Chapter 10
Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital
Richmond, Virginia
January 11
When Dana Scully, her red hair damp from a shower, her mood less than cheerful, stepped into the corridor from the doctors’ locker room, she almost walked straight into Margaret Fearon.
Scully, in street clothes (light blue shirt and dark blue trousers), had nothing medical in mind at the moment. She was on her way to find something edible in the cafeteria, before bunking in with the doctors on call. She was exhausted from the long operation, and the argument with Mulder hadn’t exactly perked her up. She was in no mood or frame of mind to deal with her young patient’s parents, but here they both stood.
They looked so young—neither yet thirty, the pretty redhead with her heart-shaped face, the tall brown-haired guy with smoldering blue eyes. Just a few years ago, these two had been all dreams of future and family; and now…
“Dr. Scully,” Margaret Fearon said, “we’re sorry to have to bother you.”
Scully had the feeling the blue-collar couple had been camped out here awhile, waiting for her.
The boy’s father picked up where his wife left off: “But we’d like to speak with you, if we may. About our son. About Christian.”
The strained formality of that, the forced politeness, sent warning bells ringing in her brain.
Scully, her expression serious but not grave, looked from the father to the mother. “Have you been in to see your son?”
Margaret nodded. “Yes, he was sleeping. But we’ve…” She glanced at her husband with troubled eyes.
“We’ve changed our minds,” Blair Fearon said flatly. “About going forward with this new treatment.”
The parents seemed relieved now—they’d got it out. The burden of what they had to say was off them and resting squarely on the stunned Scully’s shoulders.
Finally Scully said, slowly, carefully, “This is premature. We don’t even know if it’s working…”
“It’s just too radical,” Blair said, shaking his head. His eyes, like his wife’s, were rimmed red. “We think Christian has been put through enough.”
Margaret leaned forward as if to touch Scully’s arm, but stopped short of that. “We know you have the best intentions, Doctor. But, after all our family’s been through? We’ve decided—we’d like to put our faith in God now.”
“Science, medicine…” Blair paused. “…it can only do so much. We need a miracle for Christian, not this…this torture.”
Scully stiffened. Swallowed. “I see,” she said.
The mother’s eyes showed alarm. “Please! We know your intentions are the very best. But seeing our son suffer, it’s just…it’s too much, Dr. Scully. It’s nothing against you, personally.”
“No,” Scully said.
“If…if you were a mother yourself, you’d understand.”
After the emotional wrestling match with Mulder, this was almost too much. Scully steeled herself, fighting to maintain her composure.
Quietly she asked them, “I take it you’ve spoken with Father Ybarra?”
“Yes,” Mr. Fearon said.
“I see.”
“But the decision was ours!”
Scully nodded. Anger was creeping in, and she had to battle it back. The doubt these parents shared was reasonable, understandable, and she had to respect that.
She met the eyes of the boy’s father. “What if it did work?” Now she met the mother’s gaze. “What if later we found we’d made the wrong choice by stopping?”
Margaret cocked her head. “Are you saying you can save my son?”
“I can’t promise that,” Scully admitted. She had, after all, experienced her own doubts. “I just…I don’t want to give up now.”
Margaret’s eyes were moist. “I know you care about Christian, very much. He thinks the world of you. We’re not blind to that.”
Her husband said, “But we have to do what’s best for Christian, Dr. Scully.”
“Then wait,” Scully said. “Christian will be here for several days, in post-op recovery. Let’s let some time pass, and not do anything rash. Then we’ll talk again.”
And she moved away, down the corridor, before they could say anything else.
The Compound
Rural Virginia
January 11
Back in the kennel, in her wooden box with its punched holes, Cheryl Cunningham—curled in a fetal position, blanket drawn up tight—was sleeping. She’d been sleeping for several hours and was dreaming she was somewhere better when a metallic screech jarred her awake and back to frightful reality. Her eyes popped, as another screech, with some metallic rattle in there, too, brought her to her knees and to a hole, to see what was going on.
The sounds had been the wire metal-frame doors of cages being opened, and scraping on the floor. The gaunt, tall, older man in medical gown and cap was going one by one to the caged pit bulls and letting them out. He would take them by the collar and escort them to a slightly oversize doggie door low in a wall, to push them through without any protest—this was a routine the animals were clearly used to. The woman in medical white was trailing the gaunt doctor, doing the same thing he was, letting dogs out, sending them through the doggie door into (Cheryl supposed) an enclosed outdoor run.
When the cages were empty, the job complete, the gaunt doctor moved toward her and looked in at her through the holes.
Cheryl, on her knees, hands against the rough wood of the box’s walls, gave him her most beseeching look, her eyes holding his in shared humanity. “Please…I have a family. I have a mom and a dad, just like you. I want to see my family again. Please…please. I don’t want to die. Will you please listen…?”
The gaunt doctor gave her a kindly smile and spoke soothingly to her. But the words were in that foreign language, Russian probably.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I can’t…how do I…?”
“Do…you…want…kisses?”
The bizarre question, in broken English, might have made her laugh if it hadn’t chilled her. She could only stare at him in wide-eyed, fearful non-comprehension.
Then he slipped a hand into the pocket of his hospital gown and withdrew a cupped palm brimming with small silver objects, which he dropped through her food slot: Hershey’s Kisses.
She ignored them, instead begging this seemingly gentle old man with her face, saying, “I need to go home—please. I need to go home!”
But he rose and ambled away, pushing through that plastic curtain into the bright room of medical machines, where earlier a sample of her blood had been taken.
“Don’t leave me!” she called to him, through her sobs. “Don’t leave me…”
Only he had already left.
Sex Offender Dorms
Richmond, Virginia
January 11
Her tan cashmere coat over her street clothes, Dana Scully stood at the apartment door, hesitant. She could not believe she had driven across town at night to this destination. Was she so exhausted, so emotionally ravaged, that she’d become a sleepwalker in a waking nightmare?
And yet she knocked.
It took a while for a response, but she got one, when a shocked Father Joe opened the door and stood framed there in his bathrobe and slippers, his gray hair even wilder than usual, as if he’d stuck a toe in a socket and this were the result. His gaping expression fit that post-electric-shock notion equally well.
“Now I am having a vision,” he said. “A vision if I ever had one…”
She was rocking on her feet a little. Filled with trepidation, she asked tentatively, “May I speak with you?”
The ex-priest said nothing. She might have slapped him with a wet towel, the way he stared at her, openmouthed.
Then his expression settled into something recognizably human, even gentle, and he said, “Dr. Scully, I’d like nothing better.”
He opened the door wider, moved sideways, and gestured. “Would you like to
come in?”
Slipping past him awkwardly, Scully stepped in and almost jumped when the door shut, hard, behind her.
Again she was in the dim, gray, dingy living room. Tonight David Letterman was on the TV, getting big laughs. A blanket and pillow were on the sofa (had Father Joe being sleeping out here?), with an ashtray of spent cigarettes on the end table nearby. The fog and scent of tobacco smoke hung like a curtain. The ex-priest’s world was a cold and stale one.
How many times had she and Mulder discussed the fabled banality of evil? And here she stood in a rundown flat feeling as though she’d passed through the very gates of hell.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Father Joe said, gesturing to the sofa.
She shook her head. “I won’t be staying long.”
He moved behind her, close as her shadow, on his way to the sofa; but when he came around, he did not sit—he just stood there, staring at her unblinkingly.
“You’ve come by yourself?” he asked.
No, the place is surrounded, and if you make even the smallest move, so help me God, SWAT will come down on you like Bonnie and Clyde…
“Yes,” she admitted.
Why was he staring so? To test her nerve? To gauge her timidity? Maybe just to rattle her…
Whatever the case, he finally sat on the sofa, saying, “Sit. Please. I insist.”
She looked around for an alternate seat, but no chairs presented themselves; so finally, leaving plenty of space between them, she perched next to him on the sofa. She had to grant him that much respect—after all, she had come calling; he hadn’t invited her.
“Now,” he said, hands folded in his lap. “You’re here to ask me something.”
She nodded, and he smiled gently, apparently sensing her reluctance.
He said, “We’re alone. My roommate is out. You’re free to speak in confidence.”
Great. Exactly what I was hoping for, to be alone with this creep…as if my skin weren’t crawling already…
She sighed. “You said something to me out there…”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“…yesterday. Out there in the snow…”
“Yes. I said, ‘Don’t give up.’”
Now it was Scully’s turn to nod. She felt strangely relieved that Father Joe had anticipated her purpose.
“I need to know,” she said, “why you said that.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Honestly.”
She stared at him.
His eyebrows rose; he smiled with something approaching chagrin. “You were hoping for another answer.”
She looked away. Her thoughts had been rushing all the way over here, and they still were. She paused to compose them, then asked, “Do you know anything about me?”
His smile might have been winning, had she not known who he was. “Other than that you loathe me, my dear?”
“Had you read about me? In newspapers, or magazines? Had you looked me up on the Internet?”
“No. I don’t even have a computer.”
She tried again: “Do you know what I do? What I used to do, what I’m doing now…?”
“No. But I can see you are a woman of faith.”
That didn’t take a psychic: the gold cross at her throat would have helped any sideshow mystic pull off a cold reading, just as she’d told Mulder.
Then Father Joe added: “But your faith is not in the same things as your husband…”
“He’s not my husband.”
Why had that come out so defensively? She could tell the ex-priest had picked up on that, and now his eyes fell from her face to that gold cross.
“Would you care to tell me about yourself, my dear?”
“No.”
“Do you…do you care to offer confession?”
She gaped at him, half horrified, half disgusted. “I don’t think you’re in any position to…”
“What, to judge? Possibly not. But haven’t you judged me?”
She laughed, once, mirthlessly. “Don’t you deserve to be judged?”
“As a predator, you mean? A pederast? A vile abomination of God’s earthly kingdom?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
His smile was gentle, which creeped her out even more. “And yet, Dr. Scully, am I not God’s creation, just like you?”
She got to her feet. “I don’t think even God would claim you…not after the things you did to those boys.”
She was halfway to the door when his voice, with some pulpit timbre now, stopped her: “Do you know why we live here? The men who call this ugly box of monsters our home?”
She turned toward him.
He continued: “We live here because we hate each other as we hate ourselves. For our sickening appetites.”
Her upper lip curled. “That doesn’t make those appetites any less sickening.”
He gestured with open arms, almost as if in benediction. “So where do these appetites come from, then? These uncontrollable impulses of ours?”
“Not from God,” she said.
“Not from me,” Father Joe said. “I castrated myself at twenty-six.”
That rocked her. This was hell. But it was Father Joe’s hell, and she needed to get out of it. She went to the door.
“And,” he said, “I didn’t ask for these visions, either.”
She stopped, a hand on the knob. Looked back.
He said, “Proverbs 25:2.”
She frowned, offended. “What?”
“‘God’s glory to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings to search out a matter.’”
“Don’t you go quoting Scripture to me!”
Quietly he said, “Why did you come here?”
She said nothing, trembling. Her hand on the knob…but not twisting it.
He asked, “What are you afraid of, my child?”
Frowning, she said, “You said, ‘Don’t give up’—why? What was that for?”
He shrugged. Shook his head, the twisty snakes of his hair seeming to pulse.
Pissed off, she strode over to him and demanded, “Why did you say that?”
His eyes focused unblinkingly on her. His voice was almost a whisper: “I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“I’m not lying. I’m telling you the truth.”
“They were your words—what did they mean?”
Again he shrugged. “I don’t know why I said them.”
“You looked me straight in the face…” She was hovering over him now, furious, her hands fists, wanting to pound on him the way a child does a parent whose strict ruling seems beyond comprehension.
And, as if her rage had set fire to his own emotions, the low-key ex-priest suddenly became distraught, eyes welling. “All…all I ever wanted to do was serve Him…all I’ve ever wanted was to serve my God…”
He bowed his head, closed his eyes, began to whisper to himself, praying apparently.
“Go ahead,” Scully said. “Ask for His pity. But don’t expect mine.”
She was almost out the door when he began to hyperventilate. Shivering, shaking, he looked at her pitifully, and she felt he was acting again, going over the top to try to elicit the pity she had refused him.
She even said, “You can stop the act any time,” but in seconds she knew—Dr. Dana Scully recognized the signs: This was a full-blown seizure.
Returning to the sofa, standing before the seated Father Joe, she put her hands on his shoulders. “Look at me,” she demanded, but his head hung loose as a rag doll’s and his eyes were rolled back and he was swallowing his tongue.
Then she got her cell phone out, called 911, and attended to her new patient.
The Compound
Rural Virginia
January 11
As she knelt in despair within her wooden box, Cheryl Cunningham heard the sound of unlocking. Her eyes rose with the first hope she’d experienced in many hours, as she heard the gaunt doctor gently speak to her in Russian.
Th
en the cage door swung open as a hand reached in and put on the floor next to her a plate of warm stew, large enough that it would not have fit through the food slot where, earlier, her kindly captor had rained Hershey’s Kisses upon her.
Then he shut the box’s door, but before he could lock it, the medical man was distracted by other voices speaking Russian, only much, much louder. Behind the plastic curtain, dark shapes moved and harsh words were exchanged. For several moments the loud argument continued, followed by the other two medical personnel Cheryl had seen earlier, the man and the woman; both were speaking in the foreign tongue, loud, gesticulating, and the gaunt man gave them his full attention.
But as they came through that plastic butcher’s curtain, Cheryl had glimpsed something startling enough to shake her, even after all she’d seen and experienced in these recent terrible hours: A woman on a gurney was in trouble. Cheryl hadn’t seen her face, could see her only from the chest down, but that was enough of a view to see the woman’s sad, sick state, the poor thing twitching, shaking, convulsing.
Cheryl of course had no way to know that at this very moment a certain defrocked, disgraced priest was experiencing an identical seizure. Nor could she understand the significance of the medical bracelet on the wrist of the afflicted woman—that the woman on the gurney was a missing FBI agent, presumed by many to be dead by now.
What Cheryl did know was that she had been given a chance, finally. Because when the gaunt man and his two assistants in their medical caps and gowns had pushed back through the plastic curtain, to attend their patient, the door to Cheryl’s wooden cage had been left inadvertently unlocked.
As all around her, dogs barked frantically, spurred by the commotion, Cheryl seized her moment, pushing open the box’s door, and then she crawled out, got to her feet; and her eyes searched for some means of escape, a door, a window, anything…but all that presented itself was the doggie door she had seen the gaunt man and the apparent nurse pushing those pit bulls through for their evening exercise.
She knew the night would be cold, and that she had on only the hospital gown; she knew she likely would be entering a fenced-in run for the dogs. But the dogs were back in their cages, right? And she could scale any fence, and she would rather freeze out there than die here in this house of horrors, and with any luck she would get to a road or a house or at least find somewhere warm to hide.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe Page 10