The X-Files: Goblins

FIVE

Diamond Street was barely wide enough for two lanes of traffic on its easy downward slope toward the Potomac River. Richly crowned hickory and maple lined the worn curbs, hiding for most of its length old and small, brick and clapboard homes with front lawns scarcely large enough for the name. At the top of the slope were a handful of businesses, spillovers from South Washington Street. On the west side was Ripley’s, flanked on the left by a corner grocery, and on the right by a narrow three-story Victorian converted to a dress shop on the ground floor, law offices above. The bar’s simple brick facade was deliberately no advertisement; all there was was a dark green padded door over which hung a scripted sign in red. No window large or small. It was a neighborhood bar, no outsiders or the outside need apply.

Mulder stepped in and immediately stripped off his coat, sighing a little, pushing a weary hand through his hair. To his left were a half-dozen small tables, already taken; to his right, a wall covered above dark wood wainscoting with film and old radio show posters framed in polished wood. As soon as his vision adjusted to the dim lighting, all except for the bar itself from short candles in amber chimneys on the tables and sconces on the walls, he moved slowly toward the back, down a narrow aisle created where the mahogany bar began. That was filled too, but the noise level was low.

Conversation, quiet laughter, a few nods and smiles in his direction.

When the bar ended, the room opened up into a large square, with more tables, and high-backed booths settled against the walls. There was no TV, no jukebox; the background music piped through hidden speakers was barely loud enough to register. Sometimes it was country, sometimes jazz, sometimes themes from films and Broadway shows. It all depended on the mood Stuff Felstead was in when he opened for lunch.

It didn’t take Mulder long to recognize the soundtrack from Alien. Stuff had apparently seen him coming.

With a grin he swung left and dropped into the booth nearest the end of the bar, shifted, and sat with his back against the wall, one leg stretched out on the padded seat, his topcoat dumped on the other seat. Within seconds, a tall woman stood in front of him, in loose black slacks, puff-sleeved white blouse. Black Irish from head to toe — hair, eyes, fair skin, a faint suggestion of freckles across her upturned nose.

“Are you dead or drinking?”

He rolled his eyes and groaned. “Both, I think.”

“Beer?”

He nodded.

She winked and drifted away.

He covered his eyes with his left hand, elbow propped on the table, and wondered if maybe he had slipped into some alternate time zone, some parallel universe.

All the signs were there: Aden Douglas hadn’t kept him waiting, but had personally ushered him into his office. Congratulations on the Helevito case were suspiciously effusive, as was praise for taking such good care of Hank Webber. Mulder hadn’t had a chance to say a word save a murmur of thanks before the Section Head asked him what he thought about the disappearing clown.

“A trick, obviously.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He’s not the Invisible Man, sir. Nobody can snap his fingers and vanish.”

“Intriguing, though, don’t you think?”

He heard the warning bells immediately and did his best to avoid what he feared was coming, pointing out suspect witnesses, the very backdrop of the circus, incomplete preliminary reports from the local sheriff…

It didn’t work.

He had one day to finish the Helevito paperwork, and then he was off to Louisiana over the weekend.

“Just up your alley, wouldn’t you say, Agent Mulder?”

Mulder had wanted to say, “Up your alley, too. Sir.” But a sudden attack of restraint kept him silent as he was handed a blue-tabbed case folder and ushered back out before he had a chance to continue his objections.

It wasn’t until he’d returned to his empty office and flipped through the pages that he realized Scully wouldn’t be going with him. Hank Webber would.

This wasn’t right. Not that he didn’t mind shepherding the younger man through the minefields of Bureau investigations; that was the least of his problems, and Webber was a personable, if somewhat overenthusiastic man.

What wasn’t right was the smell of it. Right up his alley, the man had said. Weird stuff. But this wasn’t weird at all; it was just nuts, and he wondered exactly who had asked for the FBI to join in what looked to be an obvious local matter.

Plus, let’s not forget the man at the Memorial. Invisible as well, and all too real.

Not protected, but not chained.

Alice was right — curiouser and curiouser.

Parallel universe; it had to be.

“If it’s that bad, maybe I’ll bring hemlock for a chaser.”

He opened his eyes and kept his expression bland as the waitress set a bottle of beer on the table, along with a plate filled with french fries. He pointed. “I didn’t order those, Trudy.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

Their aroma made his stomach growl, and she laughed silently when he reached for one and popped it into his mouth, hissing as it burned his tongue. Reluctantly, stiffly, he swung his leg back under the table and saw that a thick, all-the-trimmings hamburger had been buried beneath the fries. He looked at her sideways, and she winked again before heading across the room at a customer’s call.

He didn’t hide his interest. She was an attractive woman, a law student now at Georgetown, and they had dated a couple of times, nothing fancy, nothing hot. He enjoyed her and her company, although he couldn’t always take her mothering. Tonight, however, it was right on target, and he ate as if he hadn’t done so in a week, ordering a second burger before he’d finished the first. Taking his time. No hurry at all.

Because it was the middle of the week, the room didn’t fill. The booths were taken first, and a handful of tables changed occupants once or twice as he watched them. Mostly younger people back here; the old-timers stuck to the stools where they were closer to what mattered.

A couple of times women seated close by would glance at him, glance away, glance back, but he didn’t acknowledge them and so lost their interest. Two men in golf caps and cardigans argued quietly at a table with someone in a booth he couldn’t see. A married couple dressed more for the theater than Ripley’s fussed unhappily with kaiser roll sandwiches. A quartet of college kids tried to pick Trudy and the other two waitresses up.

A normal night.

In a parallel universe.

Oh, brother, he thought; maybe it’s time I took a vacation.

A room whose walls weren’t all the same color, mostly shadow now, mostly dark.

On the right-hand wall a dark-framed print, Gainesborough’s The Blue Boy, fronted with non-reflective glass.

Against the left-hand wall, a bunk with a thin mattress, blanket and sheet drawn taut and folded in the military style. A footlocker at the head, closed, chipped and scarred.

A metal desk set perpendicular to the rear wall. On it two piles of paperback books, a stack-able stereo system, a handful of compact discs. A yellow legal pad, with a ballpoint pen just off-center. A green-shaded lamp, softly lit. A swivel chair whose seat and back were comfortably padded.

In the far corner a club chair, with a standing brass lamp behind it, an end table beside it with a seashell ashtray.

The floor was concrete, uncarpeted save for a remnant throw in front of the chair.

A man in a long lab coat wandered around the room, poking at the books, the CDs, scowling at the legal pad whose top sheet was blank, picking up the pen, stabbing the page lightly before dropping it again. Although he was only in his mid-forties, he had more scalp than hair, his face sharp angles without seeming harsh. When he straightened, he was tall, broad at the shoulders and chest, and broad at his stomach. He glanced around, his nose wrinkling at the faint stench of cigarette smoke and mildew, sweat and blood, and finally, with a satisfied nod, strode to a padded door in the wall. He opened it without hesitation and stepped up into a corridor whose ceiling lighting was contrast enough to force a squint as he checked through the round judas window before turning right and stepping up into the next room, itself dimly lighted.

“Ready?” A woman in white sat at a wall-long shelf on which was a series of monitors and keyboards, space for notebooks and pads, and two styrofoam cups of steaming coffee.

The shelf was set just beneath a window that looked through the ghost of the Blue Boy, down into the other room.

“Leonard, I asked if you were ready.” Long blond hair pulled back and held back by a rubber band, feathered bangs on a high forehead.

Leonard Tymons, when he had first met her, thought Rosemary Elkhart quite attractive in a hard sort of way. After four years he hadn’t changed his mind, but he had changed his plans for seduction and a brief affair. She indeed did have fair hair and fair skin, pale lips and pale blue eyes, but when he was alone he called her a black widow.

“Leonard, damnit.”

He dropped into a wheeled chair beside her. “You saw.”

She nodded toward a microphone attached to one of the computers. “For the record, okay? Let’s remember the record.”

He nodded. “For the record, everything is fine. Nothing has changed since last time. Jesus, can’t we get anyone to clean that place right? It smells like a… a…” He shook his head in disgust. “Just get someone to scrub it down before next time.”

“I will.”

There was silence then as they worked at their keyboards, setting programs in motion, for the moment paying little attention to the diagrams and numbers that flashed across the screens.

Then Tymons reached out and flicked off the mike.

Rosemary looked at him oddly.

“We blew it, didn’t we,” he said matter-of-factly A tilt of his head toward the glass. “We’re not going to bring it off, are we?”

Her face hardened as if she were about to lose her temper, and for several seconds she refused to answer.

“Rosemary.”

She sagged, and whispered, “Damn.”

The soft hum of fans, the creak of his chair’s wheels as he pushed away from the shelf desk and rubbed his face with both hands.

“Maybe,” she said, “there’s a way.”

“Maybe,” he answered, “there’s a Santa Claus.”

Her face hardened again, and she gestured him back to his position. “Santa Claus or not,” she told him, “we will find a way.” She glanced at him sideways. “If not, we’ll just get another.”

The music had changed to the muted soundtrack from Damn Yankees when Trudy Gaines slipped into the seat opposite Mulder, lit a cigarette, and brushed a strand of damp hair from her brow as she blew smoke at the ceiling. “One day, he’s going to find everyone in here puddled on his precious floor.”

Mulder raised an eyebrow. “You’re warm?” He hadn’t noticed.

She nodded, and even in the gloom he could see the lines, the shadows, that made her more her age. “I think I’m getting the flu or something.”

He finished the last burger, picked up his second beer. “So take a day off.”

“You pay my rent?”

“You give me that autographed Thing From Another World poster?”

“In your dreams, G-man. In your dreams.”

The Golf Caps’ argument grew louder.

“Jesus,” she muttered.

“What’s up?” The person in the booth was still in shadow; all he could see was one arm, in a tweed, elbow-patched sleeve.

“The Redskins,” she said in disgust.

He couldn’t help a laugh. “What? May’s just started, for God’s sake.”

She looked at him with one eye open. “It’s always autumn when you’re a Redskins fan, Mulder, don’t you know that?”

One of the Golf Caps stood, his chair scraping back. Before anyone could move, a man in shirtsleeves, a white apron tied around his waist, appeared by the table. He was, Mulder thought, the perfect walking cadaver. Only the badly arthritic hands spoiled the image. Evidently the Golf Cap didn’t think Stuff Felstead could do anything but glower. He was wrong. Ripley’s owner said something so low only the other man could hear. It was enough. He sputtered, gestured placatingly and by his expression suggested to his companion that they leave.

It was over in less than ten seconds.

“Magic,” Trudy said, catching him staring.

“Probably. After all this time, I still don’t see how he does it.”

“Keep it that way,” she advised him. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.” She set her palms flat on the table. “Well, break’s over. Gotta finish up.”

“Nice visiting with you, too,” he said, sweeping up the last of the ketchup with the last french fry. “So what’s the problem?”

She froze halfway out of the booth, avoiding his gaze, staring at the seatback behind him.

He waited.

Finally, she slumped back and shook her head. “It’s silly.”

“Probably.”

“I feel like a jerk.”

He reached out his hand and waggled it until she handed him his coat. “You’re off in ten minutes, you’ve had another fight with your boyfriend, you have a tort quiz tomorrow, and you want a walk home in case he tries to hassle you.”

She didn’t blink. “You know, Mulder, sometimes you’re damn weird.”

He shrugged. “So they tell me.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“Sure. No problem.”

A quick smile was her thanks as she returned to work, and fifteen minutes later she was back, heavy sweater over her arm. He paid at the register at the end of the bar and followed her to the street. His own apartment was a couple of blocks past King Street, closer to the Potomac; she lived the same distance in the opposite direction. He didn’t mind. It was a nice night, a comfortable breeze, and Trudy spent most of the time complaining about her landlady in a way that, at one point, had him laughing so hard he tripped over a raised section of sidewalk.

He didn’t fall. A quick, exaggerated turn kept his balance.

But not so quick that he didn’t see the man in the tweed jacket strolling behind them a block away.

It didn’t register at first because they had already reached her place, a renovated colonial divided into a half-dozen apartments, hidden beneath a clutch of oaks. She kissed his cheek quickly for thanks and hurried up the walk, fussing in her purse for the keys.

He didn’t leave until the front door was open and she was inside.

Then he turned around and headed back the way they had come, hands in his pockets, whistling softly. His footsteps were loud. Traffic didn’t exist. A dog raced silently across a sloped lawn to check him out, tail wagging, fangs bared. Mulder gave the animal a smile and walked on.

Checking the shadows for a shadow that didn’t belong.

By the time he had crossed King Street again, he had begun to scold himself. After all, people had to live someplace, some of them actually lived in the same area he did, and the Tweed Man was probably one of them.

His own building was on a quiet residential street. Well-kept dark brick with a slight arch over the recessed entrance. Hedges that made the tiny lawn seem even smaller. As he slipped his keys out of his pocket, he began making a list of things he’d have to do in the morning, not the least of which would be to try to change Douglas’ mind.

A disappearing murderous clown was not his idea of a good reason to see Louisiana.

By the time he reached the door he was already in bed; all he had to do was get his body settled in the same place.

He turned the lock and absently glanced over his shoulder.

The Tweed Man strolled by on the other side of the street, cigarette in one hand tracing orange in the dark, face hidden by a felt hat pulled low.

Weariness slowed Mulder’s reaction. In the few seconds it took to convince himself he wasn’t imagining it, the man was gone, lost in the shifting shadows between widely spaced streetlamps.