The X-Files: Goblins

THIRTEEN

It took a while before Webber was finally able to get them back to the Royal Baron. Once there, as a doctor, not a partner, Scully ordered Mulder to bed with an ice pack and aspirin until she returned from a visit with Sam Junis. He didn’t protest. Just a crooked smile and a phony sigh, and she knew he wouldn’t sleep; he’d be too busy trying to squeeze the obvious so it ended up looking like a goblin.

Licia she found in their room, transcribing her notes from the Radnor interview. “Shorthand,” the agent said apologetically. “Can’t keep up otherwise, and I hate recorders.” As she slipped the papers into a briefcase, Scully asked her what, if anything, she’d found out.

“It was like she didn’t care,” Licia complained, the insult to justice clear in her tone. “And even though she has exercise stuff — says she uses it when she remembers — in that downstairs room off the office, she still drinks like a fish.” Then she smiled. “She knew the corporal, though.”

“How?”

The smile became a smug grin. “It seems the engaged to the major’s sister corporal enjoyed an occasional R&R. Like, nearly every weekend.”

“Did she say who he was with?”

“No name, and she only got a glimpse. The corporal, it seems, was very careful. I don’t know if that has anything to do with anything, though.”

Scully agreed before hustling Andrews into her coat and outside. Webber would watch Mulder in case the shooter tried again, or Mulder decided to have an adventure on his own.

They took the second car, and on the way, she filled Andrews in, ignoring the comments and the outrage.

It also helped her think.

It was evident they were dealing with two different suspects. Aside from the fact that Mulder had been attacked by someone other than the shooter, she was certain the murderer of Ulman and Pierce hadn’t suddenly decided to switch to a rifle as his weapon of choice. He was too good with the knife. And a knife was more personal, requiring close range; a rifle was too remote, dispassionate, requiring little or no victim contact at all.

When she had proposed this on the way back, both Mulder and Webber had agreed, but neither could find a reasonable explanation of why, suddenly, they were faced with two opponents.

“Maybe somebody’s protecting the goblin,” Andrews suggested.

“It’s not a goblin,” Scully snapped. “Please, don’t you start, too. Mulder’s already got Hank thinking that way.”

“So what do I do? Call him Bill?”

“I don’t care. Just don’t call him a goblin!”

Andrews laughed and shook her head. “Boy,” she said, “he really gets on your nerves, doesn’t he?”

Scully didn’t answer.

The doctor’s bungalow was in only marginally better condition than those of his neighbors, its saving grace a large front garden whose arrangement and vivid blossoms signaled a great deal of time taken and care bestowed. The doctor himself was on the tiny front porch, sitting on the railing, smoking a cigarette. He seemed to be in his early fifties, his greying hair plastered straight back from his forehead; and despite the wind and the chill, he was in shirtsleeves and jeans. Most of him was lean, but his arms were hugely muscled, all out of proportion to the rest of him.

“Popeye,” Andrews muttered as they took the narrow slate walk toward him.

Scully almost laughed aloud. She was right; all the man needed was a corncob pipe and a sailor’s cap to complete the image.

“Been having a time of it, haven’t you,” he said by way of greeting. Then he nodded to a police scanner on a small table behind him. “It’s either that or Oprah.” He grinned.

Scully liked him immediately, and wasted no time getting into his reports. He took no offense at her questions, and asked no questions about the way Andrews barely took her gaze from the surrounding woodland.

The interview didn’t last long — Junis agreed with her reconstruction of Pierce’s murder, and actually apologized for not getting better photos. He also suggested that the knife used wasn’t ordinary. “Sharp as hell, sure,” he said, “but the cut of it, I think it might have been heavier than you’d find in your average kitchen.”

“Like what?” Scully asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it, but I still don’t know.”

She knew then she had to ask the next question, and for once, she was glad Mulder wasn’t with her. “You had some notes in the margin.”

He laughed as he flicked his cigarette onto the lawn. “Yeah. Goblin, right?”

“What does that have to do with anything? As far as your examinations went, I mean.”

“Not much.” He pulled another cigarette from his pocket and stuck it between his lips. He didn’t light it. “Nothing. I’d just been to see Elly Lang, had to calm her down a little with a mild sedative, and that’s all she talked about.” A sideways glance. “You heard about it, huh?”

“We talked to her, yes.”

Junis followed the wake of a pickup heading west. “Don’t think she’s crazy, Agent Scully. Don’t write her off. I don’t know who she saw, but she’s no fool.”

“She was drunk, Dr. Junis.”

He laughed abruptly, loudly, until his eyes began to water and his face reddened alarmingly. “Sorry.” He laughed again and wiped his eyes with a sleeve. “God, I’m sorry.” He gripped the railing with both hands. “Drunk? Elly? You’ve been listening to Todd Hawks. Nope, never. She goes to that bar for the company, that’s all. She’s outlived her family, has no real friends to speak of. She has one drink, a Bloody Mary, that she nurses until she’s ready to go home, and that’s about it. That woman has never been drunk a day in her life.”

“Then what about the spray paint?”

Junis watched another truck pass. “Because she believes it, Agent Scully. She believes it as sure as you believe there ain’t no such thing. That doesn’t mean she’s certifiable.”

Scully wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t know enough to pursue it. Instead she asked about the other witness.

“Fran?” Junis lowered his gaze to the garden. “I can take you to her, if you want, but she won’t do you a whole lot of good.”

“Why not?”

His expression hardened. “The heroin she took that night was damn close to an overdose. I brought her to a facility up near Princeton.” He paused. “A mental rehab, by the way, we don’t have anything like that around here. She was pretty far gone.” He lit another cigarette and blew smoke into the wind. “She’ll recover from the overdose most likely, but as for the other… she isn’t going to be released for a long, long time.”

Swell, she thought; just what I need — an addict who probably can’t even recognize her own reflection. Interviewing Fran Kuyser quickly dropped toward the bottom of her list.

“Do you sit out here a lot?” Andrews asked then, not bothering to look at him.

He nodded to Dana, not at all fazed by the sudden change of subject. “Guess I do, come to think of it. I like to watch the world drive by, see who’s going where. People around here, those that work on post or at McGuire, they have their military doctors, and the others…” He shrugged. “Not a lot left, but I guess you already noticed that.”

Scully also noticed that he didn’t seem to mind. Although he was too young to step down yet, he appeared to be resigned that this practice wasn’t going to get him a retirement home in a better location, and that, for whatever reason, was all right with him.

“Oh, we have our moments,” he said, startling her. “And it beats all to hell working an ER.”

She wasn’t inclined to disagree, thanked him for his time, and told him where she was staying in case he thought of something else.

“I already know that,” he said. And grinned.

Back in the car, Andrews shook her head in disbelief. “You know, you can’t breathe around here without somebody knowing it. Hardly any privacy at all.” She forced herself to shudder. “That’s too weird for me.”

Dana grunted, but she wasn’t really listening. There was something not quite right here, something she and the others had missed. She didn’t think it was tied directly to the killings, but it was, somehow, important. Small, but important. She knew Mulder felt it as well. In spite of the afternoon’s attack, she knew it bothered him, and maybe by the time they returned to the hotel and he had rested, he would know what it was.

As long, she added glumly, as he doesn’t call it a damn goblin.

The motel lights were all on when they returned, highlighting the crown facade, flooding the parking lot with dull silver, making the clouds seem even lower and thicker than they were. After sending Andrews to fetch her interview notes, she pushed through Mulder’s door just in time to hear him say, “…a multitude of sins.”

“What sins?” she demanded. “And why aren’t you in bed?”

He sat in shirtsleeves at the room’s tiny table, his back to the wall, papers spread in front of him. Webber was on the bed, propped up by pillows, knees drawn up to serve as a rest for a legal pad.

“Hi, Scully,” Mulder said. “I’m cured.”

Webber refused to meet the rebuke in her eyes as she dropped into the chair across the table. “You’re not cured, and you’ve been working.” But the scolding was, as always, a waste of time; he would only give her one of two looks — the hurt little boy, or the sly-fox, lopsided grin — and do what he wanted anyway.

He settled for the grin. “We’ve been checking up on Major Tonero.”

“It’s weird,” Webber commented from the bed. “His office confirms he’s head of Air Force Special Projects, like he told us, but they wouldn’t explain what that means.”

“Which,” Mulder continued, “covers a multitude of sins.” He shook his head slowly. “Curiouser and curiouser. Why would an Air Force major, who isn’t even medical personnel, be assigned to an Air Force hospital on an Army post? Which, for the most part, is used as training for reservists, and a jumping-off point when troops have to get overseas in a hurry.” Then he pointed at her before she could answer. “And don’t tell me there’s a perfectly rational explanation.”

Oh, Lord, she thought; he’s in one of his moods.

“And,” Webber added eagerly, “why would he be so interested in the ambush? And why were his people there, too? Those two doctors, scientists, whatever.”

Scully stared at him for so long, he began to look embarrassed. “Well… it’s a good question, isn’t it?” He scratched the back of his head. “I mean, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Hank, it is,” Mulder said when Scully didn’t answer. “And I’ll bet I have a possible answer.”

“Mulder,” Scully said, her voice low and warning. “Do not read into this more than there is.”

“Oh, I’m not,” he protested lightly. “I’m not even going to begin to suggest that maybe these goblins have something to do with the major.” He leaned back in his chair. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she said. “Because you already have. Now look, we’ve got a—”

Andrews walked in then, smiled a not very sincere apology for being late, took a reluctant seat on the bed, and said, “So now what?”

Dana checked her watch; it was after five. “So now I think we’d better break for a while and have something to eat.” A look shut Mulder up. “There’s been too damn much excitement around here, and I want us to cool down for a while before we end up on horses.”

“What?” Hank said.

“A definition of confusion,” Mulder explained, hands clasped behind his head. “He jumped up on his horse and rode off in all directions.” He winked. “Scully likes wise sayings like that. She hordes fortune cookies, you know.”

Hank laughed; Andrews only snorted and shook her head.

Dana, for her part, did her best not to react, because she recognized the signs — he was high on an idea, the bits and pieces of the puzzle beginning to give him some kind of picture. The problem with him was, that picture was often one no one else saw but him.

It was what made working with him at once so fascinating and so damn exasperating.

Rather than try to derail him, however, it was better to give him his head and go along for the ride. For a while.

So she suggested they clean up and meet in the restaurant in half an hour or so for coffee. Her tone brooked no argument. When Andrews left without a word, Scully’s expression sent Hank along as well, deciding it would be a good thing to take a walk around the building.

When they were alone, Mulder’s expression sobered. “I saw it, Scully. I’m not kidding, I really saw it.”

“Mulder, don’t start.”

He spread his hands on the table. “It’s not like I’m the only one, you know. Even Chief Hawks admitted there were others.” He held up a palm to keep her quiet. “I saw it — okay, just a glimpse — but I also touched it. It wasn’t my imagination, it wasn’t wishful thinking. I touched it, Scully. It was real.”

She leaned away from him, thinking. Then: “I’ll grant you it was real. He was real. But it wasn’t any goblin, no supernatural creature.”

“The skin—”

“Camouflage. Come on, Mulder, Fort Dix is a training base. That means there are personnel who are experts in all sorts of weaponry… and camouflage. God knows how elaborate they can be, but it’s probably a lot more now than just smearing greasepaint on your face.”

He tried to stand, grimaced, and sagged back. “My jacket.”

It had been tossed on the dresser. She fetched it and looked it over.

“I hit it twice, once pretty hard.” He leaned forward under the light. “There’s nothing there, Scully. No paint, no oil, no nothing.”

She dropped the jacket onto the bed. “A suit, that’s all. Skin-tight, latex, who knows? No goblins, Mulder. Just people in disguise.” She pointed at the bed. “Lie down.”

She knew he still wasn’t feeling well when he made no cracks, just nodded wearily and shifted stiffly to the mattress. As he settled down, she brought him a glass of water and aspirin and watched him drink.

“What about the major and his people?” he asked. His eyelids fluttered. “Hank’s right, that’s kind of fishy.”

“Later,” she ordered. “You’re not doing anybody any good, least of all yourself, when you can’t think straight.” Her frown deepened. “Get some rest. I’m not kidding. I’ll drop by later to see how you’re doing.”

“What about the others?”

She smiled prettily and headed for the door. “Oh, I think we’ll manage. We’ll muddle through somehow.”

She opened the door and looked over her shoulder. He hadn’t closed his eyes; he was staring at the ceiling.

Then his gaze shifted. “Scully, what if I’m right?”

“Rest.”

“What if I’m right? What if they’re out there?”

She stepped out, the door closing behind her. “They’re not, Mulder. For God’s sake, rest, before I—”

“How do you know they’re not? You can’t see them, Scully. They’re out there, somewhere, and you can’t see them.”