Title: Querant: The Chariot
Author: Suzanne Turgeon
Archive: As you wish.
Spoilers: 2.14: Die Hand Die Verletzt; Via Negativa;
immediately post ep The Gift and before the Boston Subway
System romp. See also my previous story, Querant: The
Hanged Man, to fill in other details.
Rating: Somewhere beyond PG-13.
Category: Angsty drama.
Summary: Logically, there is only so much stress a
black-and-white mind can take trying to operate in a totally
gray realm before critical mass is reached and meltdown sets
in.
Feedback: to: TURGEON2@prodigy.net
Disclaimer: These are, of course, all Chris Carter's
wonderful characters (except for the one I created, obviously),
profiting only the exercise of my own overactive imagination.
Author's note: Done for the pure enjoyment of writing and
reading.
Title: Querant: The Chariot
by Suzanne Turgeon
Prologue:
Dana Scully was not entirely surprised to find him at his desk
since Special Agent John Doggett was often already at work when
she arrived at the day's normal start time. But she hadn't had
a good night and, in her restless discomfort, had given up and
come in early herself. It was just 6:10AM.
Pausing, Scully canted her head to look at him as she passed by
on her way to her -- Mulder's -- desk. Doggett glanced briefly
at her from hollow, tired eyes. The screen of his lap top was
blank and the inevitable Styrofoam cup was three-quarters full
of scum-surfaced, cold coffee. The early stages of stubble
graced his chin and jaw. He looked like hell.
"Are you all right, Agent Doggett?"
He glanced back as she moved around to her chair. Her expression
of concern forced his eyes back down to the keypad of his laptop.
"John?"
He looked back and their gazes held. The subsurface plea in his
was alarming. Lips parting, Scully took in a cautious breath.
"What is it?"
"This case," he finally said. "Skinner told me to forget writing
it up."
"What happened?"
"Honest to God, I'm not sure I know." He sat back slowly into
his chair and closed the screen lid on his computer. His
fingers rested on the black surface in defeat. "Did Skinner say
anything to you about what happened?"
"A little and that nothing panned out. That was late last
evening. Have you been here all night?"
"Yeah."
"Have you slept?"
"No."
Scully folded her hands on top of the desk. And waited.
The silence in the basement office encapsulated them.
"I think maybe I'm losing it, Agent Scully...Dana." His
voice was a whisper that cut through her heart. Doggett was
looking at her but seeing something else. "He...was here...
last night...I saw him."
"Who?"
"Agent Mulder."
"What?"
"He appeared right over there. Just for a few seconds.
Standing there, in a dark suit, leaning up against the counter.
And then he was just...gone."
Scully followed the line of Doggett's fixed gaze across the room.
"I'm in way over my head."
"We all are," she said, finally breathing out.
"How much did Skinner tell you about where we went and why?"
Doggett bracketed the laptop between his fingertips, looking
at its closed lid.
"That you were investigating Mulder's trips, following up
those cell phone calls. That...nothing came of it."
"Nothing that's fit to print, by Kersh's standards or for all
our sakes -- yours, mine, Skinner's -- if we want to stay in
the FBI's graces." Doggett swallowed hard. "A man -- or a
kind of human being -- gave his life for mine this case. I
was killed...I...died....I was dead. Really dead. And a
stranger gave...I...There...aren't words for any of it. I
just don't have the words. I don't even know how to begin
to explain it. Or understand. I...."
Scully didn't remember getting up from her chair but she was
acutely aware of the vibrating life under her hand as she
steadied the shoulder under suit and shirt. A life that was
about to shred away under her touch if she did not somehow
intervene. "A flashback from your drug exposure in the Tipet
case."
"I wish. I hope."
"That's what it was. That's all it was. A hallucination
triggered by fatigue. Agent, you have to weigh off dedication
to your work with some dedication to resting yourself." She
smiled unconvincingly as he looked up at her. "You know the
old saw, all work and no play makes Jack a dull lad."
A thin smile returned the lame humor and it was as unsteady as
the message under her palm.
"It's Friday. I'm feeling a little under the weather myself.
I'm just planning to go over reports and look at data downloads.
Give yourself a three-dayer. Go home, Agent Doggett, get some
sleep. Doctor's orders."
She waited in the center of the office until she was sure he was
gone, that he wouldn't come popping back in. Then, slowly, Dana
Scully walked over to the spot where Doggett's reported specter
had presented itself.
Slowly she pirouetted, holding her breath, trying to sense with
all her being anything hinting at the essence that might have
been there. In that room. Within her grasp. The tears came
unbidden, unstoppable. "Oh God, Mulder, why him? Why not me?
Where are you?"
I
He walked, for hours.
Finally, mechanical need for nourishment cued him to stop at
a restaurant, one with an outdoor section. The memory of that
cave left him craving sky. He ordered brunch and ate without
tasting, autonomically. On his face, the breeze, sometimes
cool, sometimes cold, kept him in touch with a part of the world
he could trust and which made no demands on him.
He paid the server, laid out a tip, but lingered over the hot
coffee. The restaurant was not overcrowded that day and there
was no need to hurry. Where was there to go anyway? That idle
thought seemed deeply philosophical to him just then. Maybe
that was a good sign. And then he thought of her caring touch
on his shoulder.
Why had he told her about seeing Mulder?
The realization of what that must have done to her hit him
viscerally, gripped his throat. He watched the ripples in the
white mug in his hands and fought the sting in his eyes.
Voices, sudden, strident, cut through his thoughts. Blinking,
he raised his head to see two women a few tables away exchanging
some sort of verbal gunfire.
One of them, several decades older, thrust up from the table on
buttressing arms and loomed over the younger, literally getting
in her face. The hissing words were unintelligible, in contrast
to the initial attention-getting outburst that had patrons and
waiters looking at the pair. "You have no idea what you are
doing!" replayed in his mind's ears, and he felt his body
tensing, preparing, by trained reflex as he watched the older
woman's lipless mouth move stiffly on whispered vitriol and her
hands become tense fists.
Automatically, he recorded the women's appearances:
Standing female: thin, 115 pounds max; probably five-five,
mid-to-late fifties, dark hair tied back severely in a bun;
high-cheek-boned hawkish features; dark eyes; small gold stud
earrings; navy blue pin-stripe business suit with a hemline
below the knee, practical navy pumps; medium-sized plain matching
purse with a shoulder strap; could conceal a weapon. But her
real weapon was the cruelty on her face.
Sitting female: 135 pound range; five-five to five-seven,
twenty-five to thirty; dark blond, long curly hair;
heart-shaped face with a cheerleader's prettiness; new
designer-look levis, peach crewneck sweater, tan car coat; no
visible jewelry except for a sports watch; spotless jogging
shoes; floppy denim shoulder bag that could conceal a weapon.
Defenseless.
For a split second, he thought the older woman was going to
strike her companion.
Doggett rose.
Then the older woman turned and was striding directly toward
him and the doorway beyond his table.
Her approach telescoped in on him as their sight locked on
each other. She brushed stiffly past, leaving ice in his mind
along with the memory of depthless black eyes and a glacial
tingle against his arm. He felt oddly slow to react, to turn
and watch her departure, that unfeminine rigidity of walk and
haughty bearing as she passed through the entrance and turned
out of sight.
When he looked back, he saw that the younger woman was still
in her chair, head bowwed with a hand covering her face. And
in standing, he was afforded a view of the table top.
And the scattered cards.
#
"Are you all right, Miss?"
It had been a private argument, pure and simple; he had no
legitimate right to intrude. None, other than that of a
concerned citizen butting in where he had no business
intruding, except as conscience dictated.
And whatever hand was dealt.
She looked up, startled. Her hazel-green eyes were red-rimmed
with stifled tears and full of deep hurt. And fear. Then she
ducked her head, wiping fingers with peach-colored nails at
her eyes.
A napkin and a lone card lay on the concrete under the table.
Doggett bent to retrieve them. He couldn't help himself.
He wanted to know what was on the card that lay face down on
the decking. And he was too deeply afraid to turn over the
card to find out. He lay the napkin and the card on the
table in front of the woman.
"Sorry, I don't mean to be nosy. It just looked...well, I
thought she was going to hit you."
The young woman shivered as she glanced around in rising
embarrassment at having been part of an unseemly public
spectacle.
"Are you going to be okay?"
She looked up at him and tried a weak smile.
"My name's John, John Doggett."
"Twyla. Holden." She took a deep breath. This time the
smile was a little more assured. But the underlying fear
was still there, especially when she looked past him toward
the door.
"What happened? You do a reading the lady didn't like?"
"Oh." She looked down at the cards on the table. "I -- you
know something about Tarot?"
"It seems to be a recurrent theme in my life lately."
"Oh, I'm rude," Twyla Holden said, flustered. "Please sit down,
if you want to, that is."
"I'll get my coffee."
Doggett settled in across from her. Up close and personal, this
Twyla was less a woman and much more a girl, closer to twenty-five
than thirty, but with an engaging naivete that spilled out of her
wide-set eyes. With the years, she would become plumper, even
voluptuous, but remain just as naive. "On your lunch hour?"
"Well, I'm off today. I teach at Woodcliffe Elementary. I
took a mental health day. I needed some time to do
something...that I thought needed doing. Only it didn't
work out." She ducked her head.
"So who was the witch?"
"She's ... my college instructor. I take her class right
now. I'm going for my secondary teaching certificate."
"Bum tutoring session?"
She lowered her head, fingered the card Doggett had returned
to the table. "Well, we have a mutual interest in the occult
and she seemed...." Twyla shrugged. "I thought I knew her a
little better than I did. I felt the cards had a message for
her...and she...."
"Didn't."
The girl shook her head. "Boy, she really went berserk."
"So what set her off?" He had to ask even though he really
didn't want to go there.
Twyla looked at the cards, sighed, and began to reassemble
the layout. She turned over the card he had picked up and
revealed its face. "The Chariot card."
"One of the major arcana." He had seen enough of those in the
course of his and Scully's research on the Teranko-Gypsy murder
case to roughly recall its position in the heirarchy, if not its
meaning. Bad enough that he felt compelled to carry the Hanged
Man in his own wallet. He felt foolish, intellectually
compromised, and...superstitiously alerted.
"You really do know the Tarot." Her eagerness resurfaced
instantly.
"Just familiar because of some recent exposure. Like I said."
"What do you do, John?"
"Government working stiff." He considered his next move and
opted for honesty. Cards on the table, so to speak, as he
recollected the irony of words spoken recently by his partner.
He reached inside his coat and showed her his I.D.
"Oh my gosh!" she mouthed.
And maybe that was a mistake.
Twyla Holden looked as if she had just been introduced to
James Bond.
"F.B.I. work for the large part is filled with stultifying
routine," he felt compelled to add. "Don't buy into the
Hollywood version. There's a whole lot more paperwork and
telephone investigation that goes on than action adventure.
Cop work is mostly eight hours of boredom interrupted by ten
minutes of sheer terror. My degree is in Public Admin. Call
me Mr. Excitement."
She laughed, a girlish giggle really, that was disarmingly
engaging and he felt himself smile despite the dark mood of
the last few days.
"So what exactly tweaked her off?" He glanced around at the
patrons who had forgotten about the disruption of their
relatively peaceful lunch hour and gone back to chatting with
each other, reading office work, talking on cell phones.
"Something in the cards?"
Shyly, she nodded.
"So you really believe in Tarot?"
"Oh, yes! I've been reading Tarot for years, since junior
high. The cards are amazingly accurate."
"What bugged her so bad she almost went postal on you?"
With a sinking sensation, Doggett saw that she had uncovered
the Hanged Man as she put the layout back to order.
Her enthusiasm began to overcome her disheartened state as she
started explaining the cards for her dubious audience.
"I wanted to explain to her that this whole thing meant that she
had to make a decision about something she had in mind to do and
that if she wasn't careful this card, the Chariot card, in the
future position, would be her downfall because of this card, the
Hanged Man, in the past position. There is a very powerful
person in her way, not a person of the kingship or in a
religious position of authority, but someone who has things
well in control in all ways. He or she is a person who has
been initiated into the higher planes."
"So what is she into that's so crucial that somebody may
stop her? That's what you're saying, right?"
Twyla blinked at Doggett. He saw the gears of realization
spinning in silence behind her innocent's widening eyes.
"From her reaction, I'd say maybe you hit a raw nerve.
Raw nerve means something in my lexicon, Miss Holden. Either
that or the superior prof doesn't like being lectured to by
the uppity student. What do you think?"
"I -- I hadn't thought about that." She became flustered.
"So what else do the cards say?"
Twyla swallowed. "The Chariot card means triumph if the
Charioteer keeps all things in balance. This means this
Initiate can become bound up in the physical lower
temptations. It's also important to know that the High
Priestess, here," she pointed to another card, "is someone
that the Charioteer can turn to because he can not open the
sacred scrolls or know the answers to the questions. Only
she can help him -- if he seeks her out. The four elements,
fire, air water and earth, represented by the Chariot's
canopy supports, support him on earth as well as in heaven,
if he keeps looking toward the higher planes. The Priestess
will guide him. He will be used for higher purposes if he
is willing and keeps the carnal prompting from running away
with him. You see, he doesn't guide the horses with reins,
but his mind. If he loses his concentration, the horses
will run away with him."
"Sounds like the Chariot is more important than your
erstwhile friend."
"See, these other cards, all major arcana, the
lightning-struck Tower, the Devil, and the Death card, are
very powerful and all positioned for catastrophe, if the
Charioteer does not keep the spiritual clearly in view.
This was a warning to her that she's doing something she's
not supposed to. And she refused to accept that. It just
enraged her."
"So what's she teach?"
"Ms. Braddock teaches biology at City College. I'm starting
on my master's program and working to get my secondary
certificate. I want to teach highschool earth sciences,
maybe math. More money that way. It's hard, though. And
the highschoolers....maybe I'm only cut out for the
elementary kids."
"So what do the cards say about your life?"
She paused, sipped water, and looked out across the elevated
patio at the busy street. "I've...been getting a lot of
conflicting readings."
"What's that mean?"
"Maybe I'm blocking the psychic emanations, like I
subconsciously don't want to know."
"Well, I wouldn't put too much stock in those things. Like
astrology, the stars and the cards impell, they don't compell,
or whatever that old saw is? You have to kind of make your own
magic."
"They're meant to guide, to give you options you may not see."
Twyla said bashfully.
"So what do yours say?"
"I do mine every day. Every morning and every night." She got
a little quiet then, her eyes straying to the doorway again.
"And?" He prompted her with raised eyebrows but kept the smile
to the minimum. Easy to do. He kept getting a creepy
sensation in the pit of his stomach that he did not like.
"For a long time now, all this last year, especially these
last months...." She sipped her water, swallowed hard.
"Something bad's going to happen. To me. I don't know
what. Oh, I don't want to talk about my cards. Let's do
yours, okay?"
He started to sit back in reluctance, and felt as if an
invisible hand took him by the shoulder and held him in
place. The sensation took his breath away. His silence
became his assent.
She had him shuffle and cut the cards according to protocol.
Then she laid them out.
The hand's pressure on his shoulder became a profound sense
of destiny as the Hanged Man card and the Chariot came up
again.
"Oh, my gosh," she whispered, looking over the cards.
He felt his hackles rise and wanted to bolt. The Fate at his
shoulder kept him immobile.
Twyla looked up at Special Agent John Doggett with awe on
her ingenue's face. "Ohmigod! You're the one she has to watch
out for. "
He'd heard enough. Too much. He had been out of his mind to
have gotten involved....he'd....
The restraint, at his shoulder and within himself, was gone.
He stood abruptly, but leaned down to confidentially address
Twyla Holden with an uncle's tempered sternness. "Look, I'm
sorry about this, but I think you are into this card thing
way over your head. She's a biology teacher, a *science*
teacher, and she's probably pissed as hell that you take so
much stock in something as speculative and unscientific as
all this. And you are way too impressed by me, so it's all
coming to a screeching halt right here." He patted the table
top with finality. "Goodbye, Miss. Drive safely." A standard
familiar phrase of parting authority from his New York City cop
days. It was all he could think to say just then. He turned
and started off across the patio.
"Wait! John! You don't understand!"
He didn't look back and kept right on walking.
II
He went home long enough to run the electric razor over his
stubble and decide that he was too restless to stay there,
thinking in the emptiness the house offered. Too wired to
keep his mind on reading some escapist fiction. Too corralled
by his demons to go jogging. Too awake to sleep. Too smart
to drink alone or in company.
Scully looked at him over the tops of her wire frames.
Somehow neither of them was surprised that he had returned
to the basement office. She checked her watch. "It's three
o'clock but I could have sworn that it was still Friday.
Short weekend."
He shook his head, walked in and sat down without taking off
his coat or taking his hands out of its deep pockets.
Scully slowly removed her glasses. "Agent Doggett?"
He took a deep breath, puffed it out, and clamped his teeth
tightly shut. She watched his jaw muscles flex in agitation
and raised an eyebrow about as high as Mr. Spock.
"Jesus, Agent Scully," he finally whispered, "I'm starting to
feel as paranoid about the supernatural as your three buddies
are about political conspiracies."
Caught in his tension, she spoke in all seriousness: "Maybe
you'd better talk about it before you explode."
He hated being out of situational control; it was far worse
hovering on the brink of emotional control. But he reported
the episode like an officer of the law before a board of
inquiry, bit out the words precisely describing how the
lunch encounter had gone down. When he finished, he waited,
staring straight ahead at the bottom line letters superimposed
across that wall poster.
*I want to believe.*
Was it possible that the hand he had felt on his shoulder
had not been his imagination? Had it belonged to the man
who had thumbtacked that damned piece of paper to the wall?
No freaking way. Please, God, no freaking way....
Scully cleared her throat softly. "Under any other
circumstances, I would probably tell some other agent that he
or she might want to see one of the FBI counselling --"
"Under any other circumstances." Doggett looked at her with
a horribly trapped expression. "Agent Scully, I'm not losing
my mind, am I?"
"No. Under the circumstances, that would be too easy." She
stood. "Let's get out of here, away from here, for awhile."
He welcomed the motion and got up as she took her coat from the
rack. Crossing the office, he reached out to open the door.
"Wait," Scully said, "something fell out of your coat pocket."
Doggett turned, saw the strip of paper lying on the waxed
concrete between the door and the desk. Frowning, he went back
to pick it up. His frown deepened when he read it. "Where the
hell did this come from?"
Scully looked at the note. The Palmer penmanship said simply,
"Good bye. It's been nice working with you."
"Oh my God," she said, drawing up with surprise. Her pale
features grew paler.
"You know what it means?"
"John, there's an X-File on this...woman you described. From
your description, it sounds exactly like the same woman. Only
then her name was Paddock, not Braddock. She was posing as a
highschool substitute biology teacher. She was peripherally
associated with a satanic cult of teachers and parent advisors
involving child abuse, unsolved murders, and possible human
sacrifice. Paddock disappeared, vanished. There was no record
of her ever having been hired at the school she worked for.
She was just there. And then she was gone. And that was the
parting remark she left scrawled on a blackboard for Mulder
and me. We almost died on that case."
"Hell, this woman bumped into me on the way out of the
restaurant today. She must have slipped it into my coat."
Doggett stared at Scully. "Then that was intentional.
But....she wouldn't have had a clue who I am...How...?"
Scully flew to the file cabinet. In moments, she had pulled a
file folder, and was flipping through it as she turned back to
her partner.
The manila folder's edges had a prematurely aged appearance as
though it had been exposed to high heat. Doggett vaguely
remembered an incident a few years back about a basement fire.
Had *this* office been the location? Pieces of the past seemed
to pull him back into the meaning of this place for him. He
poured over the file's ambiguous but chilling contents.
"Criminy," he muttered, thrust the folder back into Agent
Scully's hands. "Well, first things first. Fingerprint time."
A trip upstairs to the lab netted one set of prints. His own.
Unnerved, he returned long enough to poke his head through
the door of their office to announce that revelation to Scully.
"This is nuts. I've got to follow this up.
"Agent Doggett!" her voice followed him to the elevator.
"If this is for real," he yelled back through the narrowing space
as the automatic door closed before she could reach it, "I don't
want you near this broad, whatever she is!"
III
Blessing the cellular age, Doggett had obtained Twyla Holden's
home address and cellular and unlisted home phone numbers by the
time he entered his car in the parking garage. But she wasn't
answering her land line and her cellular was offline.
Her address belonged to a converted three-story Victorian. When
she didn't answer the downstairs apartment buzzer either, he
rousted the elderly landlady to gain entrance. Clearly, Twyla
Holden wasn't home. A fast search of the tidy
Martha-Stewart-pastel studio turned only one possible clue, a
desk calendar hastily penciled with an 8:00 PM time for that
night but no other information.
On his cell again, Doggett requested any information on file
about the subject, Ms. Braddock or Paddock. Nothing came back
on the mysterious woman.
Just before five at the City College campus, he found Ms.
Braddock-Paddock at the door to the biology lab.
"Coming or going?" he asked as he approached the familiar
figure, still dressed in sensible navy pinstripe. "Ms.
Braddock?"
She seemed genuinely surprised as he flashed his FBI
identification, her first focus going to that, then to his
face. If she recognized him from the lunchtime encounter,
she covered it well with a suppressed spinster's trepidation
at finding a male authority figure looming at her side.
"I need to talk with you about a student of yours, a Twyla
Holden."
"Twyla Holden?" She seemed to search her memory. "Oh, yes.
My Tuesday-Thursday 6 PM class. Wha-what's this about,
Agent -- ?"
"Doggett. You want to talk out here or inside?"
"I -- I was just going in. Please, come in." She unlocked
the door and proceded in ahead of Doggett, switching on the
lights to the lab room. "I feed the snake on Friday night.
We can talk while I do that. It won't take a minute."
"This won't take long either." He followed her to the
large Plexiglas terrarium. "Reticulated python?"
"You know snakes?"
"Had one when I was a kid. Smaller than that." He peered at
the inert form in layered coils inside the tank. "A lot
smaller."
Ms. Braddock-Paddock retrieved a small white rat from a cage
at the far end of the counter. She unlocked and lifted the
tank lid and dropped in the intended snack. "I stay until
the snake eats. If she's not hungry, the rat has to be taken
out. Otherwise the rat will injure the snake. It won't
defend itself. But I suppose you know that?"
The snake began to move.
"Nah, I didn't know that. Mine always ate right away. You
wouldn't happen to have any explanation how this came to be
in my pocket?" Doggett waggled the plastic evidence bag
containing the piece of paper with its peculiar message in
front of her face.
"What?" Her eyes opened wider than he thought possible.
Genuine fear and confusion emanated from them. He had never
seen blacker eyes. There was no distinction between pupil
and iris and in that pasty WASP face, they gleamed eerily.
"You don't recall literally bumping into me at lunch today
downtown? You had just finished having an argument with Miss
Holden and were leaving the patio portion of the restaurant."
She stared up at Doggett. "I -- I don't recall...you were
there? I'm sorry, I -- was very upset by the girl."
He scrutinized her closely. "Maybe you'd better tell me a
little more about the nature of your conversation with Miss
Holden."
"Has something happened to her?" The woman stepped back,
her facade of bewilderment solidly intact.
"I don't know. I can't seem to find her. Suppose you tell me
what your lunch date was about."
There was a sound, soft, subtle, and a little squeak. They
both turned to see the snake rapidly throwing an
unnecessarily huge lasso of coils around the small casualty
of the food chain. It then proceeded to envelope the hapless
mammal with its mouth as if it were popping a bon-bon.
Ms. Braddock-Paddock checked the latch on the terrarium lid
with reserved satisfaction. "Ms. Holden is, I fear, a
disturbed young woman. She presents, superficially, the
quintessential product of young middle-class America
parenthood, apple pie and solid family values. I will have
you know, Mr. Doggett, that I normally never socialize with
my students. I feel that sets a bad precedent and
compromises the student-teacher relationship. I only met
with her today because of her recent insistence on having
lunch with me about a personal problem that she felt only
I could help her with. It was a ruse on her part. A very
disturbing ruse. She wanted to tell my fortune, of all the
insulting things. With tarot cards. It was a very
threatening story she told me and I did not appreciate it
one bit. I made my feelings well known to her. She may
be a elementary school teacher but I would not want her
teaching any child of mine. The episode today was very
upsetting to me. In fact, I felt violated. And if you
were there, I simply don't remember. She had me quite
rattled, I'm afraid."
"It had her pretty rattled, too. She was in tears. In
fact, I thought you were going to strike her. Only you
left before it went any further. That's how I got
involved."
"I see. An act of chivalry. So. Did you sit down with
her at her table?"
Doggett cocked his head as he considered this woman. They
regarded each other narrowly. "I did."
"Then it was obviously she who placed the note in your
pocket. Certainly it was not I. Sir, I would say that
you have been taken in by a pretty young face."
"Interestingly enough, the sentence and writing on the piece
of paper in question connects you to an unsolved case in a
nother state involving a highschool biology teacher matching
your description but named Paddock, not Braddock."
"A bizarre coincidence, I'm sure. What on earth is this
all about?"
"I'm trying to find that out."
"Has some crime been committed here?" The woman was becoming
archer and angrier by the second.
"Not yet."
"Then I strongly suggest that you leave me alone, Mr. Doggett.
After this day, I can assure you that I am feeling quite
harrassed on all fronts. And, frankly, Miss Holden is in
process of royally flunking this course. If she has sent you
around to try to influence me to give her a passing grade,
it will do absolutely no good. And, if you are indeed a
real FBI agent, if those credentials you flaunted at me are
authentic, then you will have to prove to me that this is
not some sort of elaborate extortion scam that you two are
trying to pull off at my expense. I suggest you leave now
before I feel forced to call campus security."
Doggett stared long and hard at the woman. The element of
doubt hung between them with the possibility that Twyla
Holden had placed the note in his pocket. There was the
possibility of name and description coincidence. And there
was no current crime connection that could allay harrassment
charges if he persisted. "All right, no argument there, Ms.
Braddock. But if something happens that makes the case
connections that I need, I can assure you I will be back and
you will find out exactly how authentic I am."
#
At his car, Doggett tried Twyla Holden's home phone again.
This time she answered and he told her to stay there, that
he needed to talk to her. The tone in her voice was not
overly enthusiastic but she agreed.
Reluctantly, she allowed him into her apartment. "My landlady
said you'd been here earlier."
"Been trying to get hold of you for awhile." Doggett surveyed
the small apartment again. It was almost too stereotypically
sweet and wholesome, or was he looking at it through the
suggestion implanted by a subtler personality?
"How did you find me?"
"Standard Bureau procedures," he said bluntly and faced her
candidly. "Only reason I'm back here is because of something
I found in an old case file that could possibly tie into this
professor of yours. First, though, I need to know if you put
this in my coat pocket and you better not shine me on."
He held out the plastic bag with the note.
"I wouldn't have any reason to put anything in your pocket."
She barely glanced over the dangling clue before glaring back
at him. The offended hurt in her eyes was that of a petulant
teenager. "I thought that was pretty mean of you at the
restaurant, blowing me off like that. It's bad enough that
my teacher patronizes me, the F.B.I. puts me down, too. If
you really are F.B.I, if that I.D. is really real. Maybe
that's just your pick-up line. And that -- whatever it
is -- is part of your game."
"Funny, I feel like somebody's trying to play games with me.
I guess we're one for one, Miss Holden." Doggett's hard stare
forced her to look away. He handed her his business card.
"If you run into any serious problem related to today's
little adventure, you call me. Otherwise, I see no good
reason for either of us to have contact with each other again.
Agreed?"
She agreed and slammed the door behind him.
IV
He staked out her apartment, waiting in the car until a little
before 8 PM when Twyla Holden came down the steps of the old
Victorian home to go to an older model Toyota Corolla.
Surprisingly, her mode of dress was quite different. She
sported a shiny black vinyl or leather great coat and boots
under the street lamp, and a layering of make-up that
disspelled her earlier squeaky cleanness. She had gone Goth
for the evening.
Doggett tailed her through the night to a seedy D.C. business
district and a warehouse night club that featured a strip act
and a clientele that mixed Goth, gay and gogglers. Assailed
by a high-decibel cacaphony that hardly resembled music, he
pushed in through the front door and a crowd of partiers into
the throbbing flash and dazzle of the huge room. The effect
was mind-numbing and he felt as though the trace of the designer
drug that had invaded him weeks ago was sucking him back into
that suffocating stop-action realm.
Fighting his rising panic, Doggett forged ahead into the
maelstrom.
The corruscating light effects from the ceiling overheads
bombarded his vision. Squinting, he tried to see, to orientate
to the motion and dizzying scenery. Off to his left, he became
aware of a blond stripper performing her runway act with some
patchy ribbon, which a second sustained observation revealed to
be a large python. The snake's presence startled him,
threatened to become hypnotic in its fascination as the overly
endowed woman entwined with the creature. Blinking, he wrested
his waylaid attention from the spectacle and searched in other
directions around the quasi dancefloor-concrete pad of the
converted warehouse.
The party was just starting to roll. He'd come in early. It was
only going to get wilder and worse. As though floating, Doggett
persisted despite the inner fear. No telling how long he wandered
in that limbo, jostled by dancing bodies high on drugs and drink.
He and they were awash in a vast altered state.
Then, across a corner of the cavernous room, through an
escalation in the strobe sequences, he thought he saw her.
He pressed forward.
As blue light throbbed into red, he spotted Twyla or someone
who looked like her. The crowd was filled with lots of blond
girls in leather and bizarre make-up, though. It was not her.
He kept on. Fear and frustration and now anger and exhaustion
pounded at his head.
He saw the other woman first. And wasn't sure what he was
looking at. And then realized the recognition factors.
It was Ms. Braddock.
Braddock in black, Gothed out to the max. Frighteningly so.
There was nothing spinsterish left of her. There was
only...Twyla with her.
*Holy shit!* he thought, through a switch in the din of sound
that burst forth as hooting and screaming and clapping
acclamation.
The startling change in accoustic bombardment pulled him around,
away from the image of Ms. Braddock firmly kissing Twyla on the
mouth. He looked up, saw the naked stripper exiting the catwalk
past him, holding the python high overhead, draped across her
coveting hands. Jerking himself back to the tableau, he saw
the demonic stare auguring straight into his eyes.
The older woman had made him.
Her hand grasped Twyla's arm and they moved sideways past a clot
of spike-haired men wearing lots of metal. And out of his line
of sight.
Doggett shoved his way forward past the blocking, jostling
mannequins. The stripper was off the floor and another coming on
board as he elbowed bodies out of his way. By the time he got
past the spike-hairs, there was no sign of Twyla and Ms. Braddock.
Only more seething examples of something passing as a sort of
humanity.
"Oh shit," he breathed out in frantic supplication. "Twyla!"
Through the crowd and bouncing light forms he thought he
glimpsed a red exit sign. He made for it, a sinking boater
heading through thick fog for a lighthouse.
His hand hit the crashbar. His shoulder followed against the
door. He reeled out into the cold night air. The dirty
plastered brick wall caught him, supported him as he gasped for
breath through receding claustrophobia.
Then he heard an outcry, a voice among hundreds of voices,
calling frantically for help. He tried to locate the voice's
direction against the pounding sound and pressed back on the
firedoor to hasten its slow closing. The door shut, muting
the pummeling sounds that vibrated through the steel against
his palms.
"Twyla!"
Nothing.
Swearing, Doggett pulled his weapon, chose instinctively
and ran down the angling alley.
At its corner, he jolted to a halt.
Ahead on the ground in the narrow access, something dark and
silvery moved obscenely.
Not recognizing any of what he was witnessing in the halflight
filtering in from the street beyond, Doggett moved forward.
The writhing form existed only in nightmares. It was huge.
So huge he could hardly distinguish the other form compressed
within its coils.
"Oh Jesus," he said, a pure prayer, and stumbled in stunned
revulsion.
The snake was working its jaws downward over the shoulders of the
thing in its grip. He could make out shiny blackness and
whitish limbs.
"No, goddamn you, no!" He moved in on it in rage, fear banished
by anger beyond words. Where to shoot...no clear shot without
punching through it into the girl...he grabbed it the only way
he could see to intervene and began to haul up on the front of
its mouth until every muscle and sinew in his body had corded to
the snapping point. Slowly the snake's giant head raised with
that Herculean effort and the body it was engulfing began to
slide back out.
And then it was writhing between his legs and rage began to
uncoil in his hands. The girl's body slipped free.
There was only a split second before that satanic wrath
unleashed itself on him.
He emptied the .45 into its skull.
When he staggered clear of its death throes, he was looking back
on a serpent a third the size of what he had just wrestled with
so desperately. Gasping for wind, he looked down on an
impossibility.
And then at the broken body within its flacid embrace.
Trying to comprehend, Doggett stood over the girl's crumpled form.
He had tried.
God, how he had tried!
And how he had failed.
#
The police came. And the paramedics, although it was far too
late to do her any good except to cart her off to the morgue.
The snake got its own body bag and a trip to animal control for
disposal. The club owner's distraught exotic dancer could not
explain how her now exterminated snake had come to be out in the
alley, escaped from its cage in her dressing room only moments
after she had put it there, nor how it could have wreaked the
mortal damage that had clearly been committed there in the
alley.
Doggett answered questions about his presence at the scene. He
wasn't even sure later what he said.
He only knew there had to be a murderer on the loose, one they
would never find. Something that mere bullets had only chased
away. Something that he could search for but would never find
unless it wanted to be found. Something that would hide, until
some dark day it chose another victim to feed its own dark
purposes.
The ambulance moved off down the alley. Around him the city
walls blazed with flashing emergency lights. As if drawn by
its presence in his pocket, he felt compelled to take out the
scrap of paper and reread it --
And reread it again.
Had he missed it the first time?
Angling the paper to catch the light, Doggett confirmed what he
thought he glimpsed. Beginning the line of script was a "P.S."
Blinking, he stared at it. How had he missed it the first time?
He turned the paper over, examined it thoroughly for any other
writing that he might have overlooked. When he turned it back,
there was ....
Nothing.
Not even the original line of farewell.
No post script. Nothing.
Suddenly, desperately, he needed sanctuary.
More desperately, he needed to know that she was all right.
Epilogue:
The phone had that echoey cellular tone to it when she sleepily
answered it at 3:45 Saturday morning.
"Agent Scully. You mind me coming over awhile? I...need to
talk to you." His voice sounded far more hollow than any bad
connection could make it. "Don't open the door to anyone
until I get there."
Gun in her hand, Dana Scully let him in, and was stunned by
the stricken expression on his face.
"I blew it." His empty whisper of confession filled eternity
at the altar of the High Priestess. He handed her the
evidence bag containing the blank scrap of paper. "The girl
is dead. Somehow I blew it."
He wasn't sure where he was walking to. He remembered seeing
the sofa ahead of him. And standing between the seating and
the coffee table. And then he was sitting on the floor, his
back against the couch. Maybe it was just gravity. Maybe he
was just as far down as he could get physically and not risk
falling any farther. Either way, somehow sitting on the
floor was safer.
Scully sat beside him on the couch. He felt her bracing leg
against his left arm. And, as it had started this longest of
all days that any 24 hours could stretch into, a hand on his
shoulder. But this time a substantial one. The only one he
wanted to feel there.
And, a word at a time, he managed to tell her what had
happened. Everything that had happened.
He spoke staring straight ahead, looking at nothing and seeing
only the crushed body in the alley and the lurid emergency
strobes illuminating Hell. And then there was nothing left to
talk about. Except for one thing.
"I'm not him." Doggett looked up at the pale, deep concern
above him. "I don't know how to be him. I can't be Mulder."
"It's okay." Scully's soft whisper reached inside him as she
studied that dazed expression of the shell-shocked soldier.
Her hand capped the side of his head, moved down the clammy
coldness of his neck. "You did everything you could do. You
did everything he could have done. And I think what she did,
she did of her own choosing, and she was the only person who
could make that decision."
The wise counsel of his High Priestess.
There seemed nothing left inside himself except a last bit of
warming strength that her voice and touch had seeded there.
He lay his head against her knee, let go, and sobbed away the
pain.
-- Fini --