The X-Files: I Want to Believe

by Max Allan Collins

  Her tan cashmere coat flapping in the flake-flecked wind, Dana Scully got quickly down from the rider’s side and approached an impossibly young-looking uniformed officer.

  “I’m Dana Scully,” she told him, with a nod toward the vehicle being craned. “That’s my car.”

  “Right,” the officer said. “I have your name. I spoke to some bigwig at the FBI who called over from Washington.”

  “Walter Skinner,” Scully said with another nod.

  The cop was looking past Scully at the tall male figure in a dark topcoat getting out on the driver’s side of the SUV.

  “That’s him,” Scully said.

  Because of the call Skinner had made earlier, Scully already knew the crashed vehicle was empty; but she asked the officer, “Any sign of the driver?”

  He held up something that had been in his right gloved hand: Mulder’s cell phone. Something dark reddish-black crusted the phone’s earpiece.

  “Found this thrown clear, stuck in a snowbank,” the officer said. “Figure the driver was on his cell when the crash happened—had his window down for some reason.”

  Scully took the phone, and the cop had an expression that said he probably should have protested (but he didn’t), and she turned and strode to meet the approaching Skinner halfway.

  “Officer found this,” she said, shaken. “It’s got blood on it.”

  Assistant FBI Director Walter Skinner was a commanding figure who, at six-one, towered over the petite ex-agent. Bald, bespectacled, with a professorial mien but the build of an athlete, Skinner radiated a deceptive calmness, a professional cool, that concealed heat. This man had been much more than a boss to Scully and Mulder, and could swing into decisive action like a man half his fifty-some years.

  That she was upset by the discovery of the blood-spattered cell phone was not lost on Skinner, who said, “Just calm down—stop and think.”

  He was right, but she couldn’t do it—my God, she was hyperventilating! Get a grip! she told herself.

  Skinner took her gently but firmly by the shoulders. “Listen, he’s okay. He’s got to be. Look at the scene—be an investigator again.”

  She swallowed and nodded and turned back to take in the wreck being pulled up with skill and care by the African-American woman at the wheel of the tow truck.

  Thoughtful, Skinner ambled closer, and Scully tagged along as he said, “Mulder climbed out of there somehow, down below…and if he climbed out, he probably climbed up…”

  “I’ll buy that,” she said, calmer now. “But where did he go?”

  Skinner’s thin lips twitched something that was neither smile nor frown, merely an acknowledgment that he had no idea what the answer to that question was.

  Nor did Scully.

  The Compound

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  At the same moment Dana Scully and Walter Skinner were wondering where the hell Fox Mulder could be, Janke Dacyshyn—following the muddy path around the conjoined mobile homes—was wondering the same thing, though the name Fox Mulder would have meant nothing to him. He had identified Mulder as an FBI agent and right now presumed the intruder had, with some weapon or other, split in half the head of (well, one head of) the now dead two-headed dog.

  As he continued his search, the Russian moved by the small doggie door that concealed the answer to his question: Mulder had crawled through into a dark tunnel designed for dogs but accommodating, if tightly, the bloody, cold, exhausted former FBI agent.

  Mulder crawled through the tunnel and soon emerged into what he saw was a cramped kennel where a number of one-headed dogs slumbered. Not wanting to wake them and have his presence announced, he got quietly to his feet and surveyed his surroundings.

  What his attention went to immediately was the plastic curtain separating the kennel from an adjacent, brightly lit room where shadows were moving and words were being spoken in Russian, a language Mulder recognized but could not understand. Still, he got a certain drift at once: One of those shadowy figures behind the plastic was issuing orders, and the others were responding with crisp acknowledgments of same.

  That much Mulder got.

  And when he noticed the larger cage, a wooden box with air holes drilled, its door yawning open to reveal a crumpled blanket on the plank floor of what was obviously a cage not for canines but for a human, Mulder knew at once that whatever was going on beyond that curtain needed to be stopped.

  Bloodied, dirtied, down to his black T-shirt and jeans, the former agent pushed through the curtain, tire iron poised to do damage.

  He barely had time to take in the bizarre operating room when he said, voice cracking but forceful nonetheless, “Stop what you’re doing! And back away from there…”

  The tire iron was raised in a bloody hand as Mulder stepped forward to better make his point. Before him were a tall, older apparent doctor—in a medical gown, cap, and surgical mask—and two nurses or assistants, a man and woman, also in surgical masks, over which wide, startled eyes appraised Mulder.

  The medical trio backed up as Mulder approached, the tall old doctor shouting at him in Russian.

  Mulder snapped, “Shut up!”

  But the doctor kept talking, kept shouting, filling the air with unfathomable Russian as a horrified Mulder finally saw the two patients this “healer” was attending.

  On an operating table rested a disembodied head, a male head, the head in fact of Franz Tomczeszyn, whose donor transplant business had been taken to its ghastly if logical extreme, plastic tubes connecting the man’s head to the throat of a nude woman who floated unconscious or nearly so in a big plastic tub of slushy discolored water, blood pumping through those tubes as the missing (and now found) Cheryl Cunningham kept the disembodied head of Franz Tomczeszyn alive.

  And still the doctor screamed in Russian.

  “Shut up!” Mulder demanded, and shook the tire iron. “Goddammit, I said shut up! Do you speak English?” He looked to the two assistants. “Do any of you speak English?”

  The doctor had taken it down a notch but was still spouting angry Russian, while the pair of assistants just stared blankly at Mulder.

  “Listen,” Mulder said despite their nonresponse. “I want her out of there…I want those tubes out of her and her neck sewn up. Properly. Now.”

  But neither assistant seemed to understand, and the tall doctor was still bleating in Russian, adding to this waking nightmare, leaving the weak, hurting Mulder with no idea what to do next…

  The doctor, however, suddenly stopped speaking and began moving toward the two patients linked by blood-pumping plastic tubes. Did the old man understand English after all?

  Mulder raised the tire iron, moving closer. “Are you going to do what I said?”

  The two assistants backed off, seeking the periphery of the brightly lit operating room, just as the doctor again began to speak in Russian, not yelling now, rather affecting a reasonable tone, gesturing to his two patients as he did.

  Mulder said, “I don’t understand. I can’t understand you…”

  But Mulder was trying to, trying to focus in this hellish situation, and did not see a shadow behind him, a figure in white behind the wall of plastic, from which arms shot through and looped around Mulder’s neck, choking him, clutching him.

  Mulder twisted, and fought, recognizing Janke Dacyshyn, but not able to squirm loose from the Russian’s grasp, and Mulder could not see the tall, gaunt doctor go to a surgical tool tray, make a selection, and turn back with a hypodermic needle, which he jabbed into Mulder’s shoulder.

  He felt the fight draining out of him, but the darkness came so quick, he didn’t notice.

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  Assistant FBI Director Walter Skinner was at the wheel of the Expedition, driving through the backwoods boonies where the only saving grace was that the snow had stopped. In the rider’s seat, Dana Scully stared pensively out at white wilderness gliding by.

  Though clen
ched with concern, Skinner did his best to soothe her: “We’re going to find him.”

  Her nod was barely perceptible.

  “I know Mulder,” Skinner went on, “and he’d get to a phone first and call. He wouldn’t go off and do anything crazy.”

  Now she looked at him as if to say, Are you kidding?

  Skinner swallowed. Shrugged. “Not overly crazy.”

  Scully returned her eyes to the window. He kept glancing at her, and saw her sit up straight. They were passing an unmaintained road, and neither Skinner nor Scully was aware that this lane was one that a plow truck had recently gone down, only to be followed by Fox Mulder on foot. No evidence of that was present for the assistant director and former agent to note, as new snowfall covered both the recent plowing and any tracks.

  Skinner wasn’t sure what had caught Scully’s attention. The moment seemed to have passed and Scully was settling back in her seat again. They drove for a few seconds in silence, then she turned sharply to Skinner and said, “Stop, please—stop here…”

  He stopped. “What is it, Dana?”

  But she was already getting out of the Expedition. When he climbed out and came around, he found her standing surveying a row of twenty rural mailboxes.

  “What is it?” he repeated.

  She moved down the row, apparently looking for a specific mailbox. A name, perhaps? Skinner wondered.

  She stopped at one that had an address that had lost a number, leaving it: 25 2.

  She was staring at the mailbox.

  “Dana?”

  “Proverbs.”

  “What?”

  “Proverbs. 25:2.” She was shaking her head, her expression stunned but somehow hopeful. “I don’t believe this…”

  She yanked open the little door and began pulling out envelopes, junk mail mostly. Skinner had no idea what the hell she was up to, but she was up to something…

  “‘God’s glory to hide a thing,’” she was saying. “‘The honor of kings to search it out.’…I’ve got it!”

  Skinner looked over Scully’s shoulder at a letter with a typed address.

  “Invoice for medical supplies,” she said. “Addressed to a Dr. Uroff-Koltoff. It’s got to be him.”

  “Who?”

  “The doctor who did the Russian transplants I told you about. He’s got an address on Nine Mile Road.”

  Reflexively, both Skinner and Scully began looking around, up and down the country road. Were any of these lanes marked?

  Her eyes were tight, her breath pluming in the cold. “Where the hell is Nine Mile Road!”

  Skinner got out his iPhone. “Maybe I can Google it.”

  “Right. You can type in mad doctor.” Then she frowned and turned away from him. “You hear that? Listen…listen…”

  The running engine of the Expedition nearby was a distraction, and she stepped away from it, listening intently. Skinner followed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Dogs,” she said.

  He heard it, too, distant but distinct: barking dogs.

  But why, Skinner wondered, did the sound of yipping and yapping light up Dana Scully’s face with hope?

  The Compound

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  Fox Mulder could not hear the barking dogs; he lay drugged and unconscious on the floor of the operating room, while the gaunt doctor was issuing orders in Russian to his assistants, loud enough to rise over the dogs but no longer with the edge of anger displayed to their intruder.

  That intruder was no longer of concern to any of them, and the doctor and the assistants would even step over him as they continued their freakish work. They barely noticed when Janke Dacyshyn grabbed Mulder under the arms and dragged him out from under their feet, back into the kennel.

  Moments later, the Russian banged open a trailer door, stepped out into the cold though he wore only the surgical whites, then reached in and dragged Mulder out of the mobile home onto the muddy pathway. Much as he had dragged many a garbage bag of dismembered limbs for disposal, the Russian now hauled the limp, heavy Mulder out into the fenced-off yard, the cargo’s feet making lines in the fresh snow.

  About midway on the journey from the conjoined trailers to a small wooden shed in a corner of the compound, Mulder came slowly awake. He had to fight for consciousness, helpless against the drug, not to mention the bruiser who was dragging him toward that ominous shed.

  Finally the Russian towed Mulder around to the front of the shed where an axe was propped against a chopping block. A pile of firewood leaned against the side of the shed, but what finally woke Mulder fully was the sight of something else on the muddy ground: a headless, naked female body.

  And Fox Mulder knew that he had finally found Monica Bannan; she lay facedown—or she would have been, if she’d had a face—near the chopping block and the axe. Moments later Mulder was deposited next to the headless body, and the former agent felt as helpless as Monica Bannan, watching the Russian stop to catch his breath.

  Then the Russian came over and Mulder’s gut tightened, but the man was after the headless body, which he yanked over to the chopping block, positioning an arm on it, obviously getting ready to chop the body into pieces.

  As the Russian raised the axe to begin his grisly job, his hands blistered from the many times he’d performed such a task, the operation within the mobile home continued, a process about to start that was not unrelated to Janke Dacyshyn’s current clean-up project.

  Franz Tomczeszyn’s disembodied head might have seemed just another body part to discard, if it weren’t for one thing: The eyes, on occasion, blinked. He was, in a way at least, still alive, joined to Cheryl Cunningham via those blood-delivering tubes that jutted from the incision in her throat.

  That same throat was currently the focus of Dr. Uroff-Koltoff’s attention, as he lowered a scalpel to the iodine-painted neckline, preparing to sever one head to replace it with another.

  In the yard, near the shed, Janke Dacyshyn was moving quicker than the gaunt doctor. His grim dismemberment routine had been quick and efficient as Mulder forced himself to look on, still fighting to regain and retain consciousness so that perhaps he would not end up like Monica Bannan, so many body parts scattered over the ground around a chopping block.

  The Russian put the axe down, leaning it against the block once more. He went to Mulder, who was trying to get his muscles, his limbs, working, before they never worked again, and felt himself being positioned atop the chopping block, apparently to remove the head first. Maybe Mulder could roll off, and flee, but could he escape swings of an axe by the pursuing Russian?

  The Russian was just raising the axe over Mulder’s neck when a voice nearby said, “Hey…”

  Then Mulder saw something that had to be a drug-induced hallucination: Scully slamming a piece of chopped wood into the Russian’s head, the man’s legs buckling as he went down in an unconscious heap among the body parts he’d created.

  Was Mulder dying and imagining this, as his brain was denied oxygen?

  Or was Scully really there, holding his head in her hands, saying, “Mulder…Mulder…”

  Inside, in the operating room, Dr. Uroff-Koltoff was carefully cutting the skin on Cheryl Cunningham’s neck, in a clean, skilled circle, when the dogs began another spirited round of barking. The doctor hesitated, looking up, and saw a big bald man burst through the plastic curtain to point a pistol at him and give him a hood-eyed look of utter disgust.

  “Hands where I can see them,” Skinner said, “now!”

  The two assistants did not speak English, and Dr. Uroff-Koltoff might or might not have, but all three understood the gun in Skinner’s hand, and they backed away from the gurneys.

  Dr. Uroff-Koltoff was saying something in Russian, in a be-reasonable tone, but Skinner was paying him scant attention, the assistant director’s eyes wide now as he took in a sight he would not soon forget: a disembodied head connected by blood-pumping tubes to a naked woman in a slushy t
ub, whose life had just been spared.

  “Lord God,” Skinner said.

  Scully parted the plastic curtain, and all her years as a doctor, all her time on the X-Files, did not prepare her for this grotesque tableau. But she pushed past the horror, and moving to the gurneys, said to Skinner, “Mulder needs warm clothes and fluids. I want you to do it. I’ve got work here.”

  Skinner cuffed Dr. Uroff-Koltoff to a machine and left the two assistants to assist Scully, who was already scrubbing up with typical calm and nervy haste.

  Soon Skinner was banging out a trailer door and running across the compound to the woodshed. He quickly checked the very unconscious Russian, cuffed his hands behind him, then went to Mulder, semiconscious on the ground near the woodshed among scattered body parts that had once been a female FBI agent.

  “Mulder,” Skinner said, kneeling.

  Skinner was getting his topcoat off, and Mulder looked up at him through a druggy haze. “Girl…inside…she needs help…”

  “Scully’s with her,” Skinner said, getting the coat around Mulder’s shoulders. “The patient’s in good hands.”

  Mulder was staring at Skinner, trying to make sure his eyes were working, that he wasn’t hallucinating. “Skinner?”

  The assistant director smiled. “I’m glad to see you alive.”

  “You…big…bald…beautiful man…I’m cold.”

  And Walter Skinner, ignoring the wind, held Mulder close.

  Chapter 16

  Rural Virginia

  January 13

  The newspaper headline reminded Fox Mulder of the kind of outré banner you normally saw in supermarket tabloids, but this one happened to appear in a major Washington, D.C., newspaper over an Associated Press story.

  FBI ARREST MODERN-DAY DR. FRANKENSTEIN, it said, and the photo that went with it was particularly satisfying to Mulder—Agent Drummy, who’d been called out by Assistant Director Skinner to the compound with other agents working the Monica Bannan disappearance, stood next to a dog cage that had just been loaded into a four-by-four truck, and sitting in that cage, his temporary quarters for transport, was Dr. Uroff-Koltoff, his gaunt features staring out glumly through the wire mesh.