“We have to help her. You have to try…”
But the shaggy-haired priest seemed near tears and approaching exhaustion. Again he shook his head. “I can’t see…I can’t see…”
Then the priest, still on his knees, fell onto his gloved hands and began to weep, deep, wrenching, racking sobs emerging from the depth of his being, even of his soul.
Drummy gave Mulder a dubious look, and all Mulder could think was how he wished Scully were there. He could be a sucker for a good act like this, but Scully would see through it, if it could be seen through, anyway. She would point out exactly what made it phony. If it were phony.
If she were here.
Drummy said, “You were right before, Mulder.”
“Huh?”
“SOB does pull this shit right outta his ass.”
Disgusted, the black agent wheeled and marched off through the deep snow.
But Mulder and Whitney remained, watching Father Joe, whose sobs continued and who seemed more and more to be just a melodramatic faker whose latest performance was going way over the top.
That was when Mulder saw the blood.
The drops of blood, dripping and plopping and puddling on the snow under Father Joe’s hanging head.
Mulder stepped forward, put a hand on the man’s nearer shoulder, and said, “Father? Are you—”
The big man with the wild hair gazed up at Mulder, who was taken aback by what he saw.
Father Joseph Crissman was weeping, all right. He wasn’t faking. He really was crying.
Crying blood, red streaking his cheeks where the tears had trailed.
Whitney had seen it, too, and she locked eyes with Mulder, nodding, and he knew her trust in him was growing.
Chapter 5
Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital
Richmond, Virginia
January 10
Dana Scully, white lab coat over her brown blouse and skirt, turned from the busy corridor into the calm of a room where her young patient, Christian Fearon, sat propped up slightly in his hospital bed, the frail, bent boy staring out the window at the whiteness of the winter morning.
“Hi, Christian,” Scully said, stepping beside the bed. “You’re awake early.”
The pale child in the elephants-and-clowns gown gazed up at her rather blankly. “I was just thinking.”
“Really? And what were you thinking?”
“About how I’m going to get out of here.”
His resolve, his courage, got a smile out of her, and one that wasn’t simply produced for the boy’s benefit. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about the same thing.”
He nodded. His eyes weren’t those of a child. An old soul, Mulder would say.
“So, then,” Christian said, and now a faint tremor was in the young voice. “Can I get out of here soon?”
Not just resolve. Not just courage. Fear was in there, too.
Her eyes tightened. “Did something scare you?”
Again he nodded. “The way that man was…was looking at me.”
She moved to the foot of his bed to check his medical chart, but found only an empty file folder. Her heart dropped to her stomach. “What man?”
The boy’s eyes told her, and Scully turned to see the almost spectral figure in black that was Father Ybarra, who was out in the corridor, looking at the very charts she’d sought.
She gave her young patient a reassuring smile and a small squeeze of the arm, said, “Don’t you be afraid, Christian,” then strode out and up to the administrator.
Scully nodded toward the charts in the father’s hands. She smiled, but her voice was sharp. “I was just looking for those.”
The sad oval of his face had a way of conveying the sort of weary compassion that accompanied not hope, but hopelessness. “Good morning, Dr. Scully. I wanted to go over the charts myself…and, of course, the results of the new tests you ordered.”
She felt herself stiffen. The administrator’s presumption was beyond all bounds of professionalism.
Icily polite, she said, “That’s not really your purview, Father—it’s the primary physician’s. Which would be me.”
The line in his rumpled face might technically have been a smile, but Scully knew there was nothing friendly or supportive about it. “It is in my purview, Dr. Scully, to make sure all my physicians are making the best choices—for their patients, and for my hospital.”
She extended a palm. “May I see the test results, please?”
He paused, then sighed and handed the charts to her. When he spoke, something genuinely regretful came in now, his concern, his tone, almost parental: “We’re here to heal the sick, Dr. Scully, not to prolong the ordeal of the dying. Certainly not to add to the suffering of a child. We have moved past treatment into care—and there are other, better facilities for the boy, to serve that end.”
The word end had a chilling sound to her, but she could not argue with the priest’s position. Not logically.
So she nodded and said, softly, “I understand,” and turned away, walking off, and she could feel the father’s mournful eyes on her back.
Mourning came too easy to the priest, as far as Scully was concerned. So did his willingness to allow a young boy like Christian to go all too gently into the poet’s good night. This was a man of faith who surrendered readily to conventional wisdom and a hospital’s bottom line.
She was walking quickly now, doing her best not to bump into anyone, doctors, nurses, nuns, patients, trying not to attract any attention though she was almost blind from the tears in her eyes, and the energy that fueled her passage was raw emotion.
Her office was a small, dark, private space where she sat down at her desk, switched on a lamp, and tried to read the charts she’d confiscated from Father Ybarra. But the tears in her eyes would not let her see. When they began to flow, she could only give in to them, breathing hard, fighting the racking sobs that wanted to take hold of her.
Fingers sought tissues from the dispenser on her desk but found it empty. She reached for her valise on the floor, got it open and fished in there, in pursuit of Kleenex, and removed several files that got in her way, and set them on her desk.
Finally she found tissues and wiped her eyes and blew her nose and generally got a grip on herself.
Breathing more regularly now, willing herself back into the professional that she was, Scully sent her eyes across the desk, looking for those charts. But Christian’s files were under the FBI files that Mulder had given her. These folders were what she’d blindly removed from the valise in her search for tissues.
Now she found herself staring at the familiar FBI designation. She picked the files up, just to move them…
…and then she opened them, and began to read, to look, and to think.
Somerset Natatorium
Somerset, Virginia
January 10
The indoor swimming pool had been around for many decades, its old tile walls having seen countless children grow up, its overhead spotlights illuminating generations of swimmers in the same eerie, reflective near-darkness. Swimmers often found this restful, almost meditative, as if the old natatorium were a world unto itself, that when you swam there, you slipped into another dimension or even perhaps into the past. A handful of people were taking advantage of the afternoon “free swim” period, including Cheryl Cunningham, an attractive young computer programmer from Somerset who was sitting on the edge of the pool in a fuchsia one-piece swimsuit.
Cheryl was thirty-four, with a slim, shapely athlete’s physique, her blonde hair ponytailed back, and swimming was her favorite exercise. She preferred off times like this, when she had something approaching privacy; the old, echoey indoor pool, when underpopulated, was strangely reassuring somehow, like a church you could wander into for a moment of prayer.
She slipped into the water, dunked under, then began to swim. After completing a lap, Cheryl stopped at the pool’s edge to grab a kickboard there, her medical ID bracelet clunking
against it before she kicked away into another lap.
Cheryl was unaware that someone was watching her, studying her, an angular-featured, muscular man who swam in parallel to her a lane over, but under water, his long dark hair streaming like seaweed. When he finally broke the surface, his bloodshot eyes continued to watch her, and she continued not to notice. Perhaps an attractive blonde like Cheryl wouldn’t have been surprised to have gained the attention of a male swimmer.
Only this male swimmer stared at her with an unhealthy, red-eyed intensity. And—as another young woman had done so recently—Cheryl might have looked at this stringy-haired, angular-featured individual and thought, Rasputin.
But she didn’t see him.
Forty-five minutes later, when Cheryl exited the Somerset Natatorium onto the facility’s snowbound parking lot—deep, plowed banks rising like fortress walls around the handful of remaining cars—she still sensed no one watching. Indeed she felt quite alone, and the solitude on this gray, overcast afternoon suited her. Despite the cold, and her recent swim, she felt warm, nicely ensconced in her purple parka over her turtleneck sweater and jeans, gloves, snow boots, ready for anything winter had to throw at her.
She opened the rider’s side of her vintage Subaru hatchback and tossed her gym bag in; then she went around and got in the car and behind the wheel, and the engine started right away, bless its heart. Behind her an old three-quarter-ton pickup, its plowing in the lot finished, turned its oversize tires toward the road, moving loudly behind her as she prepared to back out of her space. She waited for it to rumble out of her life, switched on her car radio, and soon was on the snowy country road that would take her home.
Big white flakes began to fall again. My God, this winter, Cheryl thought. Enough is a frickin’ nuff! But the flurry only grew, cutting her visibility. And as her wipers batted away snow pelting her windshield, nicely in time to Gwen Stefani doing “It’s My Life,” Cheryl sang along—not a loud karaoke routine, just an absentminded accompaniment to her efforts to see through the ever-heavier snowfall.
Taillights glowed red up ahead.
Good, she thought. I can attach myself to another car’s rear end and make it through this stuff…
Then she got a better look at the vehicle and saw that it was the old three-quarter-ton plow truck again, and nothing she wanted to get caught behind. The massive thing was plowing the right shoulder ahead and, in this snowfall, might be tricky to get around.
Cautiously she approached the big, bulky vehicle, decided there was room enough to pass on the left, and maneuvered the Subaru into the oncoming lane, speeding up a little.
But just as she began to pass the truck, the dinosaur edged over her way—maybe the driver hadn’t seen her! Then after her moment of panic, the little car seemed to panic, too, hitting a slick patch, and she lost control, the Subaru slamming into the side of the plow truck.
She seemed to bounce off the truck, like a pinball, and then she was driving again but off the road, her wheels charging through a snowbank and finally coming to an abrupt stop, hitting hard drifted snow, air bag going off with a whoosh.
Conscious but dazed, Cheryl was barely aware of the tiny blizzard she’d stirred as it finally settled, unaware even that she was buried in her little car clear up to its windows. Breathing hard, she peered across the front seat through the passenger window, where the plow truck had stopped, and saw its driver climbing down out of the cab. He trudged through the heavy snow toward her, just a silhouette moving in, and through, the white.
Her rescuer had something over his arm, a dark folded tarp, maybe. Fairly tall, he wore a canvas coat and black jeans and snow boots, and his hair was long and black, his face impassive with an angular, Apache look. Then he was beside the passenger-side window, where he bent to look in at her.
Through the glass, Cheryl, the air bag deflated now, called, “Hi! Hello…God am I glad to see you…I think I’m okay…”
But, oddly, he moved from the window and…what the hell? He jumped up onto the hood of the Subaru and walked heavily across the metal, puckering, popping it. Why on earth was he doing that?
Then he leaped off into the snow on the driver’s side, and she caught a flash of his bare hands—no gloves in this weather? She’d seen a large cut was on his right hand, and both his hands were blistered, very blistered…
Was she unconscious? Was she hallucinating?
Then his face was in her window, staring right at her with a horrible, horrifying blankness and bloodshot eyes crazily intense; dark, greasy hair dangling to his shoulders.
Rasputin! she thought.
When the window broke, she began to scream, but no one heard. And she kept screaming as she fought him, but no one saw. The snow was coming down hard now, and no one was foolish enough to be out on this road in these conditions. No one was there to hear the screams or the sound of the idling plow truck or to see its driver moving back toward his vehicle, dragging something.
A black tarp.
With something in it.
Something precisely the size and shape of Cheryl Cunningham.
Rural Virginia
January 10
Fox Mulder sat up in bed, bare-chested.
Next to him, in her mauve silk pajamas, Dana Scully faced away; but he knew somehow that her eyes were open. He had noticed, when she got home from the hospital, that an emotional day had come along with her. Still, he knew her well enough not to push. To let her process it.
Then evening had turned into night, and here in the darkness of their bedroom, she had clearly not processed it. He couldn’t stand it. He had to say something. To try to help.
He said, gently, “I can feel you thinking.”
Her back still to him, she said, “I’m sorry. I can’t sleep.”
“I might have a little something for that.”
She turned to smirk at him, her hair nicely mussed, her smirk rather mussed, too. “Only a little something?”
His hand found her hair and smoothed it. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing. No problem.”
“Scully.”
She sighed. “I have a patient, a young boy with a rare brain disease. And he’s very, very sick.”
His eyes tightened. “You’ve been carrying this around awhile, haven’t you? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
She shook her head slowly. “I thought I was on top of it. I thought there was…something I could do.”
“And there isn’t?”
She leaned on an elbow. “There are some radical treatments, yes…but no one seems to even want to talk about them. Even the experts say there’s nothing to do.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing but let him die. And somehow that doesn’t seem like an acceptable option.”
He smiled a little. “No.”
“So…” She shrugged with one shoulder. “I’m lying here, cursing God for all His cruelties.”
“Yeah? And you think God’s losing any sleep?”
Scully was looking past Mulder, into the darkness. “Why bring a child into this world just to make him suffer? I don’t know what it is, but I feel such a…such a connection to this boy. He’s got such a precious, giving spirit.”
Mulder nodded. “How old is he?”
“Six. Almost seven.”
He saw the pain in her lovely face and he knew why it was there. Why it really was there. Should he say?
“Mulder?”
“What?”
“You think it’s because of William.”
Their son, William. During a particularly dangerous, tense time for Scully—when she and Mulder had been forced apart—their child had been given up for adoption. However the couple might regret that, there was no going back.
Very gently, Mulder said, “I think our son left us both with an emptiness that can’t be filled.”
She shook her head. “Mulder, I’ve dealt with sick kids before. I’ve always been able to separate my feelings from whatever thes
e young patients faced. I don’t know why I can’t now…in this case…” She sighed and turned away from him again and curled nearly into a fetal position. “…when there’s nothing more to do…”
“Tell you what,” he said, and touched her shoulder. “You go to sleep and I’ll take over.”
“Take over?”
“Let me curse God awhile.”
She turned her head and smiled, such a lovely, loving smile, and he kissed her cheek.
“Thank you,” she said.
He kissed her again. On the mouth this time.
But she said, “Ow! Scratchy beard…”
Then she closed her eyes. He studied her, wondering if he’d been alone in thinking that kiss (scratchy or not) might turn into something; but she seemed finally to have fallen asleep, so he assumed a posture of slumber himself, and was almost out when she said, as just a mumbled afterthought: “Oh, there was something…”
“Something?”
“Something weird in the toxicology report on that severed arm.”
He was alert again, on his elbow. “What?”
“I looked at the FBI evidence reports again. In the tissue, there were traces of a drug commonly given to patients being treated with radiation. And also traces of a drug called acepromazine.”
“And why’s that weird?”
“Because acepromazine’s an animal tranquilizer.”
Scully’s voice indicated she was almost asleep, but Mulder was sitting up. “Now I can’t sleep.”
He got up and out of bed and left the bedroom.
Scully called after him: “Mulder…?”
He was in the bathroom, splashing water on his face from the sink when he saw Scully in the mirror behind him, tying up her robe.
“Mulder…what are you doing?”
“Why is there animal tranquilizer in a tissue sample from a man’s severed arm?”
She shrugged, rolled her eyes. “Possibly the doctor involved isn’t licensed to practice, and maybe was able to obtain it through a vet.”
“He said he heard barking dogs.”
The X-Files: I Want to Believe Page 5
