Disclaimers in Part 1 Open Hearts An X-Files Thing by Summer (summer@camelot.bradley.edu) In Tandem with Vickie Moseley Part Nine The Journals of Fox Mulder Saturday 20 November Finally. I thought John would never fall asleep. It worked. I can't believe it fucking worked. If he'd just admit, just break down and SAY that he's lying, then I know I could kill the last, gasping vestige of doubt that's still tucked just inside my jacket, poking a long fingernail into my side and wheezing, "But what if he DID do it?" But no. I don't think so. Not any more. Scully was right. He's been playing me all along. Scully... Scully... Scully's going to kill me for ditching her again. I'm gambling that she'll understand-- she won't like it, but she knows that when it comes down to it, I didn't really have a choice. After all, if I'd run this past her, she never would've let me do it. But it worked. Against all odds, my god, it actually worked. I feel like I've just run a marathon. I thought no trip could ever last as long as the car ride to the Forks of Cacapon, but I was wrong. The plane trip to the Vineyard today... that was longer. Not merely because I was on the edge of my seat wondering whether Roche was being honest, not merely agonizing over whether this plan was going to work... Travelling with John Lee Roche gives a whole new meaning to the term "motion sickness". For one thing, he would not shut up. I guess the other prisoners don't care to engage in conversation with a child molester and serial murderer. Or maybe it was just his old salesman's instincts kicking in-- if he could keep me talking, I wouldn't think about his story and find any inconsistencies that might mar his carefully constructed illusion. For another, I was escorting around a handcuffed man while trying desperately to conceal the fact that I, the Lone Federal Agent, was transporting a prisoner without the team of officers who customarily accompany an expedition like this. I managed to badge my way around the metal detectors so that I didn't have to uncuff him there, and with my overcoat hanging over his hands, Roche looked normal most of the time. _I_ was the one people were giving suspicious looks-- one hand constantly on my hip and the other on Roche's arm, sweat pouring down my face, anxiety tripping my words up and making my hands shake. I saw some teenager look at me and Roche and then flip his wrist at his buddy, so apparently I must've looked like a gay man... fresh from a diagnosis of HIV-positive, clinging to the guy who passed it to him in the first place. No, kid, see, I'm really an FBI agent, absconding to my childhood home with an erstwhile child molester and killer in an attempt to find out once and for all if he murdered my little sister. Never mind. Not to mention debating over whether to call Scully's answering machine and leave a message. Again. Third time's a charm, right? But there was a slim chance she'd gone home after she left my apartment, so I passed on that one. Maybe I should call her right now. Sure, it's one in the morning, but if I go ahead and call now, she'll be awake in plenty of time to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Nah. She's probably already in trouble for not reporting me when I slugged Roche. If I tell her what I've done now, she'll have to report me for this. And the hell of it is-- she might not. She might jet out here to help me bring him in without incident, then write one of her razzle-dazzle reports where she somehow makes every crazy-ass thing we do on a case sound utterly sane and sensible. But with the way Skinner was raving yesterday morning-- no, I guess that was two days ago-- whatever. He looked ready to take a chunk out of anyone unlucky enough to get close to his teeth. Not even one of Scully's reports would be enough to pacify him if I dragged her into this. No. I started this, I'll finish it myself and take the fall. I'll unceremoniously dump Roche back at the prison this morning, turn myself in to Scully and let her haul me in to get cited for misconduct. That won't look too bad. It'll appear that Scully's doing her job, keeping me in line and going to Skinner when I stick my neck out. Skinner can tear me up all he wants; I'll survive. Hell, I made it through this week. One of the A.D.'s reaming sessions'll seem like tender loving care after the shit I've dealt with from Roche. Forewarned was not forarmed, in this case. I knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it-- primarily to have a little fun, secondarily to distract me from thinking too closely about his tales of 1973. All the way from the prison, through the airport, onto the plane-- he kept at me. I knew what he was doing. It didn't help. "The investigation was really pretty sloppy," he told me mildly, like he was talking about the Redskins game. "I read about it in the papers, and there were a lot of ways they could have caught me, if they'd just kept at it. Even now, you could've traced it to me, if you were really diligent." "How?" I demanded. He just said airily, "Plenty of ways. Tons. I wasn't even wearing gloves." "Then you didn't touch anything, because they never found anyone's prints..." "I didn't need to touch anything else." On a fucking airplane, in the middle of coach, while the stewardess was passing out those goddamned bags of honey-roasted peanuts-- and my fingers ached, I wanted to hurt him so bad. Finally I realized he wouldn't quit unless I played ball with him, so I tried to catch him in contradictions, or get him to venture knowledge that he'd get wrong. "You said you sold this vacuum cleaner to my father. What was he like, then?" "I don't remember," Roche said, then a sly glance. "I wasn't really paying attention to _him_." And I meant to be objective, but I just couldn't. "My sister didn't fit your pattern. She doesn't look like Alice, John." "Samantha was the first... I wasn't sure what I wanted, then. She had such clear blue eyes. When I came to your house, her hair was pulled back with blue ribbons, and she was laughing. The whole time I was there, she was laughing." "She still didn't look like Alice." "Have you ever seen a picture of the real little girl the reverend wrote those books for? Alice Liddell?" he asked dreamily. "Blue eyes... and such lovely dark hair." I set my jaw. And wanted to vomit. "Where was _I_?" "Baseball practice, I think." Roche smiled abstractly. "Your dad pointed out the pictures on the wall of you and your sister." He focussed on me, eyes sharpening. "You know, I thought I recognized you... when you and those other men asked me questions. Your eyes are the same as they were then. But I thought, no, it's too much of a coincidence. Then I found out that yeah, you're Fox. I remembered your name from when I talked to your father. It's a memorable name." --Lies. It was all lies. But I didn't know that, then. "Why would he mention us to you? You were just selling him a vacuum cleaner. He wouldn't give you the story of his life." "I always asked, of course." That husk of a smile. "And it's suspicious, only asking about... Samantha... so I asked about you, too. It was okay. I didn't have to listen to much about you. He went on and on about her, though... which was what I wanted, after all." And I had to suppress a shiver, because that did sound like Dad; the potholder Samantha crocheted was always infinitely more interesting than the score of my last basketball game. The doubts kept gathering, worse and worse. And still Roche wore that vacant salesman's smile. "But all this can wait," he said, all empty geniality. "We can't start until we get there." "Fine." I tried to ignore him. Ran through some trial apologies for Scully. At times like this, it's good to have plenty of grovelling worked out ahead of time. Then Roche started in again, proclaiming, "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things." "Yeah, and a very merry un-birthday to you too, John. Now shut up. You'll get your chance to talk." He made an exagerrated `hrumph'ing sound. "If that's how you're going to be, maybe I won't say anything after all." I stared him down. At least I can say that much for myself. On one small point, I stared him down. "You need to tell me as much as I need to know." "And how many states can I send you and your pretty partner running to? How many times can you stand to dig for your sister's shallow grave?" I could hear the other passengers chatting, hear someone's hands takking on the keys of a laptop computer. The rustling of cellophane packages, munching of teeth on gummy peanuts. I tried to imagine the plane soaring over the Atlantic, tried to visualise how it would look to someone on the ground... a tiny silver dot in the sky, a thread of white smoke among the clouds. So small and inconsequential. It hurts to hate this much. I'm exhausted with the effort it takes to despise him. No, what's wearing me down is the effort it takes to keep from putting a pillow over his face right now. He's snoring, the bastard, five feet from where I'm sitting. I cuffed him to the bed. He said, "Kinky." And then, in plying tones, "This isn't how I'd choose to spend my last few hours of freedom..." "Good." When we took his testimony... god, it was yesterday, it was less than twenty-four hours ago... when we got him to tell us who the fifteenth little girl was, I saw the look on Scully's face. She hates him, and it was glorious to see. It's not a muddled, frustrated feeling that ties her up and tires her out. It's almost biblical, the hate she harbors for him-- pure and cold and monumental. She has no compulsion to decipher his behavior; she's not interested in what made him this way. He's a predator to be studied, caged and classified, and then forgotten. I want that. Oh how I want that. "She lived in Green Ranch, New York," Roche told her. "Mint grew outside her window; I stood outside her window atop sprigs of mint. Smelled wonderful." He drifted off for a moment. Gave Scully a date-- July 1974-- nine months after Sam went missing. But he didn't take Sam. "Her name was Karen Ann Phileponte," he said, freeing that fifteenth cloth heart at last. And then, in an absolutely textbook sociopathic display, he burst out, "I had her mother on the hook for an ElectroVac Argasy-- but at the last minute, she said Thanks but no thanks--" He fairly sizzled with indignation. Then he lapsed into his dissociative state again, murmuring, "Oh well." I remember. I remember the patterns of his speech, the currents of his delusions. Too well. "Why'd you do it, John?" Reggie Pardue's low voice; I remember how he always sounded so sure, so ordered and composed. That was the last case we worked on together, six years ago, and now he's gone. "They deserved better," Roche answered distantly. "Better than what?" Bill Patterson demanded, pushing his glasses up his nose-- whenever he was stymied, he'd always start messing with his glasses. "Than this," Roche replied. "So you took them away," Bill interpreted. Reggie-- and it's one of the reasons I miss him-- couldn't contain his disgust. "How?" he asked. "How could you do that to those little girls? Didn't they ask for their mommies, didn't they cry and beg to go home? Weren't they fighting when you held them down?" John Lee Roche squirmed. For the first time in the session he lost that far-off look and cast his eyes around the room like reality mattered. He blurted, "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If he was to wake, you'd go out-- bang!-- just like a candle!" I put myself into his line of sight and asked, "If those girls were only a sort of thing in a dream, then what are you, John?" "A dreamer," he whispered. Then, with a wry twist to his smile, "A daydream believer." I was glad he didn't quote from Lennon's "Imagine": "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..." John Roche's fixation on the works of Lewis Carroll already ruined the Alice books for me. Charles Manson's fascination with "Helter Skelter" put me off the Beatles and his endorsement of Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ made me move my copy to a back shelf. The Aum Supreme Truth cult in Japan touts Asimov's Foundation series as the basis for their apocalyptic beliefs, so I took those books right off the bottom of the coffee table, where I keep all my insomnia reading material. With all of these killers laying claim to so many icons of popular culture, I'm running out of things I can safely enjoy. At least my video collection remains unprofaned. "Why those girls, John?" Bill asked, as always scouting for indicators. "What about them made you decide they deserved better than this? You must have seen a lot of children, travelling like you did. Why them?" "The dream-child, moving through a land of wonders wild and new..." Roche quoted at him; his posture arched. Playing, now. He made me think of a kid with a magnifying glass and a few trapped ants. I lost my patience. "And something, something, something else, and half believe it true," I tossed back at him. Bill actually laughed at my mangled citing of Carroll's poetry. "That's pretty good, John," he confided in Roche, "stumping Mulder, here. That's better than any of us have managed with him." He sat next to Roche at the table, trying to encourage identification. Bill Patterson never saw victims; he saw convictions and killers. It served him well until it dragged him down. He was always so eager to find a kinship with the killer, to "look at the art" and know the artist through and through. Roche focussed on me. "The question is," he said, "which is to be master... that's all." I'd never be able to read those books again. "Impenetrability, that's what I say." "By impenetrablity, you mean we've had enough of this subject," Roche grinned. "For now." "Tell us where they are, John." He looked to Reggie and to Bill, hoping for an opportunity to manipulate his way into another line of questioning. But they both backed me up. "Tell us where they are." And he did. Terrible as it seems, I have to say-- that was a good interrogation. Bill and Reggie and I managed to act as a trinity that day; each of us took on the burden of sympathy for one of the three points of view. Perpetrator, victim, and survivor. Christ... that's how we ended up in the end... Reggie, murdered. Bill, a murderer. And me. So far. Survivor. So far. If I can just make it through this night. It's 2:54. Plane leaves at six. A few more hours. I can make it a few more hours. I'll... practice what to say to Scully. I never got the chance to come up with anything much on the way here. Hell of an awkward production, keeping close tabs on Roche. I cuffed him to the seat and went to the restroom, and when I came back he'd already talked to the elderly lady behind him long enough to borrow a pack of playing cards from her. He asked if I was up for a game of poker, shuffling the cards slowly. I took the deck away. "I could make this pretty difficult for you," he said. "I'm being very cooperative, you have to admit. It'd be a real hassle if I rattled these cuffs in the stewardess's face. Started shouting at all these nice people. Might even cause a panic." ...I let him keep the cards. Eventually he gave them back to the owner and told me he needed to use the men's room-- I always forget to figure biology into my otherwise so perfectly orchestrated plans. Decided to leave him cuffed and if things got messy for him, well, fine. Of course, the minute I let him up, the flight attendant barricaded the aisle with the drink cart. Roche headed down the rows with my jacket slung over his hands, and I had to watch as he crouched and spoke to a mother and her little girl. Finally the attendant let me through and I grabbed his arm and urged him down the aisle. "Three minutes," I told him as I shoved him in. "After three minutes, I'm pulling you out and bringing you back to your seat no matter how I find you." "You only encourage bad behavior by expecting the worst, Mulder," he told me serenely. "My therapist is confident that's one of the root causes for my condition." And then he ducked into the restroom. Lucky for me, because I didn't have a glib reply to that one. Just rage. Later, he wanted to know if I thought Lewis Carroll-- or rather, Charles Dodgson, the clergyman and mathemetician who wrote as Carroll-- was a pedophile. "I mean, you've done the reading," he said cloyingly, "you're an educated man, a psychologist... do you see that in his work?" "I didn't until we started tracking you." It's the biggest reason that I can't recapture my former affection for Carroll's books-- and "The Jabberwocky" was one of the first poems I ever knew by heart. I loved those books. But when I was profiling Roche and getting ready to interview him, some elements of Dodgson's biography took on a sinister cast. Never married-- big deal, he was a clergyman. Tutored children in math and told them stories which would later become the events of the Alice books. So far, pretty innocent. Dodgson was one of England's first photographers... and his favorite subjects were little girls. When possible, nude. Gets worse from there. The Annotated Alice had a Freudian reading of Carroll's works, and while I'm not much for Freud, the dissection of the semiotics of Alice's adventures seemed sound enough... the concentration on and confusion about body size, the way Alice grows and shrinks in imitation of tumescence... and a selection of Dodgson's diary entries seems to indicate a fixation on very young girls. It's a compulsion expressed, it seems, only in the most oblique way in his writings-- but a sexual compulsion nonetheless. Really ruins the books. "If Dodgson did have pedophilic urges," I told Roche, "it seems as though he probably sublimated them in his fiction." I suppose it shouldn't matter whether Dodgson was a pedophile or not. Dante Alighieri was known to be smitten with a prepubescent girl, and we still read his _Inferno_. Then again, we don't read _Inferno_ to our kids. Roche said, "If I were Reverend Dodgson, I'd be insulted." "If you were Dodgson, Alice Liddel would've been strangled to death and dumped in a ditch." He chuckled, "You have a point." And finally, after that, he was quiet. Until we got to the house. The house in West Tisbury. I thought it would be easy. I've lived through that night so many times. I'd stretch out and do the deep breathing exercises Dad taught me and go over everything that happened up until the blank place. And I'd remember: Mom got Samantha into her nightgown and told me to be sure she got to bed by nine. Dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You're in charge while we're next door, Fox. It's your responsibility if anything happens, so keep an eye on your sister." I tell myself that he only meant that if Sam broke something, I'd get in trouble too. That's what I tell myself. Then he thumped my arm and said, "We'll be back around ten." "We're right next door if you need us," Mom added anxiously, fussing with Sam's hair while Sam fidgeted and made a face at me. "There's some deli salads in the fridge if you want anything, but stay out of the cold cuts, I'm making sandwiches with those for the Ladies' Auxiliary tomorrow." "We'll call and check on you at eight," Dad said. "Listen to Fox, now, Samantha," Mom told her. "I will," she chirped, in the voice she only used when she wanted me to know that she was lying. "G'night, sweetie," and they gave Sam her good-night kisses, because the world would end if Samantha had to go to bed without getting kissed goodnight by everyone on the planet. The door was hardly shut when Sam ran to me, whapped my hand and said, "Tag, you're it, no tagbacks, count to ten--" and ran for the stairs. "Aren't you a little old for hide-and-seek?" "No!" "Well, I am." I turned on the television. "Pleeeeeeease?" Sam looked down from the bannister, leaning out too far over it as usual. Her feet lifted off the stairs and she dipped forward. "Showoff. I used to do that all the time. It's not really scary." "You're too tall now," she said, and stuck out her tongue. "And I'm too old for hide-and-seek." Sam stomped down the stairs and pushed her lower lip out. Scully has accused me of picturesque pouting on occasion-- well, I learned from the master. Samantha could pout anyone down for the count. "All right," she sighed, "let's play an _old people_ game." We played checkers and chess, but she got sick of both of those in a hurry. Then she wanted to watch _Rhoda_, so we quit for a while. I did my geometry homework while she watched TV. "Can't you just come find me _once_?" she said, when her show was over. "You don't even have to count to ten. You can just count to five. I won't even hide very good." "I'm not playing hide-and-seek, Sam." That pout again. "You never play with me anymore." "I'll play any of this other stuff..." I remember being angry and embarrassed; hide-and-seek was really just Sam's excuse to have me chase her screaming all around the house. But I was twelve, and suddenly about six inches taller than I had been the day before, and things kept tipping over and spilling and breaking every time I turned around. She said, "Stratego. Sometimes I win at that." We set it up in front of the television. The news came on. Something about Watergate-- again, and I was really sick of hearing about it by then. "You can go first," I told her. And for twenty years, that was where it ended. Time stopped. It began again a few days later; slow awareness of white, the smell of alcohol, my father's voice growling in the periphery, Mom putting her hand on my arm and calling, "Bill, he's waking up." Then, late in '89, the hypnoregression sessions. And regardless of what anyone thinks, I didn't just blindly accept the memories of a mysterious light, a voice in my head, my sister calling my name as she was taken from me. When Dr. Verber and I recovered those memories, I checked them against the missing persons reports and the investigations. I examined those memories, played them over and over, trying to learn more about what happened. I've revisited that night so many times, waking, sleeping... in a way, that night never ended. I thought it would be easy to listen to John Lee Roche tell me how he parked down the street... watched the house... saw Mom and Dad go to the neighbors'. Came to the window and saw us inside, listened to us talking. It wasn't. It... it wasn't easy. "You were playing a board game," Roche said. Yes. He gestured to the window. "I was listening..." He pointed to the television. "You were right there," he said. The door was unlocked, he recalled. Yes. "I came in and-- you went for your father's gun. I give you credit for that. But then you sort of... froze..." Yes. "Then I took your sister away from all this." No. "Wrong house." I saw panic in his eyes. "Huh?" "Wrong house." Sweeter words were never spoken. "This house is in West Tisbury. The house Samantha was taken from was in Chilmark." He argued. "Geography, this is geography, it was twenty years ago." He insinuated. "I hear you go after aliens from space. Like your world would be okay if you could just believe in flying saucers." He insisted. "I took your sister." He lied. He was lying. But this was the only way to be sure. And to learn the extent of the details he gleaned, I think, from my own dreams. I know. It's a long way to go to prove a point. I'll be suspended for this. The way Skinner was ranting the other day, it might be weeks. Enough to show up on my jacket. The FBI version of the "permanent record" that haunted us through school. It was worth it. Now I know. And if this last fucking doubt isn't dead yet, well, I can live with doubt. I've got lots of practice. It was the certainty I couldn't face. ...Can't face. Maybe I'm fooling myself-- seeing what I want to see. What I _have_ to see. It can't be true, therefore it is not true. Even though he gave me every detail and how the hell could Roche see into my dreams? I don't even have the faintest scintilla of science to back it up, no theories. He HAS TO have seen my dreams because otherwise, he's telling the truth and he CAN'T be telling the truth because Sam can't be dead, so damn science, to hell with the facts, John Lee Roche got into my dreams and saw my memories of Sam's abduction. He started laughing in the car on the way from my father's house in West Tisbury to this hotel. Roche chuckled at first, then doubled over, howling. "What's so funny?" Finally he gasped and heaved and managed to say, "I got into your dreams-- I just realized where you got that, Mulder-- it's the plot from _Nightmare on Elm Street_--" Had to brake hard at the next stoplight. And you know, with the handcuffs and all, John had a hard time keeping his balance. Hope the dash didn't hurt his forehead too much. God know I'm in enough trouble already, let alone if he goes back to the prison with a bruise. Might interfere with his basketball games. He was lying... he was. He didn't take Samantha. 3:39. Almost dawn. Well, another hour and a half. That's not too long. Just a few more hours. Just a few more hours. And it'll all be over. end part nine.