Mulder stood staring at it like a visitor to a shrine, someone who’d lost faith and hoped to regain it here. Gloved hands in his coat pockets, breath streaming in the chill, he did a slow pirouette, searching the surrounding area. His eyes stopped on a hill that overlooked the site.
He could not have explained, rationally, why he decided to check out that hilltop, but when he climbed up there, he confirmed how all-encompassing the view was. Then, when he looked in the other direction, he saw a narrow lane close by. Perhaps it was a hunch; maybe it was that this seemed the one rural lane in this patch of rural Virginia that he and the FBI hadn’t traversed.
Whatever the reason, rational or otherwise, Mulder found himself driving down that lane in the white Taurus. This was no small task—the road had not been plowed since the last snowfall, and he was depending on ruts left by sturdier, four-wheel-drive vehicles gone before him. Though the sun was still up—presumably at least, under the clouds—his vision was compromised by yet another round of falling snow. His wipers did their best for him, but they, like the sedan itself, were being pushed way past capacity, and Mulder would be lucky not to wind up stuck out in the middle of God knew where.
The lane passed through a wooded area and then a clearing and he was relieved to come upon a plowed and well-maintained road. He had to choose between right and left, and his gut told him nothing, so finally he turned left. With no idea where he was, he followed the road through increasing snowfall into a small country town.
The Taurus slowed as it glided over recently plowed pavement through the small, seeming ghost town, its old, low-lying buildings mostly unlit, with only the occasional vehicle sharing either side of what seemed to be the main street. He was almost through the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it community when he spotted an old frame building with a broad facade whose large sign read: NUTTER’S FEED AND ANIMAL SUPPLY.
With dusk settling in, closing time must have been nigh, because a stocky man in a blue plaid shirt could be seen through the glass of the front doors, apparently locking up.
Mulder pulled in anyway, and soon was knocking at the front window until the man appeared framed there looking like a rural Don Rickles with his bald bullet head and squinty-eyed expression. He opened the door halfway.
“I’m closed,” the man said. Not as mean as Rickles but not terribly friendly.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
Looking past Mulder to the parked Taurus, the feed store man said, “You plan on driving that car in this weather, son, you better get to where you’re going quick.”
“I only need a moment of your time.”
“Well, you better come in then. Let’s leave the cold where it is.”
And he stepped back, leaving the door open for his last-minute customer to enter, Mulder closing it behind him. He followed the man in the blue plaid shirt and jeans through aisles of animal supplies back to an old-fashioned wooden counter with feed scales and other esoteric equipment that looked ready for Antiques Roadshow.
He could only follow the stocky proprietor so far, because the man got quickly back behind the counter and disappeared into an office out of Mulder’s sight.
The feed store man called, “What do you need, son?”
“I was wondering if you stock an animal tranquilizer called acepromazine…”
“Sure.” He reappeared, a stack of paperwork in hand. His squinty expression had grown skeptical. “That is, if you got a prescription for it.”
“I don’t.”
“Then I can’t sell you any.”
Mulder reached for his back pocket and the proprietor, perhaps thinking a bribe was coming, viewed his late customer with equal parts suspicion and impatience, a mix his scales needn’t measure.
“Hold on, son…”
“I’m not here to buy the stuff,” Mulder said. “I’m wondering if you’ve ever sold the drug to this man.”
Mulder withdrew the folded-up Xerox of Janke Dacyshyn’s ID photo and held it up for the proprietor, who was just about to have a look when the phone began to ring in the office behind the counter.
“Hell,” he said, fairly good-natured, going off to answer it, “I’m never gonna get out of here…”
Mulder stood around waiting for his host’s return. He could hear the man talking but couldn’t really make anything out and wasn’t really trying. Idly he noticed headlights coming up in the dusk beyond the front window; a large vehicle was pulling in out front, and Mulder drifted over to check it out.
What he saw was an old three-quarter-ton pickup truck with a plow prow. The driver shut off the vehicle’s engine and climbed down out of the cab: the suspect who’d eluded him at the construction site.
Janke Dacyshyn himself.
When Tom Gibbons, the owner of Nutter’s Feed and Animal Supply, returned from his backroom office, he found the young stranger gone, and another customer waiting, a customer he’d had before, a big fella with dark, stringy hair and a face about as a friendly as a pit bull.
“What happened to that guy?” Gibbons asked his latest customer.
“Who?”
“Guy who was just standing there!”
But the stranger was nowhere to be seen.
Janke Dacyshyn, not giving a damn, just shrugged, and put in his order.
Minutes later, after hauling several bags of supplies out to the truck, the Russian got up in the cab again and took off into a snowy dusk that would soon be night. He did not notice that a white Ford that had been parked out front of the feed store, when he arrived, was no longer there.
And shortly after the plow truck pulled away from the feed store, Mulder in the Taurus pulled out from a side street and followed, at a distance.
This time the bastard would not get away.
Chapter 13
Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital
Richmond, Virginia
January 12
Lost in a longing that was almost physically painful, Dana Scully walked down the corridor in a kind of trance. At the intersecting corridor, Father Ybarra passed in front of her, gave her a quick, reproving glance but no other acknowledgment, and was gone. Two nuns seemed to float by, though they nodded and smiled, and she felt as if her reality had passed into a dreamlike state.
But she snapped back when she looked down at the end of the corridor where the door was open to Christian Fearon’s room, and she could see Father Joe, in his hospital gown and bare feet, standing at the boy’s bedside, his back to Scully as he leaned down over the child.
From a dead stop she went to a full-throttle run, the disturbing image becoming ever clearer, and this was no dream, but possibly a too real nightmare: The ex-priest was at the boy’s bedside looking down at him, his hand lifted in what might have been benediction but was more likely something else, something terrible…
Scully, filled with murderous rage, burst into the room. “Get away from him! Get away now!”
As she came around, she was relieved to see that Father Joe was simply stroking the boy’s brow, the frail child with the bandaged, shaved head smiling up at him. But nonetheless Scully grabbed the priest and yanked him away, saying, “Get out of here! Get out of here!”
Father Joe turned to her; now he appeared to be in a kind of trance, or at least was pretending as much. He began, “I was…”
“You piece of shit,” she whispered viciously. Her upper lip curled back over her teeth. “You sick bastard…”
The ex-priest shook his head, his expression that of a victim not a victimizer. “No…no, you don’t understand…I was just…”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything from you.”
What she wanted was to drag him bodily from the room and beat him senseless; but a crowd out in the corridor was gathering, nurses, nuns, patients, ruling out that option.
From the bed, the boy smiled weakly. He looked like a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. “It’s okay, Dr. Scully. He didn’t do anything bad. He’s nice. Sad…but nice.”
>
His angelic voice had punctured the tension, but Scully still felt the rage welling within her, while Father Joe just stood there silent as a statue, apparently stunned by Scully’s outburst.
Then, slowly, the ex-priest said, “This boy is your patient…”
Was it question? A statement? Scully stared at him, bewilderment trumping her anger for the moment.
She demanded, “Who told you that?”
“No one,” he said with a tiny shrug.
“Then what the hell are you doing in this room?”
“I’ve been here…”
She looked at the boy. “Did this man ever visit you before, Christian?”
“No, Dr. Scully.”
She wheeled back to Father Joe. “You’ve never been here. So don’t—”
“I have been here before.”
“What?” The simplicity, the sureness of his words were almost enough to convince her of his sincerity, but she was too mad to think of him as anything but a charlatan and a child molester.
“Here in this room,” Father Joe said. His tone was strange, his eyes unblinking, as if this were just now dawning on him. “You and this boy. This all happened. It’s all happened before…”
Her head swimming, Scully stood there speechless. What the hell did he mean? she wondered, but no more words emerged from her lips to challenge him. She was still standing there staring when two hospital security guards came in and fell in behind her like the reinforcements they were.
She gave them a glance, and the two uniformed men moved past her toward the father. She knew she should stay and talk to Christian, but was too shaken to do so right now; and she was halfway out the door when Father Joe, with a guard on his either arm, said, “You’ve given up, haven’t you? You gave up.”
She whirled. Stopped cold, she could only stare at the eyes of Father Joe, eyes that now burned with an intensity, a religious fervor that shook her to her soul.
“You can’t give up,” he told her sternly.
Rattled, rocked, Scully turned and went out the door as if catapulted by the ex-priest’s words.
Rural Virginia
January 12
Fox Mulder—guiding the white Taurus down a cleared two-lane road through snowfall and twilight—could see the plow truck way up ahead. In his FBI days, tailing a vehicle hadn’t exactly been Mulder’s specialty, but he felt he was doing all right—the taillights of the truck seemed a good, safe distance ahead.
He was going faster than he cared to on this road, without chains or for that matter snow tires, and his headlights were off, while the plow truck was moving along with impressive speed for these conditions in this weather.
Still, this had been going on awhile, and Mulder was feeling confident, reaching for his cell phone as he kept his eyes on the road. He noted the big vehicle up ahead as it made a tight-radius turn with surprising ease, disappearing from view.
As he took that same tight turn, Mulder was dealing with the phone, finding the right number to speed dial, and when he came around, there was the plow truck!…sitting directly in his path, stopped in the middle of the road.
Swerving, slamming on the brakes, blurting an expletive, Mulder felt a spasm of helplessness as the Taurus promptly went out of control.
With tremendous, teeth-rattling force, the sedan slammed sideways into the stationary truck and caromed off, hardly denting the bigger vehicle, then slid into a roadside snowbank, coming to an abrupt stop that on force of impact initiated the air bags.
As his air bag self-deflated, Mulder sat dazed behind the wheel, unconsciousness seductively inviting him to a dark place from which he knew he might not return. He was fighting that, though already half out, and did not see the plow truck moving toward him and the Taurus.
But then when the plow truck slammed into the Taurus, Mulder came awake as if an alarm clock had gone off in his ear. Groggy, he looked out the side window past the sagging deflated passenger air bag and saw Janke Dacyshyn’s scowl through the windshield of the plow truck as the big vehicle’s prow pressed crunchingly forward into the right side of the Taurus, shoving it even deeper into the snowbank.
Mulder had gathered enough of his wits to realize what was happening, and he tried to get out the driver’s-side door, but the piled snow, getting compacted by pressure, would not allow him to force it open. Desperate, he tried the window, and, unbelievably, it began to go down! Snow piled against the window was dropping away, but Mulder’s surge of relief was short-lived: The snow was dropping because the little vehicle was meeting not more snow, but air.
The Taurus was being pushed off an embankment.
From within the car, which was fast becoming a coffin, Mulder could not see the worst of it: The embankment was a steep one, dropping way down to a frozen-over creek bed. What Mulder could see was that plow pressing against his smaller car with steady, clear, deliberate force that finally sent the Taurus over the edge, tumbling down…
He was conscious while the Taurus rolled over and over, ears filled with the sounds of the violent crash, and when the little car finally hit with a sickening metallic crunch, he was knocked out by the impact, no air bag left to soften the blow.
And up above, the plow truck, its headlights cutting through the darkness that had taken over dusk, backed up and then rolled away down the lonely road, leaving the crashed vehicle where the thought of anyone finding it seemed as hopeless as its driver surviving the fall.
Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital
Richmond, Virginia
January 12
Dana Scully, still shaken by the strange exchange with Father Joe in her young patient’s room, stepped into the welcoming darkness of her office and shut the door behind her, leaning on it for a moment, trying to gather herself.
Finally she went to her desk, switched on the lamp, and sat down at her computer. Tapping in a password with one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other, she sat there and quietly waited for her screen to come alive.
Absently, she reached for the stack of printouts she’d made before; the sheets were in a haphazard pile and she took time to straighten them. In the process, a paper-clipped file fell to the floor. She bent down for it and placed it neatly atop her fresh stack, and large bold print caught her eye:
RUSSIAN STEM CELL THERAPY IN TRANSPLANT PROCEDURE
Below this headline was a picture of a doctor and a dog.
She frowned, staring at the page, then leafed through the file, and stopped when she came to another photo, a startling one, again of a doctor and a dog. But this dog was special.
This dog’s head had been replaced—this dog had the head of another dog grafted onto its neck.
For a moment she stared at this photo as well, aghast; but then she was out of her chair, as if rocketed, digging for her cell phone in the pocket of her lab coat. She bolted from her office, hitting a speed-dial number as she went.
As she moved down the corridor, cell phone to her ear, she heard Mulder’s voice: “I must be busy. Leave me a message.”
“Shit,” she said. She tuned out the endless messaging instruction of a robotic female voice, then said, “Mulder! I need to talk to you. I need you to call me as soon as you get this, Mulder. Believe it or not, that FBI agent is alive, at least part of her is.”
J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, D.C.
January 12
In the conference room turned provisional command post, a handful of FBI agents continued to work the case, but the hustle and bustle was past. Agent Monica Bannan was dead, and so was ASAC Dakota Whitney. The hospitalized Father Joe Crissman, with his connection to alleged organ-donor black marketeer Franz Tomczeszyn, was providing the current, more limited path of inquiry.
The landline phone that rang was answered by Special Agent in Charge Fossa herself, the dark-haired, disapproving professional woman Fox Mulder and Dana Scully had noticed on their first visit to this room, but with whom they’d never actually spoken.
Right now,
however, SAC Fossa was, albeit briefly, speaking to Dana Scully. But Fossa didn’t handle the call. She said to SA Drummy, seated nearby at his laptop, “It’s for you.”
Drummy went to the phone, identified himself, and heard a female voice saying, “Mulder’s missing and I need your help. I got a call from him a minute ago and I heard him yell before the line went dead.”
“Is this Dr. Scully?” As he spoke on the phone, SAC Fossa hovered, an eyebrow raised.
“Yes,” Scully said impatiently. “It’s Dr. Scully. Look, this is—”
“Why don’t you dial it down a notch or two and tell me exactly what the problem is.”
“I can’t reach Mulder.”
“Where is he?”
“Would I be calling, if I knew that!”
“Just a moment.” Drummy looked to SAC Fossa, who’d been standing close enough to hear all that; and the woman shook her head. With a sigh, Drummy returned to the conversation. “Dr. Scully, I’m going to suggest you call the police.”
“What?”
“This is not an FBI matter.”
“He’s out there working on your case!”
“He’s done all the work we need from him. His consultancy is over.”
“You people asked for him! You called him in—”
“Well, that wasn’t my call.”
“No, it was Whitney’s. And she died when she and Mulder were chasing your suspect.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
“Listen to me—I need your help!”
Drummy’s jaw clenched; she was right—they owed this to her. But his boss, SAC Fossa, was watching him with eyes as cold as they were unforgiving.
So Drummy heard himself saying, “I’m sorry. But I can’t help you.”
“Then why don’t you let me talk to somebody with some balls there who can!”
The X-Files: I Want to Believe Page 13