The X-Files: I Want to Believe

by Max Allan Collins

  “Dana,” Father Ybarra said, still seated.

  She paused at the door.

  He rose, a tall, almost skeletal man in his mid-forties whose long sorrowful face held kind eyes. “I know you must be disappointed. You know I’ll say a prayer for your young patient.”

  “So will I, Father. But I’m not quite ready to leave his fate to God.”

  She did her best not to stumble out of the conference room. She could feel Ybarra’s eyes on her, following her out, but he himself did not, for which Scully was grateful.

  In the corridor of the old hospital, moving past several nuns, Scully headed back toward her office, movement itself burdensome under the weight of the outside expert’s opinion. Before she reached her destination, her head lowered as she fought the miasma of disappointment, Scully almost bumped into the very family she hoped to help.

  Margaret and Blair Fearon, a salt-of-the-earth working-class couple in their late twenties who deserved better, were rolling their young son Christian down the hall in his wheelchair. Blair, lanky and brown-haired, towered over wife Margaret, a pretty redhead. The hopeful faces of the parents found Scully’s, and she instantly covered her despair with confidence.

  As for Christian, the frail boy in the elephants-and-clowns hospital gown gave her a smile as radiant as it was lopsided—his brain cancer, ever worsening, had made it hard for him to express himself.

  She bent slightly as she smiled at the child, saying, “Hi, Christian. How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, Dr. Scully,” he said, each word an effort, but one he seemed to think worthwhile. “How are you?”

  “Me? I’m doing just fine.”

  “You look pretty.”

  “Thank you, Christian. Nice to hear from a handsome young man.” Her eyes lifted to meet the beseeching expressions of Christian’s parents; their hope was almost as hard to take as that callous consultant’s words.

  These young parents had aged ten years in the months Scully had known them; they had the haggard look of refugees, and why not? Weren’t they after all casualties in this most personal of wars?

  Blair Fearon risked a smile. “Dr. Scully, did you get some outside opinions?”

  “Yes.” She grasped the notebook Christian had given her, as if it were keeping her afloat. “I just came from a satellite consultation.”

  “Good news?”

  She tilted her head. “Forward movement. We’re going to start by doing more tests.”

  The eyes of the parents died a little. Looking up at her from his chair, Christian stayed ever sunny, even though this child had suffered more than his share of hospital horrors.

  “Dr. Scully,” Margaret said, “Christian’s already been through dozens of tests. Isn’t it time to start treating this illness, really treating it?”

  “Soon,” Scully said, and her tight smile was meant to give them a few rays of hope, yet not build them up too much. “The next round of tests should point the way for us.”

  “Dana Scully…”

  The voice behind her hadn’t posed a question. If anything, it was an order, an order to turn around and see what this sonorous voice wanted.

  And when despite herself she complied, Scully knew at once who she was looking at, though she had never seen this commanding, unsmiling African American before, a man of perhaps thirty-five, a rugged six feet packaged in a crisp navy-blue suit with a blue dress shirt and a perfectly knotted black-striped-blue tie.

  It was that suit, added to the tone of voice, that told her she was facing an FBI agent.

  “Dr. Scully,” he said, “I’m looking for Fox Mulder.”

  She smiled at the little family, excused herself, and moved off, and her tall, broad-shouldered visitor followed along.

  “I’m Special Agent Mosley Drummy,” he said. “With—”

  “I can guess who you’re with.” She continued down the corridor as he kept up. “You’re with people who’ve been looking for Fox Mulder for a long time.”

  His manner was brusque, businesslike. “Old sins can be forgiven. Charges can be expunged.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  Drummy did something with his lips that wasn’t quite a smile. “The FBI needs urgently to speak with Fox Mulder. They’re hoping you can help them.”

  She stopped abruptly and so did the agent. They faced each other.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t work with Fox Mulder any longer. And I don’t work with the FBI, either. Forensics pathology is my past. I work with the living now.”

  Drummy said, “Good. Because if there’s any way you could contact Mulder, it might save a life.”

  She said nothing, but could not hide her interest.

  “The life of an FBI agent, Dr. Scully.”

  She studied the hard, chiseled features. Drummy’s eyes were unreadable, but that was no surprise—it came with the badge and gun. His words, however, carried an undercurrent of concern. An agent’s life was at stake, and SA Mosley Drummy worked with that agent. That Scully would bet on.

  But could she safely bet that the FBI wasn’t playing her? That those old sins, those old charges, would be anything but expunged or forgiven?

  And would Dana Scully wind up the Judas sheep for Fox Mulder?

  Rural Virginia

  January 9

  Dusk had not quite arrived when Dana Scully guided her white Taurus down a two-lane highway through a snow-covered landscape suitable for a Currier and Ives print. But by the time she pulled into an unmarked lane blocked by a paint-peeling metal gate, anything picturesque about the drive had faded with the day.

  She left the car running as she got out, walked to the gate, and unlocked it. Her eyes could not keep themselves from checking if she was being watched as she swung the gate open, got back in her car, and nosed in just clear of the gate. Again she left the car, this time closed the gate, reached around and locked it again, with her eyes traveling everywhere in that old suspicious manner, a habit that over the years and months had gradually gone away.

  Till now.

  She and the Taurus made their way down the bumpy, snow-patched gravel road until they came to a dreary little low-slung, single-story house. Unremarkable in every way, the small clapboard might appear abandoned, if a few lights had not been on within.

  The interior—after she unlocked the front door and stepped in, putting her valise on a table—did not have the desolate look of the exterior. This was a homey place, lived in, with furniture that was either secondhand or had been around long enough to seem to be. She took off her long tan cashmere topcoat, revealing a dark blue silk blouse and tailored blue slacks, looking too chic by half for these modest surroundings. But she did in fact live here. She hung up the coat in the closet and moved through the little living room to a hallway, where she opened a door.

  The room, a small converted bedroom, reminded her of the cramped office in the bowels of the FBI Building where she and Fox Mulder had once worked on X-Files cases, those unexplained crimes and events that had been designated X and consigned to a sort of bureaucratic scrap heap, till Mulder—the young hotshot from Violent Crimes—had taken an interest.

  Here, in this spare bedroom of the small clapboard house, were walls arrayed with photographs and clippings detailing sundry strange phenomena and images of UFOs and monsters from Bigfoot to lake creatures to little green men. Even the inside of the door was covered with such flotsam and jetsam of American life, snipped out of newspapers and magazines or printed off the Internet, stories of conspiracy theories and ETs and supposed supernatural happenings. This was the office or den or perhaps lair of a true obsessive.

  She had been in the doorway only a moment, his back to her as he sat at his desk, when he said, “What’s up, Doc?”

  “You’ve become awfully trusting, Mulder,” she said, smirking, “for a man wanted by the FBI. What if I’d been someone else?”

  Fox Mulder, a fugitive in a gray sweater and jeans, still did not turn; but she knew w
hat he was doing: clipping an item from a newspaper. Mulder subscribed to thirty newspapers and magazines and kept a P.O. box in Richmond for just that purpose.

  He said, “Eyes in the back of my head, Scully,” snipping away.

  She folded her arms, leaned against the door-jamb. Some things never changed. Mulder was one of them.

  “Auf einer wellenlange, the Germans say,” he said in that dry yet lilting way of his. “A precognitive state, Scully, often confused with simple human intuition…you have heard of woman’s intuition?…in which the brain perceives the deep logic of transitory existence unaided by the rational mind.”

  She gaped at his back. So now “eyes in the back of the head” was a scientifically proven paranormal gift? My God, he could go on. After all these years, he could still go on…

  “Moments of clarity,” he continued, still clipping, “materializing as conscious awareness of space and time independent from all sensible reality.”

  She shook her head for her own benefit. As if “sensible reality” were anything Mulder knew a damn thing about.

  He laid the clipping out carefully on a desk that seemed cluttered but wasn’t, method in his madness. The major obstacle was the abundance of sunflower-seed shells overflowing their dish, awaiting their turn in a wastebasket rife with them.

  Then he swiveled to her. Despite his full growth of facial hair, and his forty-some years on the planet, he still had a youthful countenance, including those puppy-dog hazel eyes. And though he’d buried himself in this office for…how many years now?…she still could see in him that childlike sense of wonder.

  Some days, anyway.

  Mulder lifted a finger, gently lecturing up at her. “Such moments of clarity can materialize much as you just did, Scully. Though if you’d actually ‘materialized,’ you’d likely be rapidly dematerializing by now.”

  She raised her arms and her eyebrows. See? I’m still here…

  Mulder’s eyes lost some spark, going half-lidded. “But who believes that crap anymore?”

  As if to prove his point, Mulder rose and went over to pin the clipping on the wall, close enough for Scully to read the headline: PRINCETON CLOSES ESP LAB AFTER 40 YEARS OF PARANORMAL STUDY. Well, not on the wall, onto a poster on the wall, an image of a flying saucer in a blue sky over trees, a poster that had been prominent in their basement office at the FBI and that Scully had come to identify with her partner: I WANT TO BELIEVE.

  A poster that seemed dog-eared now, ancient history and not a cry to battle.

  Scully said, “You still believe.”

  “Do I?”

  “Even if not…someone does at the FBI, apparently.”

  Half a smile made itself known in the nest of beard. But it faded as Mulder studied Scully’s straight face.

  She said, “I had a visitor at the hospital today.”

  His eyes tightened. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “The FBI wants your help, Mulder. To find a missing agent.”

  Now the eyes widened. “Tell me you said go screw yourselves. You know as well as I do, Scully, they’d rather see me dead and buried.”

  He went back to his chair and sat down again. She pulled up another chair and leaned in and touched his arm.

  “They say all is forgiven,” she said. “And they’ll drop any charges against you, if you’ll just come in and help them solve this one case.”

  Now his eyes flared. “The FBI will forgive me? How about, will I forgive the FBI for putting me on trial, on bogus charges, and trying to discredit a decade of my work? Of our work.”

  “Mulder…”

  “They should be asking me for my forgiveness.”

  She locked eyes with him. “I think they are, Mulder. Desperately.”

  He shrugged. “How could I possibly help these people?”

  “It’s an X-File, Mulder.”

  “There is no X-Files.”

  “There are X-Files, just no agents handling them.”

  He said nothing for a few moments, then: “Is Skinner involved?”

  Walter Skinner, the assistant director of the FBI, had been their friend and ally over the years, even in the darkest days.

  “No. The ASAC is Dakota Whitney.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  Scully shrugged. “I don’t, either. The agent who came to see me, Mosley Drummy, I also don’t know.”

  “That’s comforting.” His sigh was more disgusted than weary. “Why me, Scully?”

  “There’s someone who’s come forward with promising evidence about this missing agent. A psychic, or so he claims.”

  Mulder shook his head. “It’s a trick, Scully. To smoke me out.”

  And she shook hers. “If the FBI really wanted to get you, Mulder, I’ve no doubt they could. I think they’ve been happy just having you out of their hair.”

  “Good. I’m happy to have them out of mine.” His eyebrows rose. “Do the words lethal injection ring a bell?”

  That stopped her for a moment. Then: “How long have we been living here, Mulder? In this house?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Five years?”

  “Would Skinner have told me I could return to my career if we weren’t safe? It’s what we’ve always said—short of killing you? Your apprehension, with all the media attention it would bring, would do nothing but embarrass the bureau. And the government.”

  He raised a finger. “Let’s go over that short-of-killing-you part again, Scully.”

  She gestured with both hands at the walls of clippings around them. “Wouldn’t you like to step out into the sunshine again, Mulder? Wouldn’t it be nice if we both could? Together?”

  He swiveled his chair away from her.

  She said, “There’s a young agent’s life at stake.”

  He shrugged, held up his hands, as if to say, Not my problem.

  “Mulder…I know I don’t have to say it, but…this could easily be you…or me…missing out there somewhere.”

  Mulder scratched his beard. His eyes searched his desk for something or other.

  She shifted her tone. “Truth is, Mulder, I worry about you. And the effects of long-term isolation.”

  “I’m fine, Scully. Happy as a clam here.”

  “Really.” She cast her eyes toward the ceiling, where in the tiles were stuck dozens of pencils, tossed up there in nervous frustration by the bearded man at the desk.

  She rose. “I tried…I’ll let them know your answer.”

  She didn’t pause at the door, just went on out into the living room, not seeing the man she shared this house with, her life with, sitting thinking at the desk. And swiveling to cast his eyes on the poster, and those familiar words: I WANT TO BELIEVE.

  She did, however, hear him when he said quietly: “I’ll go.”

  She turned and he was in his doorway. His expression was deadpan, but something in his eyes told her that she’d won, although she wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  “On one condition,” he said.

  She smiled. She knew what that condition was.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go, too.”

  Chapter 3

  Washington, D.C.

  January 9

  From the helicopter, the abstraction that was his nation’s capital city at night could thrill Fox Mulder as much as the next American. He was enough of a patriot to marvel at the familiar shapes of illuminated monuments rising with all their mythic power out of the light-dotted darkness. He was enough of a romantic to hope that the greatness of the American dream could still come true, despite all the nightmares he’d witnessed.

  But the nightmares could not be dismissed. Seated by Scully in the FBI chopper, cold despite the brown topcoat he’d flung over his sweater and jeans, Mulder could only look over at his former X-Files partner, and forever life partner, and think how small she seemed, how vulnerable, despite his knowledge of just how strong in every way this petite woman could be. She had talked him into this, but his insistence that she
go, too, had put her in the seat next to him, and her expression told him that she shared with him the same apprehensions about their impending homecoming.

  As the aircraft slowed over Pennsylvania Avenue to descend over the familiar, triangular-shaped J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, with its severe lines and beehive of windows, Mulder smiled at Scully and said, somehow working his voice up over the churning chopper blades, “If it’s a trap, I’ll make a break for it. You cover me.”

  She just gave him that pursed-lip look, that cross between a kiss and a smirk he knew so well.

  When they stepped from the chopper onto the rooftop, a tall African American in a navy suit awaited them, the artificial wind of the helicopter flapping the man’s clothes and making a waving flag of his tie. He appeared supremely bored. This would be Scully’s hospital contact, Special Agent Drummy.

  Mulder approached the agent, who offered no greetings, and said, “Thanks for the lift. Wouldn’t want to hitch on a night like this.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Drummy said, eyes as cold as the weather around them. “I didn’t send it.”

  Mulder glanced at Scully, who frowned just a little. The cold shoulder from the guy who’d invited them? What was that about? Right now SA Drummy was moving ahead of them, toward the doors into the building, and the two former FBI agents followed dutifully, if for no other reason than to come in from the cold.

  Come in from the cold is right, Mulder thought.

  This time of night, even a bustling enterprise like the FBI Building was fairly deserted. Drummy was keeping a brisk pace, and Mulder and Scully, side by side, followed a few steps behind, traversing several gray corridors. They were both in civvies—Scully in her camel-hair topcoat over a light blue blouse and darker slacks—and the few agents they did pass gave them suspicious glances.

  Scully seemed vaguely offended. “They’re looking at us like suspects.”

  He smiled a little. “Aren’t we?”

  Finally Drummy, his eyes as cold in the warmth of the building as they’d been on the chilly rooftop, paused at a doorway. He said, “Wait here,” opened the door, letting out the noise of busy worker bees, then went in and shut it hard—not quite a slam but a nice period for the end of his sentence.