01 - Goblins (11 page)

“What’s an hour?”

“Atlantic City. There’s some really nice places at Resorts and the Taj.” Then
she stuck her tongue out and laughed, pulled his hands to her breast, and stuck
her tongue out again. “Just so you don’t forget.”

He kissed her then, long and soft. “Like I would,” he whispered.

“Liar.”

“Maybe.” He slipped away and stood. “But I’m damn cute, right?”

She didn’t laugh, didn’t smile.

He leaned over and kissed her again, quickly but just as earnestly “See you
later.”

“I’ll be here, sugar. No place else to go.”

He blew her a kiss from the door, closed it behind him, and hurried down the
long gold and royal blue corridor. Her apartment was above the office, tucked
behind the crown facade, and he used the outside back stairs to get to his car,
hastily parked there when he had spotted that redheaded agent pull up not long
after he himself had arrived. He figured he would run into Mulder sooner or later, but right
now he preferred it to be later. The way he figured it, the agents wouldn’t be
here more than a couple of days, not on a case that was as cold as this one, and
they’d probably eat at least one meal at the Inn.

They would talk while they ate.

Whatever they said, he would know less than an hour after they were done.

It was so perfect, he crossed his fingers to ward off the feeling that it
just might be too perfect.

But he wasn’t going to run from it, either. Hell, he got a free room, a free
woman, and a chance to sneak up on Dana again. What the hell more could he ask
for?

The killer, he answered as he pulled slowly around the side of the building;
I want the killer, that’s what I want.

He had another feeling, and he leaned forward, looked up, and saw her
standing at her bedroom window. He gave her the smile, and the wave, and when
she waved back he blew her a kiss before speeding out onto the road.

What a day this was going to be. Lunch with a uniformed toad who thinks his
cousin is a jerk, a little investigative work around town, dinner in Atlantic
City, a roll in the hay in a bed so big he could build a house on it.

Life, he decided, just doesn’t get any better.

* * *

Leonard stood at the end of the basement corridor, listening.

He didn’t know what he expected to hear. There was never any noise save for
the faint grumble of the machines that gave the building its power.

Nevertheless he listened, and wished there were more lights.

A single bulb over the entrance, one down at the far end. Nothing more. No
need for more. He and Rosemary were the only ones who used it; Major Tonero was
the only one who visited.

Still, he couldn’t help thinking there should be some sound other than the
rasp of his breathing.

You’re making yourself jumpy, he scolded as he started toward the Project
office. Not that he shouldn’t be. So much had gone right, and so much had gone
wrong, that half the time he didn’t know whether he should shout or cry.
Rosemary didn’t help either, nagging at him constantly, pushing him, reminding
him unnecessarily that this had to be the right one or all support would vanish
as if it had never been.

And, he feared, him with it.

Ten yards down he reached the first of three doors on the right—there were
none on the left at all.

The first was his private office. No markings, just dull steel. The second
door was the same, the Project center within. He glanced through the wire-mesh window and saw that
it was empty. Rosemary must still be at lunch.

The third door was closed.

He glanced at it nervously, checked back toward the exit, and decided he had
to know.

With one hand in his pocket to stop his keys from jangling, he hurried to it
and looked through the reinforced glass judas window.

No one sat in the armchair, or at the desk now stripped of everything but the
pen and legal pad. He couldn’t see the bed.

He flipped a switch by the jamb and rapped lightly on the window with a
knuckle, and jumped back with a stifled cry when a face suddenly grinned at him
from the other side.

“Jesus,” he said, eyes closing briefly. “You scared me to death.”

Above the door was a microphone embedded in the concrete, a speaker grille
beside it.

“Sorry.” The voice was distorted, asexual. “I’m on break. I thought I’d drop
in. Sorry.”

It wasn’t sorry at all.

“How do you feel?” He approached the door again, warily, as if the face
belonged to a superhuman monster that could, at the slightest provocation, smash
through the steel. The stupid thing was, the door wasn’t locked. He could walk
right in if he wanted to. If he had the nerve.

“How do you think I feel?”

Tymons refused the bait, the invitation to guilt. That sort of emotion had
died the first time he had skinned a subject capuchin alive. He hadn’t liked it,
of course, but there had been no other way.

Guilt, for the Project, was too damn expensive.

“When do I get to see the results?” It wasn’t a plea, it was barely a
question.

“Later,” he promised. Below the level of the window, he crossed his fingers.
Just in case.

“I feel pretty good.”

“You’re looking good.”

He returned the smile.

“I’ve almost got it, too.”

Tymons nodded. He heard that every week, every month. “You’d better. They’re
…” He couldn’t help a grin. “They’re a little annoyed.”

“It wasn’t
my
fault. You’re the doctor.”

He had heard that one, too. Every week. Every month.

“But I’ll take care of it.”

Tymons glared and pointed. “You’ll do no such thing, you understand? You let
me handle everything.”

The face didn’t change expression, but Tymons looked away from the contempt.

“I’d like my books back, please.”

He shook his head. “That didn’t work, and you know it. The books, the music,
the TV. Too many distractions. You need to concentrate on your concentration.”
He chuckled. “As it were.”

“I
can
concentrate, damnit. I concentrate so much my brain is falling
out.”

Tymons nodded sympathetically. “I know, I know, and I’ll talk to you about it
later. Right now I have work to do.”

Even through the distortion, the sarcasm was clear: “Another little
adjustment?”

Tymons didn’t answer. He switched off the communication unit, waved vaguely,
and hurried to his office. Once inside, he locked the door behind him and
dropped behind his desk, switched on his computer, leaned back and closed his
eyes.

This was wrong.

Things weren’t getting better, and no goddamn adjustments were ever going to
work.

He sighed and checked his watch—he had almost two hours before Rosemary
arrived. Plenty of time to complete copying his files. Plenty of time to take
the Army-issue .45 Tonero had given him and go back next door. And use it.

Plenty of time to vanish.

After all, he thought with a hollow laugh, he was the expert at things like
that.

Then he glanced through
The Blue Boy,
and started.

The room was empty.

“Damn.” He flicked a switch beneath the shelf, activating the lights embedded
in the room’s ceiling. All color vanished, all shadows.

Still empty.

The bastard had already left.

Like a ghost, he thought, glancing nervously at the door; the damn thing
moves like a ghost.

After all this time, he couldn’t bring himself to think of it as human.

The overcast thickened, splotches of shifting cloud from grey to black
bulging and spreading, using the wind to warn that the rain that had fallen
before would be nothing like the rain to come.

Dana stood uneasily in the middle of a narrow paved road, not at all caring
for the way the woodland pressed around her, not liking the faint hint of ozone
that promised lightning when the storm broke again.

They had eaten in the diner as planned, but neither she nor Mulder had been
either surprised or pleased with what they had heard: Webber and Andrews had
learned nothing that hadn’t been recorded or implied in the reports already. No one had seen anything, no one had heard anything; many of the shopkeepers
knew Grady, most of them not kindly; a couple recognized Ulman’s picture, but
there was nothing more than that. He was from the post. Big deal.

No miracles.

No one had mentioned goblins, either.

Hawks had explained that, over the past couple of months, some kids and a
couple of adults had reported seeing… something drifting around the town.
They called it a goblin because everyone knew of Elly Lang’s obsession.

“But it doesn’t mean anything,” he had insisted calmly. “A story like that,
it kind of feeds on itself.”

By two, the afternoon light had worsened, shifting closer to false twilight.
Mulder decided to check the site of the corporal’s murder before the storm
broke. Andrews, on a hunch, volunteered to return to the motel to interview the
owner; it was possible, she said, Ulman had used the out-of-the-way place for
weekend escapes. Maybe he had provoked the wrath of someone’s husband. Chief
Hawks quickly volunteered to drive and introduce her.

“And keep her out of trouble,” Mulder had said later, in the car.

Scully hadn’t liked the idea then, and she didn’t like it now. Webber, on the
trip out, had already told them that Andrews, her attitude unchanged, had made
the interviews, brief as they were, “kind of difficult.” Except, predictably, when the subjects were
men.

Webber stood now some fifty yards up the road, hands in his pockets, playing
the part of the Jeep the Ulman witness had been in. He looked miserable as the
wind slapped his hair and coat around; about as miserable as she felt.

Mulder was on his third circle of the tree from which the arm and weapon had
allegedly appeared. It had been easy to find—there was still a ragged piece of
yellow crime scene ribbon wrapped around its thick trunk.

She glanced up; the sky was lower.

Nothing moved in the woods but leaves and bare branches. And the
slow-strengthening wind.

Behind her, their car shuddered when a gust slammed it broadside.

She turned in a slow circle, shaking her head. The corporal had been
drinking; he had, for some reason, come out of the woods down there by the
ditch, staggered up here… and had been killed.

Mulder joined her, waving Webber to them. “You see it?” he asked.

The road was a flattened loop that left the county highway just west of
Marville, skirted the post boundary here, and met the highway again a mile
farther on. While it was possible Grady had been a random victim, there was no
way she would believe Ulman had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong
time.

The killer had followed him through the woods.

“He was meant to die,” she said.

He nodded. “I think so, yes.”

Webber trotted up. “So is it hollow or what?”

She frowned. “What? The tree?”

“Sure. That woman saw—”

Scully took his arm gently and turned him around, pointing to the place he’d
just left. “There are no lights, there was no moon, and all she saw, from way
back there, was whatever the corporal’s flashlight showed her.”

She waited.

“Okay.” He nodded. “Okay. But what was she doing out here?”

Mulder didn’t answer. He grunted, and headed back for the tree.

“Well,” she said, watching Mulder circle the tree again, squeezing between it
and the caged white birch on either side, “she could be an accomplice. She could
have been waiting for the killer.”

Webber disagreed, as she knew he would. “That would mean they both knew Ulman
would be here, at that time. And they didn’t, right?”

“Right.”

“So it was what? Her bad luck?”

“That’s about the size of it,” she said. She also reminded them that the
so-called witness, Fran Kuyser, had been drinking, and taking heroin. Not
exactly the most reliable observer they could hope for.

“When are we going to see her?”

Scully hunched her shoulders briefly. “Later, or tomorrow. From what the
chief said, the condition she’s in, she won’t be able to tell us anything
anyway.”

“A hell of thing,” Webber said. He shifted uneasily. “Can you tell me
something?”

She nodded.

“Are the cases you work on… I mean, are they always this screwy? Messed
up, I mean.” He shook his head once, violently. “I mean—”

She laughed in spite of herself. “Yes. Sometimes.”

“Brother,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

Mulder rapped the trunk with a knuckle, then pried at the overlapping bark.
Scully knew, however, that he saw more than just the tree. That was only the
center; his focus touched it all.

“That old lady you told me about,” Webber said, for some reason keeping his
voice low.

Scully didn’t look at him. “Ms. Lang. What about her?”

“She said… I mean, she was talking about goblins.”

She did look then, sharply. “There are no goblins, Hank.”

But she knew what he was thinking: She and Mulder were the X-Files, and that
meant this case contained something well out of the ordinary. It didn’t matter
that the so-called paranormal had perfectly reasonable explanations, once you
bothered to examine such incidents more closely. It didn’t matter that the extraordinary was only the ordinary with curious
trappings. They were here, goblins were mentioned, and now she wasn’t sure Hank
didn’t believe it a little himself.

Mulder snagged his coat on a bush, yanked it free angrily, and took it off.

A hoarse cry overhead made her look up—a pair of crows flew lazily across the
road, ignoring the wind.

“This place is kind of spooky,” Hank said, rolling his shoulders against the
damp chill.

She had no argument there. They could see barely a hundred feet into the
trees now. If it was twilight out here, it was near midnight in there.