  He
sighed.  He was pouting and he knew it.

"Anything good?" he asked, sitting in the chair across from her.  She had sat
there just two weeks ago, sat there and said, "everything isn't about you,
Mulder."  It had surprised him that he was surprised by that.  Ten things you
don't want to know about your relationship with your partner for a hundred,
Alex.

"Just a report.  What do you have on your plate for today?"

"Mail opening.  Reports.  I'm desk jockey with a vengeance today, Scully."  

She looked up and smiled briefly, but it wasn't the same.  It wasn't the same
kind of smile she had given in response to his smartass bullshit three weeks
ago.  Mulder resisted the impulse to say something else and leaned forward,
scooping the mail out of the in-box.  Before he could ask, she slid the letter
opener across the blotter.

"Thanks," he said.  She nodded, but did not look up.

He sliced open one envelope after another.  Info he had requested as research
on a case they had closed two months ago, an advertisement for time-share
condos addressed to Ms. Fox Mulder, a notice that the Bureau health plan was
about to be changed, several news clippings from the Weekly World News about
aliens in Utah accompanied by self-important letters from believers ("I *new*
that you shuld know about this, Mister. Mulder, because I was there and this IS
THE TRUTH"-how come all of his fellow believers were wackos who couldn't
fucking spell, he wondered for about the six thousandth time), and an envelope
with the address scribbled on it in big letters:  Frank Mulder, FBI  Paranormal
Division, Washington D.C.  The mail guys must have gotten a real kick out of
that one, he thought, sliding the letter opener into the corner.

The letter addressed to Frank Mulder, Paranormal Division wasn't the typical
loony shit that usually came to him via the address-impaired.  It was hand
written, like all the rest of them were, but the handwriting was on notebook
paper that had been torn out of a spiral binder--the left edge of the sheet was
all fringed where it had been bound--and the handwriting was neat, but loopy,
full of unnecessary bubbles and swirls.

Dear Mr. Mulder, the letter said.

I know that it is really weird to be writing to you like this because this is
not how you get your cases, but I think there is something going on in my town
that you should know about.  I know you investigate stuff like ghosts and
monsters and stuff like that because I saw your name in the paper when you
solved that kidnapping case, and I think that something like that lives in my
town.  I'm not the only one who thinks that.  I can't really describe what's
happening here, because I've never seen it, but Alan has seen it and he thinks
it's the devil.  I don't think it is, but people are missing and if you don't
come who will stop it?  The police are no help.  They belong to it.  I would
really appreciate it if you could come and see if Alan is right or if we're
just being paranoid.  I would be so grateful!

Thank you in advance,
Lisa Nelson

Mulder flipped the letter over.  Nothing on the back.  He read it again.  A
kid.  A kid who saw his name in the newspaper in--he flipped the envelope
over--Wisconsin, and decided to write him a letter because her friend Alan was
telling her boogie stories.  He looked over at Scully, who was still typing,
biting her lip gently in concentration.  He glanced at his in-box, which was
empty, and at the file cabinets, which were full.  He looked at the letter
again, at the blue ballpoint pen ink on the wide-lined paper.  At the
exclamation point at the end, which didn't have just a dot at the bottom but a
big circle.  All the "i"s had circles, too, instead of dots, and he wondered
what might be going on in--he flipped the envelope again--Onowani, Wisconsin
that would cause a girl who used circles instead of dots to write to the FBI.

"How would you feel about a road trip, Scully?" he asked.  She lifted her eyes
to his and he handed the letter over.  She glanced at the envelope.  Read the
letter.

"Mulder," she said.  "I thought you would never ask."

Halfway through the paperwork he remembered the dream. It no longer seemed
important enough to tell her.

***end 1/13***

Lonely Nightmare II:  Ice Age
by Justin Glasser

***

"Because you've made it through your ice age, let me in."

***

He knew Wisconsin would be cold, but he only knew it intellectually, the way he
knew you could stop a shark attack by hitting it hard on the nose, or that you
couldn't measure both the speed and location of a subatomic particle
simultaneously.  That Wisconsin in winter was cold was general knowledge, but
Mulder didn't have any actual experience with it.  Until now.

Scully was at the luggage carousel collecting their suitcases and Mulder had
left to get the cab.  He had his coat on, of course, and his gloves in his
pockets, and he was Special Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI, and he had been to
places that had winter before, hell he'd been to the *Arctic* before, so he
thought he could handle a little cab reconnaissance, even if the pilot on the
plane had announced something ludicrously low as the local temperature.  He
went through the sliding glass doors, and the wind whipped his unbuttoned coat
wide open and brought tears to his eyes, tears that seemed to be freezing even
as they formed, and the blood in his hands seemed to be solidifying because he
couldn't find his pockets let alone his damn gloves, and he took a breath so
sharp he thought his lungs would implode with the sheer simple *coldness* of
it, and he turned and bolted back inside just before the doors slid closed.

"Fuck!"  He clamped his hands down over his arms and rubbed.  "Holy FUCK!"

"Mulder?"  Scully was wheeling one of those carts that look like grocery carts
on a crash diet, piled with their bags.  "Are you okay?"

"It's cold out," he said, wondering how many of the people waiting for their
luggage had heard him.  Scully didn't roll her eyes at him, but he thought she
might have been, internally.  "It's *really* cold out," he explained.

She nodded.  

After a second, he let go of his arms and began to button his coat.  "I'll go
get us a cab."

"You do that," she said.

He did it, cursing under his breath all the time, wondering why the cabbie
didn't fucking *help* with the luggage for Pete's sake, until he realized that
if he were making as much money as the cabbie was making, he wouldn't be
getting out of his nice warm car to help yahoos with their luggage either.  He
and Scully piled into the back seat in a bundle of long winter coats, and
Scully leaned forward and told him the name of the hotel.  She sat back,
comfortably close.  She tilted her head back against the back of the seat and
closed her eyes.

"Tired?" he asked.  He could see all of her neck, down into the collar of her
coat.  Her skin was very pale.  She looked like the kind of woman who hickeyed
easily. He wondered if Ed Jerse could validate that suspicion.

"You want to work?"  She had not opened her eyes.

"Nah.  Nothing to work on, really.  Onowani doesn't have any history of any
usual occurrences, no folklore about mysterious disappearances, nothing.  It's
just a town, like a thousand other small towns around here."

"I thought you guys were staying at the Marriott," the cabbie said.

"We are," Mulder answered.

"Well, then, why would you go to Onowani?"  the cabbie asked.  Mulder caught
his eye in the rear view mirror.  "No place for a nice couple like you."  

Mulder noticed that Scully had opened her eyes and was watching the cabbie's
profile.  "We have business there," she said.

The cabbie laughed.  "Business?  That's new.  No one has business in Onowani,
unless they're a travel agent.  Only thing going on in Onowani is leaving."

"Why is that?" Mulder asked.  The cabbie shrugged.

He sat back, hardly aware that he had leaned forward to talk to the man.  "What
do you think, Scully?" he murmured.

She shrugged, too.  She had closed her eyes again, and was leaning against his
side.  She was indescribably warm.

When they were getting out under the canopy of the Marriott, bell boys hustling
in ski jackets with the name of the hotel emblazoned on the back, Mulder leaned
in the cabbie's window.

"Why do people leave Onowani?" he asked, handing the cabbie the fare money.

The cabbie shrugged again.  "No reason, man.  Small town.  You know."

"I don't know," Mulder said, drawing a fifty out of his wallet.  "Why don't you
tell me?"

The cabbie took the money and smiled.  "All I'm saying, man, is that if you got
business in Onowani, you want to get it done while the sun shines.  Place like
that is not a place you want to be when it gets dark."  He started to roll up
his window.

"Wait!" Mulder held his gloved hand over the edge of the window; it kept going
up.  "Why not?" he yelled.  The cabbie, safe behind the glass of his closed
window, smiled and shrugged.

***

They had the cheapest rooms at the Marriott, which was was a little like saying
they had ordered the cheapest caviar at the Ritz, Mulder thought, sprawling on
the soft mattress.  Rooms like this were not covered in the expense account,
but he had some extra room on the credit card, and the room stipend would cover
some of it, so he'd figured what the hell.  After his bleak introduction to
Wisconsin winter, he was glad he had added the expense.

Scully knocked on the connecting door.

"It's open."

She had already changed too, but her men's cut pajamas and white socks seemed
so much more adult than his sweatpants and raggedy gray t-shirt combination. 
Scully was put together even when she went to bed.  It was a quality he
alternately loved and hated about her.

"What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" he asked, tapping the
empty end of the bed with his foot in invitation.

"Funny, I was just going to ask you the same thing." She didn't sit down.  He
changed a channel on the t.v. aiming the remote from above his head.

"Is this the part where you challenge my judgment about the nature of the cases
we should be taking and tell me that this isn't an X-file?"

She smiled, but leaned in the doorway instead of sitting down.  "I was just
wondering, Mulder."

He smiled.  Changed the channel.  "I got a letter, it seemed interesting, the
holidays are over, and we got nothing but time.  I figured we might as well see
the sights, Scully."

She nodded.  "I figured.  For the record, this isn't an X-file."

"Duly noted, Agent," he said.  She turned to go back into her room.  He wished
she'd have sat down.  He watched the channels change on the t.v.

"Hey Mulder," she said, and even though he knew it would be nothing, he felt
his heart stutter in his chest. 

"Yeah?"

"Next time you want to see the sights, can't there be an X-file in Hawaii?"

"Good night, Scully," he said, and he knew that he was smiling.

***

He came awake abruptly to the sounds of a man shouting, and Scully tearing at
his blankets.

"Hey!" he yelled, not sure if he was yelling at her, or for her, if he was
helping or hindering.  It was a weary and familiar feeling.  Scully pushed at
him, tugging at the sheets, shoving her hands under his body.  Mulder felt his
back arch upward.

"Hey!" he yelled again, this time definitely at her.  The man was shouting
something about TEMPERATURES STAYING LOW FOR MOST OF THE WEE--

--and then there was silence.

And Scully dropped back down on the edge of the bed, and dropped the hard and
rather heavy remote control onto his chest.

"You fell asleep on it," she said.

"Oh."

She sat there for a moment and he could see her face in the glow of the light
from the t.v. that said MUTE in big red letters at the bottom of the screen,
and he could see that she wanted to say a thousand things to him, that she was
tired, and he had woken her by falling asleep on the remote, and that she had
come running in here scared out of her mind, and he knew that she wouldn't say
any of this.  He didn't really want to say anything to her especially not--

"Sorry," he said--

because he didn't mean it.  What he meant was "stay," but he couldn't say that,
that was impossible, so he was just forced to lie here and listen to her sigh
and say--

"It's okay."--

but it wasn't okay, not really, and it hadn't been since she had gotten snowed
in in Philadelphia because he had been a jerk.  She sat there for a second,
watching the flash of the images change on the silent t.v.

"Put that on the table," she said.  Then she leaned over and picked her gun up
off the floor and he knew she really had been scared.

"I will," he said.

"Good night, Mulder," she said.  He didn't say anything, because he only wanted
to say "stay" but that was impossible.  So he kept quiet, and when she had gone
he noticed how cold it was in his own room and got up to turn up the heat.

***end 2/13***


Lonely Nightmare III: Barren Garden
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

"Because it's barren in your garden, let me in."

***

They were on the road by ten, driving west on highway 94 toward Madison. 
Mulder drove, only half listening to the hum of voices from NPR.  Scully looked
out the window.  They would be in the car for about three hours today.  Lisa
Nelson was expecting them to meet her at the diner ("the only one in town"
she'd said on the phone when Mulder asked for a name) at five.  They had
reservations at the Onowani Lodge ("the only motel in town" Lisa had said when
he asked her where they should stay) right off the highway.  Mulder suspected
that the accommodations would be somewhat less glamorous than they had been at
the Marriott.

"Remember when we were here before?" Scully asked.

Mulder nodded.  "Yep.  Couple of times."

"I never told you our family came here one summer camping."  

He glanced over at her.  "No, you never did."  He wondered what that had been
like, camping with Scully's family.  They had probably had picnics and made
smores and sung campfire songs in six-part harmony.  He knew he had an
idealized picture of Scully's childhood, but he couldn't stop himself from
imagining that she had grown up in the Navy equivalent of the Cleaver family. 
Somehow, it made him feel better about his own tortured youth to think that
Scully had escaped some of that, that she'd been normal until she met him.

"Did you like it?" he asked.

"I did, mostly.  But at night, it was strange.  We were up north, much further
than we're going today, almost to Canada, and the forest there . . . It's old,
Mulder."

"Are you saying it was *spooky*, Scully?"

She shot him a disgusted glance.  "I'm saying that there was so much there, so
much vegetation, so thick and green.  The forest seemed alive, Mulder, not
necessarily in a bad way, but I was nine.  It was a little scary, especially at
night."

"And now?" he asked, waving his hand at the window.  The hills sloped away from
the car, and trees seemed removed, as if they were prevented from reaching the
road, which seemed to stretch on in front of them forever.  It snaked like a
black line through the gentle white humps of the hills, and Mulder imagined
that life out here between Milwaukee and Madison on bright empty winter days
was quieter, somehow, than the one he had been leading in D.C.  He knew people
out here had the same problems as they did in the city, but looking at the
placid landscape, white, black, evergreen, it didn't seem the same.

"I was a girl, Mulder.  Now it seems empty."

He nodded, unsure of what to say.

"I miss him, Mulder," Scully said, and there was something in her voice that
told Mulder he should not look at her, not if he wanted to preserve her
dignity.  Not if he wanted to pretend that their partnership was all right.  "I
don't want to anymore, but I do."

He cleared his throat.  "We don't get to choose," he said, not sure if she
could hear him.

She did not answer.

***

They stopped and had lunch in Madison at some chic college-town restaurant that
served "world cuisine" and micro-brews, and Mulder had two with his hamburger,
which he had had to special order by talking to the cook specifically (the
hamburger being some strange and exotic food outside of the U.S. and
pretentious world cuisine restaurants), so Scully drove the rest of the way to
Onowani, not talking, and somewhere along the way Mulder fell asleep and didn't
wake up until he felt the car slowing down to take a curve.

He opened his eyes, and realized that he was hearing Scully sing, not along
with the radio, which was off, but just to herself, kind of out of tune and
mostly under her breath.  

"--sister golden hair surprise, and I just can't live without you--"

He didn't smile, but stretched, so that she would know he was up.

"Hey," she said, giving the impression that she was looking both at him and the
road at the same time.  "Perfect timing."

"Hmm?"  He pulled his seat back upright and looked around.

"Welcome to lovely Onowani, Mulder."  Scully stopped at a stop sign.  They were
at an intersection surrounded by pines and other evergreens.  There was nothing
else in sight except a sign: Onowani Township, population 171.

"Where's the town?" he asked.

The town, such as it was, was ahead about a half a mile, buried in the
coniferous forest.  A general store, a gas station, the diner, a hair salon, a
bar and a couple of miscellaneous store fronts lined the block that was the
main street.  Mulder could see about two blocks more of houses, some fairly
large with big porches, others nothing more than double wide trailer homes. 
Further down he saw a long low building he figured was the high school.

"Well, Disneyland it ain't, Scully," he said.

"This was your idea," she answered, opening the car door before he could even
pull his coat closed.

***

The diner was decorated in a fifties style, not, Mulder suspected, out of any
desire to capitalize on the retro appeal of a fifties restaurant, but because
the diner had, in fact, been decorated in the fifties.  The posters and record
album covers on the wall seemed slightly yellow with either age or grease, and
the linoleum was cracked and warped, but the formica speckled counters were
clean as far as he could tell and it was both bright and warm inside, so he had
no complaints.  They even had an Elvis clock, his pelvis ticking back and forth
like a metronome.  

When he was young, before Samantha  . . . went, his parents would take them on
road trips up and down the coast.  Sometimes they would visit relatives, or
historical sites, or sometimes they would just head to the beach.  And they
would stop at this type of place, the roadside diner, and his mother would
order for them, hamburgers and shakes, or tuna salad sandwiches with pickles
and chips, or meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy, and he would always be
delighted when the food came.  "These places always have the best food," she
would explain, and his dad would lean over and hug her to him and say she just
knew what to pick.  They had been happy once.

As he followed Scully, who followed the heavy set waitress to a booth, he
thought of her and her family, driving the rolling Wisconsin highways further
and further north where there were no McDonald's or Wendy's, eating what her
mother picked out from a plastic covered menu.  

"When was our summer?" he asked.

Scully turned, her coat half off her shoulders.

"What did you say, Mulder?"

The waitress was looking at him, too, but she wasn't really interested.  She
was waiting for them to sit down so that she could ask them whether they wanted
coffee.

"Nothing."  He shed his coat and sat.

"What did you say, Mulder?" she asked, after the waitress had gone to get them
coffee and soup.

"Nothing important, Scully," he said.  "I wonder where Lisa is."  He glanced at
his watch.  5:01.

Nothing important, he thought, but he sometimes wondered about that, especially
since he had come back from his vacation wishing he had never left.  The trip
to Graceland was supposed to have been fun, whimsical, stupid, and it had been
all those things until he had called Scully from the King's house and realized
the depths of his error.  He had let her go--forced her to go--to Philadelphia
alone, and she hadn't wanted to.  She had wanted him to stay.  To say
something.  And he wondered now when his and Scully's summer had been, when
they had had the halcyon days of their partnership without his noticing, and
when those days had ended, never to return.  When had they had their summer,
and would it ever be warm again?  

Scully said something about the girl being on her way, probably.

"Scully," Mulder said, knowing that he couldn't let this moment pass. 
Something was happening to their partnership, and he had to say something now,
or there would be a case and the case would get in the way, or their wouldn't
be a case and the return trip would get in the way, or he would lose his nerve,
or something.

She looked up from her menu.

"I just wanted to say that I'm glad you came.  This is probably nothing, and
I'm glad you came."  The words sounded stupid when he strung them together like
that, but at least he had done something.  He had taken steps.  She opened her
mouth to speak, but her reply was lost, because at that moment a young blond
girl stopped at the table and said:

"Mr. Mulder, I'm Lisa Nelson.  I wrote you?"

***end 3/13***


Lonely Nightmare IV: Stone Range
by Justin Glasser

***

"Because it's cold out on your stone range, let me in."

***

There was a case, as it turned out.

Lisa Nelson shed her coat, revealing a black and red cheerleader's outfit with
a big red O on the front, and long john pants under her skirt.  She flopped
down next to him, blond ponytail bobbing, the embodiment of every fantasy
Mulder had ever had when he was fifteen.  She smiled at him, across the table
at Scully, and he could see that she was one of those pretty girls who had "the
right upbringing," the kind of girl who would be polite and friendly at her
mother's funeral.  He thought for a second that Samantha would have been this
type of girl, too, only with a brunette ponytail, and a blue and gold
cheerleader's outfit.

"I'm so glad you came," she said.  "You have no idea."

"Why don't you tell us?" Scully asked.  Mulder wondered if she had ever worn a
cheerleader's skirt.

"Okay, um, yeah."  She toyed with the silverware in front of her.  "See, it's
not even like I totally believe this, but Alan says that it's true, and I
believe Alan thinks it is true, and weird things have been happening.  I wanted
him to write the letter, but he thought it would be better if I did, you know,
because of this," --she waved her hand over the O on her sweater-- "'cause I'm
more credible, or whatever.  No one listens to Alan."

"Lisa," he said.  "Why don't you start from the beginning?"

"Huh?" She turned to him, blue eyes wide.  She was a movie teenager, he
thought, a stereotype.  "Oh, you mean, like what *exactly* is going on.  Sure."
 She nodded again.  Mulder knew she would get good grades in school, not only
because of that blue-eyed innocent look, but because she would catch on.  Once
she got a read on you she would start leaping ahead, understanding what you
wanted.  Lisa Nelson was a people person.

"Okay, so, here's the thing.  Last year, some of the senior class had this
great idea to have a bonfire in the woods on the night of Homecoming.  And we
did, and it was really cool, kind of like that scene in Grease, where they have
the big speeches and the football team gets introduced and everyone has a good
time, right?"  Mulder nodded.  He had no idea what she was talking about.  He
hoped Scully was a young Travolta fan.  "Okay, so, it was all cool and we
followed all the safety regulations, like, completely, and everything was good
until they found out that Jeremy Stricher and Angela Jameson were there and
didn't come back."  She paused, and took a sip of Mulder's water.

"So, there was this huge search party, and they didn't find them, like, at all,
like *any* of them, you know?  And everyone just kind of assumed that they had
run away together, which didn't make any sense at all, because Jeremy and
Angela weren't even friends, which I know because she was on the squad with me,
and we hung out all the time, but everyone just kind of assumed that they did,
because that was like, the most *obvious* explanation, you know?"

Mulder glanced over at Scully.  She was not looking at him.

"Have there been bonfires since?" Mulder asked.  Lisa looked at him as if he
had just asked her what she thought of Clinton's foreign policy, and Mulder
suddenly remembered that he had been a dork in high school.

"As if.  No way is the school going to let us have bonfires after *that.*  But,
see, that's the thing. It doesn't matter, because kids have still been
disappearing and no one is doing anything about it.  There was Leroy Williams
and Jenny Miller last winter, and Suzie Choy and Brian Farlow in the spring,
and John Martinez and Jenny Anderson in the summer, and Bobby Oakes and Juliana
Marshall right after school started."

"It's always couples?" Scully asked.

Lisa nodded.  "Yeah, it's always boy-girl, but that's the whole thing, they
*aren't* couples.  They're, like, people that hardly talk to one another at
all, like totally different--"  Lisa's hands were pulling apart, making a
motion that was the opposite of clapping.

"Cliques," Mulder said.

"Yeah, cliques."  Lisa nodded again.  The endless movement of her ponytail was
making him dizzy.

"I'm not sure why you thought of us, Lisa," Scully said.  "This sounds like
something the local police should be investigating."

"See, that's the whole thing!" She slammed her hand down on the table.  "Every
time something like this happens, they do investigate it.  They call out the
dogs and go through the woods and they never find *anything* and then they say
that they were just following the example set by Jeremy and Angela and took off
for, like Chicago, or something, but it's not true!"

"How do you know?" Scully asked.  Her voice was low, calm.

"I just do!" Lisa hissed.  Mulder could see tears welling up in her eyes.  "And
Alan thinks he's going to be next!  He's heard the beast and he's going to be
next and they're going to say that he ran off to Chicago with some girl, maybe
Kim Bertram, or Shelly Potranski, or *whoever* and it won't be true, just like
it's not true with any of the others, because Alan is gay, but that doesn't
matter because he's going to be taken and no one will do *anything* about it!"

They sat in silence for awhile, Mulder sipping at his coffee.  Scully handed
Lisa a napkin to wipe her face.

"Thanks," the girl said, her voice muffled by the napkin.

"Lisa, where is Alan now?" Scully asked.

"At our house."

"You live together?" Mulder asked.  Times had changed, but--

"Duh.  He's my brother."  She gave him another one of those looks.

"Maybe we should go talk to him," he said.  Lisa nodded and stood grabbing her
coat.  

"Yeah, he said you'd want to, but he wouldn't come out because it was getting
dark."

"He's afraid of the dark?" Scully paused, her hands up around her collar.

Lisa pulled her ponytail out of the collar of her coat, and Mulder was relieved
to see that he wasn't the only one in this partnership who would be getting the
"duh" look on this case.  

"Wouldn't you be," the cheerleader asked, "if you thought the beast would take
you?"

***

Lisa Nelson lived in one of the houses on Main Street, one of the big houses
with a front porch and a mailbox shaped like a little cottage.  The house was
wide and white, and still had wreaths and lights on it from the holiday season.
 It looked like a postcard for small town life.  It looked exactly like the
type of house Mulder would have expected Lisa Nelson to live in.

Her brother Alan did not look exactly like the type of brother Lisa Nelson
would have.

He came out of his room when she called to him from the brightly lit foyer.  

"Alan!  Alan, they're here."

Alan Nelson was a tall, painfully skinny boy with dyed black hair and pale,
pale skin.  Where Lisa looked pale and glowing, vibrating with energy, Alan
resembled more of a corpse than an actual living human being.  He leaned
against the wall in the hallway.

"Hey," he said.  "Nice to meet you."

Mulder blinked in surprise.  He had expected many things from this boy in a
ripped black t-shirt and camouflage pants, but he hadn't expected manners.

"They want to talk to you," Lisa said.  "I'll call Mom and tell her I need
shoes."

Alan nodded.

"Shoes?" Mulder asked him.

"She needs a certain kind of shoes for cheerleading.  They only sell them in
the next town.  You wanna come in?" he asked, extending is arm toward his room.

Mulder nodded.

The room was . . . black.  It was covered with posters from floor to ceiling,
bands that Mulder had never heard of, and suspected he wouldn't have even if he
didn't listen to the classic rock station in D.C.  The ceiling had a black
sheet hanging from it, and was strung with purple Christmas tree lights.  There
was one lamp on next to the bed, and a black light over the fish tank.  Mulder
hoped this was not a typical teenager's room.

"Here."  Alan moved some stuff of a chair for Scully to sit down. "You can sit
on the desk," he told Mulder.  "Just throw that stuff on the floor."

Mulder scraped a pile of books and magazines off the desk and set them on the
floor.  They tipped over, but Alan didn't seem to notice.  Surveying the rest
of the detritus on the floor, Mulder was not surprised.

"Lisa was telling us about what was going on in town over the last year.  Why
don't you tell us what you know?" Scully asked.

Alan flopped back on the bed, grabbing a pillow and curling his arm around it. 
"I don't really know anything," he said.  "Things have been happening around
here, and I think I'm next.  Nothing else to tell."

"Why do you think you're next?" Mulder asked.  He felt stupid, his feet
dangling from the desk, leaning forward to talk to this kid who could only
stare at his pillow.

"I heard the beast.  Last week outside my window.  I heard it sniffing around
my window.  I heard it asking for me."  He pointed at the window, and Mulder
noticed for the first time that there were nails in the frame.

"Did you tell your parents about this?" Scully asked.

Alan laughed.  It was a depressing sound, Mulder thought, mostly because no one
as young as Alan Nelson should have sounded so old and hopeless.

"My parents would *not* be interested.  They think I have problems."

"Do you?" Scully asked.  She was leaning forward, too, her hands folded in her
lap.  Mulder loved that voice, the voice that said you could tell her anything,
that she would understand, but Alan didn't seem to feel the same way.

"Lady, does this look like the room of a well-adjusted adolescent?"

"Your sister said that you were homosexual, Alan--"

"Jesus!" Alan sat up, glaring at him.  "And you think this is some gay-bashing
thing?  That I'm a paranoid fag in a small town in rural Wisconsin, and that's
all there is to this?  Fuck!  I thought you guys were supposed to help!"

"We don't think that, Alan," Scully said.  She reached out and touched his arm.
 "We're just trying to figure out what happened here.  We're looking at all the
possibilities."

Alan shook his head.  "I know.  But I also know what I heard, and I know those
kids didn't 'run away' together."  He made quotation marks with his fingers. 
"Those kids, they didn't really know each other, and even if they did, they
didn't like each other."

"Lisa said something in her letter," Mulder said, pulling it from his breast
pocket.  "Something about how the police belong to the beast?"

Alan sighed.  "She's guessing.  I mean, we don't know.  Lisa's not so smart,
you know, but she gets people, and she said we shouldn't tell Mom, and she said
the police knew what was happening and we shouldn't tell them anything."

"You believe her?" Mulder asked.

Alan shrugged.  "Lisa isn't usually wrong about stuff like that.  I figure
better safe than sorry, right?"

Mulder nodded.  Scully stood, rubbing Alan's arm once before she let go. 
"We're at the Onowani Lodge," she said.  She pulled a card from her pocket. 
"This is our cell phone number if you think of anything else you need to tell
us.  We'll be in touch."

Alan shoved the card in his pocket, and ushered them out to the foyer again.

"Hey," he said, watching as they pulled their coats on.  Mulder turned.  "You
aren't going to tell them, are you?  The police?"

"We'll do our best to keep your name out of it," he said.  Alan nodded, toying
with the collar of his shirt.  He had black fingernail polish on, Mulder
noticed.  He could see the thin line of Alan's collarbone framed by the
stretched out collar of his shirt.  Alan looked like a sick bird.

"Hey," he said, just before they opened the door.  Alan looked up.  "You think
it can get in?" Mulder asked.

Alan looked around, at the brightly lit living room and the large bay windows.
He shrugged.  "I don't think so, man.  I think it has to be invited."

Mulder nodded.  He reached out and clapped Alan on the shoulder.  "We'll be in
touch," he said, knowing Scully was watching him.  She opened the door, and
they stepped out into the cold dark night.

***end 4/13***


Lonely Nightmare V: Passing Glimmer
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

This story is also available at
www.geocities.com/justinglas

***

" . . . 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 of 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*** 

Lonely Nightmare VI:  Light and Shade
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

"C'mon show me all the light and shade that made your name."

***

The police station, like everything else in Onowani, was on Main
Street, and after breakfast at the diner he and Scully walked over.
The snow was just deep enough to creep over the tops of his shoes, and
the news was predicting more for "Madison and points west" tonight, but
that meant it was warmer.  His snot wasn't freezing when he breathed,
so Mulder supposed he should be grateful.

The station was a small tan brick building with the word "Police" in
metal letters over the door, just like a thousand other civil service
buildings built in the 1950s.  The fifties seemed to have been a banner
year for old Onowani.  Inside the station, three men sat at office
chairs around a big desk, drinking coffee and listening to the radio.
One of them had a newspaper in his hand: another had his feet up on the
desk.  They looked up when the sleigh bells hanging from the door
handle jangled.

"Hi," Mulder said.  "I'm Fox Mulder, FBI." He held out his I.D.  "This
is my partner, Dana Scully.  We're looking for Chief Henry Austin."

The oldest man stood up.  "Yeah, that's me."  He glanced at the I.D.,
leaning over the table.  "You want some coffee?"

"No, no thank you," Mulder said.  "We're here about some disappearances
reported in the area over the last year.  We were wondering if you
could tell us some of the circumstances surrounding the cases."

"Disappearances?"  One of the other men smiled.  "What disappearances?"

"We've had reports that a number of teenagers have gone missing over
the last year.  Is that true?"

The Chief stepped from behind the table, and leaned back on it,
crossing his arms across his chest.  "You mean the runaways."

"You think that ten kids ran away in one year?" Mulder asked.

Chief Austin shrugged.  "Onowani's a small place, Agent Mulder."

Mulder nodded.  "I wonder how many children you have that you can
afford to lose ten and not blink," he said.

"I wonder if you've ever lived in a really small town, Agent Mulder.  I
wonder if you've ever been a teenager in a place so small that everyone
knows your name, and who you're going out with, and whether or not you
have a pimple.  I wonder if you understand just how close a small town
can be.  How much pressure a town small like Onowani can exert on a
teenager.  A kid feels that, he might want to run away, do you think?"

"I wonder," Scully said in a voice that might have been relaying facts
about the weather, "if you know that hampering an FBI investigation is
a federal offense?"

Chief Austin looked at her.  Then he smiled.  "She's a smart girl,
huh?" he said to Mulder.  Mulder pretended to smile back.

"Listen," Chief Austin said.  "We're not hampering anyone.  You go and
talk to whoever you want.  Investigate."  He waved his hands at the
street outside.  "Just don't come running back to me when you find out
those kids took off for Milwaukee and Chicago to live the glamorous
lives of hookers and drug dealers.  Pleasure to meet you, agents."  He
went back around the desk and sat back, putting his feet up again.

"Thank you, Chief."  Mulder opened the door.

"Excuse me, Chief Austin?" Scully asked.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Is this your whole police force?"

"No, ma'am.  I've got three more men who come in and do the night
shift."

Scully nodded.  "Do you just cover the township here, or are you shared
with some other towns?"

"We're Onowani police, Agent Scully.  Can I ask why you're so
interested in the workings of my force?"

"No reason."  She shrugged and gave him the wide pleasant smile that
Mulder knew meant trouble.  Scully's real smile didn't have nearly so
many teeth in it.  "I was just wondering how a hundred and seventy one
people managed to pay the salaries of six policemen."

Chief Austin's smile grew wider.  "I see," he said.  "Again, it was a
pleasure."

"Thank you, Chief," Scully said.

"Jesus, Scully," Mulder said, when they got down near the diner.  "Rip
his throat out.  What was that all about?"

"Something I picked up living in a small town, Mulder.  Onowani is a
township.  It's barely incorporated.  You want to tell me how this town
can support a police force of its own without the help of neighboring
communities?  I'd love to know."

"You think that means anything?"

She shook her head, opening the passenger side door.  "Not anything
we're here to investigate."

"So you just brought up the fact that the Chief of Police might be
embezzling, or taking blackmail money, or be involved in the black
market or the drug trade for cash because . . . "

"He called me a little girl, Mulder."

"He called you a smart girl, Scully."  She gave him the Lisa Nelson
look that said he was being stupid and should shut up while he was
still ahead.

"Things like this are good to know about you, Scully."

"Shut up and drive."

***

The principal of Onowani High, Mrs. Johnson, didn't give them any
trouble.  She had a student body of just under a hundred (unlike the
police station, the high school did share its services with the
surrounding communities) and the disappearance of ten percent of her
student body had disturbed her greatly.  She set them up in a classroom
across from her office, and called Lisa Nelson to the office of the
p.a. to speak to them.

Lisa showed up in jeans and a sweater, her hair held back by a
headband.  Jesus, Mulder thought, and then felt like a dirty old man.
He caught Scully looking at him, and felt even dirtier and older.

"Hi!" Lisa said.  "Alan said you all might be coming.  Okay, so, what
can I do for you?"

"You knew most of the people who were . . . the kids who are gone,
right?" Mulder asked.  She nodded.  "We'll need their names, and the
names of their friends."

"Basically," Scully said, "we need to talk to anyone who has any idea
what's going on here.  Anyone you can think of."

"Sheesh, that's, like, the whole student body.  You're only going to
need the important ones, though," she said.  "And the ones who'll
talk.  Okay, so, do you have something for me to write on?"

Mulder handed her his pen and notebook.

"Cool!" she said, turning it over in her hands, feeling the leather
cover.  "Do you, like, get one of these when you join the FBI?"

"It was a gift," he said, glancing at Scully, who had been the giver of
that particular gift.  Scully seemed not to be paying attention.

"Wow.  She must like you.  This is, like, calf's leather, or something,
and I used to work at the mall in Lamona, so I know.  Your girlfriend
gave you this, right?"

"If you could just write down the names, Lisa," he said.  His face felt
hot.  Scully was looking at the bulletin board displays.

"Okay, sure."  She began to write in that looping bubbly handwriting
that was on the letter.  Mulder went over to stand next to Scully in
front of the countries of Europe display.

"Remember when all of this was just U.S.S.R.?" he asked, pointing.  She
smiled.

"I'm still not sure what we're expecting to find, Mulder.  We don't
have any leads."

"Velly true, comrade," he said.

"So what happens if we talk to all these kids and we don't get
anything?"

"We haf vays of making them talk, Scully."

"Seriously, Mulder."

"Seriously?"  He shrugged.  "We talk to them and see if we get anything
interesting out of them.  These kids are the only contact we have with
the phenomenon, if there even is one.  If we don't get anything, then
we go back to your friend Chief Austin, and ask to see his files on
the `runaways.'  There might be something in there we can follow-up."

"And if there's not?"

"That's what I love about you, Scully, your sunny outlook."

"I'm just trying to be realistic, Mulder.  I know you want to help
these kids.  I do, too.  Alan Nelson is scared out of his mind, and I'm
not sure he shouldn't be, but there doesn't seem to be anything here.
You don't even have a theory."  She was staring up at him, her voice a
harsh whisper so Lisa couldn't hear.

"Well, actually . . . "

"What, Mulder?"

"A demonic beast comes and kidnaps kids in pairs at night, and the
Police Chief calls the disappearances runaways because he serves the
beast?"

Scully hung her head, shaking it slowly back and forth as if to clear
it.

"Unbelievable," she said, but he could hear the smile in her
voice.  "You are unbelievable."

"I aim to please," he said, and went over to see how Lisa's list was
coming along.

***end 6/13***

Lonely Nightmare VII: Danger on the Wind
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

"Only get a second chance when danger's on the wind."

***

"Mulder," Scully said, after the door had closed behind Amy Thaller,
the last girl on Lisa Nelson's list.

"I know."  He held up his hands in surrender.  "We've got nothing.  You
hungry?"

She nodded.

She was right.  He wasn't simply giving in this time to Scully's
pragmatic nature, or to her desire to wrap up something that could not
be wrapped up: they really had nothing.  Ten kids were missing, and for
all they knew the Chief of Police could have been right and they could
have all taken off for the busy anonymous streets of the big city.  He
and Scully sure didn't have any proof to the contrary.

Almost all of the kids on the list had been eager to share what they
knew about the disappearances, but what they knew amounted to a big
pile of not much.  Some of the kids said they heard rumors about a
madman who lived in the woods.  One girl said that she heard it
knocking on her windowpanes at night when the wind was bad.  One guy
said he'd given up taking his girlfriend to make-out in his car because
he was afraid they would be next.  The only thing they shared was that
they were all afraid they would be taken.

And they all called that fear "the beast."

"It's like the Bogeyman," Scully had said, after the third interview in
which the "beast" had been mentioned.  "These kids are all convinced
that something out there is coming to get them."

"One key difference, Scully," Mulder had said, picking at his
fingernails with the edge of a piece of notebook paper.

"What's that?"

"The Bogeyman only comes to get you if you're bad."

So they had nothing.  They'd commandeer Chief Austin's files tonight,
if possible, and start in on the parents of the missing kids tomorrow.
Mulder buttoned his coat and pushed open the doors for Scully.  Snow
swirled around their heads and blew past them into the hallway.  It
wasn't even three-thirty yet, school was still in session, but the
light already had that blue twilight quality from the clouds.  The six
streetlights were already on.

The car crept down the unplowed streets like a big cat, snow crunching
under the tires.  Mulder pulled up in front of the lighted police
station and left the engine running.

"You stay here, little girl," he said to Scully.  "I'll see what I can
get."

"What I wouldn't do for a penis sometimes," she said, her breath coming
out in a sigh.

Mulder peered in, one hand on the roof, one on the car door.  Scully
looked at him.  Her smile danced around her head, but didn't actually
appear on her face.  Finally, still speechless, he slammed the door on
her, and heard her laughter.  He paused in front of the station door to
wipe the smile from his face.

One of the men from that morning sat behind the table, watching t.v. on
a little 9 inch set on top of one of the file cabinets.

"Hi," Mulder said.  "Fox Mulder, I don't believe we were introduced
this morning."

"Umm . .  . yeah.  Danny.  Danny Kowalski."  Danny Kowalski shook the
hand that was offered to him.

"Steellllaaaa!"  Mulder said, smiling.  Danny Kowalski looked at him.
"You know?  Stella?  A Streetcar Named Desire?"

Danny smiled a little.  "Yeah, sure," he said, and Mulder saw that this
kid had no idea what he was talking about.  "What can I do you for,
Agent?"

"Well, Officer Kowalski, I need the files for all the kids who've
disappeared over the last year."

"Uh huh.  Do you have a search warrant for those?"

Mulder smiled.  Easier than taking candy from a baby.  "No, Officer.  I
don't need one.  I just need you to agree to hand them over and we'll
be all set.  Search warrants are for suspects."

"Oh!  Oh, right.  Sorry!"  Danny looked around as if his ass had fallen
off suddenly and he was looking to see where it landed.  "Um, okay,
lemme look."  He went in the back room.  Mulder heard the sound of
filing cabinets being opened and shut.  He looked at the papers on the
table.  Paper work on traffic stops, a domestic violence thing, an
accident report.  Nothing useful.  Officer Kowalski came back out with
two folders in his hand.

"I could only find these ones," he said.  "The rest of them are
probably in the basement.  I can look for you if you want."

"That's fine, Officer."  Mulder held out his hand for the folders.
"I'll come back for the rest, okay?"

Officer Danny Kowalski nodded.  "Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Sure," Mulder turned back from the door.

"Was it hard, you know, um, getting into the FBI?"

Mulder looked at the young officer.  He thought of the FBI entrance
exam that he'd hardly studied for, the physical fitness qualifications
that he'd passed with no problem, the classes that he'd soared through,
breaking the curve again and again.  He thought of his classmates, both
eager to get close to him and resentful of his success.  He looked at
the young officer in his too-big polyester uniform, standing in the
town that he grew up in.

"Yeah," Mulder said.  "Yeah, it was pretty hard."

Danny nodded again, one hand on the back of his neck.  "Yeah, I
figured.  Have a good night, Agent Mulder."

Mulder saluted with the folder.  "'Night, Officer."

***

They were the folders for the last two kids that had disappeared: Bobby
Oakes and Juliana Marshall.  Juliana Marshall looked up from her file
photo, a puppy on her lap and a sunny smile on her face.  She wore a
majorette's uniform, and her dark hair was in two ponytails on the
sides of her head.  She was chubby and pretty.  Bobby Oakes couldn't
have been more different.  He was thin and sullen-looking, with spiky
blond hair, and heavy eye make-up.  He had a dog collar on, and a black
t-shirt with a band logo on it, and he looked as if a smile would have
cracked his face in two.  Bobby looked like someone Alan would have
known well.

"Look at this, Scully," he said, handing the photos across the gap
between the bed and the cheap pressboard table where she sat with her
laptop.

"Hmm," she said.

"Hmm?  Tell me, Scully, do these two kids look like they would run away
together?  Do you really see Juliana Marshall and Bobby Oakes together?"

"No, Mulder, I don't.  But that doesn't mean they didn't."

"What about the other kids?  Do they match this same pattern?  Lisa
said the first girl was a cheerleader.  Juliana's a majorette.  What
about the other girls?"

Scully skimmed through the data she'd culled from the newspaper
accounts, shaking her head.  The phone on the night stand rang.  Mulder
rolled over onto his side to pick it up.

"Mulder."

"Agent Mulder, this is Chief Austin.  I understand you paid a visit to
my office this afternoon."  The police chief's voice sounded tight with
anger.  Mulder cupped his hand over the bottom of the phone and mouthed
"Austin" to Scully.  She smiled, and went back to her computer.

"I did."

"I also understand that you manipulated one of my officers into
provided some of our files to you."

"No sir.  I asked Officer Kowalski for the files and he gave them to
me."

"I want them back, Agent Mulder."

"Sorry, sir," he said.  He knew that the chief could hear his smirk
over the phone but he couldn't help it.  "Until we determine that
there's nothing of use in those files, they are in the possession of
the federal government."

"They're my files!"

"We can't return them until we're guaranteed access to them.  Are you
prepared to do that, Chief Austin?"

"God damn it, Agent Mulder--"

"And we'll need access to the files on the other runaways as well,
sir.  We'll be by for those tomorrow, if that's convenient."

"Agent Mulder, I--"

"Have a good night, sir," he said, and dropped the phone back in its
cradle.  "Chief Austin is mad at me, Scully."

"You'd better hope he doesn't find Skinner's number," she said.

"Gimme whatcha got, baby."

"That's the problem, Mulder.  We've still got nothing.  Leroy Williams
was on the football team, but the girl that was taken with him
apparently didn't do anything of note: she's just described as a
'student.'  Suzie Choy was headed to Madison on an art scholarship and
the boy who went with her was a gas station attendant after school.
There's no pattern here, Mulder."

Mulder tipped backwards onto the pillow.  "Damn."

"Anything in the reports?"

"Nothing.  Missing person report, details on the search, termination of
the search paperwork.  Same old, same old."

"May I?"

He passed the folders to her, and folded his arms behind his head.

"Mulder, did you see this?"

He looked over at her.

"The reports on the search, did you look at these?"

"I skimmed.  What do you have?"

"Mulder, these are exactly the same."

He scooted over to the edge of the bed and took the reports from her.
At the top, the names of the subjects of the search were different, and
the names of the participants had been changed, but after that.  She
was right.  Exactly the same.  Procedure, area covered, timeline,
evidence found ("a folder known to be in the possession of the
subject"), all exactly the same.

"Damn, Scully."

"We need--"

She was interrupted by the pounding on the door.  "Agent Mulder!  Agent
Mulder!"  The door rattled in its frame.

"You think Austin's that mad?" he asked, before he went to answer the
door.

But it wasn't Henry Austin or one of his lackeys.  It was Alan Nelson
standing out in the dark his sister said he never went out in, in a t-
shirt and jeans and black boots and nothing else, the snow melting on
his blue-black hair.

"Alan?" Mulder asked.

Alan looked at him, his face even paler than Mulder remembered, his
skin wet with sweat and melting snow.

"It wasn't me the beast was after," he said.  "It wanted Lisa."

***end 7/13***


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***

Lonely Nightmare IX: Shadows Turning Red
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

" . . . soldiers coming home like shadows turning red . . . "

***

He had been out in the snow before a thousand times.  He had driven in it, had
skied in it, shoveled it.  He had spent enough time in the snow to consider it
familiar, even friendly.  Mulder remembered going outside after midnight during
a blizzard when he was ten, he and Samantha allowed to get lost in the white
sea of snowflakes because the yard of the rented cottage they were at was
fenced in for the dog.  He remembered the feeling of being lost only a few feet
from the back porch, the throb of his excited heartbeat when he realized that
he could die out in the storm, but not really.  His dad had come out fifteen
minutes later, holding one end of a clothesline and walked them back in,
carrying Samantha under his arm like a giggling sack of potatoes. Hunched
against the snow in a small town in Wisconsin, Mulder suddenly missed his
father.

He wished someone was coming after him with a clothesline, then thought of the
bloody handprint on the door, and reconsidered.  He had crossed the street
immediately after leaving the Nelson's house: the police station was on the
opposite side of the street, and he had thought it would be easier to follow
the houses and not accidentally walk past the station.  He hadn't considered
the direction of the wind, however, and snow whipped off the roofs of the
buildings across the street, adding to the frenzy already falling around him.  

Snow swirled in his ears, and piled up in his shoes.  It sifted into his
collar, melting in silvery rivulets down his back.  It kissed his cheeks with
cold witch kisses and flew up his nose, trying to suffocate him.  Scully had
been right: this was a stupid idea.

But the police reports on the last two kids had been exactly the same and that
wasn't right.  And an anomaly like that should be investigated, especially in a
missing person's case, unlike, say, a traffic report where the cut and paste on
the computer was a cop's best friend.  And these were just kids, so the
searches should have been conducted more carefully.  And the Chief had seemed
surprisingly angry about his reports being missing, instead of mildly pissed.

And it was the only lead they had.

Someone tapped his shoulder.

He shouted, turning into the wind, but all he saw was the dancing whirling of
the snowflakes.  

"Fuck," he whispered, closing his eyes.  Despite the snow, he turned his face
upward, breathing hard through his nose.  The cool slither of snowflakes on his
throat seemed calming.  After a moment, he continued on.

The police station was still lit, but he couldn't see anyone inside through the
slats of the blinds.  He pushed the door open.

"Hello!" he shouted, stamping his feet on the welcome mat.  "Agent Mulder! 
FBI!"  No response.  Even the drunk tanks in the back must have been empty. 
The coffee pot ticked once.  The police radio hissed with static.  The t.v. on
the filing cabinet danced with images, but no sound.  "Hello," Mulder said
again.

They were probably all out on calls, helping people out of ditches, checking
for downed power lines and stranded motorists.  He would have to help himself. 


Technically, he hadn't had the right to the files when he came in before: he
and Scully had no cause to question the local law enforcement's classification
of the cases and without jurisdiction he couldn't demand access to information
about kids who had simply run away.  Without evidence of an X-file he was
overstepping his boundaries.  Technically.  But since Lisa Nelson had
apparently been kidnapped, and since she was related to the case they were
investigating, and since, X-file or not, kidnapping was a federal crime . . . 

Officer Kowalski had gone into the storage room behind the table for the first
two files, but he'd said the rest were in the basement.  Basement, basement.

He went around the desk, into the storeroom where Kowalski had gone.  No doors.
 Down the short hall, past the four empty holding cells.  No doors.  He turned
to go back and saw it, behind the door which lead out into the main office,
another door, situated so that they both couldn't be opened at the same time.

Mulder went and turned the knob.  The door opened.  The stairs were dark, but
the switch turned on fluorescent lighting all the way down and he could see the
green tile on the floor down there.  

It wasn't a full basement, and Mulder felt a little crowded by the low
ceilings, but it was clean, and fairly well-lit.  Two long card tables sat in
the middle of the room, along with some cheap wooden-slatted folding chairs. 
Boxes lined one wall.  A red, white, and blue rolled-up banner reading "olic
for uly 4" was propped against them.  And along the far wall, file cabinets,
long ones.

He pulled open the drawer that read "1996."  Unlike most rural police stations,
where the filing system was usually one old secretary who just remembered where
she put things, Onowani seemed to have all their ducks in a row.  There were
dividers making each month, and manila folders with case names all written in
the same neat hand.  Mulder wanted to kiss the anal-retentive Chief Austin flat
on the mouth.  

Lisa had said that the first couple was taken after the bonfire for Homecoming.
 He began sifting through the folder marked "September."  Halfway through
"October," Fox Mulder hit the jackpot.

He pulled the rest in a matter of minutes, holding them in one arm, while he
leafed through the cabinet with the other hand.  They all had the same basic
forms in them, varying only in the number of witnesses interviewed.  A cursory
glance deflated his hopes of some kind of police cover-up: none of the other
folders had the same search reports as the ones Scully had found.  Apparently,
that was just some cop trying to save time by cutting and pasting instead of
typing up a whole new report like he was supposed to.  Still, there might be
something in the files, some common thread that would determine why Lisa Nelson
had been--

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

They had all been taken in pairs.  There was always a boy and a girl, that was
how it was always done.  Taken at approximately the same time so that parents
and friends would think they had run away together.  There were always two.  

Who was the other one?

Mulder slumped in one of the folding chairs, setting the files down on the
table in front of him.  Who was the other one?  He pulled his cell phone out of
his pocket and pressed *1.  

"The person you are trying to reach--"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he whispered.  He would just have to go back and tell
Scully in person then.  It wouldn't be Alan, he was pretty certain of that.  If
whatever had taken Lisa Nelson wanted her brother, it had had the perfect
opportunity and passed it by.  Besides, Scully was there.  He hoped Chief
Austin had some spare trashbags around so he wouldn't have to try to carry
these things under--

The top folder slid away from him in slow motion, gliding off the pile as
gracefully as a swan, opening and fluttering its manila wings as it vomited its
contents all over the green linoleum floor.

"Fuck!" Mulder said again, feeling not only like a klutz, but like a redundant
and unimaginative klutz.  He dropped the rest of the files back on the table,
reaching one hand out to steady them, and crouched down to pick up the loose
papers.  The file was that of the first boy who had been taken, Jeremy
Stricher.  His picture showed a big blond boy in a flannel shirt standing next
to a cow.  A farm boy.  A hick, maybe, who according to Lisa Nelson was not
friends with cheerleaders.  Mulder gathered up the papers and tapped them on
the floor to straighten them.  When he picked them up, a sheet of notebook
paper fluttered to the floor.

Leaned down to pick it up, recognizing the handwriting as the same neat
penmanship that was on the label in the file cabinet.

"Stricher, J." the writing said.
"Jameson,A.
"Williams, L.
"Miller, Je.
"Choy, S."

There were more, about twenty more, Mulder saw, last names and first initials,
the top eleven with small neat checkmarks by them.  He was not surprised to see
that the last name checked was "Nelson, L."  The next name on the list--Rhodes,
J.--did not have a checkmark.  Whoever that kid was, John or Jim or Jason
Rhodes, was next.  Looked like the police were involved after all.

"Holy fuck," Mulder breathed, and that was the last thing he said before the
chair came down on his head.

***end 9/14***


Lonely Nightmare X: Earth Turns to Fire
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0.

This story is also available at
www.geocities.com/justinglas

***

"Please tread gently on the ground when all around you earth turns to fire."

***

She held his arms above his head while she fucked him, her cool fingers
circling his wrists in an iron grip.  It hurt a little, but Mulder didn't mind,
because this was Scully, her breasts sliding sweatily over his chest, her
liquid warmth enclosing and releasing him.  

She went slow: he could feel every millimeter of himself slipping into her and
then back almost out.  He could feel the clench of his muscles, the grind of
her pelvic bone against his.  He could hear the slow hiss of her breath in his
ear, and he wondered what he had done to deserve this.  How had he earned this
gift?  What had he said to get her to agree to slide him in and out of her
body, in case this was a dream and he woke up alone in a crappy bed in the
Onowani Lodge?

She nipped at his neck, moving faster now, her breasts swaying, rubbing against
his chest hair, her thighs clenching around his hips, and he pushed against her
trying to catch her rhythm, trying to hear what she wanted in her harsh breath.
 She was slippery wet and wide open for him, at that stage of sex where the
rougher it gets the better it is, her mouth sucking at his neck and her fingers
clenched tight around his wrists, and he felt it, felt it, his balls
tightening, and his hips beating against hers, and he wanted to tell her that
he loved her, that he always would, but her breath was hot in his ear and all
he could choke out as he came was 

"Scu--scully!" in a hoarse whisper.

and she laughed in his ear, a low rough sound, that seemed not like her, but
the voices of several people, not all necessarily female, and he wondered if
maybe he should have called her Dana instead, but it didn't really matter,
because he woke up with his next gasping breath, and it had been a dream, and
it was still dark, and he hoped he hadn't said her name out loud and woke her
up, and why couldn't they get her damn heater fixed because this whole sleeping
together thing was getting out--

--and then he realized that his hands were still held above his head.

And he still heard laughing.

"Who's there!"

The laughter stopped.

He was on his back, on a table or a board or a floor or something.  He seemed
to be blindfolded.  His hands were tied.  His ankles were tied, he discovered,
trying to lift them.  He didn't seem to be^wet, despite the dream he just
had, but his neck felt raw, as if it been chewed, and his pants were open.  And
there were people in the room with him.  God, Scully.

"Who's there?" he shouted again, but no one answered.  If he listened close, he
could hear them breathing, moving, but they did not speak.  Lisa's letter came
to his mind, the frayed notebook paper, her loopy handwriting: the police
belong to the beast, she'd said.

"Austin!" Mulder said.  "Austin!  Untie me.  We'll forget the whole thing."

Still no sound.

"Kidnapping an agent is a federal crime, Austin," he said, trying to keep his
voice from shaking, trying to take charge.  "I can make sure no one knows about
this."  Promise them anything, his instructor at the Academy had once said. 
The hostage taker wants something, and if he thinks he's going to get it, then
you stand a better chance of getting them out alive.  If he could get them
talking, get them to engage him, he stood a better chance.  Especially if the
other officers were as young as Kowalski.

"Kowalski!  You don't want to be a part of this, do you?  Kidnapping a federal
agent?  I could pull some strings for you at the Bureau, Kowalski, but you have
to let me go."

Footsteps, soft and steady.  Maybe it was just him, the young officer who
wanted to be an FBI agent, and would let Mulder go for that chance.  "C'mon,
Kowalski," he said.  He kept his voice soft, encouraging.

The footsteps came close, closer, then stepped past him and went away.  More
than one person.  Three?  Four?  He couldn't tell, but they all went past him
without even pausing.  He heard the turn of the doorknob, felt the slight rush
of air on his face (but, thankfully, not on his dick--he seemed to be at least
partially covered), and heard the snick of the door being shut.  He was alone.

Mulder yanked his arms and felt the cool bite of handcuffs.  Probably his own
fucking handcuffs, he thought, yanking at them again.  They were hooked over
some kind of pipe: he could feel the smooth metal when he tried to press his
hands together.  He tried to pull his legs up.  Rope.  Rope on the ankles, each
one individually tied to something, handcuffs on his wrists, tight enough and
high enough above his head that he had no leverage.  He could thrash around a
bit, but he could not break free.  

The police belonged to the beast, and he belonged to the police, we all lived
happily ever after, he thought, and for a second he was overcome by panic, and
he yanked and yanked and yanked at the handcuffs and tried to pull his ankles
free, kicking out like a wounded bird, kicking and kicking, shouting Scully's
name until he could no longer breathe, the pressure of the blindfold over his
nose almost unbearable, and he was forced to lay back, letting his head drop
and his mouth hang open, sucking air, not crying, he was *not* crying, he was
trying to breathe and that was all, dammit--

--something brushed his ear.

"WHO THE FUCK IS THERE?" he shouted, jerking away.

Nothing.

No sound.

Not really a sound.

The non-sound of something moving, stirring the molecules of air in the room,
but not enough to hear, especially when your own rasping breath was so loud in
your own ears.  And Mulder couldn't hear it, not really, but he knew what it
was, he knew the sound of the beast when he didn't hear it, and suddenly he
thought he knew what had happened to all of those runaways.  They had run away
to this room and had made a new friend.  This was it.  He would make a friend,
too, and the police would say that he had run away with the pretty blond high
school student to Chicago or New York and there would be a scandal and Scully
would know it wasn't true, but she wouldn't have any leads and eventually
Skinner would force her off the case, and she'd get a new partner and he would
be down here still, with his friend the beast.

There was heat, now, the steady tidal heat of something breathing on the bare
skin of his ankle, where his pants leg had been rucked up by his struggle.
There was no sound of breath, but there was heat, and the faint moisture of air
expelled.  Mulder's arms shook as he strained against the handcuffs.

"Leave me alone," he said, and his voice seemed too loud in the quiet.

The air in the room flexed, and Mulder turned his face against his shoulder,
and knew that whatever it was, it was above him now, crouched around him,
looking down, and suddenly the blindfold didn't seem like a bad idea at all. 
Suddenly, the blindfold seemed like a gift from a merciful god, and then there
was that breath again, that breath on his throat, and he didn't want to, but he
did, he whimpered--

The door opened, and the breath was gone.

He almost wept with relief, but there were footsteps again, staggered and heavy
this time, as if they were struggling under weight, and he heard movement, and
the harsh gasping of real breath, human breath, and he understood that
something was happening.  That was bad.  That was the thing you always wanted
to prevent from happening in any hostage situation.  The goal was to keep the
perps as calm as possible, to make them comfortable, to establish a routine,
because when you did that they got accustomed to you and to their hostages,
they became complacent.  Above all, you did not want "things" to happen.
Because when things happened, those things were usually followed by the most
dreaded of all things: escalation.  And Mulder thought that the sound of
footsteps, of something heavy coming into a room where he was tied and gagged,
seemed, in his professional opinion, like escalation of the worst sort.

The footsteps stopped, and there was the thud of something being put down,
maybe on a table three or four feet from him, and the clink of handcuffs.  At
least, he thought, I might not be chained up with my own, and then he realized
that handcuffs meant hands, and he said again, for the six hundredth time--

"Who's there?"

And this time he heard gasping and the sudden intake of breath, and a girl's
voice drifted to him.  "Help me," it said.

"Lisa?"  he shouted.  "Lisa?  LISA!"

"Frank?" the voice said.  "Frank, make them stop!  Help me.  Help me, FRANK!"
and then the voice stopped crying and started screaming, and Mulder realized
that he was Frank, and that Frank was of no help to anyone.

***end 10/13***

Lonely Nightmare XI: Darkest Night
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

"Even on the darkest night . . . when the lights of hope are fading quickly . .
. "

***

--it wasn't the same as dreaming of monsters, because in dreams you could see. 
See Scully, see Scully run.  See Scully save her partner Frank from the thing
that breathes, from the beast, but careful, careful, not too quick, what big
teeth you have--

--Scully hadn't let him apologize for the tattoo joke.  He'd tried more than
once to say he was sorry, to draw her out about what had happened in the city
of brotherly love, brothers were supposed to protect their sisters, keep them
safe and he hadn't been able to do that, not any better than Alan had been,
because everything was about him, and he had sent his Scully right into the
mouth of danger, right into Philadelphia, right to have her heart cut out, and
she had come back anyway, marked now, marked for life, and told him everything
was not about him, and when he had found the hearts and wanted to cry, Scully
had let him press his face against her, but she hadn't let him apologize and
now it looked as if he had lost his chance for good--

--he wished that he didn't believe.  He wished he were Scully, so full of
science that there was nothing in this room but other people.  He wondered if
it would work like that, if it were a matter of belief and if he could convince
himself that hell was only other people and not that which swirled around his
ankles, purring, licking up the spilt blood--

--the blood tasted like copper, like licking a copper penny, and it leaked into
his mouth.  They hit him, they, not it, they hit him when he tried to talk to
the Lisa, to stop her screaming.  She didn't not scream anymore.  He was not
sure, but he thought that Lisa might never scream again, not even in happiness
when her team made a basket with the blue and gold pom-poms in her hands, and
he thought "that's a shame," because she was probably good at it in a way he
could never be, that she was a people person with pretty pretty blue eyes, and
all he wanted to do was look into those eyes and put his fingers in her short
red hair and kiss her, and hear her cheer for him--

--it was his need to urinate that made him wonder how long he had been here. 
He didn't know.  He couldn't tell, and when he asked they did not answer him. 
Was Scully looking for him?  Had the storm outside lessened enough that she
could venture out herself, or was she still at Alan Nelson's house waiting for
his parents?  How long had it been since he left?  Had he gone at Alan's house?
 He couldn't remember. Were Alan's parents back already?  Had days passed? Had
he been missing for days?  The table pressed against his shoulder blades and
his buttocks: his lower back ached from the angle, his shoulders burned, his
legs shook.  He knew, then, that it didn't matter whether or not he had been
here for hours or days, he would be here for eternity.  He would never escape--

--you can't see love in someone's eyes.  He knew, because otherwise she would
know already and he wouldn't feel like there was something stuck in his throat,
something that would suffocate him if he didn't keep swallowing it down--

--he could see Scully everywhere, she was everywhere, and he knew he was
blindfolded but that didn't matter because he could see her, in her tailored
suits, and her short, shorter, shortest hair, looking up at him and smiling,
looking down and him and frowning her cool small hand on his forehead.  "What'd
you do, Mulder?" she said, and smiled.  He wanted to answer her, but his throat
hurt, his throat had been chewed, and he could not say, and he knew that she
was not here, that he was blindfolded, and he couldn't keep doing this couldn't
keep watching her, because then he would go mad and what help would that be?
And then he thought, what help am I now?  But he tried not to see her anyway--

--they did not speak, the men with the footsteps, so after a while he began to
speak for them, asking them questions and then providing their answers in a
sing-song smiling voice, wagging his head back and forth while he listened to
them moving and grunting in the room.  "Why did you do this?" he asked them. 
"The better to see you with, my dear," he answered for them.  Eventually,
someone came over put a rag over his mouth, a rag wet with something, and
pressed, until he was frantic with the need for air, and then they took it
away.  He stopped speaking, then--

--he couldn't remember a time when he wasn't like this.  Even in his memories
of childhood, his first day of school, his tenth birthday party, Samantha's
abduction, his arms burned and his breath came in rushed harsh gasps.  This
pain had been there all the time, in his every conversation with her, just
waiting for the right time to come to the surface, to reveal itself and show
him the truth about himself, that he was weak, that he was a failure, that he
was worth no more than this--

--the room was never empty.  He wanted it to be, he wanted to be alone so that
he could think of Scully and how she would find him, and cry with self pity,
and stop being so damn afraid, but the room was never empty, he was never
alone.  The beast that breathed was always there, just waiting for the others
to leave so that could climb up on the table with him and walk back and forth,
stalking around him like a cat stalks along a fence top.  It would taste him,
his wrist where the blood seeped, his forehead, where the sweat beaded above
his brow, with a long serpentine tongue, and he would flinch away and not
scream and know that it was smiling.  Smiling and waiting until it was hungry
again.  He thought maybe it was better than none of those kids had been found. 
Maybe they had gone insane from this--

--he thought that he had never understood this, that maybe Scully would
understand better than he was what was happening to him, and what it meant.  He
had been kidnapped, sure, that he understood, but there was something else
here, something that he felt in the pit of his stomach, something that maybe
had been watching him when he looked at a bloody handprint on Alan Nelson's
door. Something that was waiting for him.  And Mulder thought that even though
Scully was a scientist she would understand this better, because, although he
had thought he knew what she meant, he was realizing now with every breath that
he had never really understood the nature of evil--

--leavemealoneleavemealoneleavemealone--

--as long as there were footsteps he was okay.  He hadn't wanted the footsteps
because footsteps meant men and men meant bad things for Lisa, very bad things,
but it had been one of the times when there were no footsteps and Lisa had been
crying softly on the table next to him, and he had been trying to whisper to
her, when he had heard the soft sound, the wet sound, and the end of Lisa's
crying.  He had smelled a smell he was too familiar with, the smell of copper,
and he had been afraid then, that there would be breath again, breath on his
throat, and when the footsteps had come back he had been grateful.  The men
reeked of evil, but they did not bite--

--he knew that there would be a time soon when he no longer hoped for rescue,
for Scully on her white horse, when he would hope only for death.  In the
meantime, he counted footsteps and hoped that Lisa had gone to heaven--

--outside there would be snow piled high in the road and blowing from the
rooftops.  The whole town would look like something out of a fairytale, off a
greeting card, something perfect and pristine and flawless, and Scully would
step off the porch and onto the walk and shade her eyes from the bright cold
winter sun, and she would smile at him and say "What did you do, Mulder?" and
he would smile back and say--

--he is sorry, Scully.  He is sorry--

***end 11/13***


Lonely Nightmare XII: Homing Angel
by Justin Glasser

Notes and dedication in section 0

***

"I'll be your homing angel, I'll be in your head."

***

He wasn't entirely sure when it happened, but eventually Mulder realized that
he was living the final hours of his life.  His shoulders and ass had gone
numb, his bladder ached from pressure, and he could feel his heart thudding in
his chest, and suddenly he understood that this was it, that whatever he had
been put on this earth to do was finished.  It seemed a little anti-climactic.

For a while, it had seemed certain that he would die at the hands of the shadow
government, blown up or shot or captured in pursuit of a higher truth, but that
no longer seemed to be the case.  No great and noble death for him.  Instead he
would die here, in Podunkville, Wisconsin, killed by a group of small-town
rogue police and their pet demon because he couldn't hold onto a bunch of
files.  He had a feeling his high school shop teacher would not be surprised. 
"You're a bright boy, Fox," Mr. Murphy used to say, "but you haven't got the
common sense God gave a rock."  If Mr. Murphy were here, he would look down at
Mulder trussed like a hog, and shake his head, smiling.  "Couldn't just get the
files and go, could you?" he would say.

Mulder looked up at him, smiling back.  It seemed funny, now.  Didn't people
always say that: you'll look back on this and laugh? It was nice to know that
even while "this" was still going on he could look back on it and laugh.  It
was nice to know he hadn't lost his sense of humor.

He heard footsteps still, soft and padded, as if they were walking on dirt and
not linoleum flooring, now.  He suspected that was what the men were doing all
this time, in the ages since there had been a sound from Lisa.  Bringing in
dirt and scattering it around.  Ceremonial, he thought, idly marking that
thought in his mind for the report he would never make.  lSome dust had gotten
on his mouth, and he licked it off before he thought about it, then wished he
could spit.  It was dry, but it had tasted oily, somehow.

When they went out for more, the other thing--the thing that Mulder had given
up all pretense toward and just called the Beast now--always came back.  It had
stopped licking him for a while, when the dust was still in the air, it seemed,
but that had resumed.  Its breath was hot, still, and smelled stale as if it
had been kept inside not just for the few seconds that it took to inhale and
exhale, but for ages. Centuries.  

Mulder found that it no longer bothered him, not now that he was dying.  That
was the beautiful thing about death, he thought, once it was actually
happening, you could kind of go with the flow and ignore the big and scary
thing leaning over you, even when, say, a drop of something that should have
been saliva landed on your cheek and burned like acid.  It was all over but the
shouting, as his dad used to say, and Mulder wished that one of the men would
go ahead and shout, or that they would at least have the common decency to
leave the room long enough for the beast--who apparently had issues about
killing with people in the room--to rip his throat out.  He was starting to see
what condemned men meant when they said that the death penalty wasn't cruel and
unusual punishment, but the wait was.  He was getting a little impatient.

The men were out of the room now, getting some more dirt maybe, or ceremonial
robes, or some other god damned thing--Mulder had never fully understood what a
pain ritualistic killings were until now--and it was back, winding along table
beside him.  He thought it had four feet and a tail, probably, sometimes when
it turned away from him, he felt something brush his cheek like a tail.  And it
had teeth, he figured, and it definitely had a tongue, and it liked to walk,
back and forth, back and forth, and look at him, stare down, he imagined,
breathing on him until he flinched away from its moist mouth.  It was more like
a cat than he had realized at first: it liked to toy with its prey.  It was
big, though.  When it had stepped onto his stomach, pressing one what?  claw,
foot, paw, he didn't know, into his belly, all of his air had rushed out in one
whoosh, and Mulder had clenched his teeth to keep from wetting himself.  It had
paused there for a second, watching, Mulder figured, to see what he would do. 
He had done nothing--what could he do?--but gasp for breath and pray that it
would not step lower.

Now it weaved back and forth over him, pacing, crossing over first one ankle
then the other, then his waist, then his face, and that was still bad, death or
not, when the thing crossed over his head and he had to hold his breath or face
the stale dry musk of its sex.  He always turned his face to the side: he
couldn't help it.  He would have to tell Scully about what that was like, see
if she could class--

Scully . . . he stopped himself.  He wouldn't be telling her anything, not now.
 Not about this, or Lisa, or even what he was going to say in the basement that
day, when she had said that it was her life, and he had wanted to reach across
the desk and tell her that it was his life, too, that she could not go and do
things like that because then he would lose her and what would become of him
then?  That was what he had wanted to say that day, but by then it was too
late.  She had gone and marked herself, trying to be rid of him.  The last
thing she wanted was for him to declare his need.  And now there wouldn't be
anything more to declare.  Easy.  No point in thinking about her, about what he
should have said, about what he should have done, about mistakes he had made. 
It was over.  He was dead.  All over but the shouting.

And suddenly there was shouting, and the brief pop-pop of gunfire, and
something slamming up against the door, and he thought *Scully* but it was too
late because the beast was on his chest, heavy and hot, and the beast owned the
police and the police owned him, and without even thinking about it Mulder
lifted his chin to give it better access because this was it, he was dead, and
there were teeth at his throat and the door flew open, and the beast was heavy
and hot--

--and gone--

--and someone was screaming and then there was something heavy and hot on his
chest again, and he thought *finally* but there was no biting only a mouth over
his wet and demanding, and he screamed, pulling his head away, thinking there
had to be better ways to die, and there was a voice in his ear, gasping,
harsh--

"Mulder, it's me."

--and the mouth returned, and of course it was her, it was Scully, and it was
over, and he wasn't dead, and he knew that he had been lying the whole time,
that all he had wanted was to be worth saving, and since he was saved that was
close enough.

"Scu--" he said, but his mouth wasn't really working. 

"Be quiet, Mulder," she said.  And he heard the clink of keys and his arms fell
to the table, finally, *finally*, like so much dead wood, and he knew that they
were going to hurt, but just for a second they felt so good, and free, and
Scully was untying his ankles, and she pulled his blindfold off--

--and there she was.

Her hair was messed up, hanging in her eyes, and she had a scrape on one cheek,
and her mouth was drawn together in that old lady expression of concern that
she always got when he had done, or was about to do, something incredibly
stupid.

He turned his head, trying to look past her.

"Lisa," he whispered.

Scully shook her head.  "She's dead, Mulder.  I can't help her. I tried."

He nodded and tried to swallow.  "So did I."

She smiled down at him, her fingers twining through his hair.  "I know.  I
thought I told you to be careful?" she said.  She brushed her knuckles over his
cheek.  "When are you going to start listening to me?"  

Mulder felt his mouth twitch into a smile.  "Scully," he said.  His voice
sounded like it was rubbed over sandpaper.  Screaming, he thought.  That's from
when I was screaming.

"What, Mulder?"  She was rubbing his shoulders now, trying to work the blood
back into them.  He was alive, so she was playing Doctor Scully, all business,
rubbing their relationship back to normal as quickly as possible.  Mulder
wasn't sure he wanted it back to normal so quickly.  Mulder wasn't sure he
could handle normal right away.

"If you kiss me again, I promise not to shout."

She stopped rubbing, looking down at him, her face smooth and blank.  Then,
abruptly, she leaned down and kissed him.  He didn't shout.

***end 12/13***


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 had 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: