It didn’t take Mulder long to recognize the soundtrack from Alien. Stuff had apparently seen him coming.
With a grin he swung left and dropped into the booth nearest the end of the bar, shifted, and sat with his back against the wall, one leg stretched out on the padded seat, his topcoat dumped on the other seat. Within seconds, a tall woman stood in front of him, in loose black slacks, puff-sleeved white blouse. Black Irish from head to toe — hair, eyes, fair skin, a faint suggestion of freckles across her upturned nose.
“Are you dead or drinking?”
He rolled his eyes and groaned. “Both, I think.”
“Beer?”
He nodded.
She winked and drifted away.
He covered his eyes with his left hand, elbow propped on the table, and wondered if maybe he had slipped into some alternate time zone, some parallel universe.
All the signs were there: Aden Douglas hadn’t kept him waiting, but had personally ushered him into his office. Congratulations on the Helevito case were suspiciously effusive, as was praise for taking such good care of Hank Webber. Mulder hadn’t had a chance to say a word save a murmur of thanks before the Section Head asked him what he thought about the disappearing clown.
“A trick, obviously.”
“What makes you think so?”
“He’s not the Invisible Man, sir. Nobody can snap his fingers and vanish.”
“Intriguing, though, don’t you think?”
He heard the warning bells immediately and did his best to avoid what he feared was coming, pointing out suspect witnesses, the very backdrop of the circus, incomplete preliminary reports from the local sheriff…
It didn’t work.
He had one day to finish the Helevito paperwork, and then he was off to Louisiana over the weekend.
“Just up your alley, wouldn’t you say, Agent Mulder?”
Mulder had wanted to say, “Up your alley, too. Sir.” But a sudden attack of restraint kept him silent as he was handed a blue-tabbed case folder and ushered back out before he had a chance to continue his objections.
It wasn’t until he’d returned to his empty office and flipped through the pages that he realized Scully wouldn’t be going with him. Hank Webber would.
This wasn’t right. Not that he didn’t mind shepherding the younger man through the minefields of Bureau investigations; that was the least of his problems, and Webber was a personable, if somewhat overenthusiastic man.
What wasn’t right was the smell of it. Right up his alley, the man had said. Weird stuff. But this wasn’t weird at all; it was just nuts, and he wondered exactly who had asked for the FBI to join in what looked to be an obvious local matter.
Plus, let’s not forget the man at the Memorial. Invisible as well, and all too real.
Not protected, but not chained.
Alice was right — curiouser and curiouser.
Parallel universe; it had to be.
“If it’s that bad, maybe I’ll bring hemlock for a chaser.”
He opened his eyes and kept his expression bland as the waitress set a bottle of beer on the table, along with a plate filled with french fries. He pointed. “I didn’t order those, Trudy.”
“You haven’t eaten.”
Their aroma made his stomach growl, and she laughed silently when he reached for one and popped it into his mouth, hissing as it burned his tongue. Reluctantly, stiffly, he swung his leg back under the table and saw that a thick, all-the-trimmings hamburger had been buried beneath the fries. He looked at her sideways, and she winked again before heading across the room at a customer’s call.
He didn’t hide his interest. She was an attractive woman, a law student now at Georgetown, and they had dated a couple of times, nothing fancy, nothing hot. He enjoyed her and her company, although he couldn’t always take her mothering. Tonight, however, it was right on target, and he ate as if he hadn’t done so in a week, ordering a second burger before he’d finished the first. Taking his time. No hurry at all.
Because it was the middle of the week, the room didn’t fill. The booths were taken first, and a handful of tables changed occupants once or twice as he watched them. Mostly younger people back here; the old-timers stuck to the stools where they were closer to what mattered.
A couple of times women seated close by would glance at him, glance away, glance back, but he didn’t acknowledge them and so lost their interest. Two men in golf caps and cardigans argued quietly at a table with someone in a booth he couldn’t see. A married couple dressed more for the theater than Ripley’s fussed unhappily with kaiser roll sandwiches. A quartet of college kids tried to pick Trudy and the other two waitresses up.
A normal night.
In a parallel universe.
Oh, brother, he thought; maybe it’s time I took a vacation.
A room whose walls weren’t all the same color, mostly shadow now, mostly dark.
On the right-hand wall a dark-framed print, Gainesborough’s The Blue Boy, fronted with non-reflective glass.
Against the left-hand wall, a bunk with a thin mattress, blanket and sheet drawn taut and folded in the military style. A footlocker at the head, closed, chipped and scarred.
A metal desk set perpendicular to the rear wall. On it two piles of paperback books, a stack-able stereo system, a handful of compact discs. A yellow legal pad, with a ballpoint pen just off-center. A green-shaded lamp, softly lit. A swivel chair whose seat and back were comfortably padded.
In the far corner a club chair, with a standing brass lamp behind it, an end table beside it with a seashell ashtray.
The floor was concrete, uncarpeted save for a remnant throw in front of the chair.
A man in a long lab coat wandered around the room, poking at the books, the CDs, scowling at the legal pad whose top sheet was blank, picking up the pen, stabbing the page lightly before dropping it again. Although he was only in his mid-forties, he had more scalp than hair, his face sharp angles without seeming harsh. When he straightened, he was tall, broad at the shoulders and chest, and broad at his stomach. He glanced around, his nose wrinkling at the faint stench of cigarette smoke and mildew, sweat and blood, and finally, with a satisfied nod, strode to a padded door in the wall. He opened it without hesitation and stepped up into a corridor whose ceiling lighting was contrast enough to force a squint as he checked through the round judas window before turning right and stepping up into the next room, itself dimly lighted.
“Ready?” A woman in white sat at a wall-long shelf on which was a series of monitors and keyboards, space for notebooks and pads, and two styrofoam cups of steaming coffee.
The shelf was set just beneath a window that looked through the ghost of the Blue Boy, down into the other room.
“Leonard, I asked if you were ready.” Long blond hair pulled back and held back by a rubber band, feathered bangs on a high forehead.
Leonard Tymons, when he had first met her, thought Rosemary Elkhart quite attractive in a hard sort of way. After four years he hadn’t changed his mind, but he had changed his plans for seduction and a brief affair. She indeed did have fair hair and fair skin, pale lips and pale blue eyes, but when he was alone he called her a black widow.
“Leonard, damnit.”
He dropped into a wheeled chair beside her. “You saw.”
She nodded toward a microphone attached to one of the computers. “For the record, okay? Let’s remember the record.”
He nodded. “For the record, everything is fine. Nothing has changed since last time. Jesus, can’t we get anyone to clean that place right? It smells like a… a…” He shook his head in disgust. “Just get someone to scrub it down before next time.”